Using the Internet may destroy your faith – this is the conclusion of a study showing that a rapid decline in the number of religious people in the U.S.A. since 1990 is correlated to the ever growing number of people using the Internet.
Allen Downey, Professor of Computer Science at the Franklin W. Olin College, provided an answer to this question. He analyzed data collected through a general social questionnaire which was observing religious attitudes in the U.S.A. since 1972. He concluded that there were several factors that contributed to the fact that there is a decreasing number of Americans who consider themselves religious, the most controversial of which is the use of the Internet. The conclusion was that this was the precise reason why the number of people with religious affiliations had decreased over the last two decades.
The above paragraph is the beginning of an article published on a news portal, which I was heavily surprised with. Allen Downey writes about religion as if it was a shopping item, and the faithful were consumers with holes in their pockets. Faith is not a cold statistical number that can be analyzed through cold statistical questionnaires, but rather the sacred home to the soul, which liberates those who stray through the dark by means of divine light. Faith resides in every person who is a genuinely free individual, and there is no social questionnaire capable of peeking into the human soul. When Mr. Downey and others like him say that the Internet is to blame for the decreasing number of people who go to churches and other temples, he should take a closer look at the scriptures, because the Son of God teaches us that God is in every person that does good to others. A good person is the greatest temple of faith. I am asking this computer science professor whether faith’s holy mission isn’t the spreading of truth, humanity and justice. And the Internet is precisely the place that provides opportunity to many humanists and good-will people to spread those noble values that make us human in the first place. Without the Internet, there would be no Google, no Yahoo, no Gmail, LinkedIn, Amazon Kindle (an oasis to poets and writers), and a number of worldwide liberty-propagating portals. Allow me to prove the validity of my claim through a personal example. Thanks to the Internet, I have created my website containing a multitude of my articles, essays, poetry, as well as books published at e-shop, in which I write about compassion, justice, humanity, ideas towards the greater good, love, dreams, suffering and sorrows (lest we forget that a tear has the same taste and color on the faces of everyone, regardless of race, gender, or religion). These are works – essays, poetry, plays and novels – which embrace all those noble values that faith is feeding on. Of course, those works also discuss greed, insensitivity, vanity, cunning, corruption, nepotism, and all the diseases that are destroying the human soul and faith. Yes, these works might not be “bestsellers”, but they were written from the heart, for the hearts of all good-will people, and they would never stand a chance to get published in pro-regime media controlled by all kinds of dictators and political castes, or in “free” big media owned by magnates whom my works are unmasking.
