Osler's Razor

As church membership and religious belief decline, technology is being blamed. Do machines disconnect us from our souls?

If there is a connection, it can be following one or more pathways. Perhaps the internet provides communities (via Facebook or Twitter) that substitute for the ones people found at church. It could be, too, that access to more information punctures people's religious beliefs; for example, if one was raised to believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, the challenge to that belief that will result from almost any Google search may undo a person's larger connection to faith.  Or it could be that connectivity online rewires our brains in a sense, so that we expect data and opinions rather than mystery, tradition, and faith. 

I'm not convinced that technology is the enemy of faith, or necessarily its friend. The larger issue is probably that the dominant faith in the United States, Christianity, has failed to stay relevant to the issues and problems that people face. Not that those issues and problems--relationships, poverty, sickness, death, loss, love-- are different than they ever were. It's more that Christians stopped talking about them as they were pulled into rabbit-holes of arcane theology, politics, and social issues not rooted in the Gospels. 

We aren't become robots. But what is it we are becoming?