Can an Iron Age Religion Survive Internet Age Technology? [View all]
Access to information has never been easier. At the time a historical Jesus might have lived, information was relatively hard for people to come by. Some could read, but publication of information was very slow and distribution was limited. Most news traveled by word of mouth. For most people, knowledge of what was beyond where they lived was scarce, although trade had brought more people into major trade centers.
Knowledge of how nature worked was not widespread, and much was not even known. Mysteries were everywhere. Even stuff we learn in kindergarten or the first grades of elementary school was simply not available as knowledge. Religion answered a lot of the common questions people had. God did it. That settled it.
Today, a couple of millennia later, things have changed drastically. In fact change has accelerated dramatically in the past couple hundred years, with advances coming more and more quickly with every decade that passed. Information, both factual and completely wrong, can be spread globally now in an instant.
What we now know about the world around us is staggering. We don't know all the things humanity knows as individuals, but each of us knows more than we realize about how the world works and about the natural principles that govern most things. If we want to know more, additional information is now at our fingertips, and to any desired level. Anyone who wants to shed ignorance has it in his or her capabilities to do that to whatever degree satisfies curiosity. Compared to Iron Age people, we are all scholars and scientists.
All that information tends to make a mockery of the old iron age explanations of many things. We know more than could possibly have been known back then. Some of us know far more than most of us, as well. Some people still turn to the old writings, but fewer and fewer all the time. A child, curious about a rainbow, can now get a perfectly good explanation in seconds, instead of listening to an old story about a flood and God's creation of the rainbow as a symbol of some promise.
Can Iron Age religious texts still be our source of information? I don't think so. And if they're wrong about all the things we now understand, might they also be wrong about all the other stuff? It's a valid question, and one people are asking. I asked it myself, and decided that I'd look for information elsewhere. I've never been sorry.
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