'Where was God in Aurora?' comments show Internet as church for atheists [View all]

[rug]

August 1st, 2012
12:03 PM ET

By Dan Gilgoff, CNN.com Religion Editor

(CNN) – The Internet has become the de facto global church for atheists, agnostics and other doubters of God, who of course don’t have bricks-and-mortar churches in which to congregate.

We see this phenomenon in motion every day on the CNN Belief Blog, where atheists/agnostics/humanists are among the most zealous commenters.

Recent string of posts around the question of “Where was God in Aurora?” (such as this and this) drew especially large waves of comments that show atheists are using the Internet to commune with one another and to confront religious believers in ways that they don’t usually do in church.

Atheists and other secularists have offline organizations that stage in-person meetings – the Secular Student Alliance has seen its number of campus chapters quadruple in the last five years, to 368 – but the Internet has probably played a bigger role in the rise of the so-called New Atheism. The movement’s adherents evangelize their godlessness, just as many religious folks evangelize their God, often taking to the Belief Blog to do so.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/01/where-was-god-in-aurora-comments-show-internet-as-church-for-atheists/