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Vail Daily letter: Pulling aside the curtain

Some 20 years ago as the Internet was beginning to come into popular use, I asked a good friend and very successful businessman what he thought the impact of the Internet would be, and without hesitation, he said that he thought the Internet would have a greater impact than the Bible.

Today, mounting evidence indicates that his prediction was accurate, as the Internet’s ability to disseminate information and ideas instantly to billions of people around the world has had the positive effect of educating billions of people by raising the lead curtains that have surrounded and shielded organized religions from scrutiny for centuries.

History has revealed that wherever ignorance and illiteracy prevailed, organized religion found fertile ground; one has to look no further than the Middle East today to see examples of this.



Very much like Toto pulling aside the curtain and revealing that the Wizard of Oz was no wizard at all, but a humbug, the Internet is allowing the spread of scientific knowledge far and wide, thereby greatly diminishing the ability of the leaders of organized religion to control large segments of the population by perpetuating the myths of the existence of one form of deity or another.

Where all this may be heading is anybody’s guess for as the eminent Harvard theologian Harvey Cox wrote in “The Secular City,” with regard to religion, “We are somewhere between the no longer and the not yet.”

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Peter Bergh

Edwards


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