Anti-religion agenda among social media users

Andrew Barker embodies the average Digg user: a white male in his 20s, tech savvy, with a sense of humor that often pushes boundaries into the taboo. You can find him browsing the social news website a couple times a day, but you won't see him at a church, synagogue or mosque.

The 27-year-old from Mishawaka, Ind., abandoned organized religion long ago and now describes himself as agnostic. For him, time spent in the house of Digg is not unlike a Sunday church gathering. Groups of like-minded individuals share gossip and stories, and they discuss such topics as politics, sports and, yes, even religion.

But you won't find many links to Bible studies on the front page of Digg -- unless it's about the absurdity of taking Scripture literally. A 2-year-old survey of Digg users showed a significant concentration of atheists and agnostics. Because Digg's content is submitted and voted on by the users, the stories promoted to the website's homepage reflect the audience.

Although Barker reads Digg regularly, he doesn't submit links very often. But he had a big hit with a picture he posted of a child's coloring book showing Jesus riding a dinosaur. "I found it, and thought, 'God, that's such a hilarious image,'" Barker said. "Digg takes everything religious so lightheartedly."

Poking fun at evangelical Christians, Catholics, creationists, the image of Jesus Christ and, well, anything remotely associated with religion is ...

... commonplace on the website. An image, titled "The Incredible Jesuc Car: I'm Afraid Of Americans," was voted to the Digg homepage a few days ago. The photo shows a Toyota, with the license plate "Jesuc," blanketed in bumper stickers promoting Christianity, the Republican presidential ticket and anti-gay marriage propositions.

Another image, a clipping from an Alaskan newspaper's Letters to the Editor section that's criticizing atheists, hit the Digg homepage the same day as "Jesuc Car." (A previous version of this post said the newspaper was from Arkansas.) It's already in the top 10 most popular stories of the week -- an impressive feat when considering the other nine stories revolve around the presidential election.

And Tuesday night, a popular item on Digg was news that Elizabeth Dole, whom Digg users criticized for calling her opponent "godless," was defeated by Kay Hagan for the North Carolina Senate seat. Users celebrated in the story's comments section, and one user wrote, "Score one for the Godless Americans!"

Digg isn't exactly religion-friendly, so it naturally doesn't attract a very spiritual crowd. "If you were into religion and you went to that site, and you thought that you weren't connecting with anyone, then you wouldn't spend a lot of time there," said Diane Winston, professor of media and religion at the University of Southern California.

Zak Madden, a 16-year-old atheist from Battle Ground, Wash., submitted a picture to Digg last week of a Blu-Ray box for a film called "Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter." It got more than 1,000 votes, called "diggs," from users. "Most Diggers aren't very religious and love comedy so it seemed natural that they would enjoy this," Madden said in an e-mail.

Madden figures that more than half of the site's users don't actively practice religion, but says that number could be skewed by a vocal minority. "There may be more religious diggers than I am guessing, but those who are religious usually aren't very open about it," he wrote.

Madden says he found the "Vampire Hunter" graphic on a similar website called Reddit. The audience is much the same, and content critical of religion regularly makes it to Reddit's homepage as well.

YouTube also has its atheist niche. A search for "atheist" yields 124,000 results, and several of those videos have been watched hundreds of thousands of times. Granted, a search for "Christianity" returns 862,000, but many of those contain content critical of the religion.

Micki Krimmel, a.k.a. Mickipedia, a popular Twitter personality, says she attributes a part of her Internet fame to her YouTube videos about atheism. "I made a series of videos that got really popular on YouTube and that generated recognition [among] a different group -- apparently there is a big atheist community on YouTube," she said in an instant message conversation.

Social networks also exist for atheists, including Atheist Passions and Richard Dawkins.net.

Although atheist material and content critical of religion might have a large following on these mainstream websites, just as many websites exist on the Web for religious discussions, said Winston, the USC professor. ShoutLife is one Christian social network with about 140,000 registered users. Christian.com, Xianz, Your Christian Space and Holypal are a few popular alternatives. There's one for every major religion -- and atheism.

"Just as religious people want to convert people to their perspective, atheist people want to convert people to their point of view," Winston said. "The irony here is that atheism is a form of religion. You're still in something."

The Internet isn't killing religion. In fact, Winston says more Americans attend church today -- about 60% -- than in the past. "People have a mistaken notion of history that people used to be more religious," she said.

The Web merely acts as the megaphone for any message, whether that be for or against religion, to help it reach the masses. "The Internet has democratized media to a form almost unprecedented," Winston said. "So, of course you're going to see things that you never saw before -- like Jesus riding on a dinosaur."

-- Mark Milian

Photo: Religion Meets Technology. Credit: RinzeWind via Flickr

Comments

[jack]

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." - Gene Roddenberry

[Dave Coulston]

Jesus Christ himself was anti-religious (look at Matthew 23! He was really down on them). What he was getting at was radical (and still is today). Religions and organised faiths with laws & rituals CANNOT lead to knowledge of God, relationship with God or a path to enlightenment. It is all internal & invisible, no-one can tell you stuff to do to get you there.

God has come part way, now you have to go part way but you have to figure out what that means for you.

Actually read one (or more) of the gospels to see what Jesus was saying. They aren't long and you may come to an understanding of what "your way" may be.

[Paradigm Shift]

Digg is not anti-religion, just pro-logic and pro-science. Religion and science very rarely share the same space without conflict.

This is a personal opinion, but one I'm sure my fellow Diggers could appreciate. There was an artist rendering of the Milky Way based on scientific mapping of the universe that made its way up the Digg leaderboard. It showed the Sun as a tiny spec among millions of other specs rotating around our galactic center. While it was a scientific rendering, it really made me think about my religious views.

Think about how tiny Earth is, and how tiny the Sun is just inside our own galaxy, filled with millions of stars...and then think that we are just one of millions of galaxies. Now keeping that picture firmly in mind, how egocentric is it to think that among all that vastness of space, the creator of it all would worry about this tribe rising above that tribe and talking through burning bushes. Or that the creator of all of it would take human form, perform some rather mundane miracles (on the cosmic scale) and then wonder why he was forsaken in his final moments. Keeping the scale of the universe in perspective it all seems just so absurd. There may be a higher being, but I certainly do not believe in the Biblical God. One scientific picture on Digg unquestionably reaffirmed my agnostic position.

[Zaphod]

What is wrong with you people? Seriously.

Every time I look south of the border I have to wonder: What is the big deal about religion with you people? Aren't you the land of the free? And what's with the mixing of religion and politics?

If someone believes in God, fine. Let them believe in God. Likewise, if someone *doesn't* believe, that's their prerogative too. In Canada it's very much a non-issue for most people. Our media doesn't write about it, and for the most part we all live pretty happily.

You nutballs on the other hand seem to enjoy tossing your Christianity or Atheism around like a football. Who cares? My neighbour might be an atheist, or a Christian. He could be Muslim, or he could be into Zoroastrianism for all I know. It doesn't matter to me - all I know is that he is a *nice person* and I enjoy chatting with him in the elevator in the morning.

Enjoy your life, and stop worrying how your neighbours live theirs.

[Nate]

"The difference between atheism and religion comes down to wether you believe in a piece of ancient literature, or modern science. There not compatible."

They are compatible, if people actually looked at the research that has been done on the subject, instead of listening to atheist's interpretation of the research, they would see the the creation story of Genesis is supported by science, along with the flood.

[InsaneBrain]

First of all, a Atheist is a person who doesn't belief in any form of God. A atheist doesn't need a ferry tail book to tell them that everything is going to be all right. A atheist MAKES it going all right, ALL BY HIM/HERSELF. He/She needs no holy book of indoctrination that tells how to life, a atheist CAN THINK FOR HIM/HERSELF.

Second...STOP CALLING ATHEISM A RELIGION.

It's time that all the so called 'Christians' take a look into their own history, and see that what they believe in is an ancient believe of whoreshipping the SUN. It was started by the Maya's more than 5000 years ago and it has been molded over time into this so called 'beautiful' belief of a eternal life after death. The simple fact is that people are afraid of dieing, and to accept that, they made up a ferry tail of an afterlife. Please, GROW UP and accept that nothing is everlasting.

[Adamq]

Anti-religion agenda? Not really. Many of the examples you list are simply indications of satire and comedy that happen to deal with religion. To say that Digg users purposely submit articles because they hate Christians and Christianity, or religion in general is misleading. Like others have mentioned, religion, like anything else, is susceptible to rational discussion and debate. Considering that religious people say a lot of ridiculous things, it only makes sense that a popular social bookmarking website would note of particular events. Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America and what you're essentially writing ironically has an anti-atheist agenda. To call atheism a religion is absurd and other commentators above me have already stated that, including the political party analogy by J.

When you believe in something that relies on miracles, historic documents and books, and human interpretation of myth over centuries, you're going to hit a brickwall.

You can use the faith argument and say "well I believe that God is the supreme being and creator of all things." While that may work in your own personal spiritual world, within the realm reason and debate it will be dismissed.

[darter22]

Gods live in the knowledge gaps. It is not surprising that religiosity goes down when knowledge increases.

[Douglas]

Atheism is a religion? Hah.

Dugg for the stupidity of that statement.

[michael]

@Joe the Hedge Fund Manager

My thoughts exactly! It is up to those who believe in god to prove their position. Taking something so important on faith is careless and stupid.

You'd think there would be one shred of physical evidence...

[Happiness & Coexistance]

Freedom from Religion is a Civillian Right, where else can people go to get away from the reach of religion but the Internet?

Religion is embodied in every aspect of the public realm, it's socially taboo to be anti-religion in a public setting - so much so that it could be dangerous.

[Patrick]

I disagree that Diggers are anti-religion as a whole. Besides picking out a few extreme quotes, I think you would find that Diggers are actually anti-religous extremism not anti-religion. I don't think the majority Diggers have any problem with fair minded religuos people who don't use religion as an excuse to brainwash others and start wars.

[AvangionQ]

"But you won't find many links to Bible studies on the front page of Digg -- unless it's about the absurdity of taking Scripture literally. A 2-year-old survey of Digg users showed a significant concentration of atheists and agnostics. Because Digg's content is submitted and voted on by the users, the stories promoted to the website's homepage reflect the audience." ... that's because the majority of Digg users *are* atheists, but only a limited minority of them are militant atheists -- and just like the extremists of the religious ilk, they are the ones that are pushing a polarizing agenda ... the main difference between militant atheists and religious extremists being, they're not pushing for violence, but for evidence, logic and reasoning over blind faith ...

[Dave]

Nate, there are many religious institutions and holy books that have the great flood or the creationist myth. Yes there is evidence that there was a massive flood in the ancient world but that was only a small portion of the earth, no one knew of the Americas or Asia back then (except for those who lived there!) so just because the bible says it happened doesn't mean it was a global affair. The figure of Noah also appears in many pre-biblical texts and is just an archetype to explain to the ignorant how all people and animals could have survived. I'm not quite sure about "scientific" evidence for the creationist story in genesis and I have been unsuccessful in finding any. Basically, just because it's in genesis does not qualify it as scientific fact. The bible is merely a hybrid plageurism of religious texts before it that were deluded attempts to explain how things work. So sorry, no scientific support here please try again.

[Nerd by trade, not by nature]

Of course Digg is anti-religious. The reason is that the voting users are a tiny minority of the readership -- the site has millions of hits, but it barely takes a few hundred diggs to reach the front page. So you are seeing the reading preferences of the minority of people who spend long enough on the site to warrant signing up for an account, whereas most readers access the site very briefly and anonymously. Put simply, there's a selection factor for (frankly) nerdiness, which has its own selection factor having difficulty with interpersonal relationships. That's not the kind of person who is likely to be considerate of another person's point of view, and also not the kind of person who would consider "a relationship with God" attractive.

[ralph brynard]

I am a Christian. But I probably fit more into the category of people who believe that there is somthing seriously wrong with church, who find the biggotry and hatefulness hypocritical, and find religious humor (even when it's directed at Christianity).

I'm curious to find out if atheism and agnosticism is somehow connected to the hatefulness of evangelicals? Anybody have thoughts?

[Will]

Just because you think the Christian religion is silly doesn't make you an atheist. Christians don't have a monopoly on spirituality.

[Skippy]

Nate, please provide "proof" of the creation story, as well as proof of the flood.

[Corey Clamp]

I completely agree with Dave (11:42).

I want to start a Church of Reason that is like a social club and a forum for people who want to discuss issues but don't want the thinking to be encumbered by a 2,000 year old book. We could have the same type of social activities as churches, and children would be welcome. I think it would be great.

Is there anything like this out there?

[Esh]

may be a 1000 of those 100000 regular diggers are atheists and they dig it ... i sure digg those articles if it tickles a funny bone and i am not a atheist ... this article and most of latimes' articles are useless ... i was not sure why this even was dugg by so many ... does that mean believers are the ones responsible?? the article is as stupid as my qn in the previous sentence...

[digg user]

you've been DUGG..... Expect to hear back soon..... ;)

[steve]

@ Gordon Hill
Atheists do not need EVIDENCE, because they are not trying to prove anything. It is the religions that need EVIDENCE to prove their fairy tales - fairy tales that were written by crazy people (sometimes well meaning) and have caused the death of millions of people.

In general Atheists believe in science, and we have the scientific method to prove that :)

If a someone wants to prove to me that some force/being/god/collection of gods lives up in the sky/heaven/alternate universe, then to be compatible with science you need EVIDENCE.

Gordon Hill your comments make you sound like a fools fool.

[steve]

maybe the reason there is no pro religion articles on digg is that religion has nothing to say but be quiet, have faith, do what the head of the church says, no questions ask, oh yeah and all those bits in the big book that have been proved wrong, well that's just the translation.

[Patrick Draper]

Atheism is as much a religion as "bald" is a hair color. Atheism is the simple lack of any belief in any gods, nothing more, nothing less. To say otherwise is ignorant.

[James]

These are the only links you find on Digg:
1. Something promoting athiesm
2. Something dissing religion
3. Some cool new phone/computer/software
4. Something loving Obama OR hating Hillary/McCain

As much as Digg users say they're fair and open to different viewpoints...if you visit the site and read the comments it's quite the contrary. It's like the website is one person registered with thousands of users who are the exact same person...and anytime someone posts a comment that isn't seen by 'all' it is buried by everyone. Similarly, since so many of the articles from one of the 4 topics above are posted, the exact same comments are monotonously glorified over and over.

I visit occasionally because sometimes they have cool links to articles...but the website will never grow because it's really only a place for people with the same interests and viewpoints...I find that I have many of their viewpoints and fit their stereotype to an extent but it's kinda like watching the same annoying movie over and over again.