Google 1 God 0

A recent article on Slate website shows how the internet and modern techonology is dealing a well placed blow at the heart of the worlds stupidest religions, providing some individuals for the first time, access to knowledge and awareness of the real world about them.

"Once upon a time—say, in the 1990s—a Hasidic Jew looking for escape from her blinkered world might have gone to the library. But by the time F. Vizel, a Satmar Hasid, learned that the public library existed at the age of 20, she’d already made a far more critical discovery. She’d found the Internet.

Vizel, who grew up an hour and a half from New York City, started going online at 19 on her husband’s laptop. Within two years, she began exploring blogs by people who had left Hasidism, and had a huge realization: She wasn’t the only Hasidic Jew questioning what she now calls a "lifetime of indoctrination and being taught not to think." When she set up an anonymous Facebook account, she posted a painting of Eve in the Garden of Eden as her profile picture, implying that the Internet had become her tree of knowledge.

In time, Vizel became so rebellious—she asked to stop shaving the hair she covered with a scarf, flouting the standards for married women in her community—that she says she was asked by community leaders to hand over the laptop. By then, though, it was too late. Two years ago, she and her husband split, and some months later she left their community in Kiryas Joel, N.Y., taking her son with her."

Her story is familiar to others who have broken free of restrictive religious practices. The article continues:

" Ari Mandel, 29, who grew up in a community of Nikolsburg Hasidim in Monsey, N.Y., purchased a home computer because he was interested in breaking into graphics for work. Through the course of reading science blogs, as well as covert visits to the library—he went just before Shabbat sundown on Fridays, when he felt sure roving members of the "purity squad" wouldn't be watching—Mandel was shocked to discover an alternate version of the world's origins. He had been raised to believe that the world was less than 6,000 years old; he recalls his father telling him, on a rare family visit to the Museum of Natural History, that a dinosaur skeleton was "just rocks." "

What insanity drives the religious to such preposterous beliefs? The freedom to learn, to discover, to evolve as a human, to interact with the world about us are surely the most basic of all 'rights' - what kind of god demands otherwise? A socialist world would at last do away with such nonsense once and for all, if Google hasn't got there first!

SussexSocialist