Google the new God?

Since humans have made the transformation from a nomadic tribal system to an organized political entity, they have based religion either in the highest esteem in their society or near the top of importance for their people.

Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome all were dominate peoples of their times in which the people both ruling and poor looked to the Gods and sometimes God for answers to their everyday problems. These civilizations even developed imagery of the afterlife practicing the rituals of “pleasing” the Gods so that you would be taken care of in the after life. This practice toned down after many centuries and as religions evolved, new ones developed rituals and then migrated to prayer, meditation, a code of behaviors, worship and as well as other aspects that took hold in the middle ages.

This practice and worship style of religions has been kept mainly unchanged for the past millennium except for a few things here and there in order to stay with the popular culture, though in the present culture we are seeing a quiet revolution.

Religious service attendance is increasingly falling from fifty years ago and many families especially those in Europe and North America don’t practice a religion though claim one as their faith, more as a family tradition or social norm than an actual personal choice. Slowly but surely people have stopped asking God their questions and have turned to science and technology. When in the past a family would pray for their young children to recover from a sickness as a major part in recovery, now parents rely entirely on the medical science and technology of present times leaving the praying alone as a sort of voodoo ritual which is a nice gesture but holds no real tangible result.

Imagine if you will that a family member of yours is diagnosed with cancer and the doctor, instead of using science and technology to help them, told you that he would pray for your family member to recover and instructed you to do the same, because its in Gods hands almost like him telling you the Arabic saying “In šaʾ Allāh” (If It Is God Will’s). After laughing in the doctor’s face you would most likely find a new doctor to deal with your family members illness.

Present day people are moving away from God (the Intangible) to Science/Technology (the Tangible), which brings up the main point, are things like Google replacing God. When I need an answer to any problem and I mean any problem from illness, childcare, what are the Yankees chances of winning, how many species of Aardvark are there in the World, etc. Whatever your question or request Google is there and is rarely ever wrong.

Organized religion though has failed people many times and has been attributed to causing more death and destruction than any disease, political matter, accident, or natural occurrence. So is the replacement of religion with Google really that bad? If I am lost I text Google on my phone and it tells me where to go, if I need guidance on life, I ask Google and it tells me who to see or what to do. It seems that Google is a ubiquitous item in our lives now so much so that it even is listed in dictionaries, so much so that Google and other technologies are challenging religion.

Maybe in fifty years from now people will be sacrificing animals in front of their computers praising Google to give them a nice afterlife preferably with the new LCD Flat screen they saw on the Best Buy website on sale. The question that needs to be asked and answered;

Is religion needed anymore in the present time?

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