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What I Learned Talking with Thousands of Skeptics on Reddit

Bishop Robert Barron

I just finished my second dive into the Reddit AMA world. One of the most popular websites in the world, Reddit is a forum for all sorts of online conversations and presentations. The AMA (for Ask Me Anything) is a twenty-first century version of the medieval quodlibetal questions, during which a game theology professor would entertain any inquiry that came from the floor. Now, things are a bit cruder and more rough and ready on Reddit than they were in the universities of the Middle Ages, but you get the idea. When I engaged in the exercise last year, I received almost 12,000 questions and comments, making mine the third most commented-on AMA after those of Bill Gates and Jordan Peterson. This time, I’ve received over 15,000 comments and counting, making mine the second most commented-on AMA of the past year, just after Bill Gates and ahead of Bernie Sanders! I mention this not to show how popular I am with the Reddit crowd (I’m sure most of them have never heard of me), but rather to demonstrate just how massively interested young people are in the questions of religion.

If you can make it through the plethora of obnoxious, juvenile, and insulting comments, you will actually learn a great deal about what is on the minds of the Reddit audience—mostly young men between the ages of eighteen and thirty—when it comes to religion. I would identify four major themes: proving the existence of God, the problem of suffering, the determination of why one would choose one religion over another, and homosexuality. Each of these issues was addressed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. Permit me to speak, very briefly, of each in turn.

Praise the Lord

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