Orthodoxy and Information Technologies

  1. Lemma
  2. Pravoslavlje i informacione tehnologije
  3. Serbian
  4. Stevanovic, Aleksandra
  5. Orthodox view on technology and engineering
  6. 24-8-2016
  7. Subotic, Oliver [Author]. Religion and Information Technologies. 61–64
    1. Subotic, Oliver
  9. Orthodoxy and information technologies

    1. The work presented by Subotic during Round table “Religion and Information Technologies” organized at Serbian Academy of Science and Arts (SANU) on August 15th, 2007, accentuates that Orthodox Church has neither confronting nor conformist attitude towards information technologies nor their vast usage. Instead of a general attitude, it considers them according to Christ for every particular case of their purpose. It has critical stance of a fruitful critical synthesis – right and wrong usage is being pointed out, but not from technical aspect, but rather from anthropological perspective since information technologies change lifestyle and human attitude.

      Subotic also states that affirmative attitude of the Church is seen in multimedia contents, numerous websites with Christianity themes. Thus, people easily get familiar with Orthodoxy. However, the call of the Church is recognized in the sentence “Come and see” (Jn, 1, 46) since outside information has no real liturgical value.

      Another challenge is so-called modern eschatology which tells that death would be overcome by the means of transferring human brain content into computer memory. This is the place where Church should play a vital role. It should control the information technologies influence and foster consciousness-raising so that there is no need for virtual heaven creation.

      The conclusion is that there is need for a deeper dialogue between religion and information technologies sector so that the optimal solution may be found, instead of proposing one-sided answers which has been done both by the Church and science. Therefore, the paper presented by Subotic strongly argues that an affirmative critical stance towards modern civilization and its creations should be established.