Religion & Shannon's Diagram

Although initially the stark definition of "information" stripped of any connotational value presents a rather bleak subject for a religious studies class, it soon becomes clear that religion itself follows the same communications pattern presented in Shannon's schematic diagram (p.218, 222), albeit on a much larger scale. Shannon's diagram looks like this:

This diagram can be used to more fully understand the relationship between information transportation and religion. Imagine that the information source is a set of moral values. These values are filtered through a transmitter (a religion or church), and sent to a receiver (an individual). Along the way the message may encounter interference from a noise source, equivalent to the many instances religion has been distorted for evil purposes. The ultimate destination, however, is society as a whole.

Shannon's machine transported bits of specific information from one point to another, representing a very small-scale example of communication theory. Religion, however, can be considered an extremely large-scale example, transporting a set of moral values from one point in history to future societies. Similarly both signals can be corrupted, leading to unreadable files and unimaginable horror, respectively.