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Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

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Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#601

Post by prewett »

coliveira wrote: post #349
m0llusk wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own experience being raised mainline Protestant was a bit different which might be illustrative: My parents were not at all devout, but still took wisdom and moral lessons from the Bible, especially from the teachings of Jesus. At the same time the preachers in town leaned right in their beliefs and focused on reading and interpreting more obscure passages. This resulted in a modest ongoing tension about what exac…

This demonstrates the big flaw of Christianity. Even thought there are millions of sincere, loving and friendly Christians around the world, the whole thing is based around a book that espouses views that are exactly what you call fundamentalism. Sooner or later someone will be confronted with the fundamentalist ideas about women, non-christians, and sexual diversity (for example), and start spreading the hate ideas…

The fundamentalist interpretation is only one way to read the biblical text, and it tends to ignore the context the text was written for.

Women: Jesus' ministry was financially supported by women. Jesus explicitly did not condemn the woman caught in adultery like the Pharisees did although he did not condone her conduct, either. Jesus taught to women (e.g. Mary, Martha's sister) while the rabbis forbid it; one rabbi said he would rather burn the Torah than teach to a woman, and the Torah was so sacred that they put old unusable Torah scrolls in the walls of the synagogue rather than the trash. A woman dealing in purple cloth hosted one of the early churches (and probably led it after Paul left). A woman is mentioned with the title apostle.

Homosexuality: nowhere does the Bible hate homosexuals. It says that it is a harmful behavior and is not to be tolerated in God's people because it leads to death. It is not "hate" to consider someone's behavior unhealthy, or even to disapprove of someone's behavior. We don't "hate" thieves because we disapprove of thievery. In fact, most people hate thievery and think it is so harmful to society that it should be repressed, but it does not mean we must hate thieves. American LGBTQetc seem to require love to look like complete acceptance and consider anything else as "intolerance", but that is a false dichotomy.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#602

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

Sigmoid wrote: post #584
nsilvestri wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence that heterosexual parents are better for children than non-het parents. An important factor is that their parents have a stable relationship. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01494929.2015.10... https://journals.lww.com/jrnldbp/Abstract/2016/04000/Same_Se...

Heterosexual couples have been the norm for thousands of years, and the traditional family has been proven through survival to be a good way to raise children. People don't know the long term societal consequences of a homosexual marriages. Could be no issue, or it could be Pandora's box. Either way, it's stilly to take these studies of <200 families seriously, especially when there's a clear a agenda among political…

Yeah, an agenda of having equal rights under the law in a nation that supposedly separates church in state, but where in practice religious justifications are used to deny equality and justice.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#603

Post by Noos »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #442
gonehome wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent). If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? Obviously religious people remain the vast m…

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? That line would only hold if fundamentalists have correctly identified the fundamentals. I wage they have badly missed it, which is why their theology is so bad. > being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness Being a good person is not the primary point of religion. It is rather a hoped for outcome. Religio…

if you've ever talked to non-fundamentalists, usually they just regurgitate whatever the contemporary secular morality of the moment is with a mild religious gloss, and they suffer in membership much worse than the fundamentalists because it's obvious.

Fundamentalism is usually just taking the source material seriously at what it says; liberal Christianity tends to try and reinterpret the source material to fit contemporary mores. It's impossible to justify homosexuality in the scriptures for example; most progressive arguments end up just setting fire to the inspiration of the bible to do so, by saying "they weren't really speaking about homosexuality" or "why should we trust what Paul says about it?"

Fundamentalists are disliked, but they are a lot more logically and internally consistent than the mainline. Mainline is just the halfway stop to atheism, honestly.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#604

Post by randcraw »

rayiner wrote: post #476
gonehome wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent). If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? Obviously religious people remain the vast m…

As someone who went in the opposite direction, I observed as I got older that “evidence based reasoning” is less useful than I had assumed. Nearly everyone has beliefs about the world that are based on faith whether they call it that or not. Very few political premises are based on scientific evidence that’s well established as say anthropogenic climate change. For the most part the data is mixed and hard to interpre…

> And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to...

I can't agree with either point: 1) basing your view on faith is equally as good as non-faith, or 2) expecting a world view based on any belief will reliably lead you to draw conclusions that won't be bad.

Both of these assume that beliefs are primary in shaping "your world view" and that that view is what shapes how you interact with the world. In fact, what's important isn't what you believe; what's important is how you choose to think. It's the questions you choose to ask. It's how willing you are to start without multiple choice answers and then go looking for a multitude of possible solutions. And it's whether you're willing to accept partial and interim solutions, and sometimes, [shudder] no answer at all.

I know it's not popular to look for answers and then be willing to say, "Nope. I can't answer this." But as you point out, sometimes it's impossible to answer a question with a definitive yes or no. Sometimes you have to gather more information. And the useful part of your world view is how you choose to go about becoming more informed.

If you don't look any further and just guess, or just trust someone else to tell you how to think (especially someone who won't explain their sources or their reasoning), then you will make a lot poor choices in your life, regardless of whether faith is part of that formula or not.

If instead you seek out others whom you know are better informed, and if you ask questions yourself and try to test those answers yourself, that will serve you far better than will any belief system. But most of all, if you are willing to stop your quest at some point and say, "I can't answer this question definitively" and accept that you have two choices: a) a tentative best answer that seeks to work around what you don't know, or b) that you simply refuse to answer now and accept that "I don't know", now THAT's enlightenment. In my opinion, that's a world view that will minimize error and make fewer mistakes. Beliefs be damned.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#605

Post by NotSammyHagar »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #550
anonAndOn wrote: post #514

The comedian Emo Philips has a well-known joke about religion that may explain some of the decline in membership... "Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me…

This is a somewhat funny joke but it doesn't actually map to reality. Inter-Christian conflict is almost nonexistent in 2021 and has been so for probably a generation. Edit: by “conflict” I mean actual real violent conflict. Not people arguing on Reddit. People literally killing each other (or pushing them off bridges) because they are “heretics.” This doesn’t happen much at all anymore in the Christian world. Even t…

In the us it's conservative christians against everyone else (mostly evangelicals but multiple other groups too, and they also fight among themselves).

The group that isn't fighting much is liberal christians (I try to define them as accepting homosexuality) and non believers. Those are the groups not fighting.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#606

Post by lootsauce »

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

David Foster Wallace

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#607

Post by CodeGlitch »

stephenr wrote: post #472
CodeGlitch wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing up in the 80's (UK) as a Roman Catholic, I remember the services being full on Sunday mornings. Not been since I left home at 18, because frankly I stopped believing in God the same time I stopped believing in Father Christmas (7?). The only reason I went was to make my parents happy. Now I'm in my 40's I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place. We know from numerous studies…

> where is the pull for good old family values? Whose family? Which values? This honestly just sounds like a “back in my day...” rant to be honest.

It did occur to me that perhaps people who weren't brought up in a traditional (mother+father) Christian family might not know what "good old family values" means. Not meaning to make an assumption about you of course.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#608

Post by ur-whale »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #535
anonAndOn wrote: post #514

The comedian Emo Philips has a well-known joke about religion that may explain some of the decline in membership... "Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me…

And yet our society is more polarized than ever. From your anecdote, one would think that declining religion would result in peace and love overflowing in society, but we see the opposite. Public morality cannot be maintained without religion; we will sadly see the end result of that in coming years.

> Public morality cannot be maintained without religion

This tired, offensive and a thousand time debunked old trope requires imo a little more argumentation than the "it is thus" justification you just provided.

I'd recommend reading Hitchens, specifically [1] where he addresses that lame claim at length.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Is_Not_Great

[EDIT]: here's a good summary from the man himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOHgrnaTxk0

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#609

Post by some-guy »

kypro wrote: post #244

Although I believe religion is outdated and in many ways I'm happy to see it in decline in the West, I do worry about the side effects the decline of religion has. It seems to me that people my age today (late twenties, early thirties) are extremely self-centred and struggle to see any higher pursuit in life than self-satisfaction. This is in contrast to the few religious people I know who are far more family focused…

I'm in a similar boat. I grew up Christian and then became a very "online atheist", but since the mid-2000s I've become more worried about the lack of what feels like a real in-person community.

My wife is Reform Jewish and one thing that I have come to appreciate is what seems to me a good balance between community and a good dose of secularism--I agreed to help raise our children this way with her for this reason (without converting myself). The most dogmatic thing you could maybe argue is some kind of allegiance to Israel, but this isn't present as much in the younger / millennial Bay Area Jewish community that I've witnessed.

Re: Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

#610

Post by ddoolin »

hkarthik wrote: post #563
brobdingnagians wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet our society is more polarized than ever. From your anecdote, one would think that declining religion would result in peace and love overflowing in society, but we see the opposite. Public morality cannot be maintained without religion; we will sadly see the end result of that in coming years.

It's an interesting argument that you lay out, and as agnostic that came from a religious family, it's something that I've personally grappled with. In the absence of religion, where do people find their moral and ethical compass? I wasn't raised atheist, and when I ask atheists this question they often dismiss it as not important or obvious. I feel like that's half the reason religion persists, because they actually…

I think nowadays they can come from other people. Pretty much anyone/everyone (so maybe "society" is a good stand-in?) But, originally, perhaps when times were a lot different, the word of the Lord, whichever is your flavor, was more useful in keeping people on a more-fulfilling track. People with strong family ties likely didn't need to be as devout and so the church provided a good net for those alienated from society for many reasons. These days we're a lot more likely to have support and a lot less likely to be outcast (or at least not so severely) for being different.

I am also agnostic-raised-Catholic and this type of question is posed a lot. I don't struggle with it since I feel like I know the answer...BUT A) It's difficult to articulate, B) I can't really prove it, and C) it's also that I just know "the Bible" is very likely NOT the answer which just crosses one possibility off a list.

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