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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

#451

Post by brundolf »

forrestbrazeal wrote: post #433

My personal observation (having left a fundamentalist background, though still identifying as Christian) is that hardcore young-earth creationism of the Ken Ham variety has driven a ton of deconversion in my generation. Ken Ham & his ilk have been teaching for decades, explicitly and repeatedly, that if you do not buy into their specific 6-day literal interpretation of Genesis, then you might as well be an atheist. […

Trumpism (and the past couple decades of political lead-up to it among fundamentalists) being the other big one. I think these are the two major forces that actively drive people away.

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

#452

Post by dawg- »

louwrentius wrote: post #373
dawg- wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I became an atheist/agnostic as a teenager and now in my late 20's I have slowly come back to religion. So I am really interested in this topic. My comment is specifically about online atheist communities, because I think they are often toxic to both religion and to atheism itself. A lot of these communities are hyper-focused on fundamentalism, to their own detriment. These online atheists communities can be very unf…

> just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith Well, that's the whole point: Atheists don't. Indeed we can't explain everything, not even close. But we don't have any reason to even remotely believe in any kind of supernatural power, which in turn begs an explanation it self ad infinitum.

You don't have any reason that you have considered. Which is totally fine. The problem comes when atheists believe a priori that any argument for God's existence would be automatically false, even the ones they have never heard or considered.

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

#453

Post by [deleted] »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #189
AuthorizedCust wrote: post #102

So many of the comments here are affirming what I have long observed: much anti-religious sentiment (“much”, not “all”!) is actually a reaction to fundamentalism, which is the bad theology of scriptural literalism, which brings heresies like hating LGBT, insisting the Bible is also a science textbook, superstitious views of certain Middle Eastern lands, and more. Growing up as a mainline Protestant, I thankfully didn…

After being raised in a non-Fundamentalist denomination I'd say the progressive ones are more insidious and no less harmful. Their foundations are all the same text, no matter how literal or figurative they interpret it. IME they usually also teach the same bad ways of thinking: emotion over logic, testimony over hard evidence, authority beyond your understanding, etc.

[deleted]

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

#455

Post by dcolkitt »

forrestbrazeal wrote: post #433

My personal observation (having left a fundamentalist background, though still identifying as Christian) is that hardcore young-earth creationism of the Ken Ham variety has driven a ton of deconversion in my generation. Ken Ham & his ilk have been teaching for decades, explicitly and repeatedly, that if you do not buy into their specific 6-day literal interpretation of Genesis, then you might as well be an atheist. […

Except, mainline Protestants are shrinking at a much faster rate than evangelicals. If church attrition was driven by a rejection of fundamentalism we wouldn't expect Unitarians and Episcopalians to be losing members faster than Baptists and Pentecostals.

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

#457

Post by ketzo »

krastanov wrote: post #419
lazyninja987 wrote: post #380

I am interested in one more detail. average family income for all church members. I have observed hindus, muslims, christians, jains. My observation so far is, religious fervor is directly to 2 factors. 1. is that religion a minority in a given state ? 2. whether you grew up in prosperity (not wealth, but above middle class)? societies which are poor tend towards fundamentalism. religion gives some sort of escape pla…

I have the impression this does not necessarily apply to the US. There are plenty of examples of... vicious(?) fundamentalists that are rich and of the ethnic majority.

I think that the people about whom you're talking tend to use fundamentalist religion as means to enforce existing power structures from which they benefit; there's a reason that modern American conservatism is so inextricably tied to the evangelical churches, and why Southern Baptism was once used to justify the capture, sale, forced labor, and breeding of human beings with different skin colors.

I guess what I'm saying is that your point is not mutually exclusive with the comment to which you're replying, and that extreme religious values can have multiple "purposes," explicit or implicit.

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

#458

Post by loveistheanswer »

gonehome wrote: post #428
AuthorizedCust wrote: post #102

So many of the comments here are affirming what I have long observed: much anti-religious sentiment (“much”, not “all”!) is actually a reaction to fundamentalism, which is the bad theology of scriptural literalism, which brings heresies like hating LGBT, insisting the Bible is also a science textbook, superstitious views of certain Middle Eastern lands, and more. Growing up as a mainline Protestant, I thankfully didn…

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 they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

Can you steelman what the basic thing is that religious people get wrong?

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

#459

Post by Robotbeat »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #389
Robotbeat wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better to join a church/synagogue/whathaveyou that DOESN’T require total philosophical adherence. There’s a similar problem in political circles, as politics has in many cases (especially last 5 years) replaced religion. Adherence is mandated by many, but the healthiest political circles/communities do not require strict adherence but instead allow healthy debate. And in part, it is a difference in tradition. In Minn…

"Better to join a church/synagogue/whathaveyou that DOESN’T require total philosophical adherence." I'm a philosophical materialist and I don't believe in any kind of deity or supernatural world. There is no "church" that would have any place for someone like me, other than maybe the Unitarians, and, well, honestly, they're not that interesting. I hung out in Marxist study groups and Trotskyist groupings for a while…

Yeah, the political groups have very similar community effect. The healthier ones allow philosophical differences and debate.

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

#460

Post by barnesto »

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…

Why are you singling out Christianity? The same could be said for any of the book based religions.
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