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

> You just told an emotional anecdote then declared that I’m wrong due to a straw man

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> That’s my point.

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> ...and is exactly counter to my experience...

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> Here’s the crux of it: you’re making faulty arguments ...

Apologies; You didn't provide any evidence or elaboration on claims in your original post, just that "I think it's pretty obvious ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake," so I did make assumptions about your motivations etc. It would have been better of me to ask "Why do you think churches would have addressed these problems?" instead of blindly countering what I thought your arguments were.

That said:

> I must have missed your [supporting arguments].

I'd thought I gave several possible counter-arguments to your points--which you then responded to? I'm confused as to what you 'missed'.

> Eg, calling me a “churchgoer stereotype”

I did not call you a churchgoer, I said you fit the stereotype, in that you made claims without bothering to effectively support them (at the time); you may consider this 'bigoted' to stereotype in this manner, but to me it's a chronic frustration with defenders of churches. I'll grant that it's implied that I called you a churchgoer, but the specifics there are beside the point.

At this point I would also add on the stereotype that, when your ideas are confronted, you act as if you're under "attack" and are being "oppressed," a la "war on christmas."

> You’re just a bigot: factually wrong and stereotyping people.

I'm not certain I agree with that definition of 'bigot'; I'm also not certain you've demonstrated my factual incorrectness.

I'm also rather frustrated around the disconnect of you treating churches as a roughly homogenous group (as in "ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake", "[most charity] work gets done by churches", "several modern problems trace to the collapse of churches"), yet when I similarly generalize it's "stereotyping" and I'm a bigot.

We clearly have different experiences w.r.t. churches, as most people do. I have plenty of friends who have a litany of issues with the churches they grew up in; I have several other friends and family members who have had wonderful experiences in their churches. Both of these common classes of experience (you may call them anecdotal, I call them endemic) existing in the same space makes it very frustrating to me when people make claims around the positivity of churches with little support and ignoring these widespread flaws. You say it was a mistake to ditch churches without "a replacement"--I'd claim there are many whose lives are better off for having not been subject to the whims of their church, and calling it a mistake to abandon them is to ignore the church's share in their own faults where they exist.

> [saying churches are a self-selecting population that inherently echochambers] sounds like a stereotype more than a fact

People who go to church literally self-select in that they all believe in __roughly__ the same doctrine, god, etc. Even more so if you account for the fact that "church shopping" is a thing where people try to find one that "fits," and then they get their general beliefs reinforced by going. I really don't see what's a stereotype here.

The "outside groups" they struggle to relate to is demonstrable by things like how they interact with LGBT people, or folks of other religions, or atheists. There are certainly examples of where some churches do these things well, but again your claim of "ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake" __does not__ makes these distinctions, and ignoring them is tantamount to ignoring the harm churches--generalized or no!--have done to these groups.

But even I accept your argument that they had, why is organized religion the only way to achieve that good? Why not provide societal benefit through secular and people focused governance, for instance? Why does the teachings of thousands of years old people have to do anything with it, even if we do cherry pick them and only listen to the parts that we as a modern society agree are good? When you draw your philosophy from a book that says at the end “don’t change this or you’re going to hell”, then it’s little surprise that extremists arise with what are actually fairly reasonable interpretations of the Bible.

That's different from religiosity correlating with "being a good person" though, which I'm interpreting as "the ability to act both morally and independently".

It does seem that some people need religion to be a good person, because they lack the moral structure to do without (due to trauma or bad parenting or whatever). For those people, religion allows them to function in society with a set of business rules, but they still tend to lack a solid moral/ethical decision matrix to function on their own or act outside the contexts they have rules for.