Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time • Hacker News Board

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

#581

Post by gonehome » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

elcritch wrote: post #533

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…

You make strong assertions that would be difficult to prove in general and based on a lot of assumptions (e.g. that materialistic reductionism is the only accurate worldview). I believe the viewpoint you espouse that religious people have broken reasoning is bit myopic in understanding human rationality and intellectual pursuits as well. Humans are complicated as is our understanding of reality we all share. Good cou…

I don't mean to imply that a religious person can't be outlier smart in other ways (Knuth being a great example but there are many others), but that doesn't mean something isn't broken with their world view. People are wildly inconsistent by default (myself included) and it takes great effort to try and recognize these kinds of failures in order to correct them.

In fact, the smarter the person is - the more complex their rationalizations typically are.

As far as finding major religions support a rational world view, it's too easy to cherry pick religious text examples to support anything so I won't do that here. I'll just say that while I'd like that to be true, I think that it's not.

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

#582

Post by leetcrew » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

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…

so depending on how you phrase that question, it can be perceived as an insult. it almost implies that, by default, an atheist wouldn't have a moral compass. I'm not saying you think that, just that it's a plausible interpretation for someone who's already feeling a bit defensive. also some atheists are just obnoxious.

but maybe I can answer your question. I think of morality as a way to rationalize the emotions I feel when someone treats me a certain way or I treat someone else a certain way. my morals are rules I can feel good about following.

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

#583

Post by throwaway0b1 » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

freddybobs wrote: post #321

throwaway0b1 wrote: post #230

This may be a very bad idea. But as (in the words of the at-present top comment) a fundamentalist adhering to scriptural literalism (aka a conservative Lutheran) [addendum: who does not hate everyone], I feel compelled to offer to answer questions anyone might have for me, so AMA. I don't really want to individually respond to everything throughout the rest of the comments, but I will begin by saying that most church…

What's your take on the dead sea scrolls ? How do the aspects of the early church align with scriptural literalism? Specifically the split of the early church between Paul and Jesus brother James. James was Jesus's choice to lead the church in his absence. A direction which aligned more with Judaism - including circumcision, and kosher foods. Yet later Christianity revolves around Paul at odds vision. Paul was a Roma…

Indeed, some points were a bit unclear. This is literalism in the sense of "God is real, created the world, Jesus lived and died to save you from your sins", not "there is no figurative language in the bible" or "the Bible is a bunch of stories about how to be a good person."

One important phrase in interpreting Scripture is "let Scripture interpret Scripture." (cf. 1 Cor 1:18f, Romans 11:33-35, 2 Cor 10:5 - our reason is not capable of fully understanding God, so we interpret it as his Word says and leave it at that.)

I should point you toward the Council of Jerusalem for part of the early history of the church, and I'm not really sure where you're coming from with the rest.

As for the rest (mostly about the history of biblical manuscripts), could you please put what I missed into a couple more clear questions?

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

#584

Post by Sigmoid » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

nsilvestri wrote: post #218

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…

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 groups to promote normalization of homosexuality.

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

#585

Post by cableshaft » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

whiddershins wrote: post #404

cableshaft wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up Protestant but have considered myself Agnostic for a while. However, lately I've been having the urge to dig into spirituality more, as I'm starting to suspect there can be something there, it's just that, except for a single sermon I sat in about people destroying natural rock formations that have been around for millions of years on a whim (yeah the pastor actually said millions of years), I haven't found…

Jordan Peterson’s lectures on Genesis are pretty great. I only listened to the first few but they are very powerful. Are you looking primarily for Christianity or spirituality in general? Braving the Wilderness (I haven’t finished this one) For addiction : Breathing Underwater New Seeds of Contemplation By reputation : any CS Lewis, Bertrand Russel, and more contemporary is David Bentley Hart Catching the Big Fish by…

> Are you looking primarily for Christianity or spirituality in general?

I'll take either. Thank you for those.

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

#586

Post by LeifCarrotson » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

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…

As an atheist apostate who was raised in a fundamentalist, Baptist, Christian church in the Great Lakes region, it hits pretty close to home.

I was last in church a couple weeks ago for a funeral; it was a little weird hearing about the ways people from various highly-similar churches talked about Grandma's spiritual history as she was enlightened from her Christian Reformed early childhood to know a living and true God. Did she know the theological differences at age 10? We talked about the effect she had as the matriarch of our extended family bringing everyone together for decades by sponsoring an annual summer trip to a nearby Bible conference ground, and about how she justifiably ended that when the Bible conference lost their way and endorsed some speakers with relatively minor theological differences.

It's not "conflict" in the sense of the Spanish Inquisition - no one, as far as I know, would genuinely push someone off a bridge for being in a different sect - but around here they'd pray for the person to accept the truth, call for church discipline/excommunication/speaking bans if in a position of power, or they'd leave the church and find a slightly different sect that didn't make the wrong call on whatever issue was brought up by the council of 1912.

There's a paradox of intolerance at play: A group that aims to be universally tolerant cannot actually tolerate intolerance, and fundamentalist Christianity advocates a singular, accurately understood, unique truth at its core. You can and tolerate love those who hold different theologies all you want, but if you believe in one absolute universal truth as a lot of Christian culture does, then anyone who believes even a little bit differently is not right, which is to say, by definition, they're wrong.

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

#587

Post by leetcrew » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #515

rayiner wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no strongly-held opinion anywhere in the world that you can't play that rhetorical trick on, which may be why there are whole papers that have been written about why it's almost never persuasive to deploy gotcha statistics that way.

is this a rebuttal or an agreement? I think the point of the example was that most people can't rigorously defend their strongly held opinions. they just throw gotchas at each other.

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

#588

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#589

Post by goatcode » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

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 the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

What people call fundamentalists are often not all about the actual fundamentals. Rather, they're stuck on one or another bad, but still old idea. Actual fundamentals do not reflect the hateful, angry, bitter image that's conjured up by the term "fundamentalist."

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

#590

Post by offtop5 » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #509

offtop5 wrote: post #499

Even though I'm an atheist this concerns me since Church is one of the last remaining civic organizations. People need to be apart of an community. In the before times that's how you made friends and meet partners. Now every single indicator of courtship is at all time lows , mental illness is off the charts and we're all miserable. I don't have a solution but I'm afraid of the future we're entering.

>Now every single indicator of courtship is at all time lows, mental illness is off the charts and we're all miserable. I'm guessing this has far more to do with political and economic changes than decline in religion.

Religion isn't the point, you need to be a part of a community to meet people. It's very rare for you to be able to make real friends, or find a mate by staring at a screen all day. Church provides one mechanism, but in the old times you could also join a bowling league or an elks club.

Now instead of being a member of a community where your actions are held to account, you can hop on Twitter and call all types of people names. And for what, just so you can spread your anger to other people ?