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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

#611

Post by danans »

nonotreally wrote: post #224
justaman wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes beyond fairy tails. There is a sense of community that (for the most part) only religion has been able to maintain in the information age.

That's a lie that religions keep perpetuating. Many social groups exist that are just as fulfilling. My gym for example is full of people who actively work in the community, help each other and gather multiple times per week to better themselves and encourage their community. Religion has nothing to offer that secular society cannot offer. It does offer a lot of downsides though.

> Religion has nothing to offer that secular society cannot offer.

Similar to ethnic nationalism, it can and throughout history has provided the glue that holds groups together when they are in conflicts with other groups.

Unlike a secular club, religion cements this power inter-generationally by insinuating itself into the key human institutions of marriage, reproduction, child rearing, and membership in the religion. If you look at any ethno-religious state in the world (i.e. many middle eastern countries), they function this way.

The experiment of a secular national identity (based on shared beliefs about people's rights and dignity) is the only institution that can effectively fulfill this aspect of religion, but as we are now seeing, it can also stumble if it doesn't tend to the needs of its constituents well enough.

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

#612

Post by RhodoGSA »

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…

Rarely does anyone ever ask my religion but when people do i tell them Hellenism (Belief in the greek gods). People often give me a quizzical look - but when you study the 'religion' you find interesting beliefs that help you in modern day.

For instance, claiming you don't have 100% complete faith in the myths and gods wasn't a heretic offense. Everyone respected the fact that the stories were arch-types that displayed courage, anger, revenge, ect.

Also, if someone else came up to you from Egypt and believed in an entirely different pantheon you respected their opinion and could see similarities in your own religion.

Christianity from the very early days (The skims' under Constantine) was a very absolute one. There was a right and wrong. There was only one god and you are wrong and a heretic for believing in another.

That's why Hellenism works so well for me. I do not claim to be a moral precept but i do offer you this; A peace treaty. You can believe what you want to believe as long as you respect my own moral reasoning. In the grand scheme of things as long as there is no direct harm to you for my actions you must accept and respect them but i do not have to bow to them. It cannot be a suicidal pact, meaning if i do not believe in YOUR GOD, slip up and don't call you a 'They' or say somethings 'Gay'.

I truly believe one of the biggest problems with current society is everyone believes they are a moral precept and have all the answers. Love your neighbor.

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

#613

Post by Noos »

gonehome wrote: post #462
AuthorizedCust wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things. This means even if most people most of the time are perfectly pleasant, they can get swept up in other stuff that gets out of hand and hurts people. If you can't persuade someone with evidence based reasoning because their position is based on 'faith' or belief in the face of contrary evidence I d…

Everyone is crazy in their own way. There is no rationality strong enough to remove the crazy from people, and smart people over time have formed their own craziness not bound by religion or mysticism.

This site for example is pooh-poohing religion now, but five minutes later will gush over LSD's power to give pseudo-spiritual epiphanies. It used to love stoicism, which was shopworn even in the Victorian age. Probably in a year from now some other retread of old belief system will be rediscovered, maybe EST or Theosophy, or something.

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

#614

Post by hooande »

jariel wrote: post #539
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…

" 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 " Age 12 is pretty young to come to that conclusion. Also, it's not about direct rational inquiry, yes it can sometimes a source of aberration, but that would be missing the point. Spirituality is about who you are,…

Isn't Spirituality also a tool, that enables you to understand and improve your relationship to the greater good?

All tools have value, in some context or another

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

#615

Post by pyrrhotech »

Hopefully the declines will continue so that we approach the levels in Scandinavia over the next few decades. Religion has been a force of oppression and division for far too long. It has negatively affected my life, to the point that I am nearly estranged from my parents due to religious conflict, so my loathing of it is perhaps more personal than most here.

400 years ago I would have been executed for my atheistic views. 200 years ago I would have been a social pariah. Today my views are largely accepted in silicon valley and among millenials and zoomers on the internet, though I still face discrimination in the bible belt where I happen to live. Progress is being made, however slowly it may seem at times.

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

#616

Post by jimbob45 »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #586
ceilingcorner wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Karl Popper was a moron. You can tolerate intolerance just fine by assuming there will be someone equally intolerant of such intolerance.

I wish people would stop quoting that denthead. It’s as silly as people claiming the Qu’ran has passages specifically commanding them to blow people up.

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

#617

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

baryphonic wrote: post #195
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #46

Having the Church community while growing up was great. But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre. Frankly, growing up in the church left me with a broken moral code. It was only once I left it in my teens and had to work things out for myself that I feel like I could properly ground myself ethically. Having a moral system imposed on you can do that.

> Frankly, growing up in the church left me with a broken moral code. It was only once I left it in my teens and had to work things out for myself that I feel like I could properly ground myself ethically. Having a moral system imposed on you can do that. How did you derive your moral code yourself? Any action you take has side effects in the outside world, and so some minimal, common understanding of morality is nec…

Not who you were asking, but I had a similar experience.

Ultimately what I ground my beliefs in is empathy, and the understanding that my actions have an impact on other people. The second very important piece is every human being counts equally.

Our society and inner psychology is complex. So we'll mess up and cause harm at times. Occasionally it will be intentional. But I think it's straightforward to understand committing to this as a guiding principle.

If you do that, and also agree with every human being counting equally, then I've got no problem with you or your faith. What disturbs me is how many people use religion as justification for inequality, or how they use concepts of forgiveness and grace to avoid fully owning and learning from their moral failures.

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

#618

Post by LeifCarrotson »

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. […

How did you personally abandon fundamentalism and end up still identifying as Christian? I grew up learning from Ken Ham (literally shook his hand at summer camp), but I'm now a genuinely atheistic apostate and I can't comprehend what you have left of Christianity when you abandon a literal understanding of the Bible.

Young Earth Creationism pseudoscience is one reason, but there are tons of others. Ham, I think, is mostly right: Either (1) it's all true, in which case you have all the problems of fundamentalism and have to disbelieve science. Or (2) or some subset of the factual claims it makes are true - the Bible as miraculously inspired and truthful, YEC, the very existence and nature of the supernatural, Old Testament miracles, New Testament miracles, eschatology, and so on - but as Ham eloquently points out, once you abandon one of the claims that the supposedly truthful book makes, you call them all into question. Or (3) none of it is true, it's all fiction, in which case you can use whatever you want as a moral framework, but it has no special value. In that case, it's merely a socially evolved construct like every other superstition throughout the history of our species.

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

#619

Post by fullstop »

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 was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools until college. When I was in high school I recall having serious issues with what they were teaching. Here's a few of the gems they left me with:

    1. You should only get married if you intended on having children.
    2. If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled. 
    3. Homosexuality was abhorrent and sinful.
    4. Women should not obtain positions of power in the church.  They used Adam and Eve to justify their position.
Many years later I found out that the reason why my freshman year biology teacher left unexpectedly over the summer was because he had been shuffled to another location after molesting young boys. He was eventually imprisoned for this, after being extradited to Australia. The church and the school knew this but said nothing to the parents or the students and it was swept under the rug. It was complete silence until they were forced to say something at a point where those who were molested were fairly far into their lives.

Thinking back on all of this still makes me angry today. A priest in my elementary school was brought in and then quietly and suddenly left a few months later and I am left with unanswered questions.

I don't need that in my life. I don't need religion to be a moral person, and from my point of view the system that I was raised in was very far from moral. The Catholic church has done more to affirm my Atheist .. non-beliefs? .. than anything else.

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

#620

Post by CountDrewku »

Applejinx wrote: post #193
CountDrewku wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehhh Christian churches are some of the largest charitable donators in the world. Unless those taxes are going to the same places to help people I'd vote no. The government isn't going to spend it on things that help people and we know that.

Who is 'we'? Sounds like you are a strongly political church advocate making a political argument. I don't grant you the unilateral right to decide what places 'help people': that is a political question, and I didn't vote for you. You may not be particularly representative. In fact, according to the OP, you're not a majority here, so your attitude is not democratic, though it is still political.

You live in this country and church taxation is expressly forbidden by the 1st amendment for obvious reasons. I also do not attend church so that argument is moot and you can stop trying to attack me on that basis.

Being a majority on an internet forum is obviously not representative of the entirety of the US and is a pretty silly argument for changing an amendment, as is assuming that because people don't attend church they want it taxed.

Maybe you should take some time actually understanding the constitution instead of dedicating your time to inane internet attacks?

Pro tip - stop trying to control things you dislike, it's extremely anti-progressive and reeks of the same sort of intolerance ultra conservative religious groups display. Ironic eh?

Lastly, this country is not a 100% democracy and it's a Republic for a reason. That reason is so that the minority get a say in what happens and don't get stomped out. This is a good thing and you'll realize it when you're not in the majority at some point.

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