Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 1001 posts

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

#631

Post by nikolay »

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…

It's weird how many Americans are completely unaware of the second largest branch of Christianity (or better call it "the trunk" and everything else - "a branch") - the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is the original Christianity without a pope, indulgences, inquisition, and other things, which have nothing to do with the early Christianity.

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

#632

Post by timbit42 »

yalogin wrote: post #282

Looks like I am the only person surprised that the membership is this high, even more so that it was in the 70% range just 20yrs ago. I admit my guess is based on my interactions but I was expecting it to be in the 20-30% range.

If you are thinking of Christianity, this poll included Judaism and Islam. Christianity's numbers are around 33%.

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

#633

Post by timbit42 »

karmasimida wrote: post #410

I don't care about religions in general. It is not necessary to my daily operations, and I have no interests to have it intertwined with my life either. Why would I assume there is some God anywhere anyway?

Before science was a thing, people used the idea of God to explain the unexplainable. Today science explains those things for us.

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

#634

Post by kajecounterhack »

sethc2 wrote: post #470
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…

Exactly. Fundamentalists miss the actual fundamentals. People mistake the American Evangelical Christianity that is a few hundred years old for the church established by the apostles nearly 2000 years ago. That church was it which considered the weak as equally valuable as the strong, that insisted on helping the poor, that believed men and women both to be of the utmost value. That established hospitals to care for…

> People are rightfully scornful of American evangelicalism, but they throw the baby out with the bath water and try to pretend that the orthodox (in sense of true and right) church has not done tremendous good in this world.

There's no "true and right" church. In fact the non-stop schism of the christian faith is evidence that the views espoused by christians are incredibly incoherent. One model to use is that the bible is a map and your interactions with actual people are the actual road. And you're trying to navigate your life with this map. You have a few options:

  - Trust the map no matter what (fundamentalists)
    - You end up also arguing about how the map *really* reads, because it's incoherent at its core! Denominations are started by people trying too hard to ascertain the "fundamentals."
  - Trust the road no matter what
    - Is your map even relevant then? What's the difference between this and being an atheist?
  - Trust the road when you can see it and can't argue with it, trust the map otherwise
    - This leads to shit like voting against progress because you are ignorant to the harm it does. Since the map is incoherent you still end up drawing incorrect conclusions in directions that are harmful.
These basically all suck and cause problems vs the strategy of "live in the world, and use some other map."

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

#636

Post by Tarsul »

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…

compassion and empathy shouldn't come from believing in God. It should come from believing that humans are all the same, meaning that you shouldn't do to others what you wouldn't want to be done to yourself because otherwise how could you expect other people to treat you fairly if you yourself don't do it? At least that's where I stand and I attribute this feeling of compassion a lot more to cartoons of the 80s and 90s than I do to what I learned in the church. I'm not in the church anymore because I don't believe in God. But I believe in values and if being in church helps to give you good values then church is worth it for society. I see this pragmatically.

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

#637

Post by timbit42 »

ccn0p wrote: post #77

The Christian church has gone through an interesting time in 2020. Many churches have lost attendance as pastors closed their doors or tried to stay out of politics, while other stronger pastors who have kept their doors open despite lockdowns and are speaking up against the US government with respect to threats against religious freedom (eg see H.R. 5) -- those churches are stronger and more vibrant than ever.

This poll is about membership, not attendance.

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

#638

Post by kongolongo »

dawg- wrote: post #336
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 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…

>What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.

I'd say you're being inconsistent with your religion and that the religious part of how you came to these views is unnecessary. Sure I agree attacking the very worst of religion is easy, but even at its very best, religion doesn't make a compelling argument for its necessity.

The reason for fixation on fundamentalism is because they have the most consistent story that can be argued against. Once you start cherry picking whatever pieces of the bible seem like it could fit into today's social norms and current understanding of the physical world, you're basically showing none of it necessary.

What would you say to someone that believes a giant turtle created everything, is the one true god and also held those same stances on evolution etc? They just prepend the fact that a giant turtle created everything and then vanished without a trace. Anyone could come up with a number of creative stories that are unverifiable or disprovable and seemingly are compatible with our current scientific understanding of the world. What makes your god or any god(s) in particular more reasonable or necessary than the great turtle?

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

#639

Post by tomp »

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…

> In the absence of religion, where do people find their moral and ethical compass?

You do all the same things, except: (1) you can make your own choices depending on your own reasoning (e.g. you can independently decide whether circumcision/being gay is good or bad, independent of what any religion says), and (2) you’re doing things to be good, not to please god.

In fact, I consider people who are “moral” just because god says so / you fear the consequences / you want to go to heaven to actually be immoral. It’s akin to only helping in an accident if the person is rich - you’re not doing it because it’s the right thing to do, you’re just doing it to get something in return.

Edit: you can also pick any number of philosophical frameworks of morality. Personally I oscillate between golden and silver rules.

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

#640

Post by Alenycus »

ur-whale wrote: post #608
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.

> 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://w…

Ive read Hitchens, and I am not impressed.

Subjective morality is ultimately simple preferance and ultimately just a battle of wills. I, and most other religious people, do not consider such a "moral order" to be morality at all.

Objective morality, with a judge above all judges who is justice itself, is the only way "justice" and morality mean anything at all.

Post reply on HN