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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

#651

Post by Alenycus »

mahogany wrote: post #561
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 Do you have evidence or arguments for this, or is this just a feeling? I can see an argument for the statement "religion can be and has been used to maintain public morality" but that's not what you said, so I'm curious about your reasoning.

What is morality? It is not a physical material phenomenon and it is not scientific, so if it exists it is by definition supernatural or its synonym metaphysical

Once you are discussing the supernatural, you are discussing religion.

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

#652

Post by nikolay »

commandlinefan wrote: post #650
nikolay wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So it's like the relationship between modern agile methodologies and the original agile manifesto then?

No, it's more immutable vs mutable... or accepting messages with bad public key signatures.

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

#653

Post by birken »

RhodoGSA wrote: post #612
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 display…

I'm certainly not a religious expert, but from my understanding Christianity's main innovations were not monotheism or absolute morality. Those concepts had been around for a very long time and Christianity adopted those ideas that from others and then added their own innovations on top of that.

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

#654

Post by cjameskeller »

stephenr wrote: post #472
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…

> where is the pull for good old family values? Whose family? Which values? This honestly just sounds like a “back in my day...” rant to be honest.

Is this perhaps an intentional parallel to '_Whose Justice? Which Rationality?_" by Alasdair MacIntyre?

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

#655

Post by mixmastamyk »

rayiner wrote: post #476
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…

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…

The answer to "we don't have enough information," is not to reason less.

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

#656

Post by simonh »

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…

The violence is just the punchline that makes it a joke. The point is how ludicrous it is that people take these minuscule differences in dogma seriously, and just how seriously they do take it. That's what maps to reality.

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

#657

Post by bshep »

jrs235 wrote: post #162
Loughla wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% that second paragraph. Growing up with morals imposed on my, via the threat of fire and brimstone was weird. I did what I had to do, because I was told to do it or else. Being an adult and doing the right thing, simply because it's the right thing, and developing my own moral and ethical code of conduct has greatly reduced my stress and anxiety.

I hear you. This, reliance on the Old Testament fire and brimstone teaching is a failure of the church. The Law (and the fire and brimstone) is important to show how we (no one) can live up to being prefect and our need for forgiveness and love. We are to do things out of love, not out of fear.

Pretty much sums up my experience as well, I grew up going to church and every week it was ‘follow the church or go to hell’ and ‘you are all sinners going to hell’.

As an adult ( in a different geographic area ) I’ve been to church with my wife and its a much more positive experience.

In the end my ‘belief’ is in a moral code and not in a religion.

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

#658

Post by Trasmatta »

frogpelt wrote: post #505
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…

Jesus drove people out of the temple with a whip for disrespecting it. He called people (these are all based on KJV translation) "generation of vipers", "hypocrites", "whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones", he said it would be better some people to not have been born, that it would be better for some to have a millstone hanged on their neck and be drowned in the sea. None of that was hatred. It was love. He was…

In that case, I will show love by saying that many religions are morally bankrupt.

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

#659

Post by rbanffy »

mustafa_pasi wrote: post #187
p_l wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also the official doctrine of Catholic Church since Vatican II... Thing is, application of it by clergy is not exactly universal :(

Not really. If you are, muslim yes. But if you are Catholic, then one of your duties is mass every Sunday and not doing so is a mortal sin.

There are diverging views on the subject. For some, it suffices to act according to what Jesus taught. For others, the more strict observation of rituals is a necessity.

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

#660

Post by dawg- »

kongolongo wrote: post #638
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…

>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 commo…

I think you betray your lack of understanding by categorizing any religious belief aside from fundamentalism as "cherry picking whatever pieces of the bible...". There is a 2,000 year old tradition of hermeneutic interpretation of the bible, resulting in dozens of different, more nuanced approaches to reading and thinking about the book. But you've brushed all that aside as "cherry picking" so that your criticism can still be coherent without having to make any effort to learn more than you already know. You must maintain a narrow, simplistic definition of religion in order to retain confidence in your belief system. Isn't that a bit backwards?

One individual making up a story about a turtle is not a religion. Religions emerge from thousands of years of collective human consciousness. The stories are told and retold from millions of mouths to millions of ears. You understand that input to a human's cognitive system can shape their perception, consciousness, behavior, of course? These stories and characters have accompanied us through every technological revolution from agriculture to smartphones. Repeated through countless generations, they have literally shaped us as a species. With that suggestion in mind, can you really confront the idea that God is "The Word", and that we are "made in his image", without even a tiny amount of awe and wonder?

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