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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

#671

Post by jfengel »

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…

Note that they understood the myths to be archetypes, but outright atheism was a charge punishable by death. That's what they got Socrates on.

Also note that they were pretty limited in their tolerance. If people got pissed at you, they wrote your name on a piece of pottery (ostrakon). If enough names were gathered, you were banished -- the root of the word "ostracized".

On the upside, they were very tolerant of transgender and intersex individuals. Note in particular the case of Callo/Callon, who changed their sex and pronouns.

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

#672

Post by lordylord »

lootsauce wrote: post #606

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MzyBv4yOPU

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

#673

Post by dawg- »

thrww20210329 wrote: post #665
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…

"As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers" They also conveniently ignore miracles sent from God and seen by thousands of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun "you are pro choice" I'm sorry but that is not compatible with Christianity.

Why not?

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

#674

Post by today20201014 »

nikolay wrote: post #631
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.

I can understand the belief that Eastern Orthodoxy is more of a "trunk" than more recent "branches", but what about core ideas that predate Jesus? e.g. the immortality of the soul was reasoned by Plato (Republic, circa 350BC); heaven and hell have been portrayed by Virgil (Aeneid, circa 19BC). Aren't these the "trunk", and the Hebrew Bible and Jesus another branch?

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

#675

Post by ARandomerDude »

throwawaygal7 wrote: post #667
drumttocs8 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in a church that was very serious about "serious" preaching- Primitive Baptist, very focused on Calvinist doctrine and what could be considered scriptural literalism. It was definitely not "baby food"... but they still could not answer some questions clearly, and that is because it is an invention of man rooted in a prescientific understanding of the world. I would argue that church are losing members not b…

Original anabaptists were not calvinists... primitive baptists are inherently unserious

Never thought I'd see the day when HN would turn into the Reformed Pub!

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

#676

Post by ur-whale »

cjameskeller wrote: post #648
CedarMills wrote: post #93

As a believer and someone who attends church regularly, this is sad but not unexpected. From my own personal experience - if the church cannot answer questions clearly, their members will look for answers somewhere else. A lot of churches unfortunately are so elementary in their teaching or turn to "feel good preaching" (see Elevation Church). The longterm effect is that a person ends up being tired of getting the sa…

Agreed. This was a major component in my switch from Protestant/Baptist to ("Greek"/Eastern) Orthodox. Having thousands of years of prior religious & philosophical discussions to draw from, as well as the experiences of people living under all manner of political regimes provides a much-needed grounding against whatever may be the current, trendy topics. And a direct result of that history is that the Church mandates…

This approach, "religion as an operator's manual to living one's life" is one of the very rare arguments in defense of religion I can vaguely resonate with.

Unfortunately this argument entirely fails to support all the rest of the luggage, especially the metaphysical hokum: you can perfectly chose to live your life according to a set of rules that will help you (and others) without having to justify it via the existence of some bearded dude sitting on a cloud.

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

#677

Post by bjourne »

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?

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is often quoted as the fundamental tenet of Christianity.

> If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

Donald Knuth is a devout Christian and he has been right about lots of very complicated things.

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

#679

Post by DaedPsyker »

m0llusk wrote: post #233
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…

My own experience being raised mainline Protestant was a bit different which might be illustrative: My parents were not at all devout, but still took wisdom and moral lessons from the Bible, especially from the teachings of Jesus. At the same time the preachers in town leaned right in their beliefs and focused on reading and interpreting more obscure passages. This resulted in a modest ongoing tension about what exac…

This isn't an excuse, more curiosity, but did that take place during the mass hysteria about supposed satanic cults?

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

#680

Post by krapp »

simonh wrote: post #646
RhodoGSA wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. More than that, they believed each others gods were cultural representations of the same actual gods. After all there is only one sky. It doesn't make any sense to think that our sky god is different from their sky god, or our sun god is different…

>More than that, they believed each others gods were cultural representations of the same actual gods.

Ironically, Christianity kind of did the same thing, rather believing everyone else's gods were just demons or sorcerers in league with Satan. In further irony, this led to a lot of syncretism of pagan beliefs and rituals into Christianity.

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