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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

#951

Post by thephyber »

medium_burrito wrote: post #941
chkaloon wrote: post #939

What US society is struggling with is what to replace church with. It provided community and mutual support, but combined it with a myth that many could not accept any longer. The big question is what can provide the community and mutual support without the binding myth. There hasn't been a replacement thus far that has taken hold. Also, the combination of online life and recently the pandemic has weakened what local…

If our population was better educated , I feel like togas, buggery and acropolises could be a real option. Not more degrees, but well read- history, philosophy, religious literature, science shit, etc. Also, the whole wokespeak has seriously destroyed public discourse- not just from the right but on the left.

I don’t think generic education / knowledge completely fixes it. Without level-headed critical thinking of all knowledge and teachings, there will always be “sacred” ideas that are culturally off-limits of criticism.

Also, “wokespeak” (to the extent that it is a new thing) seems remarkably similar to older concepts of tribe signaling and religions (where members use common terminology and symbols to define in-groups and to declare out groups heretics).

I’m happy that the big legacy religions are losing mindshare, but pretending like pure abstract intelligent discussion is a direct replacement confuses why people return to church, temple, etc. Humans seem to crave tradition of conventions, emotional connection with their community, and a reason to bind together for assistance. I haven’t heard a proposal which replaces the church community without reproducing the worst aspects of legacy religions.

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

#952

Post by ineedasername »

LadyCailin wrote: post #510
xtracto wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was "in touch" with religion for 12 years (my parents sent me to a very catholic school even though both are atheists) My experience was seeing huge amounts of falsehood and hypocrisy as religious people followed and repeated all the rituals of the mass but in the day to day life they just did not care about others and pretty much ignored what their religion taught them. Thank God after those 12 years I saw everyth…

Is this the religious equivalent of a parent making the kid smoke a carton of cigarettes at once, to turn them off smoking?

Once you get outside of religion classes and church services, Catholic schools tend to be pretty strong on the fundamentals. (Especially Jesuit schools)

When I went for HS, literally the only elective was Art, and for any student in honors courses, it wasn't an elective: you didn't take art because all of your time was in academic courses except for gym once a week. Don't get me wrong, I think electives are valuable and wish I'd had the opportunity: I'm just describing the educational priorities of that type of school. However they also need revenue, so the ones that remain these days are generally a little more friendly in allowing for an individual's interests.

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

#953

Post by rcoveson »

exporectomy wrote: post #920
ur-whale wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 existe…

That's a naive view that assumes people are rational but we're not, not even you. Our minds seem to need some amount of hokum (imaginary beings) to remain sane. Children who grow up with a supportive parent who reliably takes care of them carry the feeling of being cared for and the confidence that comes from it for the rest of their lives even after the parent is dead. A dead person is no more real than God, yet the…

> A dead person is no more real than God...

I'm unconvinced that remembering dead parents amounts to believing in imaginary beings.

Reality is less relative than you're making it out to be. Dead people are "real" because I can reliably predict observable effects their past actions would have had on the world and then confirm them with observation. For example, if I wanted to track down some college essays written by my grandparents, I might actually be able to find some, even though I don't have them in my memories. Or, more practically, I can ask a mutual friend, "remember when {dead person} said X?" And they will say, "yeah, and then they said Y", and I will say, "yeah".

The fact that dead people are dead doesn't make them "hokum" in the way that Zeus or Thor or Moroni are hokum. It's fine to doubt your own mind's relationship with reality, but don't doubt it so much that you become totally disconnected and consider all the people in your memories who you can't immediately re-confirm the existence of to be as immaterial as God.

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

#954

Post by pixelmonkey »

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…

I imagine that many people might read this quote (out of context) from his speech "This is Water" and in this thread discussing US church membership, and think, "This seems like DFW is defending religion." But, I think this is far from the case. I think this was DFW indicting modern secular consumer society as no better than religion in its vapidity. "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." This is the modern consumer choice, boiled down.

The point of the speech is not to convince you that worshiping religion might be a better idea than worshiping money, things, power, or vanity. Instead, the point of the speech is to convince you that a human's "default setting" (another phrase he uses in the speech) is to worship something. And, often, that worship of something simply happens to adults, as they are going through the motions of the modern drudgery of everyday life.

Thus to move beyond worship requires a level of education (and introspection) not typically accessed by everyday adults -- yet, it's still available to all, should they try hard enough to pursue it and to see it (that is: the water surrounding the fish who swim in it).

This being a college commencement speech, DFW encourages the young graduates to use their education, and the introspection it allows, to rise above the various human psychological biases (especially self-centered behaviors and attitudes) that might make their lives feel meaningless and miserable in the moment (or in retrospect).

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

#955

Post by wslack »

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…

Yep. It's a pity there isn't more attention for churches that answer questions clearly and dig into nuance - but complexity doesn't get attention.

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

#956

Post by ur-whale »

exporectomy wrote: post #920
ur-whale wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 existe…

That's a naive view that assumes people are rational but we're not, not even you. Our minds seem to need some amount of hokum (imaginary beings) to remain sane. Children who grow up with a supportive parent who reliably takes care of them carry the feeling of being cared for and the confidence that comes from it for the rest of their lives even after the parent is dead. A dead person is no more real than God, yet the…

So, in summary: we're not rational beings, therefore improvement through self-delusion?

I'm sorry, but I have two problems with that approach:

    1. Knowing I'm willingly drinking snake oil believing it'll somehow improve me makes it very hard for me to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. On a good day, I'd call myself an idiot, and on a bad one a pathological liar.

    2. Once you open the door to being told fairy tales in hope of improving yourself, you also open the door to letting yourself being manipulated into believing *any* kind BS by other, manipulative people. This is precisely the kind of mental attitude that has given us all the "interesting" byproducts of religion: religious wars, religious persecution, faith-based terrorism, death cults, debasement of arbitrary category of people (eg women, gays) etc ... (the list is long and extremely gruesome).
Nope, none of that for me, thank you.

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

#957

Post by thephyber »

goldcd wrote: post #906
dagw wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up attending church, and on the whole have nothing but good things to say about the whole experience. It gave me both spiritual and moral support when I needed it the most and some of the best people I have ever known, I got to know through church. In fact in ways I mourn the loss of both my faith and my 'church'. However once I realized that, on a very fundamental level, the core of what they where claiming a…

I'll agree with you that I find their reasoning faulty (I did), but what I dislike about my atheism is that I get lumped in with people who'll tell theists that "they're wrong" To my mind, most of the planet's population have got to the 'right place' (show love and compassion to those you meet) - and how we all got to this same place is immaterial. I'm without a doubt an atheist to my core - but doesn't stop me admir…

> but what I dislike about my atheism is that I get lumped in with people who'll tell theists that "they're wrong"

But every Christian that doesn’t reject the first Commandment implicitly believes the same thing. Some of them picket and scream terrible things at their outgroupers. Most are reasonably neutral and nice.

Giving too much oxygen or mind share to the few vocal outliers only lowers your quality of life. Also, there are enough atheists/agnostics/nones that it’s basically useless to talk about them as a monolithic group.

I am far more concerned about the asymmetry of media/discussion about the obnoxious few with bad ideas over the quiet plurality of pleasant people who don’t force their toxic ideas on others.

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

#958

Post by AgentOrange1234 »

goldcd wrote: post #906
dagw wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up attending church, and on the whole have nothing but good things to say about the whole experience. It gave me both spiritual and moral support when I needed it the most and some of the best people I have ever known, I got to know through church. In fact in ways I mourn the loss of both my faith and my 'church'. However once I realized that, on a very fundamental level, the core of what they where claiming a…

I'll agree with you that I find their reasoning faulty (I did), but what I dislike about my atheism is that I get lumped in with people who'll tell theists that "they're wrong" To my mind, most of the planet's population have got to the 'right place' (show love and compassion to those you meet) - and how we all got to this same place is immaterial. I'm without a doubt an atheist to my core - but doesn't stop me admir…

As a teenager I was that guy you don’t like. Vocal about my right to not believe, not participate, and not be coerced into religious stuff. Quick to anger by what I saw as violations of church/state separation in my public school. Quick to tell folks how wrong and stupid they were stupid for believing it.

Now it makes me cringe. Like you, still Atheist to the core. But I can really appreciate many of my childhood church’s teachings: God is love, God forgives us, God accepts all of us. I can listen in awe at the sermons of Dr. King Jr. And while I cannot imagine ever believing the supernatural aspects of it all, I will always deeply appreciate and agree with the concern and caring for The Least of These, and our shared responsibility to one another.

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

#959

Post by rcoveson »

hudon wrote: post #753
ur-whale wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 existe…

> bearded dude sitting on a cloud That's a strange straw man. No God-fearing person I know believes in such a thing. God is not a being, but rather is _being itself_. In fact, when Moses asked God what his name was, God replies something like "I am who am". If you prefer an Aristotelian frame, he is the "unmoved mover" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover

The people you know are most like you (the same is true of the people anybody knows), and are a bad proxy for humanity. The number of people who believe their God is "being itself" is vanishingly small compared to the number who believe their God is a real, specific being who has spoken specific words and done specific things.

I agree that "bearded dude sitting on a cloud" is a strawman, but "entity who spoke directly to Adam and Moses" is pretty accurate, in most Christian's eyes.

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

#960

Post by dawg- »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #934
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 - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right? The main issue with most of these philosophical arguments is that t…

I already replied to your comment below, but this one is interesting too.

> The main issue with most of these philosophical arguments is that they don't prove anything even worth refuting. Almost all of them simply attempt to prove the existence of a deistic God that does not meaningfully interact with the world (beyond creating it or sustaining it).

I don't think any good philosopher would admit to the embarrassment of actually having "proved" something!

Jokes aside, you wouldn't consider "sustaining the world" to be a fairly meaningful ongoing interaction?

> Believing that there was a creator doesn't provide any useful information

Very pragmatic! Assume there is a God - what kind of things would he consider "useful"?

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