Why Christianity is on the decline in America

[cleanhippie]

Why Christianity is on the decline in America

You can see it in poll results from Pew Research to the Barna Group; you can hear it thunderously condemned from the pulpit and more quietly discussed in church focus groups, but agreement is pretty widespread: church attendance is declining and all Christian sects, even the loudest and most conservative, are losing ground in America.

This is the subject of a recent article in the Los Angeles Times by paleontologist, author and illustrator, Gregory S. Paul. Paul is also known for a 2005 statistical survey that measured the relationship between religion and societal health. It compared statistics from 18 different developed democracies (including the USA) on aspects of societal health and dysfunction, to rates of religious belief. The study concluded was that there was an inverse relationship between religion and poor societal health rates (IE: the higher the level of things like belief in a creator, bible literalism, frequency of prayer and attendance at services in a country, the higher the level of things like youth suicides, STDs, teen pregnancies, homicide and other crimes). (emphasis mine)

At the time, though Paul indicated the study said nothing about cause and effect, but only showed a relationship between the two variables, he was widely criticised and, as one pundit put it, became "the anti-Christ of the month" for many religious groups.

http://www.examiner.com/atheism-in-los-angeles/why-christianity-is-on-the-decline-america

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Go Reason!
:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

[Blue Owl]

1. two words: Pat Robertson

His polarizing, judgemental bullshit has done more internal damage to the outfit than anyone realizes.

[Chris_Texas]

2. Simple answer: INTERNET. People have access to information

[FiveGoodMen]

3. All the fanatical christians are on TV or in the government or military

That's why they aren't going to church.

I'd love for this trend to be real, but when christians take over every aspect of American civic life, how can that be a decline?

[tridim]

4. I hope the Hubble Deep Field had something to do with it.

[cleanhippie]

12. Every time I see that pic, it blows my mind.

We are simply unable to grasp the scale of the universe we live in. (well, most of us can't)

[thereismore]

5. If it is, the remnant religionists are all the more fundamentalist in their views. nt

[bluestateguy]

6. Unfortunately most of that decline is coming from Mainline and liberal denominations

Fundamentalist evangelicals are doing just fine. There is no evidence of their decline.

[Kennah]

17. I'm not so sure about that

When I lived in North Carolina, there were dozens of Baptist Churches (mostly Southern Baptist) in tiny little Burlington. A lot of it was apparently attributable to splits within churches where a group would leave to form a new church. A rise in the number of churches doesn't necessarily mean a rise in the number of parishioners.

[thereismore]

7. Religion SHOULD be studied by a paleontologist! How quaint. nt

[slay]

8. I feel truly bad for Christians who believe in stuff like feeding the poor, housing the homeless

it must be awful to have the best parts of your religion totally overlooked by mainstream christianity - hijacked in favor of evangelical wackos who want to tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies and focus on the hellfire and "judgement day" parts of the bible instead. I'm not a christian, but if I was, I do not think Jesus would be happy with the current state of things.

[CrispyQ]

9. I believe that if we could topple the "We Fool You" tier, we could turn this world around.

[slay]

11. I love that poster

and I despise our current form of capitalism.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_PpDUVvDyQ6M/S1yWW8C5uUI/AAAAAAAAA28/C5GwMMAZw9o/s400/capitalism+sucks.jpg

[intaglio]

16. For Non Blondes say it right

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chysEoANK7c

[slay]

18. Rage Against the Machine does it well in this one too:

Rage Against the Machine: Hadda Be Playin' On The Jukebox (Studio Version) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAFznAN8tDE

(adapted from a poem by Alan Ginsberg)

Lyrics:

It had to be flashin' like the daily double
It had to be playin' on TV
It had to be loud mouthed on the comedy hour
It had to be announced over loud speakers

The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots

It had to be said in old ladies' language
It had to be said in American headlines
Kennedy stretched and smiled and got double crossed by lowlife goons and agents
Rich bankers with criminal connections
Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba working with a
big time syndicate from Tampa, Florida
And it had to be said with a big mouth

It had to be moaned over factory foghorns
It had to be chattered on car radio news broadcasts
It had to be screamed in the kitchen
It had to be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting

It had to be howled on the streets by newsboys to bus conductors
It had to be foghorned into New York harbor
It had to echo onto hard hats
It had to turn up the volume in university ballrooms

It had to be written in library books, footnoted
It had to be in the headlines of the Times and Le Monde
It had to be barked on TV
It had to be heard in alleys through ballroom doors

It had to be played on wire services
It had to be bells ringing
Comedians stopped dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas

It had to be FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Costello syndicate
mouthpiece meeting in Central Park, New York weekends,
reported Time magazine

It had to be the Mafia and the CIA together starting war on Cuba,
Bay of Pigs and poison assassination headlines

It had to be dope cops in the Mafia
Who sold all their heroin in America

It had to be the FBI and organized crime working together
in cahoots against the commies

It had to be ringing on multinational cash registers
A world-wide laundry for organized criminal money

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI together
They were bigger than Nixon
And they were bigger than war

It had to be a large room full of murder
It had to be a mounted ass- a solid mass of rage
A red hot pen
A scream in the back of the throat

It had to be a kid that can breathe
It had to be in Rockefellers' mouth
It had to be central intelligence, the family, allofthis, the agency Mafia
It had to be organized crime

One big set of gangs working together in cahoots

Hitmen
Murderers everywhere

The secret
The drunk
The brutal
The dirty rich

On top of a slag heap of prisons
Industrial cancer
Plutonium smog
Garbage cities

Grandmas' bed soft from fathers' resentment

It had to be the rulers
They wanted law and order
And they got rich on wanting protection for the status quo

They wanted junkies
They wanted Attica
They wanted Kent State
They wanted war in Indochina

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI

Multinational capitalists
Strong armed squads
Private detective agencies for the rich
And their armies and navies and their air force bombing planes

It had to be capitalism
The vortex of this rage
This competition
Man to man

The horses head in a capitalists' bed
The Cuban turf
It rumbles in hitmen
And gang wars across oceans

Bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet pilots
manned Egyptian fighter planes

Chiles' red democracy
Bumped off with White House pots and pans

A warning to Mediterranean governments

The secret police have been embraced for decades

The NKPD and CIA keep each other's secrets
The OGBU and DIA never hit their own
The KGB and the FBI are one mind

Brute force and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money

It had to be rich and it had to be powerful
They had to murder in Indonesia 500000
They had to murder in Indochina 2000000
They had to murder in Czechoslovakia
They had to murder in Chile
They had to murder in Russia

And they had to murder in America

[old mark]

10. K&R Many people claiming to be christians have little idea about

the religion...or the life they should be leading if they actually were christian. Jesus was not a hater, and did not teach racism or murder...or stupidity or hypocracy.

mark

[JDPriestly]

13. My Unitarian Church seems to be doing very well, especially

its children's education program. There is simply a movement to less fanatical faith and more sincere social commitment at this time.

[cleanhippie]

14. I attend a UU Church too!

Although, most of my congregation considers themselves to be atheist, secular humanist, agnostic or "spiritual".

[JDPriestly]

19. I think that the more rational and questioning "religions" like UU

are growing slowly but surely while others are declining.

The Evangelicals seem to have to get more and more outrageous in order to attract members. That means they are likely to attract kooks. And kooks do not usually work well with others, so the long-term outlook for Evangelicals, in my opinion, is not so great.

A collection of unpredictable, overly emotional people is prone to infighting and eventually disintegration.

[LiberalEsto]

20. Same with ours

The RE program just keeps growing and growing

[WingDinger]

15. I want to beat the shit outta republican God, makes me not go.