Gallup Poll for 2022

[Jehanne]

Thanks for posting that.  I was of course aware of this in concept, but not in terminology.  I know I'm continuing to splinter us away from the original message of the thread as I post, but I had to follow up on this.  When I clicked through, the first thing I noticed was that definitionally it is "faith seeking intelligence" (or reason) and not "faith seeking evidence".  Interesting, and important, given that I could probably "reason" my way into an argument that my dog is a reincarnated Civil War general, but would never have evidence for that.  Seems like all of intelligent design (for instance) falls here, in that it starts with creator and works backwards to reasoning but with no testable/falsifiable premise.

It's a useful term and spot-on.  It describes a lot of the people I know.  Actually, it's pretty generous to many of them.  I have a lot of family members who just start and end with the faith part and never even seek the intelligence backfill.  I guess to tie this into my gripe about clergy, I would say the primary reason for this faith (in tandem with reward/punishment aversion) is that they base it on the argument from authority.  The pastor studied all this and understands it better than me, so I don't need to worry about it, right?

It's good to know the terms. Having the faith come first, and using reason to support it, is certainly a normal situation for Christians.

It's not sufficient to define someone as a Scholastic, however. Scholastics were a particular kind of theologian with a particular kind of training. Merely having the faith come before the intellect is not sufficient to be defined as a Scholastic. 

If your pastor was a Catholic who engaged you in dialectic using strict Aristotelian logic, then he might well have been a Scholastic. Otherwise, not.

In the West, monasticism predated scholasticism, and eventually after Thomas Aquinas, scholasticism dominated the theological schools. Even Martin Luther was a scholastic. It was not until the Enlightenment that scholars, followed by certain theologians, began to abandon the idea of the New Testament as simply recounting supernatural history.

[Fake Messiah]

Maybe we could look at it by state



https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/rel...udy/state/

[TheJefe817]

Maybe we could look at it by state


https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/rel...study/stat

Interesting chart, and sadly unsurprising.  If I squint the right way, it resembles a big black hole centered over Mississippi and Alabama.  Insert your own low-hanging-fruit joke there.  I think the only state at first glance which is somewhat surprising to me is Utah - I would think it might be higher.

[Jehanne]

Maybe we could look at it by state



https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/rel...udy/state/

[TheJefe817]

On last night's live stream, Paulogia talked about this poll (the Gallup one) for a while. Like me, he was very interested in the decline in the youth demographic specifically.

[Disagreeable]

 I would say most people believe in a god because they think there is a benefit of some sort

So, they believe in belief in God.

[Fake Messiah]

American churches closing faster than new ones can open

Churches are closing at a record pace in the U.S. as less than 50% of Americans are saying they are members of a church.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/american-chur...-ones-open

[Jehanne]

Trump's best hope of getting (re)elected to the US Presidency in his bid to avoid going to jail, in that the desperate, dwindling Christian evangelicals will look to the Federalist Society to guarantee a fundamentalist friendly SCOTUS for decades to come, and Trump is guaranteed to deliver on The Promise.