Decline of religion

[h4ym4n]

If people in the US are losing their religion then why is the religious infesting the government and making religious laws?

[The Valkyrie]

If people in the US are losing their religion then why is the religious infesting the government and making religious laws?

Because they can see their hold on society declining so they're pushing ever harder to control everything.

[no one]

The only people more full of shit than the religious, are the politicians.

They are made for each other, just like H and 2O.

[Fake Messiah]

Hundreds of churches will have to close, says Kirk

The Church of Scotland will have to close hundreds of churches in the coming years, the Kirk's trustees have warned as it stages its annual General Assembly.

A report going before the Assembly this week states that about 60,000 people worship in person on a Sunday, compared to 88,000 pre-pandemic, with a growing number of people choosing to worship online or in "other ways".

The Kirk said having more than 1,000 churches to cater for the number of people attending was "simply untenable and unsustainable".

According to 2021 numbers, the church has 283,600 members - down from a peak of 1.3 million in the late 1950s.

About 60,000 worship in person on a Sunday - down from 88,000 pre-Covid.

About 45,000 people now worship online and 8,275 in "other ways".

Each church averages just one wedding and one baptism per year - about 1,200 in total.

There were 50,000 per year in the late 1950s.

There were 430 professions of faith in 2021 (sometimes referred to as confirmation) compared with 40,000 at the peak of new members in the 1930s.

The average age of those attending church is 62.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-65645891

[Fake Messiah]

Hispanics are abandoning the Catholic Church

A survey from the Pew Research Center released last month showed that there is a rapid decline in Catholisism among American Hispanics — tumbling from 67% in 2010 to 46%. “That’s consistent with other Latin American countries, such as Brazil, where large numbers of Catholics have converted to Evangelical Christianity,” says Dr Andrew Chesnut, Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. The “health and wealth” promises of Pentecostalism in particular are driving people across the continent to Evangelical churches. “The interesting difference between Latin America and the United States,” says Chesnut, “is the percentage of religious ‘nones’, which has tripled to 30 percent in 12 years. In Latin America, they’re only usually in the 12-14 percent range.”

Nones are people who have no faith at all, and they are fast swallowing up white Christian America — now firmly a minority. In 1996, the year Bill Clinton was sworn in for his second term as president, almost 65% of Americans identified as white and Christian. Now, only 44% do. In 1990, only 7% of Americans said that they were nones, but that figure has increased four-fold over the last 30 years, largely because of young people. Today, almost half of Gen Z — young adults born from 1997 onwards — say they have no religion.

For a long time, American exceptionalism saw the United States buck the European trend of secularisation. And faith among Hispanics, who tend to come from more religious backgrounds than white Americans, remained particularly strong. Catholicism was seen, even among the young, as part of their identity — but “the inflexibility of the Church to modernise its dogma and doctrine in terms of blessing, same sex marriage, and female clergy really is culturally out of touch with Millennials and Generation Z”, Chesnut says. High-profile sex scandals have also put people off — too much even for the Latino community’s cultural Catholics. People who once ticked the box identifying as Catholic, even if they weren’t regularly attending, are now firmly in the “none” camp. And Hispanics are now abandoning the faith as fast as the rest of the country.

https://unherd.com/2023/05/hispanics-are...ic-church/

[Anomalocaris]

The only people more full of shit than the religious, are the politicians.

They are made for each other,  just like H and 2O.

You mean 2H and O?

[Anomalocaris]

I think it is perhaps instructive to recall the Roman Empire is thought to have also seen a long decline of established traditional and state sponsored religions from the 1st to the 3rd century, coincident with a rise in large number of esoteric cults of various provenance.   It is probably this fractured cultscape that facilitated a boastfully anti-rational, Credo quia absurdum, cult called Christianity to opportunistically and virulently reassert the primacy of a single, much more smothering, religion.   So decline in religion does not necessarily betoken a decline in stupidity and gullibility, it may just endow more cunningly opportunistic cults with a more open field.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I posted this over at AD, but it seems apt for this thread as well:

Seems pertinent to me:

Only half of Americans now say they are sure God exists.

That finding, from the closely watched General Social Survey, stands out among several nuggets of new data about religion in America.

Not quite 50 percent of Americans say they have no doubt about the existence of God, according to the 2022 survey, released Wednesday by NORC, the University of Chicago research organization. As recently as 2008, the share of sure-believers topped 60 percent.

Thirty-four percent of Americans never go to church, NORC found, the highest figure recorded in five decades of surveys.

Another new report, from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), said that 27 percent of Americans claimed no religion in 2022, up from 19 percent in 2012 and 16 percent in 2006.

The PRRI report tracks a historic decline in the nation’s Christian population, especially among white people. The share of Americans who identify as white evangelical Protestants has dwindled from 23 percent to 14 percent since 2006. The share of mainline white Protestants has fallen from 18 percent to 14 percent. White Catholics have declined from 16 percent of the population to 13 percent.

That is not to say Americans are not spiritual. Nearly three-quarters of people believe in life after death, NORC data show. That number has remained relatively stable over the decades.  

Only 7 percent of people do not believe in God.  

[...]

To some extent, declining faith is a generational trend. The share of Americans who claim no religion rises with progressively younger age groups: 9 percent of the Silent Generation, 18 percent of baby boomers, 25 percent of Generation X, 29 percent of millennials and 34 percent of Generation Z, according to data from the Survey Center on American Life.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-...inite-yes/

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I think it is perhaps instructive to recall the Roman Empire is thought to have also seen a long decline of established traditional and state sponsored religions from the 1st to the 3rd century, coincident with a rise in large number of esoteric cults of various provenance.   It is probably this fractured cultscape that facilitated a boastfully anti-rational, Credo quia absurdum, cult called Christianity to opportunistically and virulently reassert the primacy of a single, much more smothering, religion.   So decline in religion does not necessarily betoken a decline in stupidity and gullibility, it may just endow more cunningly opportunistic cults with a more open field.

This could actually be formulated as a law: The strength of the largest traditional religion in a given society varies as the inverse square of the number of fringe religions in that society.

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

or:   the fact that the folly of traditional religions have grown to be greater than the stupidity of their followers does not imply the stupidity of their followers have thereby underwent any appreciable diminution.