The End of Christian America

[Eochaid]

LINK (The article is way too long to be copy/pasted here)

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, "this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified." As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking.

"That really hit me hard," he told me last week. "The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous." Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. "A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us," Mohler wrote. "The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture." When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. "Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society," he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.

What do you think?

Kevin

[Viking]

Dawkins+Hitchens+Dennet+Harris FTW!!!!!

[Grey Fox]

[Tamas]

Religion as a phenomenom, is a nice collection of everything which is bad and evil in humanity.

[grumbler]

What do you think?

I think the contention is absurd, and the R. Albert Mohler is an attention-whoring moron.

When one screams that the sky is falling because 15% of the US population is religiously unaffiliated, one demonstrates Marti-style thinking, which means zero cred.

[Caliga]

While I would LIKE to believe that what the article states is accurate, I dunno.  Lots of people down here are insanely religious, of course, and I don't see that trend changing.  I can't believe this guy is based in Louisville and is worried about Christianity dying in America.

[Alatriste]

Religion at heart is a group of good, kind persons with a set of deeply illogical, even evil, beliefs starting with a childish, zealous God that punishes sons for their father's sin, feels a strange fascination with genitalia and how do we use them, and wants us to buy a ticket to Eternal Happiness obbeying and suffering his every whim, not always worthy (ask Job, Saul or Abraham). Given such a contradiction, it's not surprising that its main manifestations are hipocrisy, fanaticism and silent dissent.

Yes, many Christians have done good deeds, but was it because they were Christians, or because they were for starters good persons?

Why, yes, I'm from Europe. How did you know?

[Caliga]

Religion at heart is a group of good, kind persons with a set of deeply illogical, even evil, beliefs starting with a childish, zealous God that punishes sons for their father's sin, feels a strange fascination with genitalia and how do we use them, and wants us to buy a ticket to Eternal Happiness obbeying and suffering his every whim, not always worthy (ask Job, Saul or Abraham). Given such a contradiction, it's not surprising that its main manifestations are hipocrisy, fanaticism and silent dissent.

Yes, many Christians have done good deeds, but was it because they were Christians, or because they were for starters good persons?

Why, yes, I'm from Europe. How did you know?

I'm a step more cynical than you even.  Though I agree with most of the above, I don't think religion at heart is a group of good, kind persons.  I think that good, kind people get swept up into religions, but I think that probably most religions have been started by, at best, con artists and at worst sociopaths.  I mean, look at how (most) people today view Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, Charlie Manson, Rev. Moon, and David Koresh.

[Ed Anger]

Atheists molest children.

This is indeed fun.

[Grey Fox]

God is a pedo.

Do you condone pedophilia?

[The Nickname Who Was Thursday]

Relying on the goodness of people's hearts to keep them from doing bad things to each other is a losing proposition; we need fear of external consequences. In the modern world, we have government for that, so religion is losing its power.

[Caliga]

Relying on the goodness of people's hearts to keep them from doing bad things to each other is a losing proposition; we need fear of external consequences. In the modern world, we have government for that, so religion is losing its power.

People are animals.

[Ed Anger]

This thread reminded me it was Easter week. 

I will sacrifice a ham for god.

[Valmy]

People are animals.

Except Cal who is all altruism and goodness.

[Martinus]

Religion at heart is a group of good, kind persons with a set of deeply illogical, even evil, beliefs starting with a childish, zealous God that punishes sons for their father's sin, feels a strange fascination with genitalia and how do we use them, and wants us to buy a ticket to Eternal Happiness obbeying and suffering his every whim, not always worthy (ask Job, Saul or Abraham). Given such a contradiction, it's not surprising that its main manifestations are hipocrisy, fanaticism and silent dissent.

Yes, many Christians have done good deeds, but was it because they were Christians, or because they were for starters good persons?

Why, yes, I'm from Europe. How did you know?

The way I see it, no matter how kind, well-meaning and benevolent religious people are, they are bound to be eventually wrong about something, because of the GIGO principle.

Their choices and decisions are informed by a set of data that is simply wrong.