As we all know, young people are leaving religious institutions in ever-increasing numbers. This is naturally causing concern in religious quarters and some wealthy people think that the problem is that the young are not being equipped to ‘properly’ answer the kinds of deep questions that occur to almost everyone as they are growing up and becoming independent. By properly, these people mean consistent with what the Bible says.
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As Christian churches in the west fret over the increasing numbers of young people who are leaving institutionalized religion, they have tried various ways to lure them back in. A novel idea is to produce a new Emoji Bible at the low, low price of $2.99
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Political campaigns draw grifters like moths to a flame. The fact that money sloshes around so freely attracts hustlers who promise to reward the candidate with access to special groups and in return get favors if the politician does win the office that is sought, and in addition use their proximity and presumed closeness to prominent political candidates to enrich themselves by peddling influence.
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When I think of the typical churchgoer, the image that comes to mind is an older woman, though perhaps in the megachurches this stereotype may not hold. Such people have been the mainstay of traditional churches as younger and male parishioners fall away. So it should be of some concern to churches that women too are now drifting away in larger numbers.
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Chris Hall has an excellent article on how the atheism movement has moved away from an almost exclusive focus on proudly declaring nonbelief and on debunking religion and superstitions and is now addressing social justice issues in a much more conscious way.
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Samantha Bee walks us through the process by which evangelical Christians in the US in the 1950s shed their deep disdain for engaging in politics to becoming a powerful political force by the 1980s especially within the Republican party, to then subsequently declining in influence. The Republican choice of Donald Trump this year over the many more religious alternatives such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson who all explicitly highlighted their religiosity shows the extent of the decline, though they are by no means reduced to insignificance.
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A news report in my local newspaper had a headline that must have sent joy through Christians always on the lookout for signs that god exists. It said “Religious painting stops bullet from ripping through home on Cleveland’s East Side.”
The story that followed was a familiar one about someone claiming that their life was saved by a religious icon.
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During the interfaith panel that I was on recently, in my response to the question of whether there is a heaven, I said that the concept of heaven was not merely a harmless fantasy but harmful because it led people to do awful things in the belief that it would help them get into heaven. I mentioned Islamic terrorists who had committed recent atrocities and the Christian terrorist who gunned down the abortion providers in the belief that he would receive the grateful thanks of fetuses in heaven. I could have, if I had the time, listed Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu terrorist acts as well.
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The late comedian was a wonderful raconteur who was born into an Irish Catholic family but became an atheist. On his show he was fond of telling jokes about religion, especially Catholicism. Here is a collection.
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People often ask atheists what it would take for them to believe in the existence of god. I for one can think of an infinite number of things that would persuade me that god exists. When asked I say that if god commandeered all the TV stations in the world to announce that at a particular time the next day s/he would appear in the sky simultaneously all over the world to be seen and heard by everyone and that it indeed happened as promised, that would be pretty conclusive.
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