Are we witnessing the rise of the irreligious in America? Many (Christians) will say that this is nothing more than the latest media creation, on par with the “summer of sharks” in 2001 which saw reporting of shark attacks rise, while shark related fatalities and attacks decrease. Others (atheists) claim that the news is finally catching up to the long-established trend and that our nation is on the verge of witnessing the dawn of the age of knowledge. Me? I think it’s somewhere in between.
It should be clear that Christianity is losing much of its grip on the American culture. A recent Barna study found that the younger a person is, the more likely they are to define themselves as being outside of Christianity.
As people continue to become post-Christian like Brad Pitt (yes, that Brad Pritt) recently discussed, the society will move closer toward post-Christian status itself.
The Barna study illustrated that the younger a person is the more likely they are to be irreligious (excluding children, of course). Christian were seen as judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), and too involved in politics (75%) by the younger (my) generation.
Right now atheism is cool. It’s the iPhone of philosophy. Everybody wants one because everyone thinks that everyone else wants one, but eventually you realize that sure it’s a cool gadget but I don’t really want to mortgage my future for an adult toy. Most people don’t want what comes along with atheism – a lack of self and no real hope for anything better.
As Christianity is going through a period where we are trying to shake off the ramifications of fundamentalism and isolationism, which soured many (most) outsiders on our faith, so atheism will eventually succumb to the same problem.
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are the new Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. James Watson is the new James Baker.
Hitchens and Dawkins are already beginning to grate on people, even those on “their side,” just as Falwell and Robertson did. Watson’s idiotic, racist statements about Africans and non-whites remind people of the skeleton in evolution’s closet: eugenics.
Twenty years from now, judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned and too involved in politics will describe atheism as it swings back out of cultural fashion. Just as the iPhone will eventually be relegated to the antique pile, so the hipness of the new atheism will wane.
Hopefully, Christianity will be in the midst of a rebirth after learning how to answer the questions without sounding as if we know it all. We will have titled the pendulum back toward us as we will have gone outside of our bubbles to serve and love those around us.
You can see the signs of this around us as churches are learning how to engage in culture without going to war. This period of winter for Christianity will serve as a cleansing time, as we are forced to do the hard work of proclaiming Christ without the aid of cultural crutches. As atheism will grow fat and lazy from the preferred treatment given to it by academia and the media, Christianity in America will have to regain fighting shape and will suddenly look appealing again.
Atheism enjoy your time in the sun for now, eventually a hungrier, relevant Christianity will be back to claim the culture once again.
Watson’s idiotic, racist statements about Africans and non-whites remind people of the skeleton in evolution’s closet: eugenics.
Actually, I think Watson’s statements are entirely consistent with evolutionary thinking, but people don’t like the clear implications of evolution.
I mean, in the past, when we didn’t have genetics, we used morphology – so if a race had a more pronounced brow ridge, for instance, it was a good bet that they were more simian, and therefore, less evolved.
If a race had less hair, they might be more evolved. Many similar morphological characteristics were used to characterize fossils, but only Watson is brave enough to suggest that such rules might also be applied to living human races. Why not? It’s science.
Even with genetics, the same principles may very well hold. If we identify certain sequences associated with simians, and some races share that DNA and some don’t, perhaps we should conclude that they are less evolved (or more evolved!).
Now, some evolutionary defenders will say that this is overly simplistic, and they will have some arguments about why this is not so, but I expect them to be esoteric and philosophical, and largely filled with assumptions and short on data.
I don’t think we should be rushing to condemn Watson, even if he perhaps IS being racist (as I pointed out, racism, eugenics and Darwinism have been buddies since the beginning – see Darwinism’s history of racism), he is being intellectually honest, taking the argument where it goes logically, rather than censuring himself out of fear of offending those who can’t stand the logical ends of their evolutionary suppositions.
See:
DNA Pioneer in Evolutionary Racism Storm (AIG)
Should Dr. James Watson Enjoy Free Speech? (Discovery Institute)
…I expect them to be esoteric and philosophical, and largely filled with assumptions and short on data.
Sounds like xianity.
There are two possibilities for the future of Christianity.
If we devote ourselves to truth Christianity will dry up and disappear. It fundamentally fails to describe the world and doesn’t do a particularly good job at answering ethical questions — to believe so is to ignore what is written in the Bible. The God of the Gaps keeps shrinking; eventually there won’t be enough gaps to support it any longer.
However, it’s very possible that people will decide they dislike truth and go the other way, as happened during the medieval period when the Church suppressed already-discovered scientific truths in favor of religious dogma, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Christians are not happy only to maintain their own ignorance and superstition, they prefer to enforce ignorance and superstition for others as well.
I assume even odds for both possibilities.
You miss my point seeker. I’m saying that Watson is being consistent with evolutionary thinking, but 1) most people don’t know or understand that and 2) evolutionists have been good at downplaying or hiding this conclusion for many years. As you see Watson backing up from the statement now.
If we devote ourselves to truth Christianity will dry up and disappear. Is that a typo? The only way Christianity can ever survive is to devote ourselves to the truth and then communicate that truth in a loving, Christ-like way – truth and love the two sides of Christianity’s coin.
I’m not sure if you are equating debating evolution with debating a flat earth, but the two are not compatible. We can empirically test the roundness of the earth over and over again, we can only infer from evidence from the past that evolution is responsible for our present state. Inference and interpretation of non-repeatable data is not the same as a fact of nature that can be shown and measured yesterday, today and tomorrow.
You are conveniently ignoring the fact that religion is smoke and mirrors — it claims to provide meaning to people's lives, but it really provides only communal hysteria. Just like being in love, when the loved one leaves we find that the meaning really come from us all along.
Atheism is simply lack of belief in this one last mythology. Because atheism is based on rationality, it is just one aspect of predominantly logic-based, mostly liberal, freethinking, educated, humanist worldviews.
Many atheists have become vocal not because it's cool and not because Dawkins or Hitchens say so. Most atheists have become vocal because the prevailing mythologies require dangerous departures from reason in order to be a religionist. Atheism, or anti-religion if you will, is merely the rallying point against the self-advertizing, power-seeking edifice that thrives by promoting dogmatic ignorance and sanctified intolerance.
Most people are not particularly well educated in science or crtical thinking, but once the stranglehold of fear and false promises provided by religion has lost its illusion-based grip, America may slowly come into the 21st century.
Islam, of course will take much longer to come forward from the 14th century or whenever the 'flowering of Islam' failed and was replaced by this resurgence of hysterical ultra-fundamentalist malevolence.
Christianity is not really about truth and love. Truth is only discovered by logical analysis of evidence (including feelings), and there is no evidence to support Christianity's precepts. Those of us who are not mentally unhinged can find and feel love without any recourse to religious dogma and promises.
No, Christianity is about magic thinking and the unfulfillable promises to its devotees that SkyDaddy loves them, will listen to their wish-list, and will provide only them with Everlasting Life (despite the fact that the 'soul' dies with the body).
Sure, Christianity will live on following the rise of secularism — there will always be some credulous, emotionally needy people who value fantasy over reality.
credulous, emotionally needy people who value fantasy over reality
I don’t think liberals are that bad.
Atheism’s strength is that it depends entirely on logic. However, that is also it’s great weakness, since logic is vulnerable to it’s assumptions (the Nazi’s were very logical, as were the Stalinists), and logically speaking, is pretty much devoid of an ability to arrive at objective moral standards.
It is also severely limiting to omit sources of truth that are beyond logic – i.e. those that require, for the time being, or permanently, faith – that is, trust in another smarter than ourselves.
As I have oft said, reason on it’s own is not enough to guide individuals or mankind. But reasonable faith most certainly is.
“Atheism’s strength is that it depends entirely on logic. However, that is also it’s great weakness, since logic is vulnerable to it’s assumptions (the Nazi’s were very logical, as were the Stalinists), and logically speaking, is pretty much devoid of an ability to arrive at objective moral standards.
It is also severely limiting to omit sources of truth that are beyond logic – i.e. those that require, for the time being, or permanently, faith – that is, trust in another smarter than ourselves.”
Lets plug this into The Seeker Rhetor-O-Matic…
The…
– Bombardier Beetle
– Logical thinking
– 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
– complexity of the eye
– geologic column
represents a…
– crushing blow
– serious problem
– impossible puzzle
– grave concern
for…
– Secular Humanists
– Evolution
– The Atheist Conspiracy
– Liberal Christians
because…
– it is too hard to understand
– it leads to immoral behavior
– somebody else was wrong about something similar
– a tiny portion of the experimental data is questionable
and also…
– it denies the supernatural
– Hitler believed in it
– it is an uncomfortable idea
– Look! Polystrate trees!
therefore…
– Biblical literalism is the only alternative
– the Earth is no older than 10,000 years
– science will eventually prove creationism true
– you must repent now
furthermore…
– nobody knows everything
– God wrote the Bible Himself
– nobody has seen a live Plesiosaur
– apes and monkeys frighten me
so…
– I declare this debate over and I’m the winner
– I shall not respond to any rebuttals
– Evolution is blasphemous and offensive in the eyes of God; you will burn in Hell!
– Jesus loves you, bye!
ROFL this thing is so accurate!!!
Aaron wrote:
Most people don’t want what comes along with atheism – a lack of self and no real hope for anything better.
Sorry, Aaron, but I have to disagree here (in fact, I think this is just a groundless assertion which borders on character assassination). What do you mean, precisely, by “lack of self” anyway? Are you saying that to have a real sense of personal authenticity you have to believe in some kind of god? Selfhood can be founded on many things, including personal relationships and knowledge of art, history, literature, science, and so forth. Religion is another option, but certainly not a requirement. As to hope: one can hope for many things, including “something better” without belief is some sort of god. One can have an afterlife without god, after all.
My objection is to organized religion and the unsupportable assertions it inevitably makes. I also object to religion’s inevitable tendency to dogmatism and persecution of those unwilling to swallow its beliefs. My experience with organized religion (particularly monotheism) has not been positive. I am constitutionally unable to accept the assertions of xianity in particular, finding it hostile in the extreme to myself personally. This doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the “spiritual” or transcendent aspects of existence, however. It’s just that I am non-theist in my philosophy.
There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Aaron.
I’m saying as Stewart has argued here before, that if you are truly atheistic and you remove a god from the equation then you have to admit that you have no self, as in there is no free will or nothing you can really do as an individual. Everything is determined by the chemicals and at the molecular level. You have no self. You are just chemicals interacting with other chemicals – no self.
It was not meant as character assassination, just as a logical conclusion to the beliefs of atheism.
Hi All:
1. To Aaron and Seeker: Darwinian evolution doesn’t give any reason to support eugenics, because evolution doesn’t say that natural selection “improves” the species. What natural selection does is suggest an explanation for how species changed over time. The “fitness” in “survival of the fittest” is relative efficiency in reproduction. But even IF (as I believe) evolution is true, this doesn’t mean we ought to do eugenics. As a Christian, I believe we ought to follow Christ’s teachings, which is inconsistent with evaluating people based on their genetic utility to society.
2. To epicurus: you suggest Christianity is a fiction and that a commitment to truth would eliminate it. If you are interested in truth then you should consider this fact: when confronted with any statement, you can believe the statement is TRUE, or FALSE or you can say I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO KNOW. Wrt Christianity, you took option 2, but I’ll bet you have no reason for choosing option 2 instead of 3. You have a lot of confidence in your own faith, don’t you?
3. Seeker: I don’t agree that atheism depends entirely on logic–no POV does. The atheist like everyone else starts with unproved premises; that’s where our difference with him lies IMO. Nick’s comments seem to reflect this fact, but Nick doesn’t seem to recognize this. In fact, scientific rationality depends on placing faith in the unproved just as much as coming to believe in a religion does.
4. Christianity is certainly about truth and love–we believe certain things about jesus are true, among those are our belief that Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Scientific rationality cannot show that we ought to love our neighbors as ourselves–depending on what moral premises you start from you can easily deduce that you ought to treat everyone else as tools for your enjoyment. It is a misplaced faith in science that induces people to imagine that science alone can create a good society.
your friend
Keith
Aaron, did you know that materialism and atheism are two different things. Are you able to distinguish between the two?
Indeed. I don't see any connection between "having a self" and belief in God.
That being said, Buddhism teaches that the "self" is an illusion best shed. Only suffering and heartbreak can come from trying to maintain the mirage that is the "self."
Hi Louis:
You wrote: I also object to religion's inevitable tendency to dogmatism and persecution of those unwilling to swallow its beliefs.
I don't see why a tendency to persecute is an inevitable feature of monotheistic religion; it seems to me that it depends entirely on the specific beliefs of the religion. Consider religion X that claims:
1. God loves you even if you've done bad things, and because of this love he has made great sacrifices to repair the damage your bad things have done to you.
2. Practicing the rituals of the religion doesn't mean anything unless the practice is accompanied by love. It is far more important to love than it is to perform religious rituals.
3. One must freely embrace the religion; coercion is not acceptable and true conversion cannot possibly result from coercion anyway.
4. Adherents should take care of their own sin worrying so much about the sins of others.
Why would religion X tend to persecute non-adherents?
your friend
keith
I don’t think Quakers persecute (although I’m not sure). I suppose, therefore, it’s possible. Zen Buddhism doesn’t (of course, it’s not monotheistic). That being said, if your four points were all the religion required of its adherents, I don’t think it would persecute or become dogmatic. However, in practice and humans being what we are, I still think that, in time, it would become more rigid and dangerous. Unfortuately, xianity contains a whole lot more than your four points. What it needs is a massive new reformation.
Hi Louis:
As far as I know the Quakers were the victims of persecution, not the perpetrators. But in Pennsylvania, when it was controlled by Quakers I don’t know if non-Quakers were disadvantaged in business etc.
I would argue that persecuting someone is not compatible with following the 4 points I mentioned above, so any additional beliefs that would support persecution contradict those points–any religion that accepts those 4 points and permits persecution is self-contradictory. Are you saying that Christianity has tenets that do permit persecution? If so, which ones? Or is it that based on our history, Christians have engaged in persecution in spite of the lip service we pay to our ideals? I would agree that we have often failed to live up to our ideals, that we have often fallen into the (what I believe is) sinful practice of God-playing by inflicting suffering on those we have considered unrighteous. I believe that to be contrary to the teachings of Christ.
your friend
Keith
The atheistic phase of American history
Are we witnessing the rise of the irreligious in America? Many (Christians) will say that this is nothing more than the latest media creation, on par with the "summer of sharks" in 2001 which saw reporting of shark attacks rise, while shark related fat…