True enough. I was speaking from my own experience, and our church tended not to talk too much about saving souls.
One theme I see coming up in this thread is that not every church is the same. I recognize there are denominations out there that are concerned with people’s well-being, and do solid charity work, just as there are outright cults and grifty megachurches.
Zappa always said “if you want an education, don’t go to college, go to the library”, and I would say something similar applies to religion.
Any particular, random group of people can include assholes and people who are nice. It’s called being human. Some are good at it, some are insufferable assholes that make the rest of us miserable.
All “religious” groups that meddle in politics should immediately be stripped of their tax exempt status.
As soon as a religion stops offering guidance & support and instead issues orders, it is not spirituality in any form. It is politics, not religion.
Here in Detroit, it is mindblowing how many political candidates’ names are preceded by “Rev” or some such. Separation of church and state should preclude preachers’ running for office.
I’m surprised the number is as high as 47%. Growing up, I only had a coupla friends who even talked about going to church. (One dragged me along with her once, and I refused to do that again.) I do remember some of my elementary school classmates left school early for what sounded like "kattykism, " but none of them talked about church, either.
My BF got into music by way of church - he was in a church band, but they were all blazin’ and praisin,’ or stealing wine every Sunday anyway and didn’t buy into any of it. Once he decided church was crap, he refused to go back and stuck with his punk band instead.
Funny. My oldest son got into church because of music. We never attended, I’m a Taoist, and he considers himself Wiccan. But he wants a place to play his bassoon, and the church does music he likes. Seems weird to me, but it makes him happy.
Many churches also rent out their buildings for events and various community group meetings. Weddings on saturdays, Boy/Girl scout meetings on wednesdays and thursdays, The occasional folk music concert, etc. For many, I suspect that hall rentals make up a substantial portion of their income.
I think not reading the book is the main reason they stay in the church. If they actually read all of the bible, and not just a few carefully selected and carefully decontextualized verses, they would have a very different view of their religion. Not just your typical “What the book of X says directly contradicts what the book of Y says” sort of thing, but also when you read the whole thing, you discover that the bulk of the famed bible stories were about people doing really terrible awful evil things to their fellow human beings. All being cheered on by (or done by) their blood-thirsty murder god. And then you realize the bible was not, in fact, written by “god” but rather by a bunch of men who were trying to justify their own right to power, and that what is in the bible, as horrible, cruel, and bloody as most of those stories are, is in fact a carefully selected reader’s digest version that the early church selected from a larger set of religious writings that they thought put themselves in the best light.
And then you realize that even the handful of “good” things (such as the actual teachings of Jesus: that society should feed and house the poor and give them health-care, that greed is bad, etc) are totally ignored by most so-called religious leaders, and that they do not actually believe in, or follow any of the actual teachings of the man they name their religion after. Or as Ghandi once said [or was attributed to have said] “I like your christ, I do not like your christians, your christians are so unlike your christ”
Yes, and he had the remarkable insight to stop comparing Netanyahu to a “southern segregationist” and rightfully labeling what Israel does to the Palestinians as “apartheid” right about the time he decided to further his own interests and run for Senate.
I won’t call him great, but will agree that he knows how to play the game.
I was raised a Catholic and attended mass nearly every week until college. In my late twenties I solidified my atheism by reading the Christian Bible from start to finish. In my early thirties my wife and I started attending a Unitarian-Universalist church. We’ve been going almost weekly for twenty years. I even served several years in two different stints as chair of the board of trustees (essentially president of the congregation). Both my wife and I are active with youth and religious education in our congregation. Our congregation is a mix of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Agnostics, Atheists, Pagans, Wiccans, and nearly any other group. By and large a thoughtful, inquisitive, and progressive group of people. Very unllike many of the christian churches which are seeing a decline in membership.
For my experience for catholic churches in big and medium cities there are a lot of activities done. I took two randomly chosen churches in Italy http://www.parrocchiacuoreimmacolatodimaria.it/orari/Holy Masses - Santuario di Oropa and this is only for masses. Then there are marriages and funerals, confessions and so on. Not to mention the other things that are done in parishes.
In small towns is another story
I share the skepticism about the superficial reading of these statistics; looking at the most alarning types of American, I would guess a lot of them grew up in churches but graduated to being “christian” at home because organised religion wasn’t selfish, cruel or bonkers enough for them.
That said, the shape of the graph suggests that declining membership makes membership decline faster, and I wonder if that reflects churches becoming more extreme as their more casual members drift away. It’s well-documented that people who grow up in fundamentalist churches are much more likely to leave the church than those who grow up with “moderate” religion.
I bet the political hypocrisy also translates to religious hypocrisy. I forget what percentage, but a great many of the capital insurrectionists didn’t even vote. Dimes to donuts the average right winger, god-professing, “values” person rarely, if ever, sees the inside of a church at all.
I assume he did, as in Rabbi Yeshua Ben Yosef did, but that a lot of things attributed to him he didn’t say. The Q gospel (the sayings parts of Mark, Matthew and Luke) and the Sayings Gospel of Thomas being around the best sources. I think she would have wanted you to worship, just that the second temple in Jerusalem was utterly corrupt and compromised. I don’t think he would have had much to say about Christian churches as he wasn’t one. Those were later people and a lot of the very Christian but unsourced in Jesus’ words parts are actually Greek and other local philosophies which Jesus would have hated almost certainly. A lot of the nice things people think he said, he didn’t. He didn’t say wrt stoning adulterers “let him without sin cast the first stone” as this directly contradicts what he likely did say that the way to make good with God was to follow the law of Moses. This is textually almost certainly a much later addition. Additionally, like tends to be the case with these late additions it is there to undermine Jesus as a devout Jew rather than a Christian, to counter his statement of following the law of Moses.
I basically agree with this. Someone almost certainly existed who fits the general description, but who he was and what he said has been changed and added to so much that the Jesus we think of is mostly fiction at this point.
“What Would Jesus Do” is also kind of pointless if you think of him as a magical deity-- what Jesus would do is perform a miracle like feeding the multitudes with five loaves and two fishes-- I can’t do that, nor can I walk on water or bring back the dead. If you think of him as just a really wise and caring human (whether that’s who he was or not) then what to do becomes a little easier to figure out.
