Fewer Americans Than Ever Believe in God, Gallup Poll Shows (yahoo.com) 517
Belief in God among Americans dipped to a new low, Gallup's latest poll shows. While the majority of adults in the U.S. believe in God, belief has dropped to 81% -- the lowest ever recorded by Gallup -- and is down from 87% in 2017. From a report: Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God, Gallup reported. Younger, liberal Americans are the least likely to believe in God, according to Gallup's May 2-22 values and beliefs poll results released Friday. Political conservatives and married adults had little change when comparing 2022 data to an average of polls from 2013 to 2017. The groups with the largest declines are liberals (62% of whom believe in God), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%), while belief in God is highest among conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%). The poll also found that slightly more than half of conservatives and Republicans say they believe God hears prayers and can intervene, as well as 32% of Democrats, 25% of liberals and 30% of young adults.
Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
If people irrationally want to impose their philosophy on other people, then address that antisocial tendency.
We did. The Founding Fathers who observed various forms of Christianity and Deism as a whole, spelled out in a document there shall be a separation of Church and State in this country. You want to worship? Have it. The government will not intefere. Conversely, you don't get to dictate to the government how to run things.
Unfortunately, there is a large segment in this country who likes to spout, "It's not in the Constitution!" ignoring something which is literally in the Constitution.
Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Please understand that at the time the US had just fought a war to secede from England. The king of England at that time, King George III, was also the head of the Anglican church, which made England kind of a soft theocracy and why you might have (just maybe) heard about the pilgrims who were fleeing "religious persecution". It was extremely important to them that religious leaders would not be able to dictate the mechanisms of government at any level. When people today talk about "putting God back in government", please know they're absolutely full of shit, at least when it comes to the United States of America.
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The sad thing is that today the CofE is one of the most laid-back churches around (for example belief in God is optional, nice to have but not essential, while cups of tea are) while a sizeable chunk of the US is working hard to turn itself into a theocracy.
There is a certain easiness when your church was setup with the only reason for being so a king could get a divorce hundreds of years ago.
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Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Informative)
You know the constitution so well do you? It does not say this at all, perhaps except in your mind.
Yes, it does. In fact, the guy who worked to craft the Constitution, who lived the Constitution, then stated the clear and unequivocal notion [baptiststudiesonline.com] of separation of Church and State.
and violates in particular the article of the Constitution of the United States which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment."
Further, having seen the effects of Ecclesiastical meddling in governmental affairs, he stated in an earlier year:
“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
In fact, he was so opposed to both government inteference in relgious worship and vice versa, he considered the opening prayer to Congress a violation of the First Amendment. However, because it was Congress doing this, he had no say since that dealt with separation of powers.
So yes, that is what the Constitution says. Or are you saying the guy who wrote the damn thing didn't know what he was talking about?
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Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Informative)
No. This is the actual wording:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
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So why is "in God we trust" the official motto of the USA? It's even on your money and the official seal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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How would you feel if it said "In Vishnu we trust"?
Or better: in Satan we trust. Or how about just having "there is no god" written on all the materials.
Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there is a problem with moral laws, which are mostly religion based,
An often repeated direct lie. Religion basically did a hostile takeover of morality and then corrupted it for its own purposes. It is in no way the source of moral and the morality of the religious is generally worse than that of atheists.
Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
All around the world human societies have fairly similar morals like that killing other people isn't good. Or that stealing isn't good. And they have it without Christianity. Similar behaviour can even be found in groups of animals. One might think that it's some kind of natural emergence in social animals. But whatever.
That should be be a good pointer towards the Judeo-Christian religions having adopted those seemingly common universal morals into their moral code, while the organized religions that sprang from those roots on the other hand haven't simply adopted but appropriated those morals claiming it as their own original ideas.
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Furthermore, how do you estimate which morality is "better" or "worse"?
We could start with whether we agree that slavery is inherently evil, and see which holy book(s) agree with that. Anyone besides The Satanic Temple [thesatanictemple.com]?
Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that the American Abolitionist movement originated in the churches, initially among the Quakers, but among other (northern) Protestants during the Second Great Awakening. They apparently believed they had scriptural support for their view.
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They apparently believed they had scriptural support for their view.
That's generally the problem.
You can twist and interpret "Gods will" to mean absolutely anything.
Religion is just writing a blank cheque. People will later fill it in with anything they want.
Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Informative)
From a purely secular perspective, morality is necessary in order to achieve sufficient group cohesion to keep a tribe alive. Obviously, a tribe full of liars and thieves and murderers would destroy itself within minutes! In order for tribes to endure from one generation to the next, they need most of their members to exhibit moral behavior most of the time. Interesting articles like this one [sciencedaily.com] examine the approach-to-morality taken by hunter-gatherers that still exist in the modern day, uninfluenced by any of our great religions, and we see them putting a high value on the same moral principles that everyone else does.
From an evolutionary perspective, those pack-animals that manage to have packs that work well together have a selective advantage over those animals whose packs are full of internal predation. After millions of years of this, humans would naturally have at least some degree of instinctual behavior that is essentially moral in character. The rest is a matter of social conditioning.
Religion comes in primarily as a tool of that social conditioning. But it is not necessarily the only such tool available. One character of the religious approach to morality is that it tends to resist refactoring. For example, ancient religious condemnation of things like homosexuality are rooted in the cultural values of the time, and don't have any actual necessity behind them (in terms of what keeps a culture going). So they wind up causing unjust harm to a subset of the society. But, due to their religious nature, they tend to linger and continue to cause harm. That would be one example of how religion "corrupts morality for its own purposes."
In terms of judging which system of moral laws is best, we basically have two ways: 1: run the system by our own emotions and see how we react, and 2: look at the prosperity level of the culture that includes them. The former is a way of engaging our emotions and basic pack-instincts in an effort to weed-out any moral dictates that are actually political in nature, and not related to true survival necessity. The latter is a way of judging the tree by its fruit.
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It still has the underlying moralistic codes under which your actions are judged by some higher power that you'll never be able to fully control, but which has some control over how things go in your life or what happens after you die and so forth. But on the other hand their higher power still kind of works like some automaton, which can be bribed by performing rituals that then somehow are weighed (Karma) to produ
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Abraham was reportedly fine with it too.
Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
The 10 commandments, which have established the moral code, prohibiting theft, murder, adultery and mandating respect for one's elders
Well, aside from the fact that you omitted the goofy ones that are not generally agreed upon by every society in history (like how God is super jealous and doesn't like you worshiping other gods, which totally don't exist because He's the only one and it really matters whether you make graven images but apparently slavery did not make the cut?), the funny thing is that y'all can't even agree what they are [wikipedia.org] amongst yourselves.
Are you going to legally require that we "honor our mother and father"? Are we going to put every teenager in jail who's ever whispered to their friends that their parents were schmucks? What if they just thought it?
Your religion constrains your morality, not mine. Mine's doing just fine with common human empathy and logic, thank you very much.
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Religious commandments have never succeeded in preventing such crimes. Every society ever, including all Christian societies, needed to have a police force in addition to their priests, because people broke the laws in large enough numbers that such enforcement was still required.
It is hard to argue the necessity of a religious motivation behind such laws when, as history has proven, the religious motivation is insufficient to ensure compliance.
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The 10 commandments, which have established the moral code, prohibiting theft, murder, adultery and mandating respect for one's elders is now falling apart.
Yes, because no one else has ever formalized the thought that theft and murder are bad things that you don't want in a society... -bangs head against wall-
It's laughable when abrahamists think they are the origin and only source of ethics. You seem to have fallen in the same trap.
The society will have to come up with a different set of moral laws and I don't see any viable basis for that, short of religion.
So you seriously think that religious laws are the only thing that can make a person think that murder is bad?
And apparently you also think that atheists can't have morals because morals outside of religion have no basis?
WTF is wro
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The Universe exists Q.E.D. my God made it.
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So no axioms or postulates for you. Gonna make mathematics awfully difficult to develop.
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Exactly. Forming a hypothesis does in no way entail "believing" in it. Or the converse. Forming a hypothesis is merely a step to formalize a question so that the existence and nature of an answer can be investigated.
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Other than the Pythagoreans and their persecution of anyone who hinted at irrational numbers, there aren't very many violent mathematical belief systems remaining.
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(since, you know, if you put two rocks in a bucket and then put two more rocks in a bucket, you now have four rocks, and this experiment is easy for others to perform and verify).
Things get a lot more complicated if you put apples in the bucket. [google.com]
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And belief without evidence is fucking stupid
Do you believe in love? Have you ever been in love? If so, show it to me. Hold it out in your hand, because I don't believe "love" exists. It's a belief without evidence, which according to you, is fucking stupid.
And don't point to your significant other and claim that is love. That's not love. That's a human being. Ask your doctor if you don't believe me.
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Nope
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Not loving anything around you...even what created you, is one thing.
Not loving yourself, can be self-destructive.
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Re:Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
By definition, "love" is not an object. It's a state that objects might wind up in (specifically, human brains).
But since it is a state, and not an object, it doesn't make sense to demonstrate it by holding it out in one's hand. The same way you cannot hold "falling" in your hand, even though "falling" is a real state that real objects might be in.
If you want evidence that love exists, it would come in either of two forms. You could query people and ask them if they are in this state or ever have been in that state. Alternatively, you could look at brain scans of people who report being in this state, and people who do not, to see the differences that define it.
My point is that you are committing a strawman fallacy. A claim like "love exists" is an entirely different kind of claim than the claim that "Elon Musk exists," and so the nature of the evidence that one would need to present is different in the two cases.
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because I don't believe "love" exists
No joke: this is the saddest thing I've read today.
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Profanity is also the refuge of the ignorant.
Re:Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
So rather, it is not religions that do this, but rather people. People make mistakes and treat other people poorly. Being a Class A Jerk is a human quality that is ubiquitous across gender, ethnicity, and religious upbringing. The people who do these things know that they are wrong, so they cherry pick aspects of whatever belief system the use, such as religion, to justify their poor behavior; again the sign of someone who is weak minded. But I can assure you that exact same behavior comes from others; atheist countries like China and the USSR and Cambodia are responsible for more untimely deaths in the 20th century than just about any other system imaginable.
Pol Pot of Cambodia was a highly educated atheist technocrat who committed the Cambodian genocide.
Islam is a beautiful religion that a few people who cannot understand their poverty or difficult life use to justify to kill others.
Buddhism is often considered a religion of peace and mindfulness as it condemns violence in every form, and yet radical Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand are committing violence against Muslims and ethnicities like the Rohingya.
Just because someone uses something as an excuse for being a jerk doesn't change the fact it's just a person being a jerk.
Re:Religion is belief without evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Religion is belief without evidence (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much all organized religion comes with organized cognitive dissonance, so to say. There is the original PR-type mission statement, usually some drivel about not doing evil, and then there is all the evil that you get instructed to do.
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As is ruling out the hypothesis without evidence against it. Agnosticism makes some sense; atheism doesn't.
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Re: Religion is belief without evidence (Score:4, Funny)
I think everybody believes something without evidence. For example, I'm an atheist, but I believe rsilvergun is a closet Stalinist.
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He's religious, but not smart enough to figure out Slashdot doesn't support Unicode?
That's evidence he really is a religious nut and not playing Poe's Law on us. But you can never be sure about Poe's Law. It's like VR. Are you sure you turned it off?
(Actually, he writes so strangely I'm not sure if he is or is not defending organized (or disorganized) religion. The Unicode problem is just the thumb in the eye part of it.)
GOOD. (Score:5, Insightful)
The sooner religion disappears the better. Religion is single handedly responsible for more deaths than any other cause.
Re:GOOD. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't so much how many beielve in "a" god, but the numbers who believe that theirs is the right and and want their beliefs legislated into law and given primacy. Also the numbers who feel that religion must be tightly tied to partisan politics. That is, those who still want the harmful bits of religion.
I don't care if some people are religious. As a philosophy, there's some good stuff there that would be great if people followed it, rather than ignoring or distorting the teachings. As in "love your neighbor as yourself". If everyone did that it'd be great. But we've got modern pharisees who reinterpret it all, they don't think someone they disagree with is their neighbor. If they'd just go about trying to lead a better life without forcing others to lead the same life there wouldn't be a problem.
You kind of have to (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if you read these as they were meant to be, as non literal stories, that's not really an issue.
But if you take a more simplistic and literal approach... well the result is pretty clear. Every time you sin you're contributing a certain amount of "sin points" to the world. And if th
Re:GOOD. (Score:5, Insightful)
Many wars over "religion" are not actually about religion. Much of the time, it's some greedy asshole who wants more resources, land, and people to rule over but they don't want to risk their own life, so they set up a bullshit premise that will rally other people to risk their lives to get the greedy asshole what they want. Sure, religion is a common premise, but if it suddenly went away overnight, all of the greedy assholes aren't going to just call it quits. Instead, they'll pull from the dozens of other forms of tribalism humans engage in and use that as their tool of manipulation.
While I'm not sure about GP's statement (Score:5, Insightful)
All of these have clear bible verses that speak out against doing them, but that's kind of the trouble with God's word. It's way, way too open to interpretation because rather than write it himself he left it to mere fallible men to do so. We know, for example, that Genesis isn't meant to be taken literally, but millions do. We know the Gospels weren't written by who they say they were, but again, millions believe that. We know that the bits about homosexuality in the new testament were mistranslated and refer to pedophilia and adulatory (look it up) and that the bible doesn't address trans rights, but here we are...
It's all too open to interpretation, which is why there are so many different sects of Christianity let alone other religions.
Re:While I'm not sure about GP's statement (Score:4, Informative)
Re:While I'm not sure about GP's statement (Score:4, Insightful)
The trouble with that (Score:3)
Now, with the sheer number of denominations that might not be true for your parish. But I'm talking statistically.
A buddy of mine once got dragged to the local priests house by his mom. Buddy wasn't very religious, bordering on Atheist, so this was a kind of "intervention".
Buddy gets there, looks around at the leather furniture and the Mercedes in the garage and says "wow, you must have taken a vow
Re:While I'm not sure about GP's statement (Score:5, Informative)
Most people do not know that the "needle ear" is a small passage in Jerusalem
I can't remember how many different explanations I've heard various pastors give for what Jesus really meant when he said the camel and needle thing, including the explanation you've just given. One thing I've noticed, though, is that they all boil down to pastors who want to keep their jobs telling people who want to get rich what they want to hear.
Jesus hated rich people, and he didn't want rich people as his followers. He said it a bunch of times in a bunch of ways. The camel and the needle was another way for him to say "fuck you" to rich people.
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Jesus hated rich people, and he didn't want rich people as his followers. I doubt that.
When a rich young man asked to be a disciple, Jesus had a requirement: Sell everything you possess and give the money to the poor.
The camel and the needle was another way for him to say "fuck you" to rich people. Not really. As a camel passes through the needle ear when you unload half of its cargo.
No, no, no, the camel just had to kneel down. So, as long as you just kneel before God, you can keep all your money to follow Jesus. /s
Jesus himself was rich, by standards of that time, at least. His father was Jospeh, one of the richest men in Jerusalem.
Which is why Joseph was able to put his family up in such a nice hotel when Jesus was born, and why he picked the poor-person sacrifice when Jesus was 12, right?
Are you sure you're not mixing up Joseph, father of Jesus, with Joseph of Arimathea?
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Religion factored in because, particularly in Christianity, there was a serious dichotomy. Many of the warrior class in their feudal society spent their entire time learn
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"Religion is single handedly responsible for more deaths than any other cause."
Not really. It's an excuse. If those folks across the river had nicer caves and stuff and there was no religion, we'd make up something about their eye-color, or how they lace their shoes as to why it's OK to go all "Moon-watcher" on them and club those outer lacing knuckle draggers to death and take their stuff.
And believing that everything will be rainbows and unicorns if religion vanished is a pretty big leap of faith itself
No great surprise there... (Score:4, Funny)
This result is not surprising, given that there is still no evidence that such a thing as "Gallup poll shows" exists. What is surprising is that 81% of Americans would believe in them anyway.
Thankfully most of us are more enlightened now (Score:2)
People need to stop believing in ridiculous bullshit like religion and start believing in simulation theory. St. Thomas Aquinas was wrong when he argued that it was more sensible for God to exist rather than not exist. But people like Rogan, Musk, and Scott Adams are right for saying it's more likely we were created by a simulator than all this just existing naturally. It just makes more sense for there to have been a simulator and us his/her/them's simulated beings.
While we're at it, it's preposterous to p
Godliness split between both parties (Score:2)
Wonder how long before both parties are nicknamed "party of the godly" and "party of the godless".
Am surprised there is still over 81% of Americans who believe in god.
I wonder if devil worship/wiccan/etc is part of this.
Re:Godliness split between both parties (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder if devil worship/wiccan/etc is part of this.
It's specifically god as worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Here are the questions [gallup.com] Gallup asked [gallup.com].
I don't believe in Americans (Score:2, Funny)
So why should they believe in me?
George Carlin was right (Score:3)
We had it right the first time, the Sun is the only thing worthy of our worship. It provides everything we need, asks nothing of us.
George Carlin - The Sun Worshipper [youtube.com]
Re:George Carlin was right (Score:4, Funny)
“You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci. Two reasons: First of all, I think he's a good actor, okay? To me, that counts. Second, he looks like a guy who can get things done. Joe Pesci doesn't fuck around. In fact, Joe Pesci came through on a couple of things that God was having trouble with.”
George Carlin
But this... (Score:4, Funny)
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Rubbish. Trust in Gallup polls is belief with evidence... you have many chances to estimate the value of Gallup polls from the actual evidence that often follows. Not all the time, but sufficiently often to establish credibility (or lack of it). That's really the point: the difference between credibility and credulity.
Other side of the coin (Score:3)
Words of wisdom (Score:3)
“Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.” ~ George Carlin
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“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
But He loves you. He loves you, and
I see (Score:3)
Only 43% claim to belong to any church,synagogue or mosque, so half of the 'believers' seem to be to lazy to go to church.
It's dead, Jim.
99% of gods not believed in by Americans (Score:3)
I guess it is fair to say that at least 99% of all deities described in literature are not believed in by any significant share of Americans. Among them ones that were in the first place in terms of number of believers for centuries.
Just show me what you showed the apostles (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody *in* the bible is ever convinced by arguments. They're ALL convinced by seeing miracles right in front of their face. So... why not just keep doing that? Obviously, because it's always been garbage, but it's funny how even the apologists are SO convinced that miracles aren't really possible that they don't even *attempt* to do them in front of unbelievers.
Of course, the REAL miracle would be watching churches help house the homeless and feed the hungry (other than on holidays), instead of preaching hate, blood and greed, and calling for executions of gay people. Maybe if I saw a bit more of ACTUAL GOODNESS coming from churches I'd start to wonder if what they have is wholesome after all. As it stands they seem like the scum of the earth and I don't see how good people could ever accept such filth as anything but bronze-age goblin worship.
Abstinence makes the Church grow fondlers (Score:4, Funny)
I'll show myself out...
No wonder there's a mental health crisis (Score:3)
They believe no one looks out for them.
Their hopes and their standards are low.
More Americans (Score:3)
More Americans than ever are willing to risk ostracism and admit to pollsters that they don't believe in God. Oh yeah, and that is based on asking like 3000 Americans, many of whom probably are not American, and then using a plethora of fudge factors to claim that it applies to 100,000 times that number of Americans.
Gallup Poll or CBS Poll (Score:3)
or any other poll on issues like this ("The country supports X") never really seem to answer the question the way the media phrases the poll results. I doubt the results of this poll. For one thing, I don't believe people are completely honest when they respond to these polls. And let's not forget self-selection bias. Of course, I did not RTFA, and most polls are supposed to account for the bias at least, so I have no idea about the methodology or what the poll's results are actually stating.
Most of my neighbors seems to have some kind of belief in God and I have not run into anyone lately who says that they've renounced such a belief. Anecdotal, but that's still part of my priors.
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So what you are saying is that the churches bully people to profess that they are Christians. Not much different than the mafia saying "nice business that you have there, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it.".
Re:81%??!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you go down south in the USA, they circulate lists of "good Christian businesses" and they tell the members of their church to boycott anyone not on the list. It's in the best interest of any business owner to be on that list. You can also write off a church as a tax exemption, so you'll drive down the road in Alabama and see "Bob's Garage and Baptist Church." Bob holds services on Sundays and he can write off some of the expenses that way. So there's a lot of financial incentives for being religious, and that's on top of the (already very strong) social incentives.
I live in the deep south and while the former is fairly accurate (though such lists are spread mostly through word of mouth and are just as often based on things like race as they are religion), I've never encountered the latter. Have an example?
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Whenever I see a cross or fish in a business advertisement or signage, I know enough to steer clear.
Emotions warp reason. (Score:5, Interesting)
People born into religious communities are taught, as soon as they can speak, that God is real AND that disbelief is an act of disobedience which results in the Ultimate Punishment.
This stuff gets into their minds before they have the remotest idea what critical thinking might be, when everything their parents say can be trusted, and when their entire world-view is still being constructed. So these become THE filter that all other learning passes through. So, they cannot reflect upon these beliefs objectively. Their basic patterns of thought are too heavily influenced by these beliefs for them to do so. To them this is simply how the world IS, and any attempt at talking them out of it seems (to them) like utter absurdity.
And, even if you DO make any headway with such people, that fear of Ultimate Punishment kicks in, it kicks up some really deep fears and anxieties, and that in turn makes their brain engage in defensive strategies. It literally warps how they think to make them use emotionally-charged logical fallacies to defend their beliefs, EVEN IF they have studied enough to be able to recognize a logical fallacy in any other context. The limbic system is a deeper neural layer than the cerebral cortex, and it absolutely can do that.
Basically, they have been root-hacked, and that is why they still believe despite the current level of scientific and philosophical progress in our culture.
Re:81%??!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:81%??!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Found the dangerous religious zealot. You've concluded that people different from you are evil, which is the root of most of the problems in the world today. Basically, religion has turned you into a bigot. You are illustrative of the problems inherent in religion.
It's even scarier than than that when you realize that you're talking to someone who believes that the only source of morals is religious dogma. What kind of mind believes something like that? The frightening conclusion is someone who would be happily murdering and raping and stealing if there wasn't a specific rule about about it, or if they lost their religious faith. It also means that they may well think that it's fine to do anything not specifically prohibited (which, since many religious people don't actually know very much about the dogma of their religion - as a whole, or for the particular sect they belong to - is a lot) even if they're just rules-lawyering it to give themselves an exception.
Not sure if serious. (Score:2)
Your statement would be sarcasm if uttered by any atheist with a decent education. Though it could equally be uttered with enthusiastic belief by a well-indoctrinated and culturally-isolated religious adherent who doesn't have the first clue about secular morality, nor fun facts about human psychology (basically, humans are pack animals and our pack instincts are the origins of our basic sense of right and wrong....and atheists and religious adherents alike share these).
I don't know you, so I don't know wh
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It means nearly 20% of the people we allow to vote - have no sound moral underpinning.
This is sarcasm, isn't it? I say that because of this [imgur.com]. If that is what you call a sound moral underpinning, your comment has to be sarcasm. I mean, certainly no person of the cloth would harbor unmoral underpinnings [yahoo.com].
Also, Penn Jillette has a fantastic response [imgur.com] to sarcasm such as yours.
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If you have a lukewarm bowl of oatmeal with sufficient cognitive capabilities to believe in as complex of a doctrine as the rapture, please write that up for a journal :).
That said, I think more widespread and easy access to information via the internet has played some part in reduced religious belief in the younger generations. It's just a hunch though. I should look for studies on the topic.
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China is a republic, it's formally part of their name; BTW, they are not a democracy.
The USA **is** a democracy and a republic BOTH. Those who say only mob rule is democracy are simpletons. Do not be a simpleton! The dysfunction of the democracy is another debate.
Most outwardly advertising Christians I've met in the USA are overcompensating fools who do not actually practice their religion; also they are quite gullible. Meanwhile the quiet humble ones practice without the need to show of their tribalism.
Re: (Score:3)
To be honest in this day and age people have become a lot more disconnected than we were before. We are social animals, we perceive one another through speech, intonation, vision, visual cues and touch. The Internet and instant messengers are a very poor substitute if any.
If people around you don't love you or you're alone, religion promises you that at least God loves you which is enough for many. If I didn't have a rational mind and high intelligence, I could very well imagine myself as a religious pers
Re:For christ's sake (Score:5, Informative)
If people around you don't love you or you're alone, religion promises you that at least God loves you which is enough for many.
Instead of indoctrinating children that they need a mythical sky being to keep them company and love them, teach them that loving and caring for themselves is key to happiness.
Re: (Score:2)
In America? Where 1 out of every 5 Americans cannot read? And over half cannot read past a sixth grade level meaning that they cannot form complex associations between what is read and how that might affect things not mentioned in the thing they read?
American education is in utter shambles and the vast majority of Americans are not just uneducated, but highly uneducated. Everyone gets on here and bitches about IT visas and what not, and it's clear that very few people have got a grip with how absolutely
Re: (Score:2)
Our brains are hardwired to accept bullshit from a perceived authority figure, even extremely nutty stuff that would take minutes of research to disprove is readily accepted by a significant fraction of people.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because America is fast turning its back on being an advanced country.
We decimate public education because people are scared to death that someone lower on the economic ladder might end up being smart enough to wonder why they're being stepped on by all those above them. We squander opportunities to increase the overall economy top to bottom because we're scared to death that the top 1-5% may lose a penny on the dollar of their net worth if we dare let somebody living on the street improve their situation.
Re:Why is it still so high ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please tell me ... (Score:5, Funny)
OK, you're a joke.