Christianity Continues Decline in America: Pew Survey Results

[viole]

Shares?

Yes, shares. The trend is to change spiritual explanations about things into materialistic explanations. The contrary never happens.

So, I would sell my spiritual shares, if I were you.

Ciao

- viole

 

[MD]

Yes, shares. The trend is to change spiritual explanations about things into materialistic explanations. The contrary never happens.

So, I would sell my spiritual shares, if I were you.

Ciao

- viole

I'd be willing to wager that panpsychism is a pretty big buying out of your 'shares'.

So I'll keep my shares, thanks

 

[Skwim]

From the Pew report

Source & Article​

 

[viole]

I'd be willing to wager that panpsychism is a pretty big buying out of your 'shares'.

So I'll keep my shares, thanks

Sure. But I would not use them to secure my rent

Ciao

- viole

 

[MD]

Sure. But I would not use them to secure my rent

Ciao

- viole

Lol

 

[LuisDantas]

So what do you make of the cause of this trend?

The cat is out of the bag. People are increasingly realizing that decency and religious affiliation are not very related to each other. Previous generations had a hard time saying out aloud that they disagreed with the beliefs of their parents. Such is increasingly less the case.

Is the rise of secularism still too slow?

Too slow for my personal taste, but obviously not for that of others.

What will happen to mainline Protestantism and Catholicism?

They will eventually have no options but to take clear secularist stances.

 

[LuisDantas]

Atheism is a new movement, just like all the movements before it.

How many millennia of age must a movement have for it to no longer be called new, and how little of a direction must it lack before it is no longer a movement?

Atheism just is.

 

[leibowde84]

Actually, modern Western atheism is strongly tied into epistemological materialism. When a person says they're an atheist, it's usually assumed that they lack belief in a spiritual reality as a whole, not just lack of belief in a deity concept. Just look at this board. When that is mentioned or implied, other atheists tend not to refute it. But I have pointed it out a number of times that atheism is not the same as materialism. The distinction is being lost.

That is not true, at least not in the US. Most, if not all, of the Atheists I know in my life do not actively believe that God does not exist. They merely lack that belief, having not been convinced as of yet. They do not think that God or the Spiritual world is impossible or anything. They merely haven't been convinced as of yet.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

That is not true, at least not in the US. Most, if not all, of the Atheists I know in my life do not actively believe that God does not exist. They merely lack that belief, having not been convinced as of yet. They do not think that God or the Spiritual world is impossible or anything. They merely haven't been convinced as of yet.

I.e. they're materialists and empiricists. You're not rebutting anything I've said.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

I.e. they're materialists and empiricists. You're not rebutting anything I've said.

Make sure you understand the difference between philosophical materialist and pragmatic materialists. And we should all be empiricists. To have someone be less than empirical would be asinine. Even religious people tend to be empirical.

 

[MD]

Make sure you understand the difference between philosophical materialist and pragmatic materialists. And we should all be empiricists. To have someone be less than empirical would be asinine. Even religious people tend to be empirical.

How can you empirically measure love? Or friendship? Or understanding a concept?

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

Make sure you understand the difference between philosophical materialist and pragmatic materialists. And we should all be empiricists. To have someone be less than empirical would be asinine. Even religious people tend to be empirical.

No, empiricism is illogical because you can't prove subjective experiences. There are some things you have to take on faith, such as emotion, psychological states and internal experiences in general. It would be pretty contradictory for a religious person such as a Christian to claim to be an empiricist because we tend to have, or at least seek out, personal experiences of/with God, Angels and Saints. Such experiences cannot be empirically proven to have occurred while they may have subjectively occurred to the person, making it real to them, if them only.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

How can you empirically measure love? Or friendship? Or understanding a concept?

Empirically simply means that we take information from around us as the basis of our knowledge. You mean "quantify". Quantify and empiricism isn't the same thing. Its hard to quantify concepts as they don't have dimensional measurements. We can quantify its effects on sociology and psychology. We can trace and identify its properties. But it is still all empirical. Even our understanding of what it is has been granted to us through empirical psychological study.

 

[LuisDantas]

How can you empirically measure love? Or friendship? Or understanding a concept?

By the observable consequences.

Love, or at least some forms of it, can be detected and measured to some degree by the signs of confort, commitment, common goals and mutual support of people. Or you can choose instead to measure physiological effects of people on each other under varied circunstances, detect and describe patterns, experiment with distances, verbal mentions, intentional recalling of absent people. Same for friendship.

It is not all that different from studying electromagnetism (which is very much a mystery when push comes to shove, and more of an evidence of a creator god than anything in emotions or biology IMO), medicine or grammatics.

Concepts, specifically, are human creations and therefore human responsibility. There is no way of measuring their understanding other than by studying human interactions and behavior.

 

[sun rise]

I'm coming late to this thread and have a slightly different perspective. To me, traditional religion is dying slowly. When I was growing up, religion was assumed and you were thought weird if you did not attend services of some kind. This was the era of lip service to many. Rich people attended certain churches. And others thought that doctrinal differences were important. By and large, most of that is gone.

So now, some reject the notion of God altogether. Some believe in God but not religion (spiritual but not religious). Some look at different spiritual or non-traditional religious groups.

I skimmed/searched the full report and the questionnaire itself and found no questions about the nature of God and in fact no mention of God outside of asking about belief of atheists and agnostics.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

No, empiricism is illogical because you can't prove subjective experiences. There are some things you have to take on faith, such as emotion, psychological states and internal experiences in general. It would be pretty contradictory for a religious person such as a Christian to claim to be an empiricist because we tend to have, or at least seek out, personal experiences of/with God, Angels and Saints. Such experiences cannot be empirically proven to have occurred while they may have subjectively occurred to the person, making it real to them, if them only.

Define empiricism. Do you know where empiricism started? Do you know what it implies?

It simply states that knowledge is gained from observation through our senses. We will not suddenly populate information in our own mind without having learned it first. It isn't illogical and it isn't contradictory to emotion or psychological states. True I think it would be hard to say that they have an empirical relationship with god but it doesn't mean that they aren't empirical about knowledge.

 

[MD]

Empirically simply means that we take information from around us as the basis of our knowledge. You mean "quantify". Quantify and empiricism isn't the same thing. Its hard to quantify concepts as they don't have dimensional measurements. We can quantify its effects on sociology and psychology. We can trace and identify its properties. But it is still all empirical. Even our understanding of what it is has been granted to us through empirical psychological study.

Empiricism emphasizes evidence. I don't mean quantify, I said and mean empiricism.

It is not fully empirical because the very nature of experience is internalized and non empirical. It has no basis in physical or objective reality. And the psychological study give us a very poor, incomplete and fuzzy picture of what actually is going on.

And the other part of empiricism is gaining knowledge through our senses, which is another rubbish position since it is not our senses which give us knowledge. What about those people (like billions of theists) who gain some subjective sense of the divine through their interaction with nature, would you classify that as empirical?

 

[CeilingCat]

thank god

no more death cults

 

[LuisDantas]

Empiricism emphasizes evidence. I don't mean quantify, I said and mean empiricism.

It is not fully empirical because the very nature of experience is internalized and non empirical. It has no basis in physical or objective reality. And the psychological study give us a very poor, incomplete and fuzzy picture of what actually is going on.

And the other part of empiricism is gaining knowledge through our senses, which is another rubbish position since it is not our senses which give us knowledge. What about those people (like billions of theists) who gain some subjective sense of the divine through their interaction with nature, would you classify that as empirical?

People can only have so much understanding or reverence for things that are literally indetectable (which is what a lack of evidence implies).

For that matter, there is only so much condition of protecting those from simple disagreements. How much truth is there in something that must be agreed with in order to exist?

 

[leibowde84]

I.e. they're materialists and empiricists. You're not rebutting anything I've said.

Nope. Materialism says that matter is all that exists. the people of which I speak merely think that matter is all we know to exist thus far.