Younger generations doubting God not ‘just a phase’

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Michael

I have often found myself in debates where I raise the point that belief in God is significantly lower in younger generations than older generations. (We’re also more liberal, too). This often gets waved off as nothing more than a phase. “Why,” evidence deniers will say, “everyone flirts with these ideas in their youth, but everyone always becomes more religious as they age.” Of course, that’s an inappropriate response. Maybe it could be argued that people become more settled in their religious and political views into their 40’s and beyond, but that still doesn’t really cut it. And now it has to end all together because the wiggle room is gone:

The percentage of Americans 30 and younger who harbor some doubts about God’s existence appears to be growing quickly, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. While most young Americans, 68%, told Pew they never doubt God’s existence, that’s a 15-point drop in just five years.

In 2007, 83% of American millennials said they never doubted God’s existence.

More young people are expressing doubts about God now than at any time since Pew started asking the question a decade ago. Thirty-one percent disagreed with the statement “I never doubt the existence of God,” double the number who disagreed with it in 2007…

“Notably, people younger than 30 are substantially less likely than older people to say prayer is an important part of their lives,” the report said.

“Research on generational patterns shows that this is not merely a lifecycle effect,” it continued. “The Millennial generation is far less religious than were other preceding generations when they were the same age years ago.”

There are a number of factors at work here, I think. In no particular order,

  • the Internet
  • higher education
  • Gnu Atheism
  • the Catholic Church

Surely there are far more aspects to this increase in doubt, but I think I’ve listed some of the major factors here.

Not too long ago the Internet was still considered a place for nerds. You blog? Ha! and You’re wasting your time! The latter may still hold some truth, but few people can utter it sans a load of hypocrisy. Facebook isn’t too far off a billion users right now. We’re all on the Internet and that exposes us all to a lot of different ideas. That has to breed doubt.

Next there’s education. This generation is the most highly educated age group in history. We’ve been given some worthwhile tools and access to a lot of different information. Moreover, just like the Internet, college is bringing together more and more diverse ideas. The days of black and white, Christian thinking is coming to an end; there’s nowhere left for religious arguments to hide now that everyone is talking. (It’s worth noting that cities tend to be more liberal than rural areas.)

Then we have Gnu Atheism. It would have been seen as absurd 10 years ago to be as openly critical of religion as so many people are today. Now we have books and bus ads and we’re even getting shout-outs from the President. That, of course, isn’t to say it wasn’t seen as absurd in 2006 when The God Delusion was released. It was. But in just the short time since then things have been changed. Gnu Atheism has worked in reverse to religion: Religious ‘moderates’ have always made space for fundamentalists (regardless of their intention), but now the aggressiveness of Gnu Atheism has made space for those who simply disbelieve but don’t necessarily see religion as a negative force.

Finally (at least insofar as my list goes) the Catholic Church messed things up. They associated religion with child molesters and rapists (all the while using the euphemism of “abusers”). Instead of facing up to their sins, they covered up as much as they could, as fast as they could. They became a meme, inviting mockery to no end. Priest jokes evolved from entering bars with rabbis to entering backrooms and more with choir boys. The idea of mocking a religious institution became more mainstream than ever. That helped, along with the Gnu Atheists, to open all religious institutions to mockery.

So this isn’t merely a phase. People really are doubting religion more and more. And that’s a great thing. I don’t say that simply as an anti-theist, but rather as someone who values science and a scientific way of thinking. Doubt is a good thing. We need to use it more, no matter what the subject. If we allow ourselves to close off an entire area to critical thinking, then we’ve put ourselves in some kind of danger. Why not shutter any other area? Why not put a stop to one line of research or another because it looks too difficult to ever come to fruition or because it conflicts with some group’s idea of ethics? We can’t do that. Without doubt we’ll stagnate. I know this generation is better than that.

At least I think I know we are.

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The state with the fewest Christian adherents

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Michael

A study was done in 2010 which quantified the number of Christian adherents in the US by state. It defined Christian “adherents” as including all those with an affiliation to a congregation (children, members, and attendees who are not members). In other words, this study, as best as I can tell, looked at the number of people who are affiliated with a church or other religious organization in some official capacity. That tells me this isn’t that useful if we want to know which state has the most believers in a particular, cultural god, but it would seem to indicate something about how devoted people in a given state are. And the good news is, Maine appears to have relatively few devoted citizens:

The researchers found Utah to be the most Christian* state with around 78 percent of population identifying as Christian adherents. The researchers found Maine to be the least Christian state with only about 27 percent identifying as Christian adherents.

*Christians include Mormons and Unitarians / Universalists who self-identify as Christians.

I’ve seen other studies where Vermont is listed as the least religious state in the Union whereas Maine is in the bottom tier but not usually topping the list. I tend to believe those, if not for the number of studies that have been done which, if I recall correctly, have given those results, then for the fact that Maine is speckled with the quaint New England churches that decorate so many calendars, not to mention its fairly conservative voting record in certain social areas; my observations as a resident of this state tells me that there are more Christians than the above study indicates.

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Dan Savage discusses Bible, children walk out

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Michael

It’s still finals week, so short posts will have to do:

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New rule for Christians

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Michael

No more metaphorically talking about “the heart” until you bother to define what it means.

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And now for the patterns

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Michael

I posted yesterday about why the Catholic Church’s coverup for sexual abuse is especially egregious. Today I want to toss up a rather lengthy list of the Church’s failings:

Here are some details of some major developments in the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandals in Europe in the last two years:

IRELAND:

— November 30, 2011 – Cardinal Sean Brady, head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, agreed to a legal settlement over his role in administering an oath of secrecy to a teenage victim of clerical sexual abuse in 1975, the victim’s lawyer said.

— July 13, 2011 – The Catholic Church in Ireland concealed the sexual abuse of children by priests as recently as 2009, a decade after it introduced rules to protect minors, and the Vatican was complicit in the cover-up, a government report into the handling of sex abuse claims in the diocese of Cloyne, in County Cork, showed.

— May 31, 2010 – The Vatican named two cardinals and three archbishops from England, the United States and Canada to lead its inquiry into sexual abuse by clergy in Ireland.

— March 24, 2010 – Pope Benedict accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee of Cloyne, accused of mishandling reports of sexual abuse in his diocese. He later accepted the resignation of two other Irish bishops.

— March 20, 2010 – In rare letter to Ireland’s Catholics, the pope told abuse victims he felt “shame and remorse” over the scandals and announced an official Vatican probe of Irish dioceses, seminaries and religious orders.

AUSTRIA:

— November 11, 2011 – Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn faced down calls for radical change in the Church from priests and lay people at a four-day meeting. Catholic rebels made calls for “disobedience” and changes in the Church, after a record 87,000 Austrians deserted it in 2010, many of them in response to allegations of sexual abuse by priests.

BELGIUM:

— December 14, 2011 – Victims of sexual abuse by priests in Belgium should be able to claim up to 25,000 euros ($32,700) in compensation from the Church, with assessments made by an independent panel, a parliamentary commission concluded.

— Hundreds of victims of abuse in the Belgian Church came forward after the former bishop of Bruges admitted in 2010 to abusing his nephew for years. Almost 500 people filed claims with an earlier commission set up by the Church but this was disbanded after police seized its documents.

— September 10, 2010 – Widespread child sexual abuse in the Belgian Church drove at least 13 victims to suicide, a Church commission reported. Of the 475 cases it recorded, two-thirds of the victims were male, with boys aged about 12 most vulnerable.

BRITAIN:

— Sept 18, 2010 – Pope Benedict made one of his strongest apologies to abuse victims while on a state visit to Britain, expressing his deep sorrow to innocent victims of “these unspeakable crimes.”

GERMANY:

— Jan 10, 2012 – A Catholic priest admitted in a German court to sexually abusing three boys over eight years, during trips that included to Disneyland in Paris.

— In April 2011 a survey said that some 180,000 German Catholics left the Church in 2010, a 40 percent rise over the previous year, amid allegations that priests had sexually abused children for decades.

— Aug 31, 2010 – The German Church unveiled new, tougher guidelines on dealing with sexual abuse of minors, obliging church authorities to report suspected cases to police.

— June 11, 2010 – A Jesuit investigation, commissioned in January, cited on May 27, 205 allegations of sexual abuse against priests at its schools in Germany, revealing decades of systematic abuse and attempts at a cover-up.

ITALY:

— Feb 18, 2010 – Italy has had dozens of cases of clerical sexual abuse involving about 80 priests over the past decade, a priest who runs an anti-pedophilia organization told Vatican Radio.

NETHERLANDS

— Dec 9, 2010 – A Church-commissioned report said 1,975 people had declared themselves victims of sexual and physical abuse while minors in the care of the Dutch Church, and criticized the Church for not responding to the scandals more promptly.

SWITZERLAND:

— June 2, 2010 – Swiss bishops said they received reports between January and May of 72 perpetrators abusing 104 victims, up from 14 perpetrators and 15 victims in 2009.

With so many people with so much power and influence, the systematic nature of these coverups points to some common denominator which goes beyond simply “institution”. Here’s a hint: It’s religion.

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The sexual abuse patterns of the Catholic Church

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Michael

There is sexual abuse that happens all over the place. It can happen between any two sort of people and within any organization. We’ve seen it from teachers, from coaches, at the college level, in the workplace, and from just about any sort of individual in just about any sort of profession. Sometimes it even gets covered up. People will go to great lengths to protect the people and institutions which are important to them. It’s disgusting and I don’t think any rational person is ever happy to hear about it.

One thing, however, that we don’t tend to see is a widespread culture of abuse and subsequent coverups within a field. The Penn State abuse with Sandusky, for instance, was awful and there are plenty of questionable things which happened with that, but that doesn’t mean it’s a staple of colleges to protect predators. That will happen on the individual level and in specific circumstances, but no one can say that there has been a national higher education sexual abuse scandal. Moreover, when abuse does it exposed, heads role.

In contrast to all this is the Catholic Church. The sexual abuse happens at the individual level and is not something which the Church condones, but the coverup has been systematic. It hasn’t been at just one Church or one Sunday School (like Penn State was at just Penn State), but rather the entire, far-reaching organization seems have had a hand in protecting itself. The moral compass of the Church has been awry for decades upon decades now.

I’m going to end this post here because it’s a little longer than I intended, but I have scheduled a post for tomorrow which will list out a number of examples of the systemic failure of the Catholic Church across Europe.

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Even the teddy bear is sad

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Michael

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Dawkins, the Bible, and titles

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Michael

Richard Dawkins was recently on a BBC radio affiliate where he cited a poll which showed that only 35% of British Christians could identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament. From this (in part), he was making the point that people in his home country aren’t as religious as most people think. That’s a fine argument, but I will leave it for now. I want to focus on the response he got from another guest on the show, Giles Fraser, former canon chancellor of St. Paul’s in London. Fraser asked Dawkins to recite the full name of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Dawkins responded:

“‘On The Origin Of Species’ … Uh. With, Oh God. ‘On The Origin Of Species.’ There is a subtitle with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”

That’s pretty close. The actual title is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, which is more than a mouthful. But it wouldn’t matter if Dawkins couldn’t get past the first part of the title everyone knows. The poll he was citing in regards to Christians asked them a simple factoid, a mere piece of trivia. One would expect a high number to know it; to call oneself Christian is to profess a belief in a book. And not just any belief(s). We’re talking about the most profound beliefs a person can hold. It is not unreasonable to expect people to be familiar with a book on which they have placed their eternal salvation.

And there’s the difference. Dawkins’ has not placed some holy importance on Darwin’s work. He obviously views the man as tremendously important to scientific and human history – and rightly so – but that has nothing to do eternity. It has nothing to do with salvation. The Bible does. That makes it logically invalid to compare a biologist’s specific knowledge of a long-string of words to a Christian’s general knowledge of what Christians profess to believe as a matter of determining what happens to their soul.

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Here’s a terrible idea

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Michael

I bet it passes:

A bill put forward by Gov. Paul LePage proposes allowing religious schools in Maine to qualify for public tuition dollars.

LePage unveiled the proposed bill with the state’s education commissioner Stephen Bowen in Skowhegan on Wednesday. Currently students in ‘school choice’ communities can attend some private schools and have their tuition paid for by the school district they live in.

I can see both sides of this argument. I went to a Christian school from K through 8 and I know it was an excellent education (minus the time wasted on religion). My class alone produced 4 high school valedictorians around the area. That’s 30 students who spread into various high schools with hundreds of kids per class and managed to succeed at a very high rate. That point acknowledged, none of this justifies using public dollars to send children to such schools. This is little more than an excuse to promote Christianity.

It’s too bad I fully expect to see a few more “Christian children” (as if there is such an absurd thing) running around in the coming years.

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When theory becomes practice

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Michael

When Christians make a stink about their religion being targeted, it is often put to them how they would react if the religion in question was Islam or Scientology. (See the teaching of creationism.) Alternatively, when another religion is seeking to do something which Christians don’t like, it is often put to them how they would react if it was their religion in question. (See the Ground Zero mosque.) The usual response is to either ignore the question or pay it lip service. The former is what I most commonly see, but every so often Christians will give the latter a little air time. I’m sure it is genuine for some, but most are so oblivious to their majority status in everything except science that they’re just espousing principles they pretend to hold but really ignore in practice.

One place where Christians often fight to keep their special treatment is at legislative meetings. They’ve become accustomed to beginning their sessions with Christian prayer. Moreover, elected officials rarely, if ever, reflect the actual population; it isn’t often a state or federal senator will challenge the idea of prayer before commencing (secular) lawmaking. What this means is that people assume they have a legitimate podium for promoting Christianity. However, since they do not, this is often one of those places where it will be put to Christians, What if the religion in question is something other than Christianity? What if Islam is being espoused? And, again, the response is usually to either ignore the question or pay it ever-so-empty lip service.

But there is a third, a-historic option.

This strategy is to claim this is a Christian nation by way of the values encoded in our constitution and the intention of the founding fathers. It is a demonstrably false claim, but it is made nonetheless. And it goes further. In addition to stating such falsehoods, Christians will follow through on their poor grasp of history and actively seek to prevent equal treatment of other religions and non-religious groups. Don’t believe me? You should:

(This is a few years old, but it was recently brought to my attention.)

This sort of thing doesn’t surprise me. It isn’t that people are merely acting like dolts in the name of religion. They are doing it at the behest of religion. It is fanatical shows of theater like this for which religion calls its sheep. Luke 17:3, for instance, tells followers to rebuke evil. Titus 1:10-16 tells believers that non-Christians can’t do anything good and should be, once again, rebuked. I’m sure if I wasted more of my time reading a book which has failed to provide a shred of evidence for its primary thesis I could find several hundred examples without problem. The point is, this is what Christianity (and most other religions) command of its followers. Spreading the word and shouting down ‘evil’ is half of the point. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when Christians and other religidiots do exactly that.

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