Decline of Religion in the America

According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center, if current patterns of religious switching persist, the proportion of Christians in the United States could drop below 50% in the coming decades. The research highlights a significant shift in religious affiliation within the country. Factors such as the rise of religiously unaffiliated individuals, commonly referred to as "nones," and the increasing number of people who identify as non-Christian faiths contribute to this trend. While Christians have historically formed the majority of the U.S. population, this study suggests that their influence may diminish over time if these patterns persist. 

Note from ChatGPT, read article at Pew Research Center

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/

Depending on whether religious switching continues at recent rates, speeds up or stops entirely, the projections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.

FAKE News Attempts Trouble

 "Fox News, a national outlet with nobody in Hendersonville this past week, took a comment from the publishing company that was terribly inaccurate," Mayor Clary said in the post. 

"I spoke with library staff several times last week and have interacted with them many times previously. I never saw any sign that they disagreed with Kirk Cameron's message. From everything I experienced, their concerns throughout the week were the patrons of the library and the safety of the people attending the event."

https://www.newschannel5.com/news/the-library-staff-has-been-vilified-unfairly-mayor-says-in-reference-to-kirk-cameron-event 

Another False Hate-mongering Narrative

      The following 2016 narrative is again floating around FACEBOOK (where else!).  According to SNOPES, this story has had two versions, both designed to rile up the less informed and hateful subscribers.

     Did a Teenaged Customer Argue with a Muslim Cashier Over His Cross Necklace? A viral story related a cross-related confrontation involving a 17-year-old boy in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

According to SNOPES the story is totally fictional, but nevertheless is promulgated for the purpose of creating hate.

CONGRATULATIONS: It is successful! Merry Christmas!  Here is the first comment that followed this FACEBOOK post that was shared with us.

Some aliens think this is their country and can make the rules, however, it is OUR country and they should be following our laws.

Naturally, any one wearing a hijab is an alien. 

Efficacy of Intercessonary Prayer

      It is common practice at most churches to request prayers or to have prayer services for someone sick. But who does these prayers help?  Numerous attempts to prove scinetificallyhave all failed to demonstrate any benefit to the ill, including a study funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

      In 1982, Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist at the San Francisco General Medical Center and born-again Christian believed that he could put faith-based prayer on a solid scientific foundation by implementing rigorous study using a double-blind randomized clinical trial. He randomly engaged four-hundred cardiac patients to prayed-for and not-prayed-for by Christian intercessors.  He found highly questionable and virtually little benefit to prayer.

      Subsequently, four new major investigations incorporating the same procedures Byrd had followed were carried out at other medical centers: William Harris, Saint Luke’s Hospital (1999); Jennifer Aviles, Mayo Clinic (2001); Mitchell Krucoff, Duke University Medical Center (2005); and Herbert Benson, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (2006). Their results were as follows:

Various broader meta-studies of the literature in the field have been performed showing evidence only for no effect or a potentially small effect (maybe depending on one's bias). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_intercessory_prayer 

So what explanation do those who uphold the value of prayer offer?

• The research is premised on a misconception of how God responds to prayer.
• God is outside the domain of science and therefore is not amenable to experimental evaluation.
• It is not possible to randomize God or truly understand his will.
• Research can neither prove nor disprove the validity of divine intervention.
• Because God already knows who needs healing, prayer is superfluous.
• It is a corruption of faith, if not willful blasphemy or sacrilege, to test God.

For additional information read:
https://secularhumanism.org/2018/12/have-christians-accepted-the-scientific-conclusion-that-god-does-not-answer-intercessory-prayer/

John Oliver Takes Down the Religious Criminals

Suicide Now the 10'th Leading Cause of Death

According to the CDC Suicide rates have spiked and it is now the 10'th leading cause of death in America.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p0607-suicide-prevention.html

According to Catholic League president Bill Donohue

If Anthony Bourdain had been a religious man, would he have killed himself? Probably not.

http://www.standardnewswire.com/news/2587414062.html   

Donohue goes on to claim with hugely erroneous logic

As I have recounted in my book, The Catholic Advantage: How Health, Happiness, and Heaven Await the Faithful, there is an inverse relationship between religiosity and suicide: those who are regular churchgoers have a much lower rate of suicide than atheists like Bourdain.

That is purely a correlation and hardly causation.   According to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center

The community is an important setting for suicide prevention. A wide variety of community groups and organizations, including schools, after-school programs, health care providers, workplaces, and places of worship, can all work together to carry out prevention activities that reflect local needs and resources.

Jesse Bering, Director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago, New Zealand, an experimental psychologist, and author of the Suicidal says

Not only is the tenor of Donohue’s sentiment completely tone-deaf and insensitive, his claim that Bourdain—or, for that matter, any other atheist suicide victim—could have been saved by religion is presumptuous and misleading.  

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/being-religious-will-not-save-you-from-suicide/?utm_source=eSkeptic&utm_campaign=f899f7b24b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_06_11_04_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8c0a740eb4-f899f7b24b-73446941&mc_cid=f899f7b24b&mc_eid=968a2f6f5e

Pence Like Trump Has Alternative Facts

As in the case of Donald Trump, Mike Pence likes to make up his own facts. In his commencement address at Hillsdale College, Vice President Mike Pence said,. "Facts are facts. Faith is rising across America." Actually the opposite is true.

According to Gallup, church attendance is going down, belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God is going down, and belief in God is going down. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated are growing as a share of the American population, and according to Pew Research, they are now the second-largest “belief” group in the country at 23 percent.

In addition, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that the nonreligious now outnumber white evangelicals. Between 2003 and 2017, white evangelicals dropped from 21 percent of the population to 13. During that same period, the nonreligious swung the other way, rising from 12 percent to 21.

Rise of Political Power of Atheists

According to the most recent Scientific American article by Michael Shermer

... this means that there are more than 64 million American atheists, a staggering number that no politician can afford to ignore. Moreover, if these trends continue, we should be thinking about the deeper implications for how people will find meaning as the traditional source of it wanes in influence. And we should continue working on grounding our morals and values on viable secular sources such as reason and science.

https://michaelshermer.com/2018/04/silent-no-more-rise-of-atheists/ 

In US, Belief in Creationist View of Humans at New Low

The percentage of U.S. adults who believe that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so -- the strict creationist view -- has reached a new low. Thirty-eight percent of U.S. adults now accept creationism, while 57% believe in some form of evolution -- either God-guided or not -- saying man developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.

• 38% say God created man in present form, lowest in 35 years
• Same percentage say humans evolved, but God guided the process
• Less-educated Americans more likely to believe in creationism

http://www.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-humans-new-low.aspx 

Mr. Diety

      Mr. Deity is a series of satirical short films that parody aspects of religion.  Premiering in December 2007, it was created by and stars Brian Keith Dalton. It is currently available on the Mr. Deity channel on YouTube. Dalton is a former Mormon.
     Mr. Deity often expresses annoyance with organized religion or human beings who claim to speak in his name.  As his character, he becomes very irate over being attributed as the author of the Bible, but not included in the editorial process.
     In a recent TubeCast, Evidence & Change, Part I and Part II, Mr. Diety asks “When the evidence for your beliefs is lacking, what then?”  After Part I was released, a viewer challenged Mr. Diety to respond to several criticisms, which Mr. Diety did in the following two videos: Response I and Response II.
     Only listen to these TubeCasts if you have an open mind willing to listen to logic.

The Real War on Science

A lot is being written about Trump’s Anti-science stance, but how biased is that reporting?  Here is an interesting article that offers counter-point.  We just got through eight years of misrepresentations from the Right about Obama.  There is no chance we won’t experience the same from the Left about Trump. 

From the magazine The Real War on Science, The Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress by John Tierney , Autumn 2016

My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?

My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

To read more follow this link http://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html

REAL science dies whenever one side tries to claim "The debate is over."  

A Universe Made Just for You

Humankind is the center and purpose of creation!  Really?

Using the Hubble Space telescope and other observatories, astronomers have completed the most accurate census of galaxies in the observable universe to date. The observable universe contains 10 to 20 times as many galaxies than previous estimates. That raises the total to about one and two trillion galaxies. Likewise, the new number of stars in the observable universe, which now numbers around 700 thousand billion billion.

http://gizmodo.com/we-were-very-wrong-about-the-number-of-galaxies-in-the-1787750693

It is very difficult to believe that any creator would be that wasteful of real estate such so humans have a pretty night sky. 

Science Questions for Presidential Candidates

The Challenge to the Presidential Candidates and to the Press

Science, engineering, technology, health and environmental issues now affect voters’ lives at least as much as the foreign policy, economic policy, and faith and values views that candidates traditionally share with journalists on the campaign trail. America’s leading science and engineering organizations are urging the candidates and the press to give equal priority to discussion of these important issues in the national dialogue, so that well-informed voters may continue to guide the democratic process. 

http://sciencedebate.org/20questions  asks the major political party candidates to provide responses, as they did in 2008 and 2012.

The website Right Wing Watch recently spotlighted a 2002 video of then- Representative Pence delivering an impassioned speech on the House floor in favor of teaching “intelligent design” in public school science classes, and challenging the scientific consensus on evolution by natural selection, demonstrating his ignorance of what is meant by the word “theory” in a scientific context.  Advocating that school children be religiously indoctrinated rather than be taught real science will handicap generations of students.

Years later on MSNBC  Pence was asked to restate his views on science and evolution. He resorted to the “teach the controversy” cliché. Pence’s other anti-scientific views consists of climate change denial and cigarettes do not cause cancer. These views can be disastrous for education and public health. 

Separating scientific fact from superstition is crucial when it comes to national policy and the education of our children. The electorate needs to know whether Pense would subordinate science to religion and cling to views that conflict with reality. Would he use his office to promote an anti-scientific agenda.

Only in America - Superstition Thrives

      In it's "Only in America" the July 15'th issue of The Week magazine reported on a recent activity of the Texas Supreme Court.  It ruled that a Christian family had the right to deny their children an education because the parents believed "the Rapture was imminent." Laura and Michael McIntyre refused to provide a school board with proof they've been actually homeschooling their NINE children saying the order violated their constitutional rights. Naturally, the court was ALL-Republican.

http://wonkette.com/603432/texas-supreme-court-permits-homeschooling-parents-to-continue-being-shtheads 

Chinese Laws Denies Promotion of Superstition.

     China's official censorship guidelines technically prohibit movies that "promote cults or superstition" — a holdover from the Communist Party's secular ideology — and the country's regulators occasionally have used this provision as rationale for banning films that feature ghosts or supernatural beings in a semi-realistic way, such as the remake of Ghostbusters and Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, due their depictions of ghouls and cannibalism.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ghostbusters-denied-release-china-910563  

Highly unlikely the "Ark of Kentucky" would have found a home.

Kentucky Celebrates Religious Ignorance

The Ark Encounter was built according to the biblical dimensions in Genesis. Seven stories tall and 510 feet long, it can be found on 800 acres on I-75 just south of Cincinnati, Ohio in Williamstown, Kentucky.

The monument was built by Ken Ham, founder, president, and CEO of Answers in Genesis and the popular Creation Museum,  A young Earth Creationist Ham said, 

" The Ark Encounter was built to answer the most-asked questions about the account of Noah and to present the gospel of Christ. This theme park is not just about entertainment, but also about presenting the Christian message."

https://answersingenesis.org/ministry-news/ark-encounter/life-size-noahs-ark-opens-doors-vip-guests-during-media-preview-day-kentucky/ 

The Purpose for Creation

      Fundamental to all religions is the belief in human exceptionalism.  The universe was created with humankind as the ultimate product.  This belief leads to the cosmological fine-tuning argument in which numerous physical constants critical to human existence had to be fine tuned by a super intelligent agent.  Even the slightest change in any one of them would have produced an forever lifeless, barren cosmos. The argument continues that the probability of the universal constants taking on the exact values needed to sustain life is so low that they could only have been tuned.

     Jérémie Harris & Edouard Harris challenge this argument in their essay The Non-Fine-Tuned Universe: The Astronomical Failure of the Cosmological Argument for Thesis. http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/non-fine-tuned-universe/.  

     One of the commenters shares our opinion of the essay as

Nice article and great writing. It makes a clear point in showing the weakness in any theistic anthropocentric fine tuning argument. In a nutshell: we do not know: there are today too many unknowns .It is a great question, it has a scientific possible answer, and for sure it is part of the scientific domain of inquiry. 

      The authors effectively dismantle the common religious thinking.  However, one might consider "what if humans are not the ultimate objective of the creation experiment, but just a intermediate stepping stone along the way, such as the jelly fish seems intermediate to mammals."  No evidence or argument substantiates the human intent.  As the authors demonstrate, humans are such a infinitesimal part of creation that one must conclude they are most certainly NOT its purpose.

Brains Hardwired for Religion

Is belief in God a matter of choice, or is it a result of evolution.  

CINO?

Christian In Name Only.  Donald Trump is hardly the first to wear that badge.  Some say he can wear it next to his RINO badge.  The issue to which "the Donald" seems oblivious is - participation goes deeper than "claims".   It also involves "practice". Pope Francis seems to question Trump's sincerity. 
http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/18/politics/pope-francis-trump-christian-wall/

Trump is hardly alone in his ignorance.  Nevertheless, we are surprised that Trump who claims expertise in everything, missed the following Bible entry

15"Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16"You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? 17"So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.…
Matthew 7:16

Will this change the mind of any Trump supporter?  We doubt it.  As in our experience in most matters religious, cognitive dissonance will prevail.

Evolution: What the Fossils Say (by Donald Prothero)