The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.
These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.
“More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ ” says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.
Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:
• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, “the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,” the report concludes.
[…]
Meabh Fitzpatrick, 49, of Rutland, Vt., says she is upfront about becoming an atheist 10 years ago because “it’s important for us to be counted. I’m a taxpayer and a law-abiding citizen and an ethical person, and I don’t think people assume this about atheists.”
#148, RBG,
Then that would mean that any child with a birth defect is the spawn of Satan. Doesn’t Satan like spinach either?
#146 Mr. Fusion, good question concerning why bother praying to heal those who God made infirm. It seems that the ideal Christian form for prayer is to pray that God will go ahead and do whatever he already plans to do. Or to phrase it a bit more poetically, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Personally, I wish Christians would spend more time praying their futile little recitations, and less time gettin’ in other people’s business 😉
Mr. Fusion, you are on the right track. The Universe is a very strange place such that we can not yet accurately and mathematically describe it. The latest discovery of dark energy making it exponentially expand is baffling. But the GUT can’t be too far off. It will be so strange, unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity, that it will amaze everyone with its beauty and simplicity (although simplicity will be on the order of QM and GTR).
I’ll bet there is someone alive today that will conceive of the unification and blow us all away. I certainly hope I live long enough to see it.
When the entire Universe is described mathematically, what need will there be for religion? It’s a valid question, and I’m not prepared to answer it.
134,
Alfred..
I see you like the Hebrew parts of the bible.
Also I said nothing of sex..
147,
Umm,
How many wives were made for adam?? Before Eve.
And no mention of there deaths.
And my comment about Moses, is the cleansing of the world. and the end of mankind over Moses and his family. If you consider’ that ALL mankind, Before this time, was from adam, we are grateful to Moses NOW..
149 Mr. Fusion
That would be like saying horrors and deaths due to the Nazis makes their victims spawn of Hitler. Your statement is a non sequitur.
RBG
#152
> How many wives were
> made for adam?? Before Eve.
There are actually two creation myths in Genesis. In the first, he creates men and women (Genesis 1:27-28). We are never told how many nor whether they actually “multiplied” (They are simply told *to* multiply). In the second myth (starting around Genesis 2:7), he creates Eden and creates one and only one man (Genesis 2:8,15) and puts him in Eden. Stating that the man (Adam) is alone, and thus implying the only man in existence, a woman is created (Genesis 2:22). Therefore, unless multiple men and women were created but only Adam was put into Eden, it must follow that Adam is the first human and Eve is the first female and thus his first wife and since there is no mention of her giving birth prior to Cain, there is no way to conclude that there were births prior to expulsion.
Mind you, this is a meticulous analysis of a myth. It is akin to arguing whether Superman or Batman is the better superhero. However, the difference between such bar room banter and ones relating to the Bible is that people actually believe the Bible really occurred exactly as described and are supposedly sober when they make such claims.
And if you go BACK in the BIBLE before the corrections made in the 1400’s you will see that Adam had 3 wives introduced to him..Eve was the last.
You need to get a concordance…the BIG one thats over 25 volumes..
# 153 RBG said,”That would be like saying horrors and deaths due to the Nazis makes their victims spawn of Hitler.”
Pooh. Hitler was a pussycat compared to your god’s endless love and mercy: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.” (Jeremiah 13)
As for free will? Didn’t work out too well for all those free thinkers in Sodom and Gomorrah. Or Babel. Whole families and cities wiped out. But the clincher of his mercy must be when enough people displease him, he just floods the world and wipes ’em all out.
Yep that’s the kind of god I want in my life. A god of true love and tender mercy. “The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works.” (Psalms 145)
#157 Nimby
War is hell when you’re fighting evil. Just ask the inhabitants of Hiroshima.
RBG
#151, Bubba,
While I do defer to your expertise, I question (wonder about) your last line.
When the entire Universe is described mathematically, what need will there be for religion? It’s a valid question, and I’m not prepared to answer it.
To me, the math is only the proof of the why, it is not the explanation. I say that because a flower is not a set of numbers but it may be reduced to them. Numbers can not be beauty, they may only express it.
I think black holes are the crux of the universe. Yes, one might prove mathematically that when a black hole reaches a specific critical mass, it will explode. But the point a layperson like myself sees is that when a black hole gets too big, it goes bang.
Again, and this is just my thought, but the rational for religion is to explain away what we don’t know. In man’s earliest years, when he needed to know something he would ask the wisest man in the tribe who, having attended the University of Texas or Baylor, since Purdue, A&M, and Stanford weren’t founded yet, would make up an answer. Hence, the equation of religion being ignorance. 😉
Therefore, in my opinion, we don’t need math to explain something, but it can be a great proof. For the laypeople, like most of us are, we want the explanation we can understand, not the math we can’t.
I thank you for the kind words in #151. My only claim on this specific matter is my own ignorance.
#155
Sorry, don’t buy it. Provide an exact name of said Bible translation and the passage and verse in which it states that Adam is given three wives prior to the existence of Eve his first wife. I can research concordance’s and I see nothing to support your assertion.
Sence you like it, HERE it is..
Also remember that the OLD testament is dirived from many sources..
“Adam and Eve – Traditions regarding Adam and other wives
In Genesis, there are two separate accounts of creation, one at Genesis 1-2:3 and another after Genesis 2:4. While creationists and many other religious people believe these to be written by the same author to represent two different perspectives, most biblical scholars support the documentary hypothesis, which claims each account derived from separate source texts that were later combined, with Eve’s name and story being present only in the Yahwist text. Nevertheless, in ancient times, the presence of two distinct accounts was noted, and regarded with some curiosity. The first account says male and female [God] created them, which was viewed to imply simultaneous creation, whereas the second account states that God created Eve from Adam’s rib because Adam was lonely. Consequently, to resolve the accounts, rabbis suggested that Eve and the woman of the first account were two separate individuals.
Preserved in the Midrash, and the mediaeval Alphabet of Ben Sira, this tradition held that the first woman refused to take the submissive position to Adam in sex, and eventually fled from him, consequently leaving him lonely. This first woman was identified in the Midrash as Lilith, a figure elsewhere described as a night demon. In a context separate to Adam, at Isaiah 34:14 Lilith is explicitely mentioned by name, though often not appearing in translations – her name (liyliyth in the Masoretic text) is replaced by the phrase screech owl in the KJV.
In the Talmud, Adam is said to have separated from Eve for 130 years, during which time his ejaculations gave rise to ghouls, and demons. Elsewhere in the Talmud, Lilith is identified as the mother of these creatures. The demons were said to prey on newborn males before they had been circumcised, and so a tradition arose in which a protective amulet was placed around the neck of newborns. Traditions in the Midrash concerning Lilith, and her sexual appetite, are believed ultimately to derive from Sumerian mythology concerning the demon ki-sikil-lil-la-ke, via an intermediate akkadian folk etymology interpreting the lil-la-ke portion of the name as a corruption of lîlîtu, literally meaning female night demon.
The Alphabet of Ben Sira goes further and identifies a third wife, created after Lilith deserted Adam, but before Eve. This unnamed wife was purportedly made in the same way as Adam, from the “dust of the earth”, but the sight of her being created proved too much for Adam to take and he refused to go near her. It is also said that she was created from nothing at all, and that God created into being a skeleton, then organs, and then flesh. The midrash tells that Adam saw her as “full of blood and secretions,” suggesting that he may have actually witnessed her creation and was horrified at seeing a body from the inside out. Ben Sira does not record this wife’s fate. She was never named, and it assumed that she was allowed to leave the Garden a perpetual virgin, or was ultimately destroyed by God in favor of Eve, who was created when Adam was asleep and oblivous.”
http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Adam_and_Eve/id/1895346
#161 ECA, no matter how well-sourced those additional traditions may be, they can’t be used in arguments with Christians because they don’t have the blessing of the Church.
According to the official Church doctrine which Christians implicitly believe, the large body of early manuscripts received thorough review that weeded out all heretical writings, and because the selection process was guided by God himself, all those scriptures included in the Bible today reflect the thoughts of the Almighty. Anything not included in the Bible was probably written by Lucifer (or his henchmen, who also write all Hollywood scripts).
In my opinion, there is only one type of argument that has any chance whatsoever of ever taking root in the brain of a Christian. That is to deconstruct the mythology contained between the covers of their own little black book of poorly written holy scriptures. You won’t see the effects immediately, but you may be able to plant a time bomb that will someday make their head explode in a sudden bright flash of reality.
Having read the myth(s) of Lilith, I think it actually hurts your argument more than helps it. There is a good reason these stories were left out of the Bible as they imply some highly controversial notions. In addition, there are numerous variations on the Lilith story. In some cases, she is created before Adam, in others at the same time as Adam etc. So there is an issue of picking which Lilith story is considered “accurate” (if that is possible in such a discussion). In fact, why do variations even exist if it is supposedly “the” word of your deity?
Regardless, I stand by my statement: in Eden there is no evidence of human births and Adam had no wives other than Eve. If you accept the story of Lilith, the union was never consummated and thus by Jewish law she was never considered his wife. Similarly with the second women that Adam rejected. I emphasize “human” births because supposedly Lilith had children not from Adam. That in itself is a thorny problem. Where did the men who impregnated Lilith come from if Adam, the progenitor of all mankind, had not yet consummated a relationship with anyone? The children that came from Lilith were supposedly all demons which provides interesting implication of birth defects. Anyway, since Adam only had sex with Eve and since her first born was Cain who was born after they were evicted from Eden, there is no evidence of human births in Eden.
If you are going to accept the story of Lilith, it presents all kinds of ugly problems. First, it shows your deity to be far from omniscient. It took him three tries to guess Adam’s preferences with respect to a woman. Second, it shows your deity to be quite fallible. He/she/it blew it twice and in the first case created a monster. I can see why the Church would have been opposed to including this story in the Bible as it would show their deity to have very human-like limitations and being clearly capable of making mistakes and thus being less than perfect.
Dear Alfred1,
You are obviously a brain washed religious freak. You base all of your beliefs off of books that were written years ago. But these books are not the history of Earth but a small part of the hisrory of mans thinking. We are advancing as a civilization and are discovering things thought impossible by previous generations. Just look around you, man is finding information that disprooves religion.
Just step outside your religion restricted mind and you’ll see.