A rough decade for American congregations

"A new decade-long survey of American congregations shows religious health and vitality are weaker than they were 10 years ago.

[...]


Congregations are also having hard times financially, the survey found.  In 2000, 31% of survey participants reported excellent financial health.  In 2010, that number plummeted to just 14%.

[...]

Roozen writes that a variety of factors led to the decline, but overall, there are fewer Americans in the pews, and "... more than 1 in 4 American congregations had fewer than 50 in worship in 2010, and just under half had fewer than 100. Overall, median weekend worship attendance of your typical congregation dropped from 130 to 108 during the decade, according to the FACT surveys."

[...]

The decline hit across religious and denominational lines, sparing no one, Roozen wrote. He said that "no single category or kind of congregation ... was exempt from the decadal downsizing of worship attendance."

The data came from Faith Communities Today surveys and represents 11,077 congregations and 120 denominations of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, the institute said."

CNN Belief Blog, September 20th, 2011

Christianity 'could die out within a century'

"Research by the Orthodox Jewish organisation Aish found that just over a third of people thought religions like Christianity and Judaism would still be practiced in Britain in 100 years' time.
Although four in 10 people said they would choose to be a member of the Christian religion, almost the same number said they would rather practice no religion at all.
Buddhism however, proved more attractive than both Islam and Judaism, and was chosen by nine per cent of those questioned.
Aish UK's executive director Rabbi Naftali Schiff said the results of the YouGov poll of 2,000 people were alarming.
"It clearly demonstrates that religion, including Judaism, is becoming unattractive to the British public."

[...]

Research published earlier this year suggested that church attendance is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation.
According to Religious Trends, an analysis of religious practice in Britain, the huge drop off in attendance means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable.
In contrast, the number of actively religious Muslims is predicted to increase from about one million today to 1.96 million in 2035.

Telegraph.co.uk, 20/06/2008

No cause for alarm!
And for the panic mongers, this will definitely affect Islam too. Practising Muslims prefer to live in religious countries, even if they are Christian, and probably for good reasons.

Faith propaganda: "Forgiveness has God on its side"

"People who believe in God or a new-age spiritual force are less likely to hold a grudge, a study of Australians has found.

A survey of almost 500 people has confirmed what many always suspected - faith helps believers forgive where secular people continue to hold onto their blame."

[...]

"The results showed that it doesn't matter what you believe in, but if you believe in something, have faith in something, it means you're more likely to forgive," said researcher Adam Fox, who led the study overseen by professor of psychology Trang Thomas.

"That indicates that there's something in the system of thought connected to spirituality that helps people to accept others and their actions."
The researchers were unable to compare individual religions due to "ethical considerations", but said there was only "slight differences" between each."

The Age, Australia, February 12, 2008

Now, this isn't surprising at all when you see what kind of moral dilemmas the participants were presented with. (Scroll down to Transgression Narrative Test of Forgiveness (TNTF))

The five moral dilemmas were "secular" dilemmas, that is, dilemmas were people from all sorts of backgrounds would feel pretty much the same, like being betrayed. And apparently, the religious were able to forgive the transgressions better than their secular counterparts. Bummer.

But if they're going to measure whether or not religious people are more forgiving overall, then why not ask about moral dilemmas with a religious touch too?

Say, dilemmas like this:

6. "Your daughter leaves your family to live with an Atheist with a pierced nose. They do not marry."

7. "You ask your son if he won't marry soon, and he avoids the question. The next day, you see him kissing a male friend in the park."

8. "After countless episodes of violence, a Danish cartoonist decides to measure your tolerance by mocking something you hold very dear. He draws the Prophet Muhammed with a bomb."

9. "Being an Orthodox Jew, you have a servant to take care of things on the Sabbath, since you're too holy to even make yourself dinner. However, on this particular Sabbath, the servant does not show up, so you can't eat until the Sabbath is over."
10. "Are you still mad about the Jews who killed Jesus 2000 years ago?"
11. "You're tricked into drinking alcohol, and get rather tipsy and are tricked into eating pork or non-kosher food as well."

OK, I could go on forever. But the point is: what is being betrayed by someone compared to breaking a religious taboo? A taboo that for an Atheist is not even worth considering? Atheists have preferences as anyone else, and we don't necessarily believe in forgiveness at any cost. But the taboos are few and far between, and that means that there's very little chance that you offend an Atheist ∞. Atheists have less toes that can be stepped on, and if you do step on an Atheist's toes, you don't simultaneously step on God's toes thereby damning you both to Hell.

Now, I could be forgiving, thinking that it's the reporter who didn't get it right(it happens all the time), but notice that they couldn't compare individual religions because of "ethical considerations". But they could use a survey to lie about how forgiving religious people are compared to infidels?
It has to be said, that this survey's goal seems to have been to learn about various religious groups, while the secular group was merely a control group. But I guess once the results were in showing how unforgiving the secular group were, they were too good not to be published, despite not being true.

Whom should I contact if I have any questions?
Please contact Professor Trang Thomas in the first instance on -. If your require support for any issue that may have resulted from your participation, you may approach any one of the following contacts below that can assist you in finding a support service appropriate to addressing your needs:

* Islamic Council of Victoria: Rowan Gould (Chief Executive Officer), -
* Kollel Menachem Lubavitch: Rabbi Groner (Rabbi), -
* Swanston Street Church of Christ: Alan Baker (Associate Pastor), -
* City Life Church: Ask for ‘Pastor on duty', -
* Crossway Baptist Church: Ask for ‘Pastor on duty', -
[* Surprise, no Godless infidel on duty]

Yours sincerely

Adam Fox B. App. Sci. Hon. (Psychology)
Trang Thomas Professor of Psychology

Holy places of Jerusalem are popular with mentally deranged people.

"This exotic disease is labeled by professionals as the Jerusalem syndrome, reports Wednesday Argumenty i Fakty weekly.

[...]

After fighting down policemen who tried to interfere, "Samson" was taken to the Kfar Shaul Psychiatric Hospital in Jerusalem. After therapy treatment he returned back to the USA by himself.
The Hospital diagnoses about a hundred patients obsessed with the syndrome, and about forty of them require hospitalization.
Most of them had been mentally affected in their home countries, and only few opened to the world as "Jesus", "The Virgin Mary", "John the Baptist", "Mohammed" or "Isaiah" in Jerusalem, the weekly reports."

Interfax, Russia, February 13 2008

See also: Jerusalem Syndrome

Divorce, Religion, and Circumcision: What A Conflict Tells Us About Parental Rights

"To get a sense of how completely secular people who are not already committed to religious practices [and circumcision] might view things, consider the following analogy:

A couple tells its 5-year-old child at bedtime every night that if he ever feels any anger at his mom and dad, then a monster will come to him at night in his sleep and smother him with a pillow. Each morning, when he wakes up un-smothered, his parents tell him that if he was in fact harboring angry feelings toward them, then the monster in question will save up the smothering and one day come and suffocate him for all of eternity. Imagine, as well, that when the child reaches the age of 6, his parents remove half of their son's left pinky toe. They argue that he can walk adequately without it, and they feel a very strong compulsion to remove what they view as ugly and impure.

Most of us would find this behavior outrageous and even criminal."

Sherry F. Colb, Findlaw.com, Nov. 28, 2007

This article deal in particular with the Boldt case were a divorced father, newly converted to Judaism wants his 12-year-old son to be circumcised, while his mother doesn't.

I'll add her closing words too (regarding the Boldt case):

"It is when parents disagree with each other and ask the courts to step in that we are uniquely able to consider some of the harm to which people expose their offspring. The Boldt case thus may, in this way, help us focus on what is otherwise "routine" in parenting and perhaps become more sensitive to the sorts of harm that we might otherwise continue to take for granted."

This is very true. I know that a lot of people will almost always prefer that the parents decide everything for the children, rather than the state. But as we can see, it's not so clear cut when parents disagree. Suddenly the question isn't about the parents' rights (because both parents have rights and they have different preferences), but about the boy's rights. And then one have to ask: Why aren't we always thinking about the rights of the children?

I've always considered myself a bit of a libertarian, or "liberalist" which is the word used here around. They are not entirely the same, and I'm in danger of mixing things here. Worse, I'm not a true libertarian, I assume. It's just the skewed perspective I have since I'm living in the Norwegian welfare state. Wanting longer opening hours to buy alcohol makes me feel like a libertarian while in USA I'd be Liberal I guess. Exhibit A: My score at the Political Compass.

Nevermind, I'm thinking about a very specific thing here that is probably common, that the state should stay out of parenting.
The idea has a flaw that sometimes becomes very ugly. It's a bit like the flaw of pacifism. It works fine as long as people won't try to kill you or torment you. But it's utter shit the moment there are malevolent murderers on your door. I'm with Sam Harris all the way on that issue.
Now, libertarianism holds that people are smart enough to chose for themselves. Perhaps. But another thing is that they also should be allowed to make their own decisions, even bad ones. I'm not optimistic about everyone's decisions, least of all my own, but not all decisions are cause of concern. Who cares if Boldt Senior chops of a piece of his dick? But should Boldt Senior be allowed to make a bad decision for Boldt junior? In general: do parents have an unalienable right to screw up their kids' life?

Among libertarians, there's always an appreciation for the individual. And I share that. But the boy who is circumcised is an individual. The girl who must wear a hijab is an individual. The children who are sent off to a loony religious school to be brainwashed are individuals. Children of Jehovas Witnesses who die because they don't get blood are individuals. The family, however, is not an individual.

Consequently: state interference is perfectly fine when it protects the rights of the children to avoid getting tortured for religious reasons by parents or getting their brains dumbed down to accept that the earth is 5000 years old.

Religion losing its allure in Australia

"Since 2001, the number of people [in Australia] saying they have no religious conviction has risen from 2.9 million, or 15.5 per cent of the population to 3.7 million, or 19 per cent.

So, over a period during which the total population has grown by just under a million, the number of non-believers has risen by 800,000. Which means the percentage increase of non-believers is close to 30 per cent.

Conversely, the percentage affirming commitment to some form of Christianity has hardly fallen – from 54 per cent to 53.2. In numerical terms, the overall number of Christians has declined from 10,768,000 to 10,577,000 – hardly cause for the bishops to sweat.

However, when the population is increasing, it's difficult to deny the emergence of a trend towards decline – and if the trend were to continue, as it has over the past three census periods, Christians will a minority very soon.

Those who fear that as Christianity declines, other religions will gain new adherents need not do so. In the past five years, the percentage of Australians claiming belief in "other" religions – Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and so on – has also slipped – from 30.5 per cent to 28.1 per cent.

[...]

So it seems beyond dispute that, rather than cleaving to "new" religions offering new alleged truths and insights and rather than falling back on the age-old shibboleths of "traditional" Abrahamic religions, increasing numbers of Australians are rejecting religion altogether."

Daily Telegraph (Australia), July 03, 2007

[Stats] U.S. divorce rates for various faith groups, age groups, & geographic areas

Variation in divorce rates by religion:
Jews - 30%
Born-again Christians - 27%
Other Christians - 24%
Atheists, Agnostics - 21%

Religioustolerance.org

See also "Conservative Christianity is Bad for your Marriage"