[T]he new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today [...] 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.
The addition of 50 million alleged adults to the population isn't such good news, but the Great Awakening seems to have begun. Not too long after the editorial staff here is dead, the Enlightenment will finally come to AmeriKKKa.
• 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.It doesn't get much better than this, does it? How long have we been telling the world it's all bullshit? Huh? How fucking long?
Kosmin concluded from the 1990 data that many saw God as a "personal hobby," and that the USA is "a greenhouse for spiritual sprouts." Today, he says, "religion has become more like a fashion statement, not a deep personal commitment for many."Bogus & superficial. Like the rest of their lives. Others have real lives, w/o the needless baggage of ritual, child molestation, & losing sleep on Sundays.
Ex-Catholic Dylan Rossi, 21, a philosophy student in Boston and a Massachusetts native, is part of the sharp fall in the state's percentage of Catholics — from 54% to 39% in his lifetime. Rossi says he's typical among his friends: "If religion comes up, everyone at the table will start mocking it. I don't know anyone religious and hardly anyone 'spiritual.'"Whatever the fuck "spiritual" means. The last compromise before absolute freedom, we think.
The reactionary excuse for failure & wide-spread rejection of their ideas (political & religious) is, as always, not that their ideas are hopelessly out-of-date, but that society, culture & the media are not doing the proper job of indoctrination they used to.
Rev. Kendall Harmon, theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, blames social mobility. "Mobility means your ideas are more challenged and your family and childhood traditions have less influence, particularly if you are not strongly rooted in them. I see kids today who have no vocabulary of faith, and neither do many of their parents." Harmon recalls, "A couple came into my office once with a yellow pad of their teenage son's questions. One of them was: 'What is that guy doing hanging up there on the plus sign?' "
(That's very funny. Probably not true, but we're going to laugh heartily anyway. "Plus sign." Haw haw haw!) The eternal verities, that must be constantly shoved down our throats, preferably w/ gov't. help, or "faith" just seems to go away.
As we like to say, every thing's political. And w/ the Republican/conservatard movement, religion is all politics, all the time.
[T]here are large, common threads – freedom, personal responsibility, limited government and an appropriate deference to the Almighty are just a few of those principles the VAST majority of conservatives and Republicans I know embrace.
"An appropriate deference to the Almighty." "Appropriate" no doubt meaning that Red Staters & their ilk go along w/ all the hateful, genocidal parts of their (un)holy book, & ignore anything about the downtrodden & powerless that Jeezis dude may have said. Leviticus yes, feeding the poor no. Hypocrisy at its most naked.
This is not good for the political right either. Something we didn't pull from Frum's Newsweek story:
But especially on gay-rights issues, the under-30 generation has arrived at a new consensus. Our party seems to be running to govern a country that no longer exists.
Like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner along the tracks, about to enter the tunnel that's just black paint on rock. KER-BLOOIE!!
1 comment:
Go Frum go! Fight fight fight! Lose lose lose!
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