The vast complex of Late Bronze/Early Iron Age monuments, burial chambers and
earthworks on Salisbury Plain, in central southern England
about which I've written before, continue to remind us how, when a religion and its god(s) disappear into the
mists of time and no-one remembers them, unlike a science could be, they cannot
be reconstructed from real-world sources, because they were never founded on
real-world sources in the first place. They arose entirely in the imaginations
of people who lacked the scientific method to discover the truth about the world
about them.
But to their believers, as we can see by the evidence of the resources they
devoted to them, they would have been no less important and no less 'proven'
than are the modern gods of present days religions. The evidence for them would
have been 'all around them'. It would have been in the 'design' of trees,
sunsets and flowers and in the way they always answered prayers like ensuring
the sun rose in the morning and the crops continued to grow in the fields, and
when they failed this was proof of the failure of their followers to pray hard
enough or to believe with enough faith or not having performed the required
ritual correctly, or because the god(s) said no, for reasons which could only be
guessed at.
The Bellefonte First Presbyterian Church in Bellefonte, Pa., USA. Founded in 1800 by the same group who founded the borough of Bellefonte in Pennsylvania, held its last service on 21th December 2021.
As though to reinforce the recent findings of the Pew Research survey which shows an accelerating decline in affiliation to mainstream churches in the USA, one of the oldest fundamentalist Christian churches in Pennsylvania, The First Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte, has closed its doors for the last time, attendance having fallen by 87% from about 200 in the 1970s to about 40 before the pandemic and just 25 now.
When it was founded in 1800, the First Presbyterian Church of Bellefonte was very much a part of the local political establishment, even holding meetings in the courthouse before the church was built and providing two Pennsylvania governors from amongst its members. The church provided the local civil leadership for the borough and the state at large, which was, for all practical purposes, a local theocracy with no attempt to separate church and state, the local Christian leadership believing it was entitled to rule.
The latest Pew Research survey reveals another huge fall in the number of Americans self-identifying as Christian and another increase in the number self-identifying as 'None' or unaffiliated. At just 63% self-identifying as Christians, this is the second lowest since Pew began these surveys, down from 75% a decade ago and from 78% in 2007.
'Nones' have reached a new high at 29%.
As the next chart shows, all the decline has been at the expense of Protestant churches which have fallen by 12 percentage points since 2007 to just 40%, in other words, 6 out of 10 Americans now self-identify as non-Protestant, including 21% Catholic and about 3% Orthodox Christian or Mormon.
The Protestant share of the population is down 4 percentage points over the last five years and has dropped 10 points in 10 years, in other words, these churches which includes those who described themselves as 'just Christian' without identifying any particular church, have been losing about 1% of their share of the people per year.
Catholicism has fallen by only 3 percentage points since 2007 and has staged a small recovery compared to 3 years ago when it fell below 20%. It is now back to its 2014 share at 21%.
After evoking outrage in white conservative Christian circles, a copy of a painting by St. Louis artist Kelly Latimore, depicting the body of George Floyd being cradled by a black Madonna in an artistic device known as a Pietà, has been stolen from the Mary Mirror of Justice Chapel in the Law School of the Catholic University of America, Washington DC.
Kelly, a devout Catholic, has also received death threats and the Catholic University has received several threatening and racist letters of protest over the display of the painting.
That Earth is flat and has a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. The moon and sun are lamps hung on this dome so we can tell day from night and the stars stuck to it can shake loose and fall to earth during earthquakes.
That a magic man designed himself before he existed then self-assemble out of nothing with enough information to create a Universe out of nothing and micromanage it to the minutest level.
That a hundred-year-old man built a wooden boat and rounded up two or seven of every species in the world to live together for a year sealed in that boat with only one small window for air, then they left the boat onto a sterile planet on which all living things had been destroyed, including the plants, but still found enough to eat so everything alive today is descended from those few survivors.
That just five generations after the survivors left the boat in 2, there were enough people to support a massive civil engineering project to build a tower up to Heaven, which in those days was just above the sky over the Middle East, and that all the languages on Earth are the result of this population each being magically made to speak languages that non-one else could understand, because the project alarmed an omniscient, omnipotent god who lived in the Heaven.
In this devastating rebuttal of the 2011 claim by Dr Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D, that generally, religious people are more moral than non-religious people, David Niose, former president of both the American Humanist Association and the Secular Coalition for America, points out the factual and unfounded errors in Plante's article. In particular:
Plante casually claims that religious people are "better citizens" and "behave better." And without citing any sources, he tells us: "Research has consistently found that religious people are less likely to engage in criminal behavior, marital infidelity, alcoholism, unprotected sexual activity. . ."
In other words, according to Plante, if you're not religious you might be a good person, but on average you are more likely to have these undesirable characteristics. This is a bold assertion that, of course, immediately puts secular individuals on the defensive. (Just imagine if the same claims were made against any other minority group.) It is precisely claims like these that lead to many Americans having an unfavorable view of atheists and other nonbelievers.
Fortunately for atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists, there is no factual basis for Plante's claim that "research has consistently found" secular individuals to be more prone to such antisocial behavior.
I mentioned at the end my last blog post that Christians seem to need the promise of a reward in order to do the right thing, with the implication that it would be much better if they just did the right thing because it is the right thing to do. However, nowhere in their handbook of morals and ethics, is that ever mandated or even recommended.
The closest they come to it is the instruction to do to others what they would want others to do to them - the so-called golden rule, common to just about every culture. Unfortunately, after several decades of the Republicans advocating greed and selfishness and insisting that it deserves a reward, most American fundamentalist Christians have come to associate doing the right thing by others as some sort of undesirable, socialist/liberal subversion of the 'American Way', and so not what God wants at all.
Few things highlight this better than the findings of a recent Pew Research survey into COVID-19 vaccine take-up, which places white evangelicals at the bottom of the table and Atheists at the top. Atheists clearly understand that by being vaccinated, they are not only protecting themselves, but also protecting other people and the society at large, by:
It looks like the USA is belatedly following the rest of the developed world in rejecting the intellectual absurdity and justification for hate that is Christianity today, if this poll is anything to go by.
It was conducted by the Barna Group which is hosted by Arizona Christian University, who, to their credit, do little to gloss over the findings which should terrify those whose livelihood depends on people turning up to church and giving their tax-free donations. Amongst the main findings of the AWVI 2021 are:
Pastor Lewis Clemons, Could have settled a claim that he raped a 15-year-old girl with a simple public admission and an apology, but he refused. So, the jury in the Superior Court of Muscogee County, Georgia, found in favour of the complainant, Lequita Jackson, and imposed a $500,000 penalty against him.
In 2017, Jackson and another of Clemons' congregants, Lakisha Smith, launched a civil lawsuit against Clemons, claiming that he had sexually abused them when they were under 16 years old. During the trial, Jackson, who is now 33, told the court that Clemons routinely sought out girls from troubled backgrounds and
Following on from the two hard cover versions published a couple of weeks ago, most of the rest of my books are now available in hard cover, including the entire, 5 volume, Light of Reason series of selected articles and essays from this blog:
An example here of how religion divides communities through bigotry and intolerance and by reacting to competition in the market place of gullible fools to exploit.
In fact, the latter could be seen as an example of how religions control their victims in order to prevent hybridization with other wackadoodle cults, in the same way genes control diverging gene pools to set up barriers to hybridization and so cause speciation to go to completion. Religions are acting like meme pools in a Darwinian competition, and so tending to cause divisions and barriers to social peace and harmony.
This example is that of Heron Michelle, a purveyor of 'pagan metaphysical' objects such as crystals, jewellery and herbs allegedly with mystical properties, from a shop, The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions, in Uptown Greenville, North Carolina. She and her shop have attracted the hostile attention of the local fundamentalist Christians. Ironically, the trouble came to a head after a festival on the last day of April, ostensibly organized to bring the whole community together following the Covid-19 lockdown.
As part of the festival, Heron set up a table outside her shop and offered to do tarot readings for anyone interested in that sort of thing. Fairly soon though, she had a visit from two young men dressed in identical green t-shirts who wanted to 'share the Gospel of Jesus' with her. She explained that she already knew about Jesus and had been baptised into three different Christian faiths but found none of them 'took'. She now believes she has found the 'love that Jesus was trying to bring to the world' outside of Christianity. She also told them that in her faith, proselytizing was regarded as a cardinal sin.
After patronising her with more preaching, the pair eventually left to re-join their large group who had been moving through the festival talking to other shop keepers and festival-goers, trying to win recruits for their cult. Afraid of what was going to happen next, Heron folded up her table and stopped offering tarot readings.
After the festival was over, things turned ugly and menacing. The entire green t-shirted mob of fundamentalists turned up outside her shop physically blocking the entrance and standing and staring at her through the windows.
This is not the first time that Heron has faced crowds of hostile Christians. When she first opened her shop in 2008, the local church organized a boycott and a crowd of women vandalized her shop by paining crosses on the windows. They then stood outside chanting about demons.
In 2017, Philip Brown, a local street preacher who travels around preaching through a bullhorn and harassing other metaphysical stores, set up outside her shop and began preaching, so she engaged him in a discussion about the Gospels. It was soon obvious that she knew them better than he did. Nevertheless he posted his recording of his 'work for Jesus' on You Tube.
Vandalism, protests, harassment and regular proselytizing are not uncommon for metaphysical shops. In 2010, Rondell Gonzalez, the owner of Pye’Wackets, south of Anchorage, Alaska, found a 7-foot cross attached to her store’s sign. In 2015, someone tossed a gasoline bomb through the storefront window at Shooting for the Moon Spiritual Development Center, in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. (It failed to explode, and the attackers were never identified.)
In Minnesota in 2016, metaphysical shop owner Bonnie Gurney filed a cease-and-desist order to stop a local woman from posting protests on her store’s social media page, publicly burning store fliers, blocking the shop entrance and harassing patrons, telling them to “repent.” In 2019, a newly opened metaphysical shop in Staunton, Virginia, was shut down, reportedly after the property owner belatedly realized his renter was a metaphysical shop.
Clearly, fundamentalists who go to these lengths to suppress any alternative superstitions, have something to fear from them. Their own faith in the truth of their beliefs must be on shaky ground for them to fear alternative views. It's not just Atheists whom they fear but anyone who might put them in danger of wondering if they could be wrong.
This was found, in a piece of research by Cory L Cook, Florette Cohen and Sheldon Solomon, published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, entitled What If They’re Right About the Afterlife? Evidence of the Role of Existential Threat on Anti-Atheist Prejudice. Human knowledge of death gives ris to:
...potentially paralyzing terror that is assuaged by embracing cultural worldviews that provide a sense that one is a valuable participant in a meaningful universe.
Anything which might cause a believer in one of these worldviews carries the risk that their terror will reassert itself, so hostility to other religions is a simple matter of terror management in response to an existential threat. In their research, which focussed on the relationship between believers and Atheists, the authors found that thinking about death made the believers more hostile to Atheism and thinking about Atheism made them more aware of the issue of death. It seems that any other set of ideas that don't include some sort of hope of survival after death, is an existential threat to fundamentalist Christians and evokes the same terror management response.
As these attacks on alternative metaphysical beliefs show, it's not just Atheists who attract the hostile attention of fundamentalist Christians. The worst thing you can do to a fundamentalist is make them wonder if they could be wrong and the response is often aggression. This is why they have developed all manner of mental gymnastics for rejecting any evidence, or logical reasoning you can offer them that might cause them to have self-doubt, and why they are so susceptible to frauds and charlatans who sell them cosy platitudes and disinformation intended to reinforce their cosy certainties and comforting freedom from their terror of death.
This tendency, in Christianity especially, to build barriers to shut out alternative ideas and to divide society up into mutually hostile camps, each distrusting the others, has resulted in over 30,000 different Christian churches in the USA alone.
Truly a house built on sand and a faith standing on the shaky ground of absent evidence and a book full of internal inconsistences and contradictions. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians are also gun nuts, opposed to any restrictions on their right to carry weapons of mass destruction. And no wonder the USA with its very large evangelical Christian population is also the most violent, divided and intolerant of all developed economies, in contrast to the countries of Europe with their large and growing populations of non-believers and rapidly falling numbers of believers.
In Darwinian terms, what these cultural memeplexes are doing is ensuring their survival in the human meme pool by rigorously excluding any potential rivals for the human resource they all depend on and preventing any dilution of their dogmas with which they recruit and retain members who are themselves looking for a means to manage their potentially paralyzing fear of death.
Dec 11, 2019. Orthodox Jewish men pass New York City police guarding a Brooklyn synagogue prior to a funeral for Mosche Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was killed in a shooting at a market in Jersey City, N.J.
Concerned by the rising tide of inter-faith tension and hate resulting in violent attacks on members of one faith by members of another, a group of New York's faith organizations have got together to try to solve the problem faiths are causing.
On April 16, clergy from 20 New York congregations, including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and Christians, met as the Interfaith Security Council held its first meeting to talk about how to share expertise and improve relations with law enforcement.
This was prompted by, amongst other incidents, the mass shooting in Pittsburg, PA, in October 2018, when a gunman attacked worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue, killing 11 people, vandalism at four synagogues in the Riverdale neighbourhood of Bronx, NY, last week, and the killing of Mosche Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn in Jersey City, N.J. on Dec 11, 2019. Armed police had to be deployed at the Brooklyn synagogue where his funeral took place.
The Interfaith Security Council is an umbrella organisation bringing together several other religious security organizations, one of which is 67th Precinct Clergy Council of Brooklyn, which supports mostly churches in the borough’s East Flatbush area. It's president, Pastor Gilford Monrose, of Mt. Zion Church of God 7th Day, blamed white supremacists for the escalating level of inter-faith violence with:
A paper published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion last March, offers an explanation for the sometimes bizarre behaviour and aggressive attitudes of male American Bible-belt Evangelical Christians, including their frequent fascination with guns and propensity to follow the male leaders of weird cults - behaviour that seems so at odds with what most of the rest of the developed world sees, rightly or wrongly as a peace-loving, pacifist religion.
The paper reveals an almost obsessive evangelical preoccupation with the size of their penis and suggests that this is due to:
...the largely patriarchal―and increasingly embattled and radicalized―evangelical subculture [which] explicitly or implicitly promotes equating masculinity with physical strength and size, leaving men influenced by that subculture (whether evangelical or not) to seek solutions for their privately felt failure to measure up.
Good ol' Christian hypocrisy is alive and well and living in Liberty University.
The fallout from Jerry Falwell Jnr and his wife Becki's 'arrangement' with the Miami pool boy, Giancarlo Granda, in which Becki had sex with Granda while Jerry watched, is continuing unabated.
Jerry Falwell Jnr inherited his position as Liberty University's president from his father, Jerry Snr, who founded the Christian fundamentalist 'University', but was forced to resign when news of his and Becki's sexual adventures leaked out. The 'University' is now suing him for $10 million claiming breach of contract and alleging that he conspired to mislead the board of directors by concealing details of the affair from them. The University is also alleging that Falwell “fashioned a deceitful scheme to manipulate the Executive Committee of Liberty” while negotiating his last contract.
The couple also bought a Miami beach youth hostel in 2013 and installed Granda as manager. While Becki admits her affair with Granda, who has the photographs to prove it, she denies the specific allegations and Jerry Jnr, again, despite the photographic evidence showing otherwise, continues to deny his part in the arrangement.
Despite the traditional attachment to the Church, especially the fundamentalist, evangelical, historically black churches, the decline in religious affiliation seen in all Americans is no less so in African-Americans, according to a running survey conducted by the Barna Group.
The proportion of Black Americans who think church involvement is "very" or "somewhat desirable" has fallen significantly in the last 23 years from 90% in 1996 (71% "very", 19% "somewhat") to 74% in 2019 (44% "very", 30% "somewhat"). The interesting thing here is the relative change in perceived importance. Only 44% now think church involvement is "very desirable" against 71% in 1996; a 27-percentage point fall! Meanwhile the proportion who think it is "somewhat desirable" has risen from 19% to 30%; a 21-percentage point increase. Clearly, the perceived importance of church invlvement is weakening but not being lost entirely, or maybe peer-pressure to declare unequivocal support for the church has lessened.
Despite this relatively high level of perceived desirability of involvement with the church, the decline in overall affiliation to the churches has continued to follow a similar trend in Black Americans to the general population. Although still higher than average for Americans, there has been a rapid decline from 2011 (89%) to 74% in 2020 in affiliation to any particular church. From the peak of 93% in 2007, this fall represents a loss of one in five affiliates to 'Nones'. 15% of Black Americans now self-identify as 'Nones'; more than double its 2007 level.
Maybe it's me, but the self-identification of religious/spiritual chart seems to reflect muddled thinking. For example, I can't imagine how someone could describe themselves as religious but not spiritual, yet 11% of Black Americans do so. The rest of this chart shows the trend common to all American demographic groups of the younger generations being increasingly neither religious nor spiritual. From a low of 7% for the Baby Boomers, through 13% for Generation X, to 16% and 17% respectively for Millennials and Generation Z. This augers well for the future since people tend to retain their affiliation once established, and affiliation is largely inherited from the parent generation, so the tendency will be for affliliation to decline and 'Nones' to increase as time goes on.
Church attendance remains relatively high amongst Black Americans at 40% attending within the last week. However, in line with other demographics, this has been falling steadily from a peak in 2009, falling 16-percentage points and more than reversing the 11-percentage point gain in the years 2001 to 2009. The average for all American demographics is just 31%, an 18-percentage point fall since 2009.
This figure would probably be significantly lower had it not been for the small rally staged by Hispanic Americans (mostly Catholic) which had declined more sharply than the average (22-percentage points) over the years 2009 - 2020 during the years of scandal in the Catholic Church.
Overall, while the grip of the church remains stronger amongst Black Americans than amongst other American demographics, they are showing very much the same trend of declining religiosity as all Americans and the same generational differences that should ensure this promising trend continues.
However it remains an enduring mystery in American religion, why the religion that was used to enslave Africans and destroy their culture to make them easier to control by the Christian slavers, quoting the Bible as justification for their racism, should be followed so fervently by the descendants of those whom it enslaved and who still endure the racism inherent in evangelical Christian white supremacism.
Another Gallop poll to gladden the heart of any Atheist or secular humanist, showing again the decline in religion in the USA. This poll appears to be undated, the only clue being that the last data points are for 2020 and the copyright is dated 2021, so we can assume the poll represents the state of religious opinion towards the end of 2020.
I'll let the charts speak for themselves since they need little by way of explanation. The trendlines in the first chart were added by me using Excel's 3 phase polynomial which gave a closer fit to the data points than a simple linear trend.
Congratulations to America for joining the rest of the developed world, where religious non-affiliation and increasing secularisation of society are now the norm.
The latest Gallop poll shows that church, synagogue or mosque membership in the USA has fallen below 50% for the first time. Now at just 47%, this represents a 26% percentage point fall since 1937 when Gallop first began polling. And the downward trend show signs of accelerating, falling 22 percentage points since the turn of the millennium and 8 percentage points since 2015.
The results of the simulation show the growth of tiny, extremely dense structures very soon after the inflation phase of the very early universe. Between the initial and final states in the simulation (top left and right respectively), the area shown has expanded to ten million times its initial volume, but is still many times smaller than the interior of a proton. The enlarged clump at the bottom left would have a mass of about 20kg.
Never having been especially interested in physics which, compared to biology, I found dry and uninteresting - probably wrongly - this subject is not something I can claim any great understanding of, but this simulation addresses the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, in the instance before the larger structures such as elementary particles came into existence.
It has been said that the initial density of the universe at this time was some trillion times that of water. Just how dense can be judged from the fact that, according to this computer simulation, some 10-24 seconds after the BB, bodies smaller than a proton had a mass of about 20 Kg! These 'inflaton halos' were responsible for the rapid inflation of the nascent Universe.
The simulation was done by theoretical physicists at the Universities of Göttingen, Germany and Auckland, New Zealand. The press release from Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen gives the details:
A Gallop poll surveying the number of American adults now self-identifying as gay illustrates the penetration of humanist ideals of tolerance, acceptance and freedom from the stigmatisation that religion inflicts on people, as they increasingly reject organised religions in an increasingly secular society.
Hopefully, the charts I have made from the data hop speak well enough for themselves, but perhaps the most noticeable aspect is how the younger the adults are the more likely they are to self-identify as gay. This is entirely consistent with other data which shows a marked correlation between age and rejection of organized religions, with the younger adults far more likely to self-identify as 'None' or non-affiliated. Very may of these will of course be Atheists or Agnostics.
It is clear that religions are losing their grip on Americans just as surely as they lost their grip on post-war Europeans, and no longer have ownership of the institution of marriage for example with even most 'moderate' Christian churches still opposed to the idea of same-sex marriages. Perhaps this is the explanation for the unedifying spectacle of the evangelical Christian abandonment of any pretence of morality in their desperate support for the odious, morally bankrupted Donald J. Trump and the sniff of political power and influence he gave them, amounting at time to hysterical, messianic worship.
In their incessant search for martyrdom, fundamentalist Christians continually complain of being victimised; of being under-represented or of not having the same rights and privilges as others, so what are the facts?
Pew Research recently conducted a survey of the religious leanings/affiliations of elected members of the US Congress and compared the proportions of the various faiths to those of the general population. Not surprisingly to those who really are under-represented in the US legislature - the rapidly growing number of 'Nones' or non-affiliated Americans - not only are Christians more than adequately represented but it is actually the 'Nones' who lack representation in what is supposed to be a representative democracy.
For example, while Christians of all denominations form just 65% of the US adult population, they comprise 88.1% of the Congress. Similarly, Protestant of all denominations comprising 43% of US adults, get 55.4% of the House; Catholics, with 20% of the population get 29.8% of the House, and Jews, who comprise just 2% of adult Americans, get 6.2% if the seats in Congress. Anglicans and Presbyterians (1% and 2% of US adults respectively) get 4.9% and 4.5% of seats.
On the other hand, with the 'Nones' or non-affiliates now making up 26% of the US adult population, they get just 0.2% of the House! This is a massive under-representation almost amounting to disenfranchisement!
