Is the church right that a great many people don’t have a religion?
The Catholic church just defended it’s advertising on billboards for the first time in our county based on two things:
That lot’s of other churches do it. (And if other churches jumped off a bridge…?)
And, that the majority of people in our county say they do not have a church, although many have mixed feelings about various gods (we have a lot of immigrants-some Hindu by culture if not practice), creation theories, literal ghosts and guardian angels, heaven, hell, limbo, etc.
I believe the first reason. Can the second one be true?
I have no statistics to back me up, but I believe it to be true. Of all the people I know, only a handful attend church regularly. Some others go to church on the odd holiday or two, but not any other time.
Most of the people I know don’t ever bother to attend church, let alone become a member, even those who profess a belief in God.
Personally, I puzzle over the people who say “Mankind needs to understand the unknown. If there were no gods, we would be forced to create some.” They never seem to be of the mind that this is exactly the case.
Last I heard non-belief was the 2nd most popular religious belief, if you can call it that. A more educated and less traditional society will do away with more or less useless institutions like fundamentalist-based belief systems.
Using billboards, youth-centered religious television programming, and commercials is shameless marketing. They figure it works for business. What I do expect to happen, as has happened a million times before, is enough changes to accomedate modern people, or the next big religion will come on the scene.
Eventualy the successful religion will have to take a backseat to science in cosmology and provide a service more akin to a life-affirming and socially responsible philosophy than the typical, outdated, fundamentalist-traditional, religious quackery and all its useless rituals.
I think most people are afraid to say they don’t care for religion, or churches, or gods, or various combinations thereof. It gets you a lot of trouble for nothing.
"Is the church right that a great many people don’t have a religion? " Yes, and more than they will ever know.
I am not sure that the majourity of people in the US have no religious affiliation, but who knows. I have no problem with them Catholics advertising.
As to Langour…you seem awfully sure of that opinion (I find many atheists to be as dogmatic and narrow focused as many religious people). Where did you come upon this epistemological surity that has eluded so many?
I’ve read a statistic somewhere (I can back it up, soon as I find the book. It’s about geography…) that more than 2.5 billion people are either atheist, agnostic, or indifferent to religion.
What I meant by that quote was that there is a urge in the vast majority of people that want to be part of something big, to be part of a organized religion for one. The organized religions need to have followers, otherwise they will disappear. In this case, you might not have a lot of people leaving, but the next generation is turning to other things than the catholic church. They relize this and are trying to make it look “cool”.
This discussion seems to be mainly about US religion, but I thought I’d have my say anyway.
Earlier this year two large surveys were made in Scandinavia, one in Sweden and the other in Denmark, that showed pretty much the same results:
~15% Believe in traditional religion. (mainly christianity)
~15% Atheists.
The remaining 70% were mostly in the agnostic/science-can’t-explain-everything category.
This is something that usually doesn’t show up in statistics because of the christian tradition here. In Sweden the church was separated from the state only recently (1990’s), and in Denmark they’re still joined. This means that most people are members of the church by default, and official statistics list over 90% as lutheran.
To how may different groups could we attribute the designation “organized religion”? I think to describe one and all as being hypocritical and principally composed of useless ritual is a bit presumptuous. And for some to have flatly categorized each and every religion as being narrow-minded seems on the surface to be ironic, and an irony that I’m sort of enjoying at the moment. Feel free to categorize this reaction as sanctimonious if it helps to keep your world-view intact.