Possibly relevant is the fact that mainline Protestant and Unitarian churches have declined while evangelicals and Mormons have grown.
When a congregation wants a minister to resign because he protests racism, that’s what leads to anti-christian bigotry. Of course, churches are what gave rise to the civil rights movement, so they’re not all bad. But I think Christianity in America is not really and truly consistent with the messages of love and compassion that are found in the New Testament Bible. Maybe the “problem” that you’re seeing isn’t a protest of Christianity but the type of Christianity that is practiced by mostly White Protestants, a Christianity that has at times and in some congregations advocated white supremacy and homophobia and promoted wealth inequality.
Just to be clear, you all realize that there will be no debate here. At least none with the OP. It is clear from the start that he is A BELIEVER and anything you say will bounce right of his Armor of Righteousness and his Shield of Moral Superiority. He will never see himself as the problem rather than the solution.
That pointed out, we can carry on the discussion.
All religious extremists give me the willies.
Nothing irrational about it.
Because they know all they have to do is repent at the last minute, will be forgiven, and get into heaven anyway. Win-win.
Hey Bruiser, do you think Americans in general are obligated to follow God’s law if it conflicts with man’s law?
Like for example, take some random person off the street who isn’t a member of your church. Do you believe that this person has an obligation to either agree with or promote your church’s views on matters like abortion, same sex marriage, or other issues?
This is a very good post and I hope (but highly doubt) the op will read and consider it. This is the exact reason why I left the church. When I realized that non-christians are more “christian” than so-called christians, I knew it wasn’t for me and I’m now an atheist-leaning agnostic.
So, there used to be a lot more diversity of viewpoints in higher education in 2015 than now?
You’d think that purge would be a major story. You’d have to fire a shitload of tenured faculty to make that happen. And given that ‘tenured’ = ‘essentially unfireable,’ and is that way precisely to protect academic freedom, including the expression of controversial viewpoints, it would be a yuuuuge deal in academia, and it would be a big enough story to make the regular news as well.
On the first point, the facts seem to contradict you:
The Republican War on Public Universities
On the second point, that seems rather specious and impossible to substantiate. If colleges are judged political by some standard you’ve invented, then they have always been so – think back to the Vietnam era, or the civil rights era. If the complaint is the one often heard from Republicans, that colleges and universities tend to align with liberal thinking, maybe what it really means is that they tend to align with knowledge and education. What’s your proposed solution to that? (You’ll be happy to know, however, that the Koch brothers are working on it; they’re injecting millions in funding to support college programs that are essentially indoctrination programs in Koch libertarian thinking.)
It’s not that the faculty has changed, it is that the desired viewpoints have changed.
Can you show me universities that are teaching creationism, undermining global climate change, or just invalidating the scientific method in general?
That’s the diversity that far right conservatives are looking for in their universities. They want their views to have as much weight as actual facts, and they get really upset that they can’t have it their way.
As an atheist liberal, I have to say that I only believe some churches to be bad for society. The Methodist church grew up in was all about fellowship and service to the community in God’s name, and I would still go there if I believed in God. The ones IMO that are dangerous are the Dominionists and the Prosperity gospel Mammon worshipers.
This feeling that some churches are bad for the country is unlikely to lead to actual persecution, though these people may feel themselves to be persecuted if they can’t impose their views on the rest of us.
The faster you discard your superstitions, or at least get them under control, the better.
+1
That is the best reply to the OP.
I have to add that as a lapsed Catholic and now Agnostic with deistic tendencies the task of the ones that do not follow old time religions is to not to press for their removal, but to ensure that they remain (or become) benevolent. As they themselves claim to be.
The one who DOESN’T hate America (Trump is the one who does).
Colleges have been more liberal for a long time. They’re more likely to be progressive, embracing new ideas, while conservatism by definition embraces the old. And our conservatism at least has aligned itself with many bad practices of the past, namely racism, sexism, etc. And so places where diverse people get together are increasingly going to reject the first, causing them to reject the second.
The difference is a change in what conservatism means. Those things were there before, but not the focus. But our conservatism in this country has largely embraced Trump and his ideals. You can say he’s not a real conservative all you want, but the fact remains that most of the conservatives who voted voted for him. That makes him the standard bearer.
Granted, he’s not got a very powerful coalition in the actual government itself. He’s part of a splinter group. But the other groups were already at least somewhat negative towards college. So their negativity can be intensified, and you have this new group of radicals that hate it completely.
Republicans hate college more because their beliefs have shifted. Colleges are basically the same. If you think the protesting is new, then you need to go back a few decades.
Honestly, for neither one. Because you’ve went years talking about how your candidate must adhere to your moral values. So it shouldn’t matter what he will do. It should matter what he believes. That is how you’ve run everything.
But the big issue is that abortion is not mentioned in the Bible, while everything evil about Trump is. The problem is that they are so pro-life that they put this in front of actually following the God they claim to worship.
These are the sola scriptura believers. There’s no Tradition they can rely on. But they put their own manmade interpretation above the things God clearly says are wrong.
That they voted for a pro-choice guy in defense of their idolatry towards pro-life is more a bit of schadenfreude. After years of telling Democrats that they were evil for voting for someone who was pro-choice because of other concerns, they now did so themselves.
It’s no longer valid to operate on a default assumption that “Republican” equates to “conservative.” For a generation, “Republican” has increasingly come to mean “reactionary.” And although “reactionary” and “conservative” once had a great deal of overlap, the GOP version of reactionary has taken on a radical aspect that is incompatible with conservatism.
So, given the statistic in the OP, can we finally put to rest the notion that Democrats hate religion? Even from those numbers, even for the most liberal segment of Democrats, most don’t.
Better question: How many people, of each party, reject the teachings of the religion they purport to hold?
Actually, it is. The Bible is in favor of it. If a woman is suspected of having cheated on her husband, she’s supposed to be given abortifacient herbs, along with a prayer that they won’t affect her if she’s actually innocent.
But that’s just it: picture a world where (a) Trump is, as you say, “a pro-choice guy”, but upon entering the White House he signs bills and picks Supreme Court Justices as if he wasn’t. And, just for the heck of it, picture a world where (b) every four years, the GOP gets “a pro-choice guy” elected – but only if it’s the kind of “pro-choice guy” who does what his opponent wouldn’t: signing bills and picking Justices exactly as if he didn’t happen to be “a pro-choice guy”. What the heck kind of schadenfreude can that provoke? How would that be, in any real sense, a loss for them?
Flip it around: you’re pro-choice, right? How would you feel if a given candidate wasn’t “a pro-choice guy” – by which I mean he vetoes legislation or signs it, and picks Supreme Court Justices and so on, as if he is “a pro-choice guy”? And, for the sake of argument, figure that you can get just such a guy elected every four years? Would that prospect be so rotten that you’d say “oh, no, how can I vote for either?” Or would you just chuckle to yourself while cheerfully voting for the guy?