That “almost” word is important.
I don’t have time to do this today, but I think the second, more recent, link you posted is what I was thinking of.
I’m not getting your math. You’ve accounted for only 39% of religious conversions, and you’ve also decided that going from theism to atheism* somehow doesn’t count as a change of religion. So is it your contention that only the other 61% are “real” conversions? That would still give a total of 30% of the population. I don’t see where the 13% is coming from at all.
*not technically accurate, as what they’re primarily measuring is actual behavior. Most people who stop going to church do so because they lose interest in their particular congregation, not because they read Richard Dawkins and the scales fell from their eyes. Conversely, most Americans who don’t go to church (temple, mosque, etc) would be open to doing so if they found a congregation they liked. The percentage of Americans who actually identify as capital-a Atheists is, well, a statistical flyspeck.
You are either being deliberately obtuse or have incredibly poor reading comprehension. I was talking about modern Americans, not Pakistanis or medieval peasants. Obviously this widespread fluidity of religious identity is a quite recent historical development.
And it’s ridiculous to say “English people are mostly Christian and have been for centuries” as though there’s been no evolution of English Christianity. Most English people who identify as Christian rarely or never attend religious services, have no problem with gay and/or premarital sex, and believe that people of all faiths should be treated equally. None of those things were remotely true even 100 years ago. They may not have changed the label on the tin, but it’s certainly not the case that people are mindlessly doing exactly what their great-great-grandparents did because they’re too stupid to know any better.
Modnote: Remember, it is encouraged to challenge the content of a post. It is not allowed to go after another poster. The either or setup is still going after another poster.
I don’t believe Jesus is the Savior. I don’t believe that you have to accept Jesus to go to heaven. I do believe in God. It occurred to me recently that there are so many reasons to not believe in God and the afterlife. The problem is it’s just too hard to truly believe that there’s nothing out there or that you totally disappear after you die.
[quote=“Princhester, post:313, topic:962965”]
To which I say gimme a break. This is a thread about why so many people believe in God. Which trivially different flavour people follow is neither here nor there.
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And your thesis, unless I am misunderstanding, is along the lines of “religion persists because children are brainwashed by their parents; the exercise of critical thinking skills by adults has nothing to do with it”. The fact that vast numbers of adults do in fact choose to do something other than what their parents taught them disproves that contention and is thus completely relevant to the discussion (even taking k9’s 13% figure, we’re still talking about tens of millions of people; I guarantee if you told Joe Biden his approval rating had just gone up or down by 13%, his reaction would not be “meh, it’s a statistical flyspeck”.)
No, I accounted for about 90% of the religious conversions in my post. Only 44% of the overall population had any conversion, the other 56% are not a part of this. So, when I talk of the 11% that went from affiliated to unaffiliated, that’s out of the entire population. Out of those who changed affiliation, it’s around 25%, hence why I stated, “11%, or a quarter of those who changed faith”. (11 divided by 44 is 1/4, or 25%, if you didn’t follow that math.)
The only ones I left out of my post were the 5% (around 11% of the population) of those who had a conversion from Catholicism to a protestant denomination. More oversight than anything else there, but once again, it’s not someone gaining a belief in god, in fact, it’s largely downgrading the intensity, number, and length of services to be attending.
No, I did not say that. However, I would not consider it to be gaining a belief in god, which is what this whole thread is about, and the contention that you seemed to be making with your post.
No, as I said in my post, that would be in the 9% that includes going from a protestant denomination to a Catholic, plus the 4% that went from unaffiliate to affiliated. My math still adds that up to 13%, just as it did the last time I posted that.
Can you back up this assertion? It didn’t ask if you stopped going to church, it asked if you were affiliated with a church.
And as you say, it is measuring behavior, not actual faith. I know a lot of people that go to church, that would say that they are affiliated with a church, who do so for social reasons, not because they actually believe in god.
Well, they did manage to find some straw.
Is that pure speculation, or do you have anything at all to back it up?
We were not talking about people who identify as “capital-a Atheists”, whatever that means, we are talking about people who do not believe in god.
And 29% is not, IMHO, a flyspeck.
Yeah, k9BF’s second cite was the most recent Pew survey, which I was thinking of. It’s a treasure trove of fascinating tidbits, but here are some relevant ones (emphasis added)
But the major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014. Over the same period, the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – has jumped more than six points, from 16.1% to 22.8%. And the share of Americans who identify with non-Christian faiths also has inched up, rising 1.2 percentage points, from 4.7% in 2007 to 5.9% in 2014. Growth has been especially great among Muslims and Hindus, albeit from a very low base.
At least 7% of the population switching teams in one seven year period. This ain’t Pakistan.
And here are the actual statistics I was thinking of earlier:
If all Protestants were treated as a single religious group, then fully 34% of American adults currently have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised. This is up six points since 2007, when 28% of adults identified with a religion different from their childhood faith. If switching among the three Protestant traditions (e.g., from mainline Protestantism to the evangelical tradition, or from evangelicalism to a historically black Protestant denomination) is added to the total, then the share of Americans who currently have a different religion than they did in childhood rises to 42%.
So it’s 42%, which seems fair to call “nearly half”. And that’s using what I would consider a reasonable definition; if we counted all the people switching between Protestant denominations which greatly resemble each other, I bet it would be over 50.
Umm, how is moving from Christianity to . . . Christianity switching to a different religion?
Indeed. I realize I choose who I am friends with, but the majority of my friends do not believe in god, although they may call themselves christian at work, to their parents,or to acquaintances, just to “fit in”.
I really don’t see where you got those numbers. They are not in the cited survey, and you have not justified them at all.
Oh Lord, lead me not unto the temptation of spending more time on this discussion, even though it is so much more interesting than work.
I didn’t realize you were using the entire population as the base, not just the subset who had experienced conversions. But it still looks to me like the movement from affiliated to unaffiliated is 6.8%, not 11%. Whatever.
There are certainly many fundamentalist Protestant denominations that demand much more time and energy from their members than Catholicism does, so that generalization is untrue.
I believe that cites for all the assertions I have made can be found in the Pew study. I don’t have the time or inclination to hold your hand and walk you through them, but feel free to check and see if my recollections are accurate.
29% describe themselves as “atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular”. Dig deeper and you’ll see that the latter two categories are much, much larger than the first.
I’m quoting those numbers directly from the cited survey! It’s the 20th paragraph of the report, about halfway down the webpage.
It does make it a whole lot easier.
For like the umpteenth time, I bring all this up in order to debunk Princhester’s statement that
It’s a conceit that people come to religious practices by any act of will at all - people who make any kind of decision to join a religion are a statistical flyspeck.
Almost all religious people just follow the religion of the family and community they were born into.
Obviously a great many people do in fact move between religious “communities”, hence this assertion is refuted. Which communities we choose to define as being part of different religions is beside the point.
Coincidentally, I know a lot of people who live in Scotland and say they are Scottish, but are only doing so for social reasons, so don’t actually count as Scotsmen.
I have to disagree with you there. Somebody who attends services only due to peer pressure etc and does not believe in G-d is NOT a theist.
I have to disagree that it is possible to draw some clear binary distinction between “going to services due to peer pressure” and “actually believing in God”. People don’t do things for one single reason, they do them because of the confluence of many factors, and the relative importance of these factors may change over time.
And a question for all those who know people who go to church and say they believe in God, then come hang out with you and say they really don’t – clearly these people are lying to avoid peer pressure. But why do you assume that it’s not YOU they’re lying to?
OTOH, I could quite honestly say that I either do or don’t believe in God, depending on which of various definitions of “God” the person I’m talking to seems to be using. Code switching is a reality.
Then I must disagree with you again. It is possible to believe in G-d but not attend services or belong to a congregation. It is possible to attend services every week and be very active in a congregation, but not believe in G-d.