Religious nonaffiliated would be not Christian, not Hindu, not Buddhist, not Jew, not Muslim, not pagan...eh?
Why Do We Trust Ancient Texts as Accurate?
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Devils' Advocate
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No, I don't think that is correct, Wil. The nonaffiliated are still predominantly from Christian upbringings. That is my sense of it.
The pendulum certainly swings. There is a cycle to things. Trends come and go. The question is if there is a shift in the center of the pendulum swing. So, is there anything unique about this era that might make a suggestion? I think there is something unique about this period -- rapid change. Thinking back on my life, so many things have changed in such a short period of time. Television, space exploration, many wars, the nuclear threat, environmental change, the technology explosion, gender issues, sexuality issues, social media, economic collapses, etc. Now some of these have occurred to varying degrees in other periods, but I don't think the pace was anywhere near what it has been lately.
If this is true, what might this have to do with religious sentiment? Now I realize the following is an over simplification, but perhaps food for thought. So what might be a factor in determining a swing in religious sentiment? For that I think we could look at the human personality, since personalities have a lot to do with the shape of society and in this case, religious sentiment. I agree that the millennials have a lot of egocentricity. No question. Why that is, is a complex question. The nature/nurture dialog must certainly have something to do with it. On the nature side, people are not blank slates at birth. Everyone has certain predispositions at birth that place constrains on the scope within which the personality can find it's shape as nurture does it's thing. Since the nature side of personality is primarily genetic, the demographics of basic personality types in a particular population may not be that much different from prior ones. There be will certain numbers of people who have tendencies to be introverted or extroverted, artistic or reason centered, conservative or liberal, emotional or subdued, self-centered or other-centered, etc. There are a number of psychological systems that outline various personality traits and categories. Myers-Briggs is probably the most well known (but also probably the least accurate). So if the genetic demographics doesn't change that much, it must be the nurture side that may cause at least a mild demographic weighting in one direction or the other. The millennials, I think, are a good example of this. Something must have been going on in parenting styles and/or culture that shifted the youth toward egocentricity. The point is that what happens in life accentuates or attenuates certain personality traits. And this is not only true for young people but probably to a smaller degree in all ages. I saw my parents shift from being pretty conservative as middle aged adults to pretty liberal later in life. So if there is a shift in where the center of the religious sentiment pendulum rests, it may have a lot to do with the environment of culture as it has an effect on personality dynamics.
Back to my comment about rapid change. What effect might that have on people's personality proclivities. Well, for conservatives, who naturally don't particularly like change (hence the label), all this rapid change could make some of the more staunchly conservative cling even more strongly to the traditions. For the moderate conservatives, some may moderately rebel against change but many may become more accustom to it, at least tolerate it, if not embrace some of it. For the very liberal, this rapid change may even be a bit too much for them. They may shift more to the right, seeking at least some stability. For the moderate liberals, they may revel in the change and embrace it without too much reservation.
If this makes any sense, then what we may see is an entrenchment of the very conservative element and a more weighted shift to the left of center for the rest. Now I have no idea if any of this will transpire, but I do think that the way things are changing so very rapidly, the cycles of religious sentiment may be different than in the past. If I had to guess, I would guess that the move away from religious affiliation will continue even if there are periods where the apostates return for a bit or the never-religious give it a try. Anecdotally I have witnessed this myself where people I have known, left their affiliations, returned for a bit, but then gave it up entirely. Perhaps to move on to something like Unitarianism or New Age spirituality. If the shift way from religious affiliation continues and the pendulum has shifted, those who care about this will have to make adjustments. However, if there is some type of worldwide crisis, then the shift back to religion could be dramatic.
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A Cup Of Tea
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Sam Albion
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Frankly, I see very few Gods who are worthy of my worship.
If God can't keep up with man, why should we carry him?
A sense of duty? Loyalty? Blind faith?
Leave that spiteful, old, blind cripple to die in the snow.
It is a kindness, perhaps, to abandon him.
Perhaps he will change when he realizes who he has become and how much he is despised?
Nobody wants a nasty, vicious God, hating on women, gays, the divorced. We've moved on. I don't think it's a lack of empathy that makes people abandon God -- in fact, for me, I see the opposite. Collectively, we're more accepting of difference. Sure, we're still fumbling in the dark, clumsily, but people DO care for their fellow human beings -- they just don't care much for this angry, punishing, controlling Father figure. They want emancipation. They want to utilize that free will they're supposed to have, they want to decide on their own ethics and morality, not do as they are told by a book that has been chopped and changed and added to merely to please kings, and rulers, and people in power.
If God can't keep up with man, why should we carry him?
A sense of duty? Loyalty? Blind faith?
Leave that spiteful, old, blind cripple to die in the snow.
It is a kindness, perhaps, to abandon him.
Perhaps he will change when he realizes who he has become and how much he is despised?
Nobody wants a nasty, vicious God, hating on women, gays, the divorced. We've moved on. I don't think it's a lack of empathy that makes people abandon God -- in fact, for me, I see the opposite. Collectively, we're more accepting of difference. Sure, we're still fumbling in the dark, clumsily, but people DO care for their fellow human beings -- they just don't care much for this angry, punishing, controlling Father figure. They want emancipation. They want to utilize that free will they're supposed to have, they want to decide on their own ethics and morality, not do as they are told by a book that has been chopped and changed and added to merely to please kings, and rulers, and people in power.
Craz
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BigJoeNobody
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one day this post will haunt you, Speaking from an Islamic perspective, none of the negative attributes you have warranted against the Almighty have any merit. 1) if you perceive issues with Christianity, explore a bit more, you might find these issues have been resolved. 2) Stop assuming you are more knowledgeable than he who created you and try to find the actual wisdom in his writing, not what society is telling you he meant.
You seem to be very angry at something that brings peace to so many people, including those you say it oppresses. Maybe the real issue isn't the religion, but rather your fear of having to learn it.
Devils' Advocate
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I don't have much use for Gods. Don't dump on them all that much either. From someone like me who has no horse in this race, it seems equally naive to say that there are zero negatives to following an Abrahamic religion as it is to say there are so many of negatives that it is crazy to follow an Abrahamic religion.
Both are opposite extremes, and truth usually resides somewhere in the middle.
Both are opposite extremes, and truth usually resides somewhere in the middle.
As a Brother of the Book I would say they have no merit in any Abrahamic denomination, rather it stems from a kind of myopic hyper-literalism with regard to the text. Man blaming God began with Adam, and it's continued ever since.
Sorry, but if someone going to rubbish my God, I reserve the right to try and balance ...
BigJoeNobody
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I get in trouble enough around here for speaking for others, I am glad you agree.
I think this is part of the problem, but I think another part would be the lack of understanding of a (or some) event in one's life that they fail to see the benefit from. Many issues where people sin knowingly I find at least a portion of the problem being from experiences they cannot find a good explanation for, usually due to lack of knowledge, but of course that is just my opinion.
Sam Albion
akaFrancisKing:ViveLeRoi!
So, none of the negative attributes I have warranted against the almighty have merit? So, there's no gay people being murdered in Africa? No child witches being hacked with machetes? No divorced people being denied communion? I must be so wrong.
You're wrong in attributing fault to God. The fault lies with man. And no matter how good God is, nor how peaceful the doctrine, man will find cause enough to kill his neighbour over the matter ... such is the nature of the beast, always was, always will be ...
God's greatest, penultimate creation...
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You do know that penultimate is the second from the best??? Or maybe that is what you meant. 
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I know this is the favorite line of the Abrahamics, God is all loving, all knowing, and all that other all stuff. And that it is man's ability to choose that gums up the works. This one has always been a ***HUGE*** problem for me. If God is all knowing, he knew all the evil in the world that has happened, is happening and will happen forever more - he knew all this ahead of time. Seems like a good God would have tweaked the formula so that man didn't come out such a sack of, ah, manure. Made humankind a bit heavier on the kinder caring side, and less on the angry, hating side. He is God after all; he could make man any way he chose to.
That he chose for us to be how we ended up seems in poor form.
I've never found the free will theodicy satisfactory. It doesn't account for the nonhuman related "evil" that we see, like tsunamis or children dying of cholera, etc. Having said that, I am of the opinion that God created "the best of all possible worlds" to use Leibniz's phrase. Let me explain. Your question of why God didn't make humanity a bit kinder or less angry... This raises the question of what would an ideal world look like? Would it be just a bit less violence and have fewer natural disasters. Would people be better to a certain degree? How far should this go? Taken to it's logical conclusion it might point to the "heaven" paradigm. No pain, no sorrow, no death, etc. But is that really something people would want. I don't think so. The very things we love about life utilize the same forces that create what we call evil. If you always won at tennis would that be so great? If there was no pain, would there be such a thing as pleasure? The very same forces that make life possible also make death and what we call evil possible.
Life is an interplay of both creation and destruction. For instance, the learning process both destroys to some extent what came before and creates the new. Life is a struggle. If there weren't struggles and everything came without effort or threat, would it be that great? I don't think so. My view is that in order for there to be life, there must also be the possibility of evil. No evil, no life. The question is, if this makes sense, is it worth it? I think most would say, yes.
Even so, there are horrible things that happen in the world. A child dying of hunger and in pain, offends our moral sensibilities. How on earth could God allow such horror? This is where it gets tough. If life is worth all this, then there must be some mitigation to offset the terrible things that happen. Now, dualistic ontologies like those found in most theistic systems don't offer, in my view, a satisfactory mitigation. If God is somehow distinct from this reality, it would seem very callous for God to sit back and watch all this horror happening. To me the only mitigation would be if all this suffering and pain are actually, literally God's suffering and pain. In other words, God chose to live and we are aspect of God's life. This points to a theistic monism. It can be found in both eastern and western thought in various forms. In the east this ontology was found in Vishishtadvaita philosophy, and called a qualified monism. In the west it has come in some (I think weakened) forms like panentheism. I call this type of ontology an "aspect monism". There is one life, the life of God and we are aspects of God's life. Obviously there is a lot more to say about this in detail, but I just wanted to point out that it may be possible to find reasonably satisfactory (although not satisfying) theistic positions to the problem of evil.
You must "choose your poison" when it comes to decisions regarding belief or non-belief. Obviously, belief has it's difficult issues but so does non-belief. If there is no ultimate basis for value, meaning, and freedom, then that leaves, in my view, a pretty grim picture of things. Tough choices all around.
BigJoeNobody
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no...
By men.. Evil doing men at that, Evil being those who disobey God's commands.
I don't think if God wanted to kill you he would need a machete. Again, this falls back on evil people not following directions.
Not by God, again, God doesn't run the Churches, Mosques, Synagogues, Temples, etc. He merely is worshiped there and those people who oppress others will be judged on Judgement Day. (yes I realize I'm using the Christian/Muslim end of days view)
Knowing your error is half the road to realizing the truth.
Second to which creation?
From most Abrahamics, especially Islam, All-knowing, All-Loving, Ever-Merciful, etc are attributes. In Islam we say they are the Names of Allah, and it has been stated that he has 99 of such (varies depending on Hadiths)
You aren't the only one. I would say 90% of the agnostics I grew up with have the same issue, many have found resolve to the question, some still persist.
Absolutely, He is omni-present and all-knowing.
He has his creations which have no free will, Angels (and others from most scholars I've heard speak on the subject). They are unable to do such acts that defy his will.
The argument here is much bigger than 1 post could hope to cover. I've heard speakers talk for hours on the subject only to end with, "there's more to the argument than we have time for today". on the short and fluffy, to analyze why we are like we are we must first assume 2 things.
1) The Purpose of this life is a test from the creator. (this covers many religious doctrines, but mind you I will be speaking from my own Islamic Idea)
2) We will never know as much as the creator as to why each and every thing is the way it is, also we cannot know the benefit of the saddest of occurrences.
To start, the most common question is "If life is a test, and God created us all, Why does he test those who he knows will fail?"
Let's use an example, a man who is so drawn to women that he rapes one. This is a terrible act. Could God stop it from happening? Yes, but he doesn't. Why, you might ask? Because it is all part of a growing plan, a test for 2 people, and a summation of at least 1 of the subjects. Now you would probably ask how is the woman being tested, and this in and of itself can be a very big question depending on many factors. some of the possible things is, 'How did she end up in a position where he had the option to rape her? (this isn't implying she did anything wrong, but rather there is a possibility)' 'Through the ordeal did she abandon her faith that God is real, or that she is abandoned by God?' After the ordeal did her faith remain? did she follow through in an honest manner of getting herself checked out, bore an honest testimony against him, If she became pregnant did she take care of the child? ... this could go on and on... Now lets say she does get pregnant, keeps her faith strong, her practice is as God has commanded, She raises her child well, maybe gets married to a man and he takes good care of them both even though the child is not his, and in the process she helps him build his faith and practice better. This woman's ordeal could very well lead to a travesty or a great thing. The process up to the child being good was hard, but with her strength of faith maybe things come out better. The negative side of events can get ugly, and her test can end up worse than his even though she was the victim of his failure.
The driving point of this part of the woman's test would have been the evil doings, and her reaction is what her judgement will be based on.
Now why does he allow the man to fail, and possibly the woman, knowing they will fail, why not just not create them. There's 2 reasons commonly cited. 1) If you are a math teacher and you know a student is going to fail the test, do you just tell him he failed or do you make him take the test so that he knows he failed on his own doing? 2) Without the evil acts, society doesn't grow. There would be no catalyst to push our understanding. Hitler was an evil evil man, but without his rise to power, Jet engine technology may never have been perfected, Genetic research may be decades behind where it is today, and we may would have never developed the knowledge for nuclear technologies (the good or bad ones).
Until you realize the good things in life that we have because the bad things happened, this kind of thinking will hold you back. There is no growth without struggle, there is no strength without suffering, No life without death, there is no Ying without a Yang
(that felt very hipsterish to say)
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Yes I've heard this argument before, of course. And obviously I cannot prove you right or wrong. It is one way to look at it that seems to justify all the evil done by humans down thru the millennium. It doesn't cut the mustard for me cause the man that is burned alive because of <fill in the blank> suffers no less because he is giving the Creator an experience. And he certainly doesn't even know that is why he is dying in agony.
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And this is another standard response of attempting to explain the evils in the world. Somehow, in some way the people who suffer are beneficial to God's Great Plan, and we are too small to understand the why. My reply would be very similar to the one I just posted for Steve.
Yes, I agree this is a thorny knot indeed. And we here certainly won't make a dent in the challenge to explain it all. For me, the standard pat answers seem just that to me. Pat answers to try to comprehend what is not really possible to comprehend.
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Hmmmm. I wonder about that last part. I sure don't know.
It is impossible for me to accept that in order for there to be life, there must be evil. Because nature works neutrally. Has for billions of years. There is no good or evil in nature, it simply is what it is. And it is interesting to me that in the natural world the majority of animals do not kill more than they need to survive. Most mating rituals do not require a fight to the death, it ends when one proves dominance.
Humankind is the only species on the planet that does so much evil to their own kind. Slaughtering for hate and all the other reasons we seem to find to kill each other. And we are the only species that understands what the concepts of good and evil means. There sure seems to be a direct correlation there.
All the rest of the planet does not seem to need the yin to have the yang. Only people. I often wonder if it is because we are the aberration in the world. We are the evolutionary wrong turn.
BigJoeNobody
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I can see you an I see life a bit differently. We come to somewhat similar conclusions on the question posed by DA, but you seem very detached from an idea centered around the "Life Test" paradigm. Something I would say is a "end of test from Allah" you would say is a death, or a natural evil. I would call those a mercy. This mercy stems from being released from the suffering of this world. I actually find myself reflecting Buddha's 4 Noble Truths (be it in my own Islamic perspective) of which I find to be a pretty good explanation of a mercy amongst Followers of God. "Life is full of Suffering", anyone who watches the news for 10 minutes has seen this, if you aren't delusional you probably have seen this every day when you realize there is no time in this life that your life is not drawn to do what is necessary, most of which we don't even want to do. "Suffering is caused by our attachments", While I admit this is broad in itself, From an Islamic perspective these attachments are those which please us here in this life. They cause greed, envy, jealousness, etc. These traits cause us to force ourselves into greater suffering to achieve something that is not attainable by doing that which noone would want to do. "The enlightenment or complete Liberation from all suffering is possible", In Islam we say that the true path to happiness and satisfaction is through the actions and mindset sent to us from our creator. "The Truth teaches us how to be enlightened", knowing the Truth (in this instance I'm referring to Islam as truth, as it is what I follow) is what allows us to focus on the real matters, release the need to attach to desires of this life which drive suffering, and instead follow the path that is straight to allow our minds to see the greatness of the creator, and the rewards that he offers for doing so.
I realize this is probably off key a bit, and I apologize for any incontinuity in thought.