If you witnessed someone insisting that they were correct, even when there are mountains of evidence to the contrary, and they were spreading their word as though it was the absolute supreme incontestable truth, would you not feel bound to correct them to avoid misinformation and willful ignorance?
Dude everybody fukking gets it, you're right and they're wrong. How many theists have you successfully converted? You're doing this for yourself don't pretend you're a humanitarian
I will not knock your belief if you believe but how can you go against his plan if it is already planned.
I might be wrong. The chances are smaller than if I was arguing for religion though. I've helped a number of friends change, but I don't feel it's enough.
learning to do these things is progressive though; learning a bunch of lies is notWe're also born without the ability to walk, talk, eat and drink on our own etc...,
That doesnt mean the knowledge gained is irrelevant
because reasons?
are you sure you are imploring the right group to chill?
I don't see how saying we don't need a "religion is stupid thread" here every 10 minutes when it accomplishes absolutely nothing. How many theists have been converted on the coli?because reasons?
are you sure you are imploring the right group to chill?
You've successfully converted theists? More power to you then I guess
c/s with the bolded... If God is real then he's a dumbass. You purposely made humans knowing that they would fukk up, and then provided a solution in jesus... Why do all that extra??? Just do it right the 1st time nikkaThere is no plan...
(1) An almighty entity would not require a plan...Plans are for humans and other low level animals...If God is almighty, then that means it has all the resources in the universe to accomplish whatever it wants to accomplish...All it has to do is will something to make it come to fruition...
(2) If God has a plan, then God is not almighty...Humans plan because they live in doubt...We are not certain of our actions and their consequences...Therefore, we have to strategize...Why would God need to do this if it knows exactly how every piece moves?
(3) If you read the Bible then you should already know the Abrahamic God is a TERRIBLE planner...He creates paradise but then leaves a poisonous tree and evil spirit in it, knowing fully well that they would ruin his creation...
When paradise is ruined, his best solution to restore his creation is to send a flood that kills everybody except Noah and his family, and that fails...Because they reproduce more evil...
He punishes humans for creating a skyscrapper, by make it more difficult for them to communicate with eachother, as result, we have racism, ethnocentrism, poor interpersonal communication which only lead to more famine, war and misery for the majority of people living on Earth...Surely an Almighty Entity could have thought a better a solution...
His solution for homosexuality was to burn down an entire civilization, and yet homosexuality is still rampant to this day...
Then sends his only begotten son to die on a cross....Yet, things are even worse on Earth...Wars are more brutal...Nobody really believes in Jesus...So, dude died for nothing...
I follow my own plan, because, if the Bible is to be believed, then God's plans only lead to war, destruction and death...God's idea of making things better is to kill and destroy...
Only a few. But they were open minded to begin with, and their own logic prevailed over their teachings.
because reasons?
are you sure you are imploring the right group to chill?
besides you casually ignoring the asymmetry between arguments online and enacting public policy that actually affects people's lives and you seemingly belong bothered more by the former than the later, can you actually show me evidence that it accomplishes nothing
Churchgoing has been on the decline for decades in Western nations: here’s why
June 9, 2015 by Epiphenom Leave a Comment
The rise of individualism. Credit: Ed Schipul @ Flickr
It’s a fact that, in the West at least, fewer people are going to religious services than they used to a few decades ago. Countries do follow different trajectories – secularization happened first in the Protestant countries of Northern Europe and Australia, and more recently the Catholic countries of Europe. The Americas have fought the trend, but in both North and South America change is underway.
Erik van Ingen, of Tilburg University and Nienke Moor of the HAN University of Applied Sciences, both in the Netherlands, wanted to know what’s driving these changes. So they turned to that massive international poll on attitudes, the World Value Survey.
Looking at data spanning 1970 to 2009 and from 49 countries from Europe and the Americas, as well as Australia and New Zealand, they were able to establish that there has indeed been a general trend downwards – although some countries like the US have been more or less stable, and in some Eastern European countries it’s risen a little since the end of Communism.
They found that these changes correlated with a bunch of other things that were going on over this period – greater access to university-level education, more urbanization, increased GDP, and longer life expectancy. They also correlated with rising divorce rate and increasing social globalization (personal contact with foreigners, access to information via internet and telephone, and – as a measure of cultural openness – the number of McDonald’s per capita).
Of these, the most influential was education. That matches with some other research has found.
Now so far this is just guilt by association. To see what factors might actually be causing churchgoing to decline, they looked at social and economic changes that occurred 5 or 10 years ahead of changes in attendance.
When they did this, they found that only changes in education and divorce rates (and perhaps life expectancy) could predict future changes in churchgoing.
Then they split their time range into two, to see if relationships between these factors were changing over time. And the first thing they found was that the decline in church attendance is slowing – it was smaller in more recent years (1990-2009) than they were in the period 1970-1989.
What they also found was that, although economic inequality (increasing churchgoing) and urbanization (decreasing it) both had quite big effects from 1970-1989, these factors ceased to play a role in 1990-2009.
The authors speculate that education could stimulate secularisation by showing people competing worldviews, thereby undermining the claim that most religions have to be exclusive holders of fundamental truths. That would fit with other data showing that humanities majors are the most likely to lose their faith during college years.
But they also suggest that the secularization of institutions, such as universities, has been the result of active struggle by secularizing activists. As they put it, a “rather than being about competing world views, this process was motivated by questions of power and authority”
They claim that the link with divorce is because this is an indicator of a process of individualization. And, as the pressure to conform relaxes, people no longer feel constrained to go to church. That’s a similar finding to that reported in US adolescents (see previous post)
I’m a bit concerned about the claims of the importance of individualization, for two reasons. The first is that we know people tell interviewers that they go to church more often than they actually do – and that this inflation of the truth is more widespread where the social expectation is that you go to church.
So maybe what we’re seeing here is not an actual decrease in churchgoing with increasing individualization, but rather a decrease in lying to pollsters about how often you go to church!
Second, even supposing that individualization is playing a real role, I want to know what is driving that trend. Surely it is increased economic security and increased health, which gives people the freedom to start thinking about living independently from their network of family and friends.
Yet it is exactly these material factors that the researchers found not to be so important in driving down churchgoing. They used a statistical technique that made multiple adjustments so they could tease out the effects of different variables, but I wonder whether what has happened is that their ‘individualization’ variable has crowded out the socio-economic ones.
That would explain why other studies, that did not include ‘individualization’, found much stronger socio-economic effects on secularization.
But the other really interesting finding was that, although decreasing income inequality and urbanization drove down church attendance from 1970 to 1989, they no longer appear to be doing so. Perhaps that’s because urbanization has not changed so much recently, and income inequality is drifting up.
Maybe that’s the reason church attendance rates in Western countries have been flatlining recently?
Is this rethorical? how would I possibly have this information? given the usual acerbic dynamic of online disagreements, what would it prove if no one ever openly admitted to being converted?
There is no plan...
(1) An almighty entity would not require a plan...Plans are for humans and other low level animals...If God is almighty, then that means it has all the resources in the universe to accomplish whatever it wants to accomplish...All it has to do is will something to make it come to fruition...
(2) If God has a plan, then God is not almighty...Humans plan because they live in doubt...We are not certain of our actions and their consequences...Therefore, we have to strategize...Why would God need to do this if it knows exactly how every piece moves?
(3) If you read the Bible then you should already know the Abrahamic God is a TERRIBLE planner...He creates paradise but then leaves a poisonous tree and evil spirit in it, knowing fully well that they would ruin his creation...
When paradise is ruined, his best solution to restore his creation is to send a flood that kills everybody except Noah and his family, and that fails...Because they reproduce more evil...
He punishes humans for creating a skyscrapper, by make it more difficult for them to communicate with eachother, as result, we have racism, ethnocentrism, poor interpersonal communication which only lead to more famine, war and misery for the majority of people living on Earth...Surely an Almighty Entity could have thought a better a solution...
His solution for homosexuality was to burn down an entire civilization, and yet homosexuality is still rampant to this day...
Then sends his only begotten son to die on a cross....Yet, things are even worse on Earth...Wars are more brutal...Nobody really believes in Jesus...So, dude died for nothing...
I follow my own plan, because, if the Bible is to be believed, then God's plans only lead to war, destruction and death...God's idea of making things better is to kill and destroy...
