Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
We get a drumbeat of bad news seemingly every day. Another mass shooting. Dysfunctional politics. Stagnant wages. Expensive healthcare. It goes on and on.
Major institutions, including religious institutions, have seen the public's confidence in them collapse. Yet from what I can tell, faith is one of the few pillars of society that isn't significantly damage. Not necessarily churches or religious institutions, but private faith. It's one of the few things I think we can rely on in times of increased tumult.
I've had some problems in my personal life the last few months. Nothing earthshattering, but enough to make me stop and reassess how I live my life, whether or not I'm making correct choices, etc. I'm finding a faith in a creator helpful during this process, especially since we have so little to cling to in civic society.
Christ's church will endure. It has for 2000 years, and it will now. Maybe the US church will fade away...that's entirely possible. But Christ will always have believers on earth until he returns.
Faith is what you use when the evidence tells you what you don't want to be true. Faith is simply the practice of ignoring the supportable in favour of a desired belief.
Faith is what prevents people from getting angry, organizing, and demanding real change from political leaders.
This can be very true. Obviously you know that there ARE people of faith who get angry, organize, and demand real change from political leaders, but too often "God will handle it" is an excuse to not get involved.
This can be very true. Obviously you know that there ARE people of faith who get angry, organize, and demand real change from political leaders, but too often "God will handle it" is an excuse to not get involved.
I’ll be impressed when I see religious people demanding real change on issues like inequality and corruption. So far, I haven’t seen it. If it exists somewhere, it certainly isn’t having an impact.
I’ll be impressed when I see religious people demanding real change on issues like inequality and corruption. So far, I haven’t seen it. If it exists somewhere, it certainly isn’t having an impact.
Well, you have to have seen religious people demanding change on issues like inequality, particularly when it comes to racism and homophobia. Those are two issues that liberal churches speak out on all the time. Corruption, maybe not so much. Environmental issues all the time, though, and social justice issues. The head of the Episcopal church in the US was at Standing Rock last year along with local churches who were supporting the effort by providing food and whatnot for the protesters.
United Methodist Church is another one that speaks out.
ETA: I just got an email from this group urging us to call the Capitol and leave a message for our representatives re not diminishing SNAP funding in NJ.
Last edited by Mightyqueen801; 11-15-2017 at 09:22 AM..
Yes. I was not going to pop up here as you bods are doing fine without me, but I'll remark that I have noticed that organized religion is joined at the hip to political control and does indeed, as Marx observed, drug then down so they don't rise up. But sometimes faith can stop being a good servant and become a bad master. British civil war, Iran, and an invisiblle ghost nation that began to take on definite form during Obama's time.
Now, that of course is not the personal non -religious Faith of the OP. But on another thread the serious question of community comes into it. While an individual may decide he can't buy the beliefs (quite apart from Dogma --based persecution of dissenters) of his local church and stop attending and just has a non -religious god -belief.
He or she is going to be as badly off as the total atheist - community gone. How long before they go drifting back to the church just for the company, and swallow or even suppress their doubts?
But as we know, once you have the the doubts that lead to rejection of what makes no sense, you can't easily dismniss them again, so going back to the bottle doesn't solve the problem.
At first I rather sniffed at the Atheist churches, but increasingly, while I would like to see less religious trappings and more indoctrination of the atheist creed...I mean..providing a non -religious atmosphere to have a community withing... something like that is going to have to be organized to provide a substitute for church in providing a local, state and even national community that in fact (as we saw in the shootings thread, even the Church can't provide, because it uses the community to serve itself. It doesn't unite the ciommunity to serve the community.
I don't think it needs to become a political party. The present political, legal and ethical systems will do fine. But if there is an irreligious majority in the USA, just to push the churches out and think that's job done, they will as wrong as ol' Dubhya was about Iraq.
This is the problem here. The churches have lost control, and there is plenty of questioning of the way the country is run, but religion has kept people rationally unaware, and there has been a conspiracy (unintentional) to stop people being able to think for themselves. That's why critical thinking at school should be introduced, whether or not there are comparitive religion classes or not. I can well imagine the One huge sickening terror of those in charge is that a rational and aware grassroots people should acquire and use the power to send in a team that wasn't paid by and dependent for promotion on the rulers, and would have the power to remove them for incompetence and jail them for embezzlement.
Somehow what has to be done is dangling in front of out noses -and yours, too - and we can't grasp it because the organization isn't there. A ratiobnalist humanism (including atheism) worldview if organized - could do this, but it needs to be aware of what it has to do and do it.
If not, a continued lack of awareness and no clear idea how to mend matters would simnply leave those with a residual (irreligious) godfaith drifing back into the clutches of Church for lack of anything else.
Christ's church will endure. It has for 2000 years, and it will now. Maybe the US church will fade away...that's entirely possible. But Christ will always have believers on earth until he returns.
This may be one of the few times that we can agree about something. No matter what happens, some people will always believe their myths and fairy tales are real. Just like the people that believe the moon landings were faked, no amount of evidence will ever change their minds.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
