Summary
Churches across the U.S. are grappling with dwindling attendance and financial instability, forcing many to close or sell properties.
The Diocese of Buffalo has shut down 100 parishes since the 2000s and plans to close 70 more. Nationwide, church membership has dropped from 80% in the 1940s to 45% today.
Some churches repurpose their land to survive, like Atlanta’s First United Methodist Church, which is building affordable housing.
Others, like Calcium Church in New York, make cutbacks to stay open. Leaders warn of the long-term risks of declining community and support for churches.
If I were a time traveler, or alien, or something, that’s almost how I’d explain how the Earth came about to primitives.
Day 1: Light (despite no stars yet?! yes literally the entire universe was on fire at one point, just gleaming light but no matter yet)
Day 2: Atmosphere
Day 3: Dry ground aka continents & plants (tbf here “plants” is a little incongruous, unless things like photosynthetic bacteria and algae are meant rather than later more complex multicellular forms)
Day 4: Sun, moon & stars -> the volcanic air clears so you can finally look up and see them, also the O2 paved the way for mitochondrial-containing eukaryotes
Day 5: Birds & sea creatures (birds is highly incongruous here, unless it just means “flying things” aka insects in which case it matches perfectly)
Day 6: Land animals & eventually humans
Day 7: no more “magic”, i.e. humans are so recent that nothing else major has happened in the last ~350k years or so.
Day 8: nothing prevents this from coming - perhaps we’ll go to space, perhaps we’ll die out, perhaps this simulator will end and our personalities will become used to make us all into sex/worker bots for the “real” people one dimension above us. Wouldn’t that suck? 😕 Or be fun I guess, depending on the person. 😳
I cannot say what the nature of reality is bc I have no clue, myself. All I’m saying is that if a preacher says “let me ass-rape your kid”, maybe someone should say no, but if they say like “hey, workers deserve their wages so maybe people should not be slaves?” then it’s worth paying attention to - not because and rather, I get it, in spite of the fact that it comes from a religious person, but even so it’s what is said rather than who says it that seems the most important.
Fuck “religion”, but “love one another”? THAT I am down with:-).
“Primitives” have the same brains we do today and were capable of understanding the same things we are.
So that time traveller or alien is a condescending and ignorant asshole for putting it to them in those generally false terms.
Is that really what you want to go with? That “primitives” can’t understand concepts like “the entire universe expanded from a single point” or “it took many, many, many years for this to happen?”
Also…
What the fuck are you even talking about here?
Sounds like some scientology bs.
Lol that’s the problem then - bc even today, what do we really “know”!? It’s not about intelligence though it’s cultural - what did they care about knowing then? Like what is a “point” and why would it matter if the universe came from one or many of them? And obviously it took a great deal of time - building anytime at all does not happen instantly.
Moreover there’s an ancient Semite vs. modern English translation issue with the words - that identical word “day” for instance is translated elsewhere as “season” and a bunch of other stuff, so basically 7 epochs / eras? Like LOTR where we came in on basically the end of the age of the elves, as it transitioned into the age of men.
It’s a story, meant to be told to children. The same way that we today preach the miracle of Santa Claus - which supposedly prepares kids for learning that not everything they are taught is strictly speaking “true”, and therefore that they need to question everything to sort the truths from the lies. Whether we think it through in those terms or not, that tradition survived somehow?
There are many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett the famous (and now late) atheist counter-apologist, that provide many examples of how religion has been helpful in the past, to get us from purely and literal tribal cultures to great nation-states. It’s our history, and it got us here to today, right or wrong.
Anyway you can go to ideological war with the 84% of people world-wide that affiliate with some kind of religion if you want (according to this Pew study, but I’m saying that there are allies within Christianity, within Muslim, within Buddhism, etc. who are capable of rational thought. Even as there are also a handful of atheists who, perhaps having inherited their beliefs, are dumb as fuck. There are fewer, and the system does not encourage that, but it does happen.
I outright enjoy talking with people of any religious background who genuinely believe whatever they believe, so long as they are willing to critically examine the nature of their beliefs. Such people are much more likely to arrive at whatever “truth” is out there to find, than someone sitting still who isn’t listening to anyone. Question everything - sound familiar? It’s both the atheist creed (or was at some point) as well as literally commanded in the Christian worldview (not that people give a damn about what the Bible says) as well as practically the scientific motto.
Or at least it used to be. People seem to be redefining what “science” means these days, as in science is why planes fly - it’s not though, science is the PROCESS that lead to the DISCOVERY of HOW planes fly. So how is it that religious people are doing the questioning process more than some modern atheists, who simply say “this is the way the world works”?
To be clear, I have no idea how the world works. I wasn’t there when it started, I only know what I can see now, which is extremely limited. Hence why I prefer my answer as being “I do not know”, rather than “I know and let me tell you how it happened…”
Our two answers are much more similar than I think you realize. But they do differ somewhat in important ways too, although it sounds like you are triggered so let’s end it here: I know exactly what you are saying and if you think about it you’ll see what I was trying to convey, but there seems little point to going more rounds just emotionally venting our upset feelings at the fuckers who misuse their authority as “leaders” of their communities to abuse people - including but not limited to children. Maybe authoritarianism thought control to abolish all religion everywhere would do the trick, but so long as wishes were horses then we all would ride, and I think there are better ways - and that’s what I was trying to convey. Not that magic exists as a replacement for science (although again, it does exist when viewed from the other side of it - i.e. to those who don’t understand the principles yet, how could it be viewed as anything but magic? If we were suddenly picked up by sufficiently advanced aliens, we would react no differently ourselves, bc as you said, we really aren’t any different at all from those that came before, only our culture has shifted).
How about you back up some of those claims with evidence.
Especially this one:
And this one: