Over the past few decades, the number of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated—often referred to as “nones”—has grown rapidly. In the 1970s, only about 5% of Americans fell into this category. Today, that number exceeds 25%. Scholars have debated whether this change simply reflects a general decline in belief, or whether it signals something more complex. The research team wanted to explore the deeper forces at play: Why are people leaving institutional religion? What are they replacing it with? And how are their personal values shaping that process?
TL;DR - it’s the hypocrisy.
For me it’s because religion is brain cancer that fucks up anyone who takes it seriously.
I was a skeptical little kid, and I have been an atheist since I first learned of the term around 1st grade. I was also very interested in archeology and mythology, so exposure to all those other religions didn’t help the Christianity case. As a child, I assumed that the whole god/jesus thing was just like Santa and the Easter Bunny. That it was a made up story to instill morals in kids, and that eventually when I was older the adults would admit it to me. Of course, they never did. But I had a lot of friends at church and generally enjoyed my time there, so I didn’t openly talk about being an atheist until college.
I actually do kind of miss the community aspect of a church. I have always assumed that is the biggest draw that keeps people interested. Both for the support network, and sense of belonging.
Because it’s a grift?
Because it’s all horseshit?
I was going to say bullshit but either will do.
When it comes to bullshit, you have to stand in awe of religion.
I miss carlin. I would love to hear his take on the current bullshit.
I’ll do ya one better and go with tyrannosaurus shit.
No no no, this ancient religion from the Middle East based off of several other cultures mythology is the TRUTH!
My guess is that the extreme hatred flowing out of outspoken “Christians” in the US is a huge turn-off, as it should be.
Everyone, myself included always come back to the same reason - there is no proof.
If I was given actual proof of a god or pantheon or any other ridiculous nonsense I’d absolutely change my mind but actual proof magic exists can’t exist because magic isn’t real
I fully accept that I don’t and can’t truly understand the universe but where the fuck does that somehow morph into “god did it” it’s ok not to know everything I don’t need made up bullshit to fill the gaps so I can feel better about not having every answer. Live with not knowing, that’s what being human is meant to be, acceptance
god definitely exists, as it’s just a philosophical concept to say the “cause of all causes”. by definition, such a thing exists, i would say.
the issue is more with organized religion. there’s a lot of rules and bureaucracy in it, and most of that is outdated.
god definitely exists, as it’s just a philosophical concept to say the “cause of all causes”.
I hope you stretched before making that leap.
Snark aside, this is just a dressed-up version of the “god of the gaps” argument, and is by no means proof of the existence of god. Changing the definition of “god” to be the “cause of all causes” is uselessly broad at best, and misattribution at worst - the “cause of all causes” may very well be a natural phenomenon, at which point attributing it to “god” is just straight up incorrect.
by definition, such a thing exists, i would say.
Actually, maybe not. There’s some new theories and evidence suggesting that it’s possible that the universe is eternal, as in it has always existed, making the existence of a “cause of all causes” impossible (unless of course you also water down the definition of that phrase to the point where it’s meaningless).
god definitely exists, as it’s just a philosophical concept to say the “cause of all causes”.
Most believers will assert that their god exists in a different, more concrete way. The number of persons able or willing to discuss the topic on your terms is an insignificant minority.
Because I don’t need God to be a good person, or know what good morals are.
Not to mention you’ll do a better job at it if you think for yourself on the subject rather than delegating it to a spiritual leader with potentially dubious agendas
I think it was Penn Jillette who put it best…
I murder all I want to, and the amount I want is zero
Most of us get our sense of decency from the inside. Some can only find it in a book. Which is more dangerous the person who sense of right and wrong are with them or the ones who are just one crisis of faith from not having any?
We can just go to therapy instead of confessional.
Confessional is cheaper
Not if you actually tithe 10% like they want you to and have insurance and/or community support. Which of course not everyone has. But my point is that more insurance covers it now than 30 years ago.
I can give you 100+ reasons why…. None are good for you and/or me.
Well, my whole life, I’ve lived in a society where organized Christianity has overwhelmingly been a force for evil, rather than a force for good. Fuck, I straight-up believe that most Evangelical Christians are devil worshipers. If your religion leads you to hate, you aren’t worshiping God, you’re worshiping the Devil.
Christianity is, by definition, a cult of human sacrifice.
Kinda puts the entire faith into perspective.
Death cult
They ritualistically eat the body and blood of their god/savior.
Let that sink in.
They wear symbols of a torturous execution device as jewelry, and use it to decorate their homes.
the thing is that the cross has taken on new meaning in christianity. to them, it’s not so much a “torturous execution device” as you have said, but rather proof that jesus christ can even live after that. in this way, it is a symbol of life after death, somehow.
Right. I was replying to someone who reframed a tradition of Christianity in a way which highlighted how it could be seen as disturbing or bizarre to someone who was unfamiliar with Christianity; I simply did the same with another tradition.
Well, they were in luck… he’s only mostly dead. If he was all the way dead, it wouldn’t have worked. but Mostly dead? Miracle Max can work with that.
Suicidal Death Cult
They are actively doing everything in their power to bring about the end of the world.
though according to their belief, the “end of the world” is actually the start of a new, eternal world.
also, as far as i’m aware of, it’s not so much the “end of the world”, but rather the “end of time”, where time refers to the progression towards god.
When you’re actively trying to bring about the end of the world, there’s no more apt description.
Death Cult Armageddon, great Dimmu album. My parents got it for me along with Enthrone Darkness Triumphant for Christmas one year but they wouldn’t buy me Diablo II because Diablo “didn’t fit the theme of the holiday.”
In all fairness, Diablo has an entirely different lore than Christianity, I can see where they were coming from. We want to burn Yahweh, not Anu.
Dooms day death cult.
Lead by Jesus, the dooms day death cult leader.
I hear he’s a “good guy.”
I don’t think dooms day death cult leaders, make believe or not and I just mean a historical grifter non magical, are good people.
Cannibal death cult, If you take part in the sacrament. That is, quite literally, internally perceived as ritual cannibalism.
Fwiw, the belief that it becomes the actual flesh of Jesus is a Catholic thing, by my understanding. In my Protestant upbringing, it was regarded as entirely symbolic.
Oh, and we did it with grape juice instead of wine, because apparently Jesus hated alcohol or something. Just don’t ask why then his first miracle was turning water into wine.
The grape juice was used because a lot of evangelicals are teetotalers and think even a shot of wine is gonna corrupt peeps.
Which, goes to the other reason Protestants frequently don’t: they don’t see a need to serve wine, while they don’t want to potentially cause an alcoholic to stumble. The chance might be small, but then it’s all symbolic anyway.
Also, grape juice is cheaper.
human sacrifice
like a candle that burns and therefore melts.
Not really; one guy died, by his own choice, but came back to life two days later. A real “cult of human sacrifice” would require it as an ongoing practice and for the victims to stay dead.
Jesus alone doesn’t make it a death cult. It’s a death cult because the whole religion is predicated on death. Dying is the entire point. Your entire life is a means to gain the rewards of dying and only then will you truly be happy.
So much wrongitude here I don’t know if this is genuinely what you think or if you’re just trolling.
Jesus came to earth so that we could know God, here and now. To nick someone else’s quote: It’s not pie in the sky when you die, it’s steak on your plate while you wait. John 10:10: “I have some so that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
I suggest you read the Bible some time. Start with the Gospels, either Luke or John. Not as a means to convert you, but so that you can understand what Christianity is really about, instead of spouting uninformed nonsense about it. You’re currently the equivalent of those Christians who say the equivalent of “evolution is just a theory”.
Your reward is in heaven right? So the endgame is death. You might get to eat steak while you are alive but you dont get the whole meal until you die. That’s a death cult.
No. John 17:3 “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
My “reward” is right here, right now. While I’m still alive.
A death cult encourages people either to kill or to die. Christianity is not one of those.
Just because there was only one sacrificial offering doesn’t mean jesus wasn’t a sacrificial offering.
The whole thing about jesus being both fully god and fully man is that no “normal” human would ever be sinless- and therefore would be an inadequate sacrifice. Therefore god became man- that is, jesus- whose sole purpose was to be a “perfect” sacrifice.
But isn’t the whole trinity thing God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit the same entity? So God sacrificed himself for himself… wouldn’t really call a two day nap for some eternal being a sacrifice either.
You’re expecting it all to make sense. It’s like a the lies a 2 year old tells to explain and justify having gotten into the chocolate cake, after having tried to lay it off like they hadn’t (missing the whole having it all over their face thing,).
The longer they’re allowed to go, and the more you poke holes the weirder it gets.
This was always my biggest struggle growing up in a catholic house. “He sacrificed himself to save everyone who came before and will come after.”
Like, is that really that big of a deal? Shit if i was presented with the option of a much smaller number than infinity, idk say 1000, id sacrifice myself. AND i don’t know that I’m god or that my father is god and that ill be taken care of for all eternity.
In all reality, that numbers way less than 1000 for strangers, and if you include anyone i know/care about, that number could be as low as 1.
He set adam and eve up, too. He meant for them to eat the dam fruit,
All so he could LARP as the White Knight™️.
No. The christian God is evil. They’re doing exactly as their religion demands.
If your religion leads you to hate, you aren’t worshiping God, you’re worshiping the Devil.
And this is how wars between religions start…
Maybe try to move away from that God/Devil thing. It’s a foolish, naive, human-centered worldview.
Ok, we can restate it. If your religion leads you to hate, you aren’t on the side of good, you’re on the side of bad?
alright, but is the world really as black and white as that? Is there really a clear Good Side, and a clear Bad Side?
Religious people seem to think so. But we can restate again: If your religion leads you to hate, your religion may cause you to act unethically.
I was trying to make the point that there is no Good and Bad baked into the universe. There is no meaning to those words inherent to the universe - they are not like positive charge and negative charge.
IMO what people generally mean when they say a person is “good” is the person makes decisions based on what is beneficial to society at large, while a “bad” person makes decisions based solely on what benefits them. The idea of Good and Bad, the idea you can judge someone as either Good or Bad, these are ideas which have arisen under evolutionary pressure, it’s a mechanism whereby you can enforce a particular behaviour across a community.
There’s nothing magic about it. If a person is good, they help make their community stronger: if they are bad, they weaken it. People raised in a traditional religious household seem to cling on to the misplaced idea that there is an absolute Good and an absolute Bad sewn into the fabric of the universe.
However, there is a way to determine more rigourously what actions are good and what are bad. It requires clear thinking, objective appraisal of the situation, and an unbiased enumeration of the choices available. Then you can hope to come to a realistic assessment of each choice, and finally make your decision.
You won’t be certain, you shouldn’t be certain. You should be aware of the limitations of your understanding, and always ready to adapt to new information. And you certainly will not be influenced by what you might imagine the Devil would make of it all.
If your religion leads you to hate, the religion and its followers are bad. The end.
We’re already in a war of religion. One side just hasn’t admitted it yet.
In the 1970s, only about 5% of Americans fell into this category. Today, that number exceeds 25%.
That’s … a surprisingly slow transition. I can understand that an official turn away from christianity only started in the 1970s, fueled by a cultural revolution.
But the fact that only 25% of people have officially said no to religion as of today is staggering me. I would have thought it would be closer to 80%, maybe.
Quantitative analysis showed a steep and consistent decline in institutional religious involvement. The number of respondents attending religious services dropped dramatically between 2003 and 2013. At the start of the study, over 80% attended services at least occasionally. By the end, nearly 60% reported never attending.
Affiliation with religious institutions also declined, with formal identification falling from nearly 89% to just 60%. Belief in God showed a more modest drop—from about 83% to 66%—while individual spiritual practices like meditation actually increased. The percentage of participants who practiced meditation rose from 12% to over 21%, suggesting that spirituality remained meaningful even as institutional ties weakened.
The ‘nones’ didn’t say no to religion, just to organized religion. Atheists are not in that percentage, nor are people who have a religious identity (eg Pagan, Jewish etc) but don’t actively go to gatherings of that religion.
Considering who has the fertility advantage here, I am not sure this trend will even continue indefinitely. I’ve seen it in my own distant family, the only ones to have a BUNCH were the weird-ass Christian extremists whose kids are all named Isaac and shit.
The rest of us mostly had no kids, with a few having 1 or 2.
And obviously, the intro to Idiocracy, but it’s true.
R strategists do not have good relationships with their kids.
that actually checks out!
what a nice pun: R-strategist as in biology, but also as in Republican, or “hard-R people”.
Never underestimate the power of indoctrination to an incurious victim.
They have tech now. And conspiracy theories. Lots of stuff to cult about. They can build their own religion if they want.
Discard organized religion, replace it with rational materialism and/or roll your own bullshit.
Personally, I opt for the second one - this religion/spiritualism stuff hits different when you know, constantly remind yourself, and tell others that it’s just your pet pile of bullshit.
With blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the religion!
samus12345, you lead and I will follow. All hail samus12345.
the atomisation of society!
it would throw society into chaos! (/s)
For their study, Schnabel and his colleagues used data from the National Study of Youth and Religion. This included four waves of longitudinal survey data and 183 in-depth interviews conducted from 2003 to 2013. The sample included over 1,300 individuals, each tracked from adolescence into young adulthood. […] The number of respondents attending religious services dropped dramatically between 2003 and 2013.
The study used data that’s 12 years old! Millennials are not young adults anymore. At this point it’s well known that Americans, especially the younger cohorts, are moving away from religion, so why even bother reanalyzing ancient data?
It is very useful to reanalyze old data. Recently, a study came out that concluded that we have misunderstood the role of nutrition and calories in fitness, and it examined studies over a period of decades to come to the conclusions. You don’t always need new data to make new conclusions.
The role nutrition in fitness isn’t likely to change in twelve years; the role of, say, politics in affecting one’s religious affiliation absolutely will.
Gen Z is more religious and conservative, than millennials, a lot more
Generally less able to identify scams so, it tracks.
I’m not sure they got to play the tutorial levels that we did.
A lot of us millennials had hotmail accounts that got the actual stereotypical Nigerian Prince emails. They were obvious as shit, so we learned to put our guard up. Gen Z came of age into a world full of pig butchering scams and other such sophisticated shit.
