People are less and less religious. Why? What will change this?

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That’s probably the case and it makes it harder to draw comparisons over history of how religious people were as individuals.
 
“Change of mentality” - people know everything because of technology connecting with people around the world
 
ltwin said:
Many people who in the past would be “nominal” Christians are today choosing to be unaffiliated with any religion because doing so does not exact a political or social cost.
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Wouldn’t that imply that many people were simply faking religiosity to avoid such costs? Wouldn’t faking it be worse?
 
parents, schools, churches and even the vatican arent preaching the true faith
just wishy wahshy stuff - which does not put the fear of God in people, thus they fall away
 
My 3 theory:
  1. In order to not offend the world we have begun to say that all religions are the same. This makes everyone happy. But is it true? I believe the direct result is that people thinking logically, see the wide differences in religions and conclude that if it all is the same then it must not be genuine. Example: the protestant religion is about protesting against Catholics. Why are we saying thats ‘all the same’?? John 18:38 Pilate: what is truth??
  2. A very sad essay I read recently by the script writer for sleepless in Seattle and You’ve got mail wrote about how her friend recently died and she thought how she didn’t know if there was a heaven or hell or God. All she knew was about the day to day material things she saw around her that caused momentary happiness and helped her forget about things like death. Her conclusion was that materialism was what she knew for sure…She died soon soon afterwards but the point is the essay made me quite sad. She didn’t seem to have hope or faith. Materialism is so meaningless but people embrase it because they can SEE it, what else is there but what you can SEE.
  3. Society seems to care about what things do. The end result. For instance, education can make people wealthy. What does faith do that we can SEE. Yes, this goes along with the materialism outlook but it’s so strong in our society I think.
 
I read about an incident that happened in Pennsylvania back in the 50s, I think, where huge dark clouds came and blotted out the sun for several days along with a noxious smell. It turned out this was from a forest fire that had happened hundreds of miles away in a remote part of Canada, but people didn’t know that. Every church in the darkened area was reportedly full after this happened. People thought the world was ending.

I think God just needs to show up looking angry and all of a sudden people will rediscover him.
 
I doubt it. What guarantee do you have children of catholic parents will inherit the faith?
 
I guess people see science as a superior alternative to religion, instead of being beautiful complementaries?
 
Curious11 said:
I guess people see science as a superior alternative to religion, instead of being beautiful complementaries?
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Many people see them as an either/or, which is baffling to those of us who never had any trouble seeing them as complementary.

I think some people are drawn to science because they like the idea of having a logical explanation for everything, and they don’t trust anything that can’t be logically explained. Those people obviously have a hard time with religion because the vast majority of religions are faith-based after a point, and there won’t be a logical basis for everything.

Other people, generally non-Catholic, were raised in an environment where the Bible was taken literally, and if the Bible and science appeared to conflict, then science was wrong. A bright person will quickly see a big problem with that approach and is likely to side with science and reject religion, not understanding that Catholics and some other Christian faiths do not think in that way and do not see faith and science as being in conflict.
 
I used to be an atheist of epic proportions precisely because I saw them as contradictory. I believe it’s very natural when you know close to nothing about Catholicism. When I researched more I saw that they don’t have to be enemies.
 
I think people do tend to follow the path of least resistance so if most people practice Christianity it would take someone very anti-religious to go against the grain.
 
For the first 40 years of my life I thought you had to suspend rational thinking in order to be a Christian. I think this is because, in this country, Christianity has lost it’s collective evangelical voice. Once I looked into Catholicism and found that Catholicism invites us to use our minds more than I ever thought possible.
 
abucs said:
A secular school system tends to create godless people as does a secular media.

Faith has to be lived in a culture.
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Just because somebody is not religious, does not mean they are Godless. I know plenty of people who believe in God but just do not belong to any one religion in particular. They find religion to be untrustworthy, in a nutshell.
 
Well,
  1. The internet:
    Atheism seems to be very popular on the internet, likely for a couple of factors. 1 being that edgy teens get to use the Internet more often than working adults. Another is that the Internet often provides a forum that discourages well thought out discourse and instead pushes for small quips. This combines with the great spread of fundamentalism in general population making it easy for people to blaspheme God and our Lord with small quips that would take some time to refute.
    The internet also allows MANY myths to spread around instead of true knowledge. In a world where everyone feels like a scholar, is it a wonder that fewer and fewer actually are?
  2. Fundamentalism
    This makes it easy for strawman interpretations and allegations to make the rounds, and add fuel to the “religious people are stupid” meme despite the great intellectual tradition of Christendom
  3. Communism
    Literally made it illegal to be religious in many parts of the world, spread atheistic ideas, etc. Some ideas of marxism that were propagated in the 60s came about as well, etc.
  4. Denial of True Authority
    The Protestant Reformation kicked off a denial of true authority which eventually led to societal revolution and rampant individualism. Enlightenment, strict skepticism, etc.
  5. Vanity
    People in the West had too many good things. They could have given their good things to other countries, but instead we see people eat too much, buy too much, etc. A rise in selfishness.
This is for the west in general. Other countries without such factors may not be affected.
 
Education on how to think and come to justified beliefs about reality, the spread of the internet that allows people to discuss these topics outside of the eco chamber of their religion and church, and evidence will change this if there was any for a supernatural realm. But at this point, it’s all just debating to define something into existence with no way to actually falsify the claim or investigate the conclusion. Also, with people being able to find friends and a better life outside of their religion, the threat of disowning the child for leaving the religion is less of a threat.
 
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QwertyGirl said:
Just because somebody is not religious, does not mean they are Godless. I know plenty of people who believe in God but just do not belong to any one religion in particular. They find religion to be untrustworthy, in a nutshell.
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Of course.

We are talking in generalities. It is important to realise the difference between specifics and generalities.

To repeat :
“A secular school system tends to create godless people as does a secular media.”

This is a general statement and cannot be refuted through a negative specific example(s).

Logic does not work that way.

Example :
  1. clouds tend to bring rain.
  2. just because there are clouds doesn’t mean it is going to rain.
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The second sentence doesn’t invalidate the first.

Just because clouds don’t always bring rain doesn’t mean that clouds don’t tend to bring rain.

There is a link between secular education/media and Godlessness just as there is a link between clouds and rain.

Regards.
 
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I was in a non-Catholic bible study and we were on some scripture passage, I objected on what they were teaching on the topic, I confronted the leader on what they believed was not true.
He made the statement that there is more than one truth to everything.

If that is the case then your truth, my truth, would seam that relativism would be taking over. That being the case then everyone can do or believe as they want, as there is no boundary’s on what the truth is.
 
There is no cultural expectation that one had to go to Church to be a good person and there are no social or financial penalties for not going.

Furthermore, they old Sunday Blue Laws were repealed, so people who would rather sleep in or go out to brunch on Sunday do that instead.
 
Christphr said:
People are less and less religious.
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Oh really?.. how unfortunate… not.

Is that a problem?
Christphr said:
Why?
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Because parents aren’t teaching kids to be religious.
Parents themselves aren’t having religiously oriented lives, with all the work and time that must be spent away from home.
You take away the main belief inducing element, which is indoctrination, and you start seeing the number of people who believe in it dwindle.
On top of that, many, if not most, of the things that were once attributed to god’s action, are now explained by the sciences and people feel that science is a far better tool to arrive at those answers. It does work quite well.
Christphr said:
What will change this?
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Why would we want to change it?
 
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