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For the first time "No Religion" has topped a survey of Americans' religious identity, according to a new analysis by a political scientist. The non-religious edged out Catholics and evangelicals in the long-running General Social Survey.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, found that 23.1% of Americans now claim no religion.
Catholics came in at 23.0%, and evangelicals were at 22.5%.
The three groups remain within the margin of error of each other though, making it a statistical tie. Over 2,000 people were interviewed in person for the survey.
[...] "We are seeing the rise of a generation of Americans who are hungry for facts and curious about the world," she says.
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Survey: As Many Americans Claim No Religion as there are Evangelicals, Catholics
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday April 15 2019, @12:30PM (5 children)
You're over-simplifying some things, and ignoring others to support your contention that all cultures are equal. The information the Muslim Caliphates transmitted to Europe was originally Greek and Roman for the most part, and was preserved while Europe experienced its Dark Ages. They did invent algebra, though, which the Europeans ran with.
Likewise you're conveniently leaving out the Reformation and the Enlightenment, which were very much based in Christianity. If you've ever been to the Uffizi in Florence the place is replete with a million depictions of the Crucifixion. The Sistine Chapel is in the Vatican, for Pete's sake, and its focus is God passing the divine spark to Adam.
Newton and Adam Smith, two towering intellects often cited by science and capitalism fans, were devout Christians. Those are just a couple examples.
I find it regrettable that academia has made such an effort to ellide all those facts, to scrub Europe and its history of its Christianity in order to serve its current secular agenda. It's false, and intellectually bankrupt.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday April 15 2019, @02:48PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday April 15 2019, @03:40PM (2 children)
Right, so no credit to the Muslims for building the House of Wisdom, preserving Greek and Roman sources while the Christians were burning them in Alexandria, and carefully ignoring their contributions to astronomy and other sciences in addition to mathematics. Heck, many Soylentils make their living thanks to the work, in part, of al-Khwarizmi. I don't think I'm the one being selective here about who did what. Also, I didn't get into this, but it's not like China and India didn't play a big role as well, both in science and technology. For example, those guns we all seem to like wouldn't have happened without Chinese experiments with explosives.
I'm not concerned with declaring all cultures equal. I am concerned that declaring one culture as inherently superior to others is usually the prelude to "Our culture is superior, so we can and should do whatever we want to other cultures, including rape, pillage, enslave, or murder everyone in them". Even if you don't give a damn about the people in the other cultures, that's still going to entail losses on your side as well as losing a great deal of whatever knowledge those other people might have had.
And you still haven't explained what exactly you mean by "Western Civilization". Who's in, and who's out? What portions of the former Byzantine Empire count? How about the Egyptians, without whom the Roman Empire could not have functioned? Where do the north Africans such as the Moors fit into this? How about the Russians, and if they're in how come the Mongols aren't? When it comes to the Levant and Jerusalem in particular, when is that part of Western Civ and when isn't it, and why?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 17 2019, @10:41AM (1 child)
Your premise was to excise Christianity as a motivating force in the development of Western civilization, and to cast it as something that had to be fought and eliminated in order for human progress to be achieved. Finally, you concluded with cultural relativism.
Christianity both opposed, and promoted progress in the West, depending on exactly, who, when, and where we're talking about. But it absolutely cannot be excised as a motivating force, and it's reductive and intellectually suspect to cram it into a negative one. It smacks of an agenda driven not by cold, factual historical analysis but by an ideological one. It has the stamp of post-Modernist academe all over it.
Cultural relativism is another fad that has had its day, but we can let the discursive tides wash it back out to sea like the intellectual flotsam and jetsam it is. Cultures are not all equal. Some produce better material outcomes than others. Western culture has produced far better material outcomes for the world. Its products, democracy, science, medicine, industrialization, and many others have made it possible for billions of people to even exist in the rest of the world. Japanese bushido, as intricate and interesting as it is, has not done so. India's yoga, as great as it is, has not done so. In fact it's thanks to the superior outcomes made possible by Western culture that those elements of Japanese and Indian culture (and others, of course) are even known to the rest of the world, so not only has Western culture proven its superiority through its direct aid, but by amplifying the impact of other, local, non-Western cultures.
Now, Western culture has not always been superior, because it wasn't. Nor may it always be, because things change. And saying its superior now does not mean that no other cultures have value and are not worthy of preservation or existence. But it for sure says that Western culture is worthy of defense, that it ought not be pooh-poohed, denigrated, or torn down by hapless youths who have no conception of the vast inheritance they sit atop.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 17 2019, @01:26PM
Again, you have refused to define "Western culture". Either you don't know what it is you're trying to defend here, or you don't want to say what it is.
But more to the point: I have several people in my own family tree that are legitimately notable enough to merit Wikipedia articles. Some of them even played significant roles in human history. And do you know what that means for me and my legacy? Jack squat! My legacy is my own actions, my own work, and my own accomplishments. If I'm not claiming credit for their actions (and I shouldn't - I had little to nothing to do with their actions), why the heck would I claim any kind of legacy for what people far less connected to me did centuries ago? Your defense of the "inheritance of Western culture" is all about claiming some sort of connection to the actions of people you've never met and had no influence over. Being born a European-descended English-speaker in the United States doesn't suddenly mean that you are strongly connected to Charles Martel's victory over the Muslims in the Battle of Tours in 732 CE.
If you want to claim a "vast inheritance", why not go with "I'm human, humans have done a whole lot of cool things over the centuries that have enabled me to live a much better life than my ancestors did"? That gives you a much larger group of giants on whose shoulders you can stand.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Monday April 15 2019, @03:57PM
And you're not giving the Islamic world enough credit. Although they did preserve much Greek and Roman knowledge, they took that knowledge and synthesized significant new knowledge (algebra, as you mentioned -- without which Newton and Liebniz could never have formulated the calculus), as well as significant medical and astronomical discoveries.
And it's true that after centuries of advancement and independent thought, the Islamic world turned away from science toward a worldview quite similar to the Christian, anti-science worldview.
That the Islamic world turned away while the Christian world began to embrace science and independent thought was due to many complex factors, most of which were political and economic in nature, rather than religious.
Academia has done no such thing. There is still plenty of good history that has been and continues to be done by academics.
The problem is that the the *teaching* of history has been severely devalued and the quality of such teaching is horrible. As you make abundantly clear.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr