Those of us who are over, say, 35 are screwed.

1- Believing in a god makes people able to believe in any political fallacy. They are extremely easy to frighten, which makes them very easy to manipulate.

2- There are probably as many believers among the progressives as among the conservatives. And they are an overwhelming majority. Like 90%.

3- This cannot be changed through information, reasoning or any other rational method. In fact, the more you objectively succeed in disproving religious beliefs, or even beliefs loosely associated to religion, the more you tend to reinforce them (e.g. cognitive dissonance).

4- It will take a generational shift to, perhaps, hope to see any reason surfacing from this cesspool. Kids hopefully realizing that they are fed a bunch of crap.

5- At age 52, this means that I will likely spend the rest of my life in a bushworld.

You just cannot find a single post over there where some benevolent democrat doesn't inject some sort of faith crap! And they are the same who regularly advocate for half-ass stuff. How can we even hope effectively opposing the idiot and his hordes, or even lose with pride, with such a sorry bunch!? I'm sorry, but Dean was the only one with some yelling power (!!)

be sure to bring your own Tidy-Bowl.

Sorry, I think it's swinging backwards. Atheists might have had more traction when this country was founded.

Some solace is that 90% of working scientists are atheist or agnostic.

--IMM

I work a lot with "sick" kids, as a psychologist, and lots of them are just plain pissed... Just a little knowledge on top of that and... But I've always been an optimistic. Can't help it.

just to tell you, that the last year I taught kids, '95, was the first time I ever had a kid tell me I should be teaching Creationism in a science class. I had been teaching on and off since '68, also i didn't usually teach science, and this was in NYC, not a hot bed of fundamentalism. also I was in a different population than I had worked with previously. what i mean to say is that is not significant, just an anecdote. Nevertheless, it had never come up before.

I would be glad to see some rebelliousness. I have often challenged my students with, "Are you going to believe something just because i tell you?" You can do great things when your students trust you.

BTW, my undergrad was in psych. Wound up as a math teacher.

--IMM

I've posed this (rhetorical) question in other discussions, and I don't necessarily want an answer so much as for everybody to think about it.

I've seen numbers ranging from 80-90% of USAmericans 'consider themselves to be Christian.' But what qualifications do they put on faith -- what does 'consider myself Christian' mean in context?

Does 'consider myself Christian' mean 'I went to church when I was a kid, but I quit going, except for weddings and funerals ... and if I went back in now, I'm afraid the roof would cave in,' or 'I saw a movie about Jesus on the TV once, and I think that's probably true,' or 'I go to church on the holidays, or when someone in my family is sick,' or 'I'm a devoted Christian on Sundays, but come Monday night football, gimme a Bud!' or 'I'm a devoted Christian who attends church every time they open the doors' -- anybody really know what the context of the question is that gets these majorities of response?

Because anecdotal evidence would indicate that those people who are serious about religion, who read the bible and attend church regularly, and who tithe and actively participate in their churches are no more than a simple majority of those who 'consider themselves Christian.' There may be more of them than there were a decade or two ago, but I'm still having a hard time buying that more than half the people in this country attend church every Sunday, tithe ten percent of their incomes, and that more than two-thirds of them are really serious about reading the bible and following all the rules to earn brownie points for hebbin.

I think you get everybody from 'gimme a Bud!' on up saying they're Christian, and maybe even 'I saw a Jesus movie once.' Hell, people who used to attend might even identify as Christian if a stranger called them on the phone doing a poll, and they knew nobody was going to sniff their butts to determine whether they really were devoted Christians or not.

I don't know -- I may be way off base, here, but this question has bothered me for the past few years. How many of these people are really serious about it, and how many of them are just blowing off a phone poll because they think it's what they should say?

Considering some of the ways they do polls, the questions can be really leading.

For example,

"Which most closely identifies your religion: Christian, Muslim, Jew, or None of the Above?" will likely get different results than "What religion, if any, are you?"

But because they need to actually tally the poll, they tend to use questions similar to the first. Otherwise, you have people putting in all sorts of different answers to question #2.

I find it hard to believe the polls that say that 86% of the people in the United States are devout, fundamentalist Christians. But, using a question like #1 and then "interpreting" the results to mean that 86% of America are evangelical Christians works. Next poll, numbers are higher because of the human tendency to "groupthink" and everyone wanting to be on the winning team. So, even the "Saw a movie" and "grab a bud on Monday" crews come to identify themselves as "Christian" so that everyone else doesn't think they are losers.

is something like "I believe in a higher power". What that higher power is does not matter, it is the fact that normal, intelligent people are ready to *believe* in things that are so obviously absurd. Like I said, really, if you believe any of this, you can be made to believe strictly anything. Just a matter of re-framing technique. On top of that, like it has been said by many elsewhere, belief is particularly resistant to reason (cognitive dissonance for example).

every group is limited to 10% I believe it is done to undermine, them to let them know there place. I think the numbers are much higher, at least double, but they (as in those wonderfully tolerant Christians) make it difficult to let your non-beliefs known because they threaten and bully those that come out of the closet with anything that doesn't fit their agenda.