Imagine No Religion?  Lamar says "Imagine No Avails"

 

 Statistical data reflecting some of the findings regarding the cultural footprints of Americans

 

The following data is from a Newsweek Poll released in April 2009, titled: A Post-Christian Nation? 

Concerning how they would classify their religious affiliation:
 
          81% of Americans identify themselves as Christians.
            6% identify as part of another religion
          11% identify themselves as Agnostics, or atheists
 
When asked, do you think religion as a whole is increasing its influence on American life or losing its influence?

When asked, do you believe that religion can answer all or most of today's problems, or that religion is largely old-fashioned and out of date?
 
          48% responded can (87% in 1957)
          25 % responded old-fashioned (7% in 1957)
 
When asked, do you consider the United States a Christian nation, or not?
 
          62% responded, yes
          32% responded, no
 
Read full report: A Post-Christian Nation?

 

 

 

Religion Makes World Richer
Birmingham News, July 19,2009

by Roger Lovette

Driving down the highway the other day, I saw this huge billboard smack dab in the middle of the Alabama Bible Belt: "Imagine No Religion."
 
Hmm. "No religion?" I thought as I drove. Without religion, I don't know if I would have made it.
 
Growing up in a family with a lot of conflict barely underneath the surface, I found solace in a little mill church up the street. Church members befriended me and loved me. Later, they would take up nickels, dimes and dollars and send me off to church camps and, much later, to a Baptist college in Birmingham. There, I found myself stretched in ways that still boggle my mind. Doors and windows that I did not even know existed opened little by little to a larger world. No wonder I found myself as a minister years later.
  
The apostle Paul said we have the treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. I have seen the earthiness of those all-too-human vessels, but I have also witnessed a wonderful transcendence in this very human place called church.
 
The good side of church and religion can be seen in almost every good cause that we have. Without healthy religion, there would be no hospitals, no orphans' homes and no charity work that spans the globe. There would be no Salvation Army or Red Cross.
 
Many of our major universities began as religious institutions. And every year, believers, flawed and human, board planes and travel to faraway places to help hurting people around the world.
 
We cannot ignore the dark side of religion.

Sunday worship still might be the most segregated hour of the week -- not only for blacks but for gays and immigrants and those who don't have the right kind of clothes.

And yet, this same church has a wondrous side. From our earthly ranks have come Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa and a multitude of others. All these have helped change the world.
 
As I drove along, I tried to imagine a country without religion. How poverty-stricken we would be without the great music and art and breathtaking architecture that have come from this all-too-human institution...No, I cannot imagine a world without the contribution that faith has made in my own life.
 
One of the Latin roots for the word "religion" means to bind. That binding does not mean to tie down or to restrict. Poor faith does that.
 
This binding, I think, is something like a rope -- a strong cable has tied me to other people and a wide and wonderful world of hope and possibility. Without that kind of religion, the world would be poorer indeed.
 
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Must Science Declare a Holy War on Religion?
By Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
08-11-09, LA Times
 
This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins -- most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, "The God Delusion" -- returns to writing about science. Dawkins' new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will inform and regale us with the stunning "evidence for evolution," as the subtitle says. It will surely be an impressive display, as Dawkins excels at making the case for evolution. But it's also fair to ask: Who in the United States will read Dawkins' new book (or ones like it) and have any sort of epiphany, or change his or her mind?

Surely not those who need it most: America's anti-evolutionists. These religious adherents often view science itself as an assault on their faith and doggedly refuse to accept evolution because they fear it so utterly denies God that it will lead them, and their children, straight into a world of moral depravity and meaninglessness. An in-your-face atheist touting evolution, like Dawkins, is probably the last messenger they'll heed.

Dawkins will, however, be championed by many scientists, especially the most secular -- those who were galvanized by "The God Delusion" and inspired by it to take a newly confrontational approach toward America's religious majority. They will help ensure Dawkins another literary success. It's certainly valuable to have the case for evolution articulated prominently and often, but what this unending polarization around evolution and religion does for the standing of science in the U.S. is a very different matter.

It often appears as though Dawkins and his followers -- often dubbed the New Atheists, though some object to the term -- want to change the country's science community in a lasting way. They'd have scientists and defenders of reason be far more confrontational and blunt: No more coddling the faithful, no tolerating nonscientific beliefs. Scientific institutions, in their view, ought to stop putting out politic PR about science and religion being compatible.

...A smaller but highly regarded nonprofit organization called the National Center for Science Education has drawn at least as much of the New Atheists' ire, however. Based in Oakland, the center is the leading organization that promotes and defends the teaching of evolution in school districts across the country.

In this endeavor, it has, of necessity, made frequent alliances with religious believers who also support the teaching of evolution, seeking to forge a broad coalition capable of beating back the advances of fundamentalists who want to weaken textbooks or science standards. In the famous 2005 Dover, Pa., evolution trial, for instance, the NCSE contributed scientific advice to a legal team that put a theologian and a Catholic biologist on the stand.

Long under fire from the religious right, the NCSE now must protect its other flank from the New Atheist wing of science. The atheist biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, for instance, has drawn much attention by assaulting the center's Faith Project, which seeks to spread awareness that between creationism on the one hand and the new atheism on the other lie many more moderate positions.

In this, Coyne is once again following the lead of Dawkins, who in "The God Delusion" denounces the NCSE as part of the "Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists," those equivocators who defend the science but refuse to engage with what the New Atheists perceive as the real root of the problem -- namely, religious belief.

...the New Atheists have chosen their course: confrontation. And groups like the NCSE have chosen the opposite route: Work with all who support the teaching of evolution regardless of their beliefs, and attempt to sway those who are uncertain but perhaps convincible.

Despite the resultant bitterness, however, there is at least one figure both sides respect -- the man who started it all: Charles Darwin. What would he have done in this situation?

It turns out that late in life, when an atheist author asked permission to dedicate a book to Darwin, the great scientist wrote back his apologies and declined. For as Darwin put it, "Though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science."

Darwin and Dawkins differ by much more than a few letters, then -- something the New Atheists ought to deeply consider.

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum are coauthors of the new book, "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future."

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