Afraid Of The Light

I agree. Evolving out of religious "belief" is a necessary component of our longterm survival. I only wish I could be here to see godlessness become the norm. Not in my lifetime, sigh.....

I agree with Jim. This guy isn't concerned with long-term benefits for the species. He's concerned with benefits for himself. No matter how big he sounds like he's thinking.

But as the reverend surely knows, US history has been marked by many revivals and periods of less religiosity. Hard times are particularly good for religion. People don't want to hear "things are going to start sucking, then suck worse, and possibly worse than that, and that's just the breaks."

Love the Plato quote.

Where do these guys come up with their analogies? The "bulb needs to be fitted into an electrical socket?"

My bad, I didn't know my light bulbs had needs. Should I feel guilty about throwing out my incandescents for compact fluorescents? Or did the heathen bulbs deserve it for failing to repent their energy wasting ways?

The CSM article's predictions suggest that christian churches will move even farther from reality than they have already, as mainstream churches wither leaving primarily the holy-roller types. And the writer hopes for missionaries to come here from Africa-the place where they still believe in witches!

While these folks will still number in the millions, they will be so weird that they will have little influence on normal folk. Then perhaps the GOP will return to sanity-lets hope the democrats stay in power until that happens. The one positive of the current economic crisis is that the Right so thoroughly wedded evangelicalism to the GOP that both are badly discredited. Its a shame they had to run the world into a ditch for that to happen though.

I keep seeing his name as "Reverend Bonehead." But he lives nearby, so I'd better keep that to myself, I guess.

I think the good reverend is manifesting another aspect of what I was talking about in my post below: he's feeling threatened.

PZ had a good item up today about a column in the Christian Science Monitor titled "The coming evangelical collapse". Here's a good passage from the column:

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the "Protestant" 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

The author of the piece, an evangelical Christian himself, sees this coming, and his reasons (explained at some length in the article) are pretty sound. Of course, his conclusion is that this is a bad thing whereas I think of it as the start of a new enlightenment. As more of our fellow citizens awaken from the soporific of religion, we will have that many more people engaged in making this world the best that it can be. And as that dynamic proceeds, others will see that they are happier and more productive, not down-trodden and tragic, and they themselves will be less in thrall to the Shaman. Rev. Bonebrake sees this coming, and knows that it may well mean the end of his gravy train. Of course he feels threatened, and will do whatever he can to hold on to his control over his flock for as long as possible.

Jim Downey

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