• America Godless? Number of People with No Religion Soars (2019)

America Godless? Number of People with No Religion Soars (2019)

There are now as many Americans who claim no religion as there are evangelicals and Catholics, a survey finds

April 2019

“Religious nones,” as they are called by researchers, are a diverse group made up of atheists, agnostics, the spiritual, and those who are no specific organized religion in particular. A rejection of organized religion is the common thread they share.

…The meteoric rise of religious nones began in the early 1990s and has grown 266% since 1991, he [Burge] said.

Burge estimates that ‘No Religion’ will be the largest group outright in four to six years.

Experts still debate the factors behind this wave of Americans declaring no religion.

America Godless? Number of People with No Religion Soars

The number of Americans who identify as having no religion has risen 266 percent since 1991, to now tie statistically with the number of Catholics and Evangelicals, according to a new survey.

People with no religion – known as ‘nones’ among statisticians – account for 23.1 percent of the U.S. population, while Catholics make up 23 percent and Evangelicals account for 22.5 percent, according to the General Social Survey.

Those three groups now represent the largest the religious groups in America. 

• These pastors were busted taking the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ to the extreme and bilking their followers out of millions by S. K. Burris

These pastors were busted taking the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ to the extreme and bilking their followers out of millions

Snippets:

by S. K. Burris

The worship of the almighty dollar is never more evident than with religious leaders who manage to work the system and avoid paying their taxes. For some pastors, faith in the prosperity gospel is stronger than the biblical gospels.

According to the Washington Post, fraud is thriving in U.S. churches, but it goes largely unreported either to church leaders or to the authorities.

…The late Rev. Dr. David B. Barrett partnered with the Center for the Study of Global Christianity to chart a statistical understanding of Christian churches around the world. Barrett “was a pioneer in collecting data on churches and noticed a significant increase in embezzlement fraud during the 1980’s,” Pavlo wrote.

• Captain Marvel Earns More Than One Billion At the Box Office World Wide, to the Chagrin of Complementarians and Sexists

It seems almost every time a movie featuring a female lead – or set of them – is released within the past five years that sexist and complementarian social media goes insane with vitriol and condemns these films, or says they are an attack on white men.

I have no idea why men (and it’s usually men) get so upset over female-led movies such as the 2016 Ghostbusters, Captain Marvel, The Force Awakens, or any movie that does not feature a young, male, white lead.

(The same guys were also disturbed by the mostly black-cast film Black Panther and tried to sabotage it – and failed. See: Alt-right group tries to sabotage ‘Black Panther’ reviews).

Before Black Panther, there was Wesley Snipes in the Blade trilogy. In these movies, which were released around the late 1990s or early 2000s, you have a black guy who is half-vampire hunting and killing vampires who were feeding on humans. It’s not as though Black Panther was the first black male superhero on screen.

Before Brie Larson in Captain Marvel and Melissa McCarthy in Ghostbusters, there was Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Conner, Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the Alien franchise, and on TV, we had Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman and Lucy Lawless as Xena: Warrior Princess. The vast majority of hero characters were male for a long time (and white), but there were the occasional women hero characters.

But I don’t recall the complementarians and sexist ass-hats having conniption fits over those women characters in the past.

Some of these sexist knuckle-draggers even tried to sabotage Captain Marvel before it opened, by down-voting it on Rotten Tomatoes.

Between The Trolls & A Bug On The Site, Captain Marvel Can’t Catch A Break On Rotten Tomatoes

‘Captain Marvel’ Sandbagged on Rotten Tomatoes Within a Few Hours of Opening

Despite the site’s attempts to subvert the trolls, 58,000 reviews were counted (with thousands of them later expunged).

• Moms Are Influencing Children for Christ. Dads? Not So Much, Survey Finds by M. Foust

Moms Are Influencing Children for Christ. Dads? Not So Much, Survey Finds by M. Foust

Several years ago, I remember seeing a few complementarian authors on their sites or blogs publishing material claiming that fathers are more important than mothers in a family because some survey from the mid or late 1990s supposedly indicated that most children are led to Christ via the father’s spiritual involvement.

I always found that a curious argument, because in my own experience, and that I’ve seen in the lives of Christian women, it’s usually the mother who takes an interest in Bible reading at home, leading the children in prayer, and making sure the family goes to church each Sunday.

The men just want to sit in their recliners watching NFL all day, if the wife didn’t force them to go to church.

But now, as of 2019, there is this:

Moms Are Influencing Children for Christ. Dads? Not So Much, Survey Finds

March 22, 2019

by Michael Foust

Christians are far more likely to say their mothers had a bigger influence on their faith than did their fathers, according to a new Barna study that examines the roles that moms and dads play in the development of children.

• Therapists Too Quick to Assume Someone Has a Personality Disorder by Keir Harding

Therapists Too Quick to Assume Someone Has a Personality Disorder by Keir Harding

Keir Harding says those who have lived through trauma deserve better, and Ash Charlton says it is a myth that one of the biggest predictors for an adult becoming an abuser is if they have been abused themselves

[Article discusses a conference about mental health that is to be held in the UK]

…We are moving away from “what is wrong with you?” and looking closer at “what happened to you?”.

• Hello, Complementarian Greg Morse of Desiring God Site: Actress Says (Vintage) Disney Films Made Her Question Her Sexuality When She Was a Kid

Hello, Complementarian Greg Morse of Desiring God Site: Actress Says (Vintage) Disney Films Made Her Question Her Sexuality When She Was a Kid

This is too funny.

Just a couple of weeks ago, complementarian Greg Morse of the “Desiring God” site wrote a moronic essay lamenting how women in contemporary Disney films – such as Brie Larson in “Captain Marvel” – are moving away from playing the usual passive Disney Princess types of decades past.

Those very same sort of women characters who were nothing but accessories to the male characters in the movies.

Morse thinks that Disney women characters of yester-year are ideal feminine prototypes for women of today.

(Note: Complementarianism takes its cues from secular culture, as I’ve said in months past on this blog and at others.

Complementarianism is a capitulation to culture, because our culture has always been patriarchal. Complementarianism is not counter-cultural, it’s cultural.

But Complementarians insist that they are following the “Bible only,” while they argue that Christian Gender Egalitarians are “capitulating to culture.”)

Well, well, well.

Now we have actress Cara Delevingne saying that some of those very same depictions of women (and of men) in older Disney movies caused her to question her sexuality, to the point she is now “gender fluid.”

Here’s a link to that:

[Movie Actress] Cara Delevingne Says Watching Disney Films As A Child Made Her Question Her Sexuality

Does Morse still want to point to older Disney movies as ideals women should be emulating today, after seeing headlines such as that one?

• Suicide Runs In Family (2019 Study) by N. Rahhal

Suicide Runs In Family (2019 Study) by N. Rahhal

Suicide Runs In Family (2019 Study)

Suicide may run in families that tend to suffer from mental illnesses, a new study finds.

The tenth leading cause of death in the US, 47,173 Americans died by suicide in 2017.

The new study, conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), suggests that families in which social anxiety is more common may also be at greater risk for suicide attempts.