Sekte verstoort kerkdiensten vanwege aanslag

[Henk Elegeert]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Cees,

Het is bijna afgelopen. :)
"Personal God Going the Way of the Dodo"


http://www.alternet.org/rights/139788/40_million_nonbelievers_in_america_the_secret_is_almost_out/
"
[Secularists have very quietly become one of America’s largest
minorities -- how long before they use their power?]

As reported recently in the New York Times, a South Carolina chapter
of Habitat for Humanity prohibited a group of Secular Humanist
volunteers from wearing their “Non-Prophet Organization” T-shirts; a
Charleston-area teacher “came out” as a nonbeliever after years of
church dinners and demurrals; and Humanist Loretta Haskell struggled
over her role as a church musician. While such stories remain
commonplace, a related story with a substantial bearing on these
anecdotes is one of America’s best-kept secrets.


A recent Newsweek cover—in a bid to (finally) match the celebrated
1966 “Is God Dead?” cover of Time—read, in the shape of a cross: “The
Decline and Fall of Christian America.” Editor Jon Meacham’s story
highlights Newsweek’s latest poll results showing that 10% fewer
Americans identify as Christian today than twenty years ago. But more
importantly, and mentioned only in passing, is the growth among
atheists and secularists of all stripes.

According to the latest American Religious Identification Survey
(ARIS) of more than 54,000 adults, between 2001 and 2008 the number
willing to identify themselves as atheist and agnostic has gone from
under 2 million to 3.6 million. Small numbers compared to the whole,
of course, but most notably it’s a rise of 85% of those willing to
describe themselves as living without God during the years of our most
overtly religious presidency!

Even more newsworthy, when the widely-scorned labels “atheist” and
“agnostic” are replaced with specifics about beliefs (“There is no
such thing” as God, “There is no way to know,” or “I’m not sure,” and
added to those who refused to answer) it turns out that over eighteen
percent of Americans do not profess belief in a God or a higher power.

According to ARIS, then, there could be as many as 40 million adult
nonbelievers in the United States!

Personal God Going the Way of the Dodo?

Consider: If these numbers are correct, nonbelievers amount to more
than the highest estimates of African Americans or gays. Secularists
are one of America’s largest minorities. It is no longer possible to
proclaim, as the Gallup Poll announced fifty years ago: “Nearly all
Americans believe in God.” That is today’s most significant change.

So what explains the impressive increase among those willing to
identify as atheist or agnostic? For those who think that books and
ideas simply don’t matter, it is dramatic tribute to the success of
the “new atheist” writers—including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins,
Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. To paraphrase the title of
Dennett’s book, their goal has been to “break the spell” of
religion—and they have evidently helped more Americans “achieve” that
goal.

If a new confidence is in the offing it is also visible in the
American Humanist Association’s scandalous Christmastime bus ads in
Washington DC (“Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’
sake.”). No less striking is the “Out” campaign (“Come Out,” “Reach
Out,” “Speak Out,” “Keep Out,” “Stand Out,”) especially among students
and young people.

One of the few writers who has paid attention to these phenomena,
Konstantin Petrenko, writing for Religion Dispatches, does so in order
to dismiss them [see “Godless America? Say Hello to the ‘Apatheists’,”
March 19, 2009]. He stresses the discrepancy between those embracing
the “atheist” or “agnostic” label and those who describe themselves as
not believing in God. “It appears that most of the unaffiliated
individuals are not atheistic or anti-religious in any activist sense,
but are rather apathetic toward organized religion and reluctant to
join any particular denomination or sect.”

True enough, but the same can be said of most religious believers.
This is no reason to downplay the fact that so many have clearly
fallen away from religion—that is, they live their lives without any
sort of God. Nor can we ignore ARIS’s statement that the six percent
of Americans who refuse to answer the question about their beliefs
“tend to somewhat resemble ‘Nones’ in their social profile and
beliefs.” Which means, according to ARIS’s most striking conclusion:
“The U.S. population continues to show signs of becoming less
religious, with one in five Americans failing to indicate a religious
identity in 2008.”

Furthermore, among those who do, over 12% of the total sample describe
their belief in ways that ARIS concludes are “deistic (a higher power
but no personal God).” One in eight American believers are as
religious as... Thomas Paine. Those who continue to believe in a
traditional Jewish, Christian, or Muslim personal god have dropped to
under seventy percent of the American population. Despite all efforts
to ignore or minimize this, it is big news.

Moments of Prayer into Moments of Silence

And the discrepancy between those willing to be public and open about
their religious disbelief and those who are not is also big news.
Among nonbelievers, judging from my discussions with hundreds of them
over the past several months, many are not “new atheists” (militantly
doing battle with religion) but are, in Peter Steinfels’ terminology,
“new new atheists.” These people are not primarily concerned with
arguing against the belief in God, but are trying to find ways of
coexisting in a society in which both nonbelievers and believers can
expect to be around for a long time to come. They shy away from labels
as they seek their own bearings and their own comfort zone in today’s
America.

Secularists welcomed President Obama’s shout-out to nonbelievers
during his inaugural address, but are painfully aware that when
launching his campaign he criticized them for trying to keep religion
out of the public square, but not the religious right for its attempts
to erase the line between church and state.

They worry, along with Americans United for the Separation of Church
and State, that Obama’s renewal of the Bush Faith-Based Initiative in
the new Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships has not ruled
out proselytizing and discriminatory hiring for religious social
service programs that are granted Federal dollars. And they wince when
recalling that he subjected himself to the informal religious test of
being drilled like a catechism pupil by Rick Warren on his own
particular way of believing in Jesus Christ (the same Rick Warren who
announced that he would never vote for an atheist for president).

Above all, rather than combating religious belief at every turn, many
nonbelievers would cheer if the President initiated a genuinely
multicultural approach to both believers and secularists in today’s
America. This might entail, as was not done at the Democratic National
Convention last August, inviting secularists as well as believers to
platforms that normally exclude the irreligious (i.e. the “values and
unity” event preceding the Convention that was exclusively for
religious believers). It might entail as much political attention
being paid to nonbelievers as believers at public events—transforming
moments of prayer into moments of silence. In other words, it would
mean abandoning the implicit assumption of so much of American public
and private life that religious values, norms and practices apply to
everyone—and show respect to American’s enormous nonreligious
minority.
"

Zie voor diverse verwijzende links, de link naar het artikel...

Kortom: De hel is nu helemaal losgebroken?

Henk Elegeert

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