Category Archives: Religion

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, June 25, 2019:

There has been much hand-wringing of late over declining birth rates and church attendance (especially among young people).

Gerald Seib is one of those wringing his hands. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Monday Seib said these two trend lines have “social and economic significance,” and he explained why.

First, according to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, just 29 percent of Americans say they attend religious services at least once a week, down from 41 percent in 2000. The group who say they never attend church has, over the same period, risen to 26 percent, up from 14 percent two decades ago. Seib noted that “the share of … younger Americans who never attend religious services has more than doubled, to 36 percent.”

Seib also lamented the decline in America’s birthrate, reporting that

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, April 24, 2019: 

The current narrative – the “secularization thesis” – that America’s churches are in terminal decline is dead wrong according to two college professors who looked into it. Professors Landon Schnabel of Indiana University and Sean Bock of Harvard published their findings atSociological Science:

Recent research argues that the United States is secularizing, that this religious change is consistent with the secularization thesis, and that American religion is not exceptional.

 

But we show that rather than religion fading into irrelevance as the secularization thesis would suggest, intense religion – strong affiliation, very frequent practice, literalism, and evangelicalism – is persistent and, in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States. (emphasis added)

 

We also show that in comparable countries, intense religion is on the decline or already at very low levels. Therefore, the intensity of American religion is actually becoming more exceptional over time. We conclude that intense religion in the United States is persistent and exceptional in ways that do not fit the secularization thesis.

Gallup has repeatedly expounded on that thesis. On Thursday,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, April 19, 2019:  

Recent Gallup polls appear to reflect and confirm the “secularization thesis” in the United States: Church membership and religious affiliation among all demographics is falling precipitously. On Thursday Gallup reported that since 2000, church membership in the United States has fallen, modestly at first but accelerating recently. Twenty years ago, 70 percent of Americans said they were members of a church or a synagogue. Today, said Gallup, that has declined by 20 points to just 50 percent. Said Gallup: “The decline in church membership is consistent with larger societal trends in declining church attendance and an increasing proportion of Americans with no religious preference.”

The decline among Millennials (born 1980-2000) was equally drastic.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, April 11, 2019: 

Nature magazine announced a new discovery on Wednesday: Paleontologists digging in a cave in the Philippines for the past three years have found evidence of a “previously unreported hominin species.” They named it after the island of Luzon, where the Callao Cave is located: Homo Luzonensis.

What French paleontologist Florent Detroit and his fellow diggers found were some hand and foot bones, part of a thigh bone, and some teeth from what they claim originally belonged to two adults and a child. Detroit celebrated the “discovery”:

We recognized [those fragments] almost immediately as hominin. The molars were so tiny, so small. The pre-molars had two or three roots.

 

I thought: Uh-oh, this is clearly a human-like something.

According to Nature,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, February 12, 2019:

In a lament written for the Project Syndicate on Monday, billionaire George Soros sees the coming collapse of the European Union. It sounded like an obituary written by the EU’s godfather:

Europe is sleepwalking into oblivion, and the people of Europe need to wake up before it is too late. If they don’t, the European Union will go the way of the Soviet Union in 1991. Neither our leaders nor ordinary citizens seem to understand that we are experiencing a revolutionary moment….

 

The next inflection point will be the elections for the European Parliament in May 2019. Unfortunately, anti-European forces will enjoy a competitive advantage in the balloting. There are several reasons for this, including the outdated party system that prevails in most European countries, the practical impossibility of treaty change, and the lack of legal tools for disciplining member states that violate the principles on which the European Union was founded.

Translation: Citizens are waking up to the personal and political liberty they lost when they traded it for the promise of an improved economy.

Soros complained that the EU had unnecessarily exposed its iron fist back in 2017:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, August 8, 2018: 

Thanks to social media (outside press isn’t allowed to report on Iran’s internal affairs), the world is learning about the growing protests by irate citizens suffering under the country’s oppressive regime. The protests predate by months the reimposition of U.S. sanctions, and the protesters are blaming the regime and not President Trump for their troubles.

For example, in one video posted on social media on Thursday, protesters chanted “Death to inflation! Death to unemployment!” while another showed crowds leaving a soccer game at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium chanting “Death to the dictator!”, referring to the country’s President Hassan Rouhani. Still another showed protests in Kazerun, a city in southern Iran, on Sunday night chanting insults about Rouhani’s security forces. On Monday the largest demonstration took place in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, after a local opposition cleric called on them to protest the government’s failure to keep its promises.

Those promises made and not kept followed protests earlier in the year by crowds in hundreds of cities demanding restoration of clean water supplies and predictable electricity.

One of the promises broken has idled hundreds of buses, as the drivers don’t have the money to buy fuel for them. One social-media entry came from driver Raman Ghavami: