But why do so many atheists/agnostics feel some need to disrespect the theist position? — Rank Amateur
But why do so many atheists/agnostics feel some need to disrespect the theist position? — Rank Amateur
Backgrounder paragraphs:
Maximum Christianity occurred in the United States around 1960. Professed belief, church attendance, participation in church activities, vocations (priests, nuns, monks), and so forth were all solid. Then, for reasons not fully understood, the tide turned. There was an across-the-board walkout--affecting Protestant and Catholic congregations alike. The Methodist Church, for instance, lost 5 million members during the decade of the 1960s. Nuns departed the convents in droves. Attendance at services and church activities started sliding, continues to slide, and, for the most part, does not recover.
Are there large, robust, well financed Protestant and Catholic parishes? Yes, particularly in the suburbs. The massive post WWiI suburbanization that was engineered by the FHA and banks produced a somewhat homogenized, white-segregated population that lacked the rootedness of the former urban arrangement. Ethnicity, which had been an important binder and source of vitality in the old urban parishes, was diluted and mixed in the new suburban parishes.
Now we have a large cohort of people who have either never been members of a church, or haven't been members of a church for a long time. A large share of these people are what I would call "functional atheists" -- they might not call themselves atheists, they may not take upon themselves the name "atheist", and they might admit to being agnostic (which is a cop-out term IMHO). They aren't so much hostile to religion as much as deaf to religion.
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