Well, this conversation suggests an additional potential factor. Anyone who seriously thinks that Ken Ham and Hemant Mehta are similar is someone who just doesn’t see the damage that Ham does to the credibility of their religion. This kind of moral obtuseness is very common among Christians, even reasonably thoughtful ones like many of the commenters here at PS. I’m still astonished that reasonably intelligent people think that Christianity earned moral cred when Christians were abolitionist leaders. Something’s wrong in those heads…
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Wow. You seem to be conflating Ham and AiG with Christian orthodoxy. I don’t know any Christians who ponder coming out against Ken Ham and AiG but then worry that it might jeopardize their faith. (Of course, those fundamentalist Christians who truly do conflate Ham and AiG with Christian orthodoxy are not the people who ever consider going down that path.)
Most Christians in America and the rest of the world really don’t care about Ham and AiG. Most of the world’s Christians have heard little or nothing about him. The ark park and the Bill Nye debate certainly raised his profile but, for example, none of the Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox Christians I know appear to know much about him or care what he says.
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Lots of people who notice that Ken Ham and Hemant Mehta have similarities in common consider people like Ken Ham to be very damaging. I’m hardly alone in that. And people like Ham and Mehta are hardly new phenomena. And there will always be Hams and Mehtas. And both Ham and Mehta have adoring fans who are oblivious to their errors. That will also continue.
Substitute various forums of humanism (including Scottish and French Enlightenment humanism) for Christianity in that sentence and I might be equally astonished. (It’s hard to quantify and compare degrees of astonishment.)
I don’t think you have a good grasp of deism—but that is a big topic for another time.
Ken Ham and AiG are the bedrock of Christian Nationalism in this country. If you follow the money it all leads to AiG, Focus on the Family and Liberty University. If the money stream begins to dwindle, Chrisitan Nationalism as an ideology crumbles taking down all of US Christianity to European levels. Catholicism is already finished due to the decades old child abuse scandal. Once Billions of dollars of lawsuits are settled, the Catholic Church around the world will find itself broke. That will be the end of the Institution of the Roman Catholic Church as we have known it for 500 years.
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I don’t think anyone has a good grasp of deism. Do you know of any living deist today? Deism is essentially “soft” agnosticism. The main thing deism does for Christians is to let the tyrant God of the Hebrew Bible off the hook for crimes against humanity. The entire Old Testament becomes allegorical for the new, reformed, compassionate, humanity saving God of the New Testament.
Confusion about deism and its history is certainly common. And the meaning of the word deism in 1776 was different from today’s typical definition.
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Even if lawsuits crush RCC wealth in this country, I’m not so sure that will be the ultimate result worldwide. We shall see.
I should start thanking you for your ad populum posts, because, while they don’t say anything true about the validity of scripture or the existence of God, they do reinforce the truth of scripture:
And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of the many will grow cold.
These are not unrelated:
Parable of the sower, and a few more (Matthew 13)
(And don’t forget what the Carpenter said about global warming, as I have mentioned before.)
While I am not a Lutheren I am a New Zealander, so perhaps I can give a little background information to our latest census data. (btw, As a former colony of Great Britain, Lutherens have never been strong in New Zealand compared to Anglicans and Presbyterians.)
There is a considerable difference in church attendance and those who tick the “Christian” box every four years in the census. One theory is that since NZ was considered “a Christian nation” by heritage those who had no idea what faith they were defaulted to ticking the the “Christian” box, even though they never went near a church. This is the number that is rapidly falling.
Meanwhile Church attendance is declining as a percentage of the growing total population, but nowhere near as fast:
graph source:
There are also a few complicating factors:
This wasn’t a good census. Our latest census was done using an online system that produced a low response rate and triggered the resignation of the head of the statistics department:
New Zealand has just had a period of unusually high growth rate due to immigration. So the results may say more about the faith of our latest immigrants than of changes in the existing NZ population.
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The lawsuits are worldwide including South America and Africa as the corruption was global and institutionalized for centuries. Yes, we shall see as it is happening before our eyes.
Bible passages written 2000 years ago in Roman occupied Palestine obviously has no relevance nor value in 2019 New Zealand.
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@DarrenG, thanks for the helpful dose of facts and relevant news. Very interesting!
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Yes, @DarrenG thanks for adding more facts and relevance directly from New Zealand. The additional facts well support Hemant’s reporting on the 2018 census. New Zealand is predominating a country where no religion dominates society, culture, law, and individual life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
So you say.
So you think the reality in New Zealand society is not reflected accurately ?
Was that to me? I was replying to your
Relevance isn’t established by age or place. We can find relevant writings from many sources, be it the sayings of Buddha or Plato’s Republic. There were wise people in the past, and their works can still have value even if the accompanying supernatural claims are not true.
I suspect that the increase in unaffiliated says more about their distaste for organized and dogmatic religions than it does of spirituality in general. We shouldn’t assume that all unaffiliated people are atheists.
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Do the treatises of ancient astronomers and mathematicians written 2000 years ago in Roman-occupied territories “obviously” have no relevance nor value in 2019 New Zealand? Chronology, geography, and geopolitics have nothing to do with the value of ideas. (By the way, I recall “The Friendly Atheist” implying similarly bizarre “logic”. It’s virtually an atheist blogger’s trope. One of my personal favorites.)
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Relevance is established by time and place. Social norms are constantly changing. Just because it was okay to write or speak something in one era doesn’t make it acceptable in another era. I find the writing of Buddha or Plato’s Republic to be irrelevant to today’s secular world.
And most unaffiliated people aren’t atheists. Most are “just leave me alone” folks.
The piece that you are missing and deny is that God is relevant everywhere all the time.