Christianity Today Thinks They Know Why We Left

[Kuroikaze]

I love how he admits that many people leave due to not getting good answers to their doubts when they are still in the church, and then his solution is we need to teach people better....

 

Failing to directly deal with the ACTUAL doubts lest he be forced to admit that the reason people are not given good answers is because no good answer exists.

[AC Skeptic]

Nonsense. I left at 31, after spending my entire life involved with the Church, for the simple reason that I realized it wasn't true. It involved no change in my behavior spare my obvious uninvolvement with the christian practices of praying, evangelizing, and attending worship gatherings. I didn't pick up drugs, I was already extremely happily married (virgin on my wedding night, faithful ever since) and already have children who I consciously pulled out of church with me when I realized it was almost entirely myth.

[Redeye_Reprisal]

What a load of pretentious mental masturbation.

 

 

 

 

I left Christianity at age 13, when I began to delve into Science and Philosophy and came to the conclusion that a rational, mature, resilient worldview tends to not include talking snakes, worldwide floods, six day creation myths and blood sacrifice.

[Jeremy Allen]

http://www.christian...mber/27.40.html

 

they hardly acknowledge that we think its bs! Mostly they think we want to 'sin' or something. Why the hell would I sin against an all powervul vengeful god if I thought he existed? arrgggh!

 

ditto.

 

which further illustrates our point.

[seeboh]

Of course it's a dishonest article! If it was honest, they might have to admit that they might be wrong! And they couldn't have that now could they? Instead, it's much better to call those who leave Christianity immoral.

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

Morninghawk Apollo (who renamed himself as is common in Wiccan practice) discussed his rejection of Christianity with candor. "Ultimately why I left is that the Christian God demands that you submit to his will. In Wicca, it's just the other way around. Your will is paramount. We believe in gods and goddesses, but the deities we choose to serve are based on our wills."

 

lolwut? Where did they find this "Wiccan"??? This is NOTHING like what I've read in ANY neo-Pagan text. And if it's an interpretation of Thelema, they're still off.

 

I smell the feces of a male bovine.

As someone who has read alot of books on wicca and neopaganism, i'm at as much of a loss as you are.

 

Though I did see names as quirky as that somewhere. O wait, now I remeber.....

[BrotherJosh]

I sent a letter to the editor...and got an auto-reply back. I'm sure they just chalked it up to some godless heathen being directed by Satan to clog up their email with sinful ideas. Any time I visit some xtian website like that I have to visit a porn website afterwards, just to balance out my internet history.

[Snakefoot]

I sent a letter to the editor...and got an auto-reply back. I'm sure they just chalked it up to some godless heathen being directed by Satan to clog up their email with sinful ideas. Any time I visit some xtian website like that I have to visit a porn website afterwards, just to balance out my internet history.

[Droptail]

I sent a letter to the editor...and got an auto-reply back. I'm sure they just chalked it up to some godless heathen being directed by Satan to clog up their email with sinful ideas. Any time I visit some xtian website like that I have to visit a porn website afterwards, just to balance out my internet history.

 

Nice! And don't sites keep track of specifically where on the Web you're coming from? That could make for some web-surfing fun...

[mwc]

From the article:

What pushed them out? Again, the reasons for departing in each case were unique, but I realized that most leavers had been exposed to a superficial form of Christianity that effectively inoculated them against authentic faith. When sociologist Christian Smith and his fellow researchers examined the spiritual lives of American teenagers, they found most teens practicing a religion best called "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism," which casts God as a distant Creator who blesses people who are "good, nice, and fair." Its central goal is to help believers "be happy and feel good about oneself."

 

From Wikipedia:

Moralistic therapeutic deism

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Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers is a 2005 book by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. The book's core hypothesis is the introduction of the term Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (abbreviated MTD) to describe the common religious beliefs among American youth.[1][2][3]

 

The book is the result of a research project, National Study of Youth and Religion, privately funded by the Lilly Endowment.

[edit] Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

 

The authors find that many young people believed in several moral statutes not exclusive to any of the major world religions:

 

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

 

These points of belief were compiled from interviews with approximately 3,000 teenagers.[4]

This article contains too many quotations for an encyclopedic entry. Please help improve the article by removing excessive quotations or transferring them to Wikiquote. Help is available. (November 2010)

 

The authors say the system is "moralistic" because it "is about inculcating a moralistic approach to life. It teaches that central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person."[5] The authors describe the system as being "about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherent" as opposed to being about things like "repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one's prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering..."[5] and further as "belief in a particular kind of God: one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly personally involved in one's affairs--especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved."[5]

 

The remoteness of God in this kind of theism explains the choice of the term "Deism", even though "the Deism here is revised from its classical eighteenth-century version by the therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God selectively available for taking care of needs." It views God as "something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he's always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process."[5]

 

The authors believe that "a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity's misbegotten stepcousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."[5]

 

Damon Linker suggested in a 2009 blog post that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, while theologically "insipid," is "perfectly suited to serve as the civil religion of the highly differentiated twenty-first century United States,"[6] a contention that was disputed by Collin Hansen, Ross Douthat, and Rod Dreher.[1]

 

References

 

1. ^ a b Collin, Hansen (20 April 2009). "Death By Deism". Christianity Today. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/aprilweb-only/116-11.0.html. Retrieved 9 January 2010.

2. ^ Veith, Gene Edward (25 June 2005). "A nation of deists". World. http://www.worldmag.com/articles/10775. Retrieved 9 January 2010.

3. ^ http://www.youthandreligion.org/news/2005-0929.html

4. ^ R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Moralistic Therapeutic Deism--the New American Religion, Christian Post, 18 April 2005.

5. ^ a b c d e Smith and Lundquist Denton (2005).[page needed]

6. ^ Linker, Damon (2009-04-07). "The Future of Christian America". The New Republic. http://www.tnr.com/blog/damon-linker/the-future-christian-america. Retrieved 2009-11-13.

 

* Christian Smith, Melina Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 9780195180954; 2009 reprint ISBN 9780195384772.

 

[edit] See also

 

* Cafeteria Christianity

* Theism in the United States

* Postchristianity

I posted the entire entry so it can be seen what a mess it is but also what nonsense the premise of the original article is based upon. It's all about this book and the premise it came up with based on these interviews with these kids. Apparently xians have a wild hair up their asses about this.

 

mwc

[Midnight-mindwanderings]

I was a Christian because it is how I was raised by my parents. I thought that it was true and accurate representation of reality. As I got older I learned that reality contradicted the bible. I learned that reality contradicted Christian morals. I learned that reality contradicted the theology of sin. It was difficult for a while trying to balance the two contrary viewpoints but in the end Christianity relaxed comfortably into the realm of mythology like Hercules and Santa Claus.

 

And now, as Valk pointed out, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. I find much more 'truth' by reading the bible as a myth and as a piece of literature than I ever could reading it as a guidebook to life.

 

The only marked difference in my lifestyle after Christianity was that I used more curse words and I was happier with myself. Eventually I had premarital sex but that was after dating for 2 years.

 

The part about the wiccan made me lmao. Where did they find this guy? Or is he in fact an imagined stereotype they invented? All the ones I know who have magickal names (which is maybe half) would certainly not use them when talking to a Christian. Not to mention the poor representation of pagan deity worship. If anything there is much more self sacrifice in most pagan religions than there is in Christianity.

 

Its also funny that by associating myself with non Christians in high school I actually became more moral even by Christian standards. The Christian groups were full of premarital sex, lies, gossip, immodesty, drugs, drinking, etc. My group of friends was honest, upfront, straight edge (as it were) and the only ones who had sex were those in long time relationships. Many of us shoplifted but I did that as a Christian too.

 

Honesty is very important to me. People need to be honest with themselves, and honest about reality before they can be honest to other people. Kind of hard to do when you believe in an inherently dishonest worldview.

 

My grandparents are obsessed with Christianity Today. I'm glad I'm in another country right now cause they are absolutely nuts over us not being a good Christian family.

[GhostOfPerdition]

It's like he collected the statistics, personal interviews and all the other information he needed, looked at it and then discarded all the parts that didn't fit his presuppositions.

Isn't that essentially the definition of Christian Science?

[dB-Paradox]

It's like he collected the statistics, personal interviews and all the other information he needed, looked at it and then discarded all the parts that didn't fit his presuppositions.

Isn't that essentially the definition of Christian Science?

+1

[PocketAces]

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/november/27.40.html

 

they hardly acknowledge that we think its bs! Mostly they think we want to 'sin' or something. Why the hell would I sin against an all powervul vengeful god if I thought he existed? arrgggh!

I'm more offended by the fact that they think it is something we'll come back to because we pro-create and create a home.

 

I mean, I'm not offended by the sin statement when the church's prime reason for marriage is pro-creation and to have sex guilt free, pretty much creating the wedding band into a metal condom. They also conscience free condemn an entire species because they don't agree with their views and their views of moral states. They can have fun with that one.

 

Yet, to say my disbelief at the age of 29 is something that will just go away when I make a family because of how some people have come back due to pro-creating is extremely offensive. It undermines the non-believers mind and reasons for staying away from religion.

 

Idiotic magazine is all I have to say.

[Vixentrox]

Load of rubbish but then, a Christian wrote it for a Christian audience so of course it was offal.

[Yalta]

Ever see the book Unchristian: What a New Generation Thinks About Us and Why It Matters? It's fun seeing the author fret about how we view Christians as too political, too anti-gay, too hypocritical, caring only about converting people rather than about people themselves as human beings, and basically all the things we think about fundies (as it's mainly the fundies who people tend to dislike. I know many cool Christians in my area, but then, it's a liberal suburb).

 

Of course, he keeps referring to "sharing the Good News" and other crap, and later on, he attempts to address what he sees as the problems with Christianity. I forget exactly what he said, but unsurprisingly, I felt he was missing the point. But what do you expect.

[HRDWarrior]

This article just goes to add further proof of why it is almost impossible for a christian to accept the REAL reasons why any of us left. Basically, they're told to ignore what we say, and assume it's something else! In fact, he almost said that point blank in the article.

 

Pretty much tells me to not bother trying to explain why I left to anyone (Christian) unless I feel the need to waste breath....