Church Attendance is dropping, that fact cannot be argued. The ones that grow are often only because other churches around them close and they all congregate to one church. But there hasn't been a similar drop in those who believe in God or claim to be religious, even though more people will claim to be religious to "make them look better". There can be a few reasons for this drop, but I'd like to take a look at biblical literalism, the thought that everything in the bible did happen and is 100% true.
A 2011 Gallup report says that 3 in 10 Americans believe that to be true, that every word in the bible is true and should be taken as fact. On the same side only half of religious people in America even seriously read their bible more than once a year. Many of the things presented in the bible are a mix of archaic values that don't apply anymore, outright scientifically disproven, like bats being birds, or weird English errors where people sometimes talk to each other.
So my question is this, are churches taking the bible super literally adding to the decline of organized religion? Can churches recover more by invoking the spirit of community and throwing away the specific words of the bible, or is the decline the natural result of knowing so much more as a species?
Also as a fair warning, if you're going to use the bible as proof, please support it with some other kind of historical text. This isn't an argument about if the bible is real or not, because it's been warped and retranslated so many times that using it as one source against this just won't work.
A 2011 Gallup report says that 3 in 10 Americans believe that to be true, that every word in the bible is true and should be taken as fact. On the same side only half of religious people in America even seriously read their bible more than once a year. Many of the things presented in the bible are a mix of archaic values that don't apply anymore, outright scientifically disproven, like bats being birds, or weird English errors where people sometimes talk to each other.
So my question is this, are churches taking the bible super literally adding to the decline of organized religion? Can churches recover more by invoking the spirit of community and throwing away the specific words of the bible, or is the decline the natural result of knowing so much more as a species?
Also as a fair warning, if you're going to use the bible as proof, please support it with some other kind of historical text. This isn't an argument about if the bible is real or not, because it's been warped and retranslated so many times that using it as one source against this just won't work.
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