Atheists Roll Out New Advertising Campaign

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Campaign Slogan – In The Beginning Man Created God

This provocative twist on the Bible’s opening line was plastered on the side of 25 Chicago buses this week as part of an advertising crusade by the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign.

The ads have been cruising between downtown and the city’s North and South sides, including the No. 56 Milwaukee route, since the beginning of the week and will run through June.

“The intent of the campaign is to stimulate discussion of religion and its place in our society,” said Charlie Sitzes, a spokesman for the Indiana group who with help from the American Humanist Association has collected more than $10,000 in private donations to buy the ad space in Indiana and Illinois.

The group brought its message to Chicago after a similar campaign in Indiana – to post the slogan “You can be good without God” – was rejected by transit authorities in Bloomington and stalled by officials in South Bend, who didn’t want the ads posted in time for President Barack Obama’s speech at Notre Dame.

Indiana’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Bloomington Public Transportation Corporation on the atheist group’s behalf. Bloomington Mayor Mark Kruzan has denounced his own transit system, saying he does not condone government censorship.

“It would appear that where there is more opposition to the message that maybe that would be the place where we needed dialogue more,” Sitzes said, maintaining that the slogan is a simple fact.

“All non-believers believe God is a creation of man,” he said. “We used to have thousands of gods. Now we’re down to one. We’re getting closer to the true number.”

Among the guidelines for determining if an advertisement can run on the CTA is a requirement that the ad be truthful and is “not directed at inciting imminent lawless action.”

via Atheists roll out ad campaign | The Seeker.

Americans Shopping For A Different Religion

William Lobdell has followed four different religions. Now he’s an atheist.

Raised Episcopalian, the 48-year-old Orange County, Calif. man switched to a non-denominational parish and then a Presbyterian one. After going through a year of Catholic conversion classes he eventually realized that he is “a reluctant atheist.”

“I wish I believed,” said the former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of the memoir “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America – And Found Unexpected Peace.” “I’d like to believe that someone is watching over me and protecting me, but I just don’t believe that.”

He may be an extreme example, but approximately half of Americans change religions at least once in their lives, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The forum recently released a report, “The U.S. Religious Landscape: Exploring Religion in America,” based on surveys of 35,000 people.

Pew found that Catholicism has seen the sharpest decrease in membership among all religions in the U.S. About 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics, according to the survey. The Archdiocese of Chicago declined to interview for this article.

via Americans ’shopping for religion’.

Peres Wants To Yield Sacred Sites To Vatican

President Shimon Peres is willing to hand over Israeli sovereignty of key Christian holy sites to the Vatican, a proposition that is reportedly opposed by Interior Minister Eli Yishai and that has ruffled feathers among other senior government officials, Army Radio reported on Monday.

Local Catholic community prepares for Papal visit

Beit Hanassi could not be reached for comment on Monday, as it does not issue statements to the press while the president is abroad.

According to the radio report, the president is exerting pressure on the government to give up sovereignty over six sites, including the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the Coenaculum on Mount Zion, Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and the Church of the Multiplication on the Kinneret.

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US Religious Right Concedes Defeat

Editors Note- The defeat is only temporary, if you read the back of The Book, ultimately we win…

Leading evangelicals have admitted that their association with George W. Bush has not only hurt the cause of social conservatives but contributed to the failure of the key objectives of their 30-year struggle.

James Dobson, 72, who resigned recently as head of Focus on the Family – one of the largest Christian groups in the country – and once denounced the Harry Potter books as witchcraft, acknowledged the dramatic reverse for the religious Right in a farewell speech to staff.

“We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said.

“We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”

Despite changing the political agenda for a generation, and helping push the Republicans to the Right, evangelicals have won only minor victories in limiting the availability of abortion. Meanwhile the number of states permitting civil partnerships between homosexuals is rising, and the campaign to restore prayer to schools after 40 years – a decision that helped create the Moral Majority – has got nowhere.

Though the struggle will go on, the confession of Mr Dobson, who started his ministry from scratch in 1977, came amid growing concern that church attendance in the United States is heading the way of Britain, where no more than ten per cent worship every week.

Unease is rising that a nation founded – in the view of evangelicals – purely as a Christian country will soon, like northern Europe, become “post-Christian”.

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Newsweek: The End of Christian America

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, “this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified.” As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America’s religious culture was cracking.

“That really hit me hard,” he told me last week. “The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous.” Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. “A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us,” Mohler wrote. “The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.” When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. “Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society,” he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.

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Faith of Conservatives, Liberals Differ Greatly

Social, political conservatives differ significantly Read more

Americans Calling Themselves Christians Drops 11% In One Generation

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.

The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

“More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ ” says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

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More Americans Say They Have No Religion

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.

“No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state,” the study’s authors said.

In the Northeast, self-identified Catholics made up 36 percent of adults last year, down from 43 percent in 1990. At the same time, however, Catholics grew to about one-third of the adult population in California and Texas, and one-quarter of Floridians, largely due to Latino immigration, according to the research.

Nationally, Catholics remain the largest religious group, with 57 million people saying they belong to the church. The tradition gained 11 million followers since 1990, but its share of the population fell by about a percentage point to 25 percent.

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Survey: Parents Rely on Personal Experience Over Biblical Guidance

Although most parents say they are trying to improve their parenting skills, few look to the Bible or church for guidance, a new study shows.

A majority of parents (60 percent) heavily rely on their own experiences growing up for parenting guidance but only one-fifth say they receive a lot of guidance from sacred text such as the Bible or Koran, the latest study by LifeWay Research found. Even fewer parents (15 percent) look to church as a source of guidance for parenting.

The vast majority (96 percent) agree they consistently try to be better parents but more than 6 in 10 completely ignore parenting seminars and over half don’t care for books by religious parenting experts, according to the study.

“Parents claim they are trying hard to be better parents but they are not welcoming outside guidance or advice,” said Scott McConnell, associate director of LifeWay Research, the research arm of LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“The only source of advice that a majority of parents use a lot is their own experience. It’s as if parents are collectively reverting to a popular toddler saying, ‘I will do it myself!’” said McConnell, co-author of a new book called The Parent Adventure.

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Conservative Groups Declare Stimulus Bill a War on Prayer

Democrats in Congress have declared war on prayer, say conservative groups who object to a provision in the stimulus bill that was passed by the House of Representatives last week.

The provision bans money designated for school renovation from being spent on facilities that allow “religious worship.” It has ignited a fury among critics who say it violates the First Amendment and is an attempt to prevent religious practice in schools.

According to the bill, which the Democratic-controlled House passed despite unanimous Republican opposition, funds are prohibited from being used for the “modernization, renovation, or repair” of facilities that allow “sectarian instruction, religious worship or a school or department of divinity.”

Critics say that could include public schools that permit religious groups to meet on campus. The House provided $20 billion for the infrastructure improvements, of which $6 billion would go to higher education facilities where the limitations would be applied.

“What the government is doing is discriminating against religious viewpoints,” said Mathew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that works to advance religious freedom.

“President Obama’s version of faith-based initiatives is to remove the faith from initiative,” said Staver, who believes Obama has “a completely different view on faith” from what he said during his presidential campaign.

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Bishops Encourage Multi-faith Prayer Rooms In Catholic Schools

A document issued by the Catholic Education Service said facilities for other faiths should be made available in all primary and secondary schools if possible.

Catholic schools in England and Wales should also consider adapting toilet facilities to accommodate ritual cleansing, the document said.

The guidance also said “respectful understanding” should be shown to pupils of other faiths who are withdrawn from or remain silent during Christian worship.

The advice – issued on behalf of the Catholic bishops of England and Wales – comes in response to new rules forcing all state schools to promote “community cohesion”.

Schools must foster race relations and religious tolerance to stop communities becoming divided.

It followed a warning from the Commission for Racial Equality that Britain’s segregated schools are “a ticking time bomb waiting to explode”.

In a document, the Catholic Church said around 30 per cent of pupils in Catholic schools were from other faiths or none.

The Most Rev Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Birmingham, and chairman of the Church’s education board, said: “Dialogue with other faiths is a consistent theme in the life of the Catholic Church. Such dialogue is conducted in many parishes and neighbourhoods, in colleges, universities and other academic circles.

“It has become increasingly important as the presence of other faith communities grows and becomes more evident in our society.”

The guidance said schools should consider putting aside a prayer room “if reasonably practicable” for use by staff and pupils from other faiths.

Existing toilet facilities might be adapted to accommodate individual ritual cleansing “which is sometimes part of religious lifestyle and worship”, it recommended.

It said schools should ensure “pupils’ health is attended to in times of fasting” – and canteens should take children’s religious dietary requirements into account.

In a further conclusion, schools with large numbers of non-Catholic students are advised to read out “messages of goodwill” at assemblies or send them directly to parents during religious ceremonies. This includes the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu celebrations, the guidance said.

The new community cohesion duty was introduced after the Government shelved controversial plans to force all faith schools to admit at least a quarter of pupils from other religions.

The U-turn followed protests by the Catholic Church which said schools should not be “coerced” into the move. It insisted schools already admitted large numbers of pupils from other faiths.

Oona Stannard, chief executive of the Catholic Education Service, said: “I am confident that schools will find the new publication helpful as we live out our clear vision of Catholic education, increasingly undertaken with those of other faiths in our midst.”

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