UK: 70% of young people are 'not religious' according to a report - Sensationalist Headlines

I think this sits at the heart of a common inability or outright refusal to discuss religion. People don't see Catholics, they see the Bible and the occasionally dodgy practices of the Church, but also the minority of Catholics that use the Christian message to despise and belittle homosexuality. Recent history has definitely shown how people can see Islam, and then view groups such as ISIS as being the epitome of following the messages of the religion (spoiler: no). I think you label it best with the use of the word 'weird'.

You are putting a lot of blame on me and that is unfair on me. I am not being sneaky by summoning an admin, I am not qualified to deal with this but BDA is very good at providing insight. His posts are quite inspiring. I just wanted to talk man, come on. Don't be like that. "Killing yourself"? No man. That's inane.

I have gone out of my way to not talk to you directly since page 2 but you're escalating things and insinuating I'm a problem that needs to be dealt with. I'm never under influence nor am I unstable right now so this is clear as day to me.

If that's how you feel then okay. Sorry it went that way but these things happen, but listen I really did just want to talk to you. Without any judgmental insinuations.

I'm actually surprised the figure isn't higher. Apart from some of my Muslim and Hindu friends/colleagues, I know absolutely no-one that goes to church.

Religion does not equip us with real rational reasons to live in a merciless world, and so people must desperately cling to it. I think this video might be a little relevant https://youtu.be/XRxAqj4R_vw You see how she needs the belief to stay alive? That's just like an addiction, you dont learn how to cope properly.

I'm not sure I entirely agree. I used to be very religious growing up, right up until the end of secondary school. It wasn't that I simply wasn't drawn to Christianity, I was actively pushed away from it. Once I reached secondary school, events in the Bible starting making less sense to me and I found those events harder and harder to ignore and from a moral standpoint I found my own morals increasingly at odds with certain common Christian beliefs from obvious things such as homosexuality being sin, which felt at odds with my own ideals that surely people should be free to do as they please so long as they do not hurt others, to ideas such as repentance and belief being more important than actually being a good person. Christian's themselves also left me somewhat disillusioned with the religion. Ironically the people from my church, the vicars, the leader of my sunday school, the people who had studied the Bible in more detail, I found myself disagreeing with them more, but they didn't bother me so much. It was 'every day' Christians that were really starting to put me off, especially those I heard of from America. The rampant contradictions, the picking and choosing, the people whom seemed to make no effort to combat greed or poverty or violence in even their own lives let alone anyone elses, but for whom homosexuality was a huge deal. Aspects of the bible which had struck me as petty, aspects which I had began making an effort to ignore, seemed to be all certain Christians cared about. And it wasn't that they were all bad. It's simply that Christianity as a whole didn't seem especially good. It didn't seem to make much difference. Sorry, this became more elaborate than I had intended.

For people like yourself who have put a lot of thought into it, the push or pull will always come down issues of morality or theology. But I was thinking more of fanatics or passive thinkers. For the fanatic, someone looking to vilify others and impose their views, the Anglican church is too non-confrontational. At least from my experience, Christians in this country are not looking for a fight. For the passive thinker, someone who simply follows social norms without consideration, the church is utterly pointless as the social norm is not anymore living in small communities where you go to church everyday.

If if you live in the states the exact vice versa happens

I mean, look. Life is hard enough. If you find value in a religion, and you personally hold those beliefs with conviction and that is what helps you through your hardships than that's wonderful. You should be allowed to do so and no one should judge you for it. I find value in music so someone could easily judge me for that, but we would just be being assholes to each other about nothing so I would like to choose NOT to do that. But the moment you clearly show you don't have that conviction and instead choose to wield your faith as a weapon against others not exactly like yourself is when you lose me. I grew up around those people. Basically the opposite of Scorpious it seems, in faith but around very religious folks, and when my own faith started to waiver I was ostracized for it. It ruined a good portion of my early years. Even in high school, I was taught that I was worthless, used, damaged. That no one would want me, all because of things I couldn't control that happened to me as a child, all because of overly religious influence in sex ed. I just have to remember that the people I grew up around don't represent all faiths, or all faithful. Even though I know I have my biases born of truly unpleasant experiences, I think it's important to remember we all have our own ways of dealing with life, and so long as we hold them with personal conviction, and don't put others down with them, we should be able to coexist happily with them. Although seriously, keep it out of government.

What are you talking about? Tons of people judge Americans for Trump and Russians for Putin.

Interesting that so many people indicate they are not religious, I expected it to be a smaller number seeing how many religious people I meet in uni and at work. Article said that researches predict the count of religious teens will be even lower in next 10-20 years. It might as well be because of situation like mine, which I've written below, especially how UK is way more culturally-diverse than, for example, Latvia. I grew up in Latvia, in a Russian family - think of it being similar to Russia where Orthodox is king - every Russian family teaches their kids about Orthodox. Government and locals(Latvian people, as in people who were born and raised in families mostly following Latvian traiditons, unlike around 50% of the country that follows USSR traditions) are all in Christianity instead, so Xmas and Easter holidays were always by the Christian standard dates like in UK, US and etc. Long story short my mum moved to UAE and completely switched to Islam. When she visits Latvia, even to this day, she gets all sorts of cautious looks on her and, I'm not even kidding, she gets extra scanned at airport security before departure. She taught me about it, and as time went during my childhood I believed it more and more but it was a huge clash of two religions in my mind. Got a bit confusing. Last year I felt like completely following teachings of Islam, and I did, but only for a few months. Then, all of a sudden, I completely lost the religious view on the world, I just started looking at it as-is instead of constantly thinking "doing this is a sin, doing that is a sin! I will get in trouble!" and right now I just don't think about it at all. I dropped all beliefs I had of either religion and I can certainly count myself into the 'no religion' demographic now. But I've got this heavy pressure on me of not telling either of my parents about it - my dad is pro-Orthodox while my mum is pro-Islam, so I reckon both would get a bit upset over my choice, but I can't really help it you know. I just don't believe in either anymore. I listen to Perturbator, GosT, Carpenter Brut synthwave artists who have pentagrams and Satan on almost any media you search about them. After asking my friends who are religious, they said it's pretty much a sin to listen to them, yet alone go to their live performances(which I have done and loved it, no we didn't summon Satan and no I'm not a satanist). What I do appreciate is that I gained insight on both very large religions, how things are viewed from both perspectives and how different cultures live with these beliefs, but I don't belong to either anymore. If you personally have bigger connection to religion than me - I can perfectly see why, and all the power to you, I'm glad! Just please don't weaponise your beliefs and try to go against me for not believing in the same thing that you believe in. Sorry this was a long post but I was trying to make it a mix of my experience and some insight in lesser-known country so you can understand my situation better.

As a Christian, I really don't understand where people get this sort of thing from. When it's from an older person, I get the feeling they're just using religion as a tool for their own authority, but when it's kids among kids, it's just totally baffling to how incorrect it is.

In my experience I think it's ignorance worn as a badge of honor, really. Ignorance is fine, it doesn't mean that person is stupid. It simply means you don't know something. No one knows everything. I can tell someone how to build a PC from parts, but that same person might have to tell me how to change a carburetor. Holding knowledge over someones head is silly. But I have noticed a trend of ignorance of certain topics being seen as a good thing in certain groups. After all, if you don't like something, why learn about it? We see it with LGBT rights and climate change for instance, where people in power not only don't understand the issue, but clearly don't WANT to, and that is seen as a positive thing. It sucks.

Look I'm going to play the dickhead here, but if you bring up this sort of statement you should back it up. Don't just go "If only you'd research, tee hee silly boy!~" if you're going to try and change someone's mind and they're not obviously arrogant and ignorant by choice, the onus is on you to educate them. It's not right for you to just throw your hands up and go "Y'ALL PEOPLE NEED JESUS" without saying exactly why.

The fact that you're perfectly fine with someone saying: "That's what happens when people are educated enough to make their own decisions and looking at the planet we live on right "Where the fuck is god hiding!" Not only that but people have very busy lifestyles right now, reading a book/scripture could be a waste of valuable time, I know they say you have to read between the lines with the bible to see what it is telling you. But that's what Theresa May does," with zero pushback, but you want evidence for his claim shows the problem more clearly than any argument. You agree with the other side. So you demand evidence from one while accept aggressive insults by the other without challenge. His comment was perfectly legitimate relative to what he was responding to.

From Muslim perspective it's a harm to yourself not to listen to songs about God, iirc. Don't know about other religions but nobody gives a shit about music you listen to in Orthodox community as far as I'm concerned, so it was very surprising to hear the contrast in 'do-s and don't-s'. I'm not going to talk about it further to avoid derailing, but I hope you see what I mean. How I defended it in my head is quite simple - I love the tunes and the energy that the music has makes me feel genuine enjoyment that not a lot of other music does(yes I'm one of these picky kiddos that only likes specific type of music) and I couldn't care less that e.g. Perturbator has pentagrams on his merch and he has an inverted cross on his laptop when he plays live. I'm not listening to his music for the satanic part, and I'm not going to his live performance to worship Satan with him. There's nothing of sorts going on, it just so happens to be his artistic influence. That said, I noticed that one friend that I asked who lives in Middle Eastern country went in much more detail how bad it is for me to do that(listen/pay for merch/pay for performance) than a friend here from London(same religion) who moved from Afghanistan as a kid and grew up here. Obviously a single answer isn't an indication of anything, but that's what I observed with my friends' reactions on top of what my mother were to say if I were to tell her about the music I listen to in more detail.

Reading your post made my head hurt because you keep flipping back and forth in tense and didn't use quotes properly but let me explain. I see posts like this all the time where the claim is "if you read more into it" or "if you cared to educate yourself on it" which is itself a silly statement to make, because if you clearly possess the knowledge to enlighten yourself on a subject, surely you should enlighten others? And no, I don't agree with the other side, thanks for making a completely and utterly baseless assumption. I was religious for six years, and although I've long since renounced my faith I believe that religious texts and the practices of religion have a lot of social bearing nowadays as well as a lot of societal worth that can be extrapolated from them. My point wasn't "uhm source please lol XD" it was that if you truly care about others becoming enlightened as to the value of texts, you should be willing to teach them when you speak up and tell them that they should learn more, otherwise all you're doing is flailing your arms around like Helen Lovejoy and hopelessly wailing that someone won't learn when you don't even take the time to teach them. If you have that magical, instant-fix knowledge, why not share it? Why stand there and wail helplessly, doing nothing but entrenching the person you're trying to dispute? Granted I don't believe it's always the case -- some people are assholes who won't learn even if you do try and teach them, but Nabile's post reeked of self-aggrandization and hoity-toitiness to me. This ideal that somehow Nabile has The Knowledge that Enlightens Them but then is unwilling to actually share why, in fact, they believe it is worthwhile, it's just point-scoring and box-ticking underdoggery. I don't like it.

Sometimes, just sometimes, it isn't worth giving what is a dissertation worth of reasons and arguments to respond to an insulting online forum post.

The reason I'm not holding JoshTheSmith to task on his own statements is because he's clearly making an ass of himself by acting like a trilby-wearing /r/atheism booster, honestly. I felt legitimately embarrassed reading his posts, so I felt like it wasn't really necessary to pants him any further. There's no bias there, I think militant atheism is stupid as fuck, sometimes even stupider than militant evangelism. I'd only ever really consider the two inequal because militant evangelism carved a bloody swathe across the globe for several centuries, honestly. And more importantly saying "go educate yourself" does nothing. If you really want them to learn you have to try and at least give them a foot in the door, otherwise you might aswell say "go fuck yourself" for what it will achieve -- if you don't show them you're willing to give them your time then they're going to disregard what you say regardless of what it was.

Feeling that way is completely subjective, and while applying the standard of replying as a call out to Nabile and not Josh is a double standard to the rest of our view. We don't know you feel he's making an ass out of himself unless you say so.

It's a lot easier for us all to agree that we've never seen god at all in our lives, because that's reality. The claim that there is a god is a positive claim, we don't have to prove a negative, you have to prove your claim. T

I honestly don't see what was wrong with joshthesmith's first post. Does anyone know why this trend is true? He offered his belief; increased education and decreased free time. I think that's a reasonable hypothesis, although maybe worded badly. There are probably a lot more factors, I'd mention also probably that more people no longer need religion in the same way like Nabile or the woman in the video posted above. I don't see how it was offensive to suggest possible reasons, it could have been used as a starting point for an honest discussion about those reasons.

Way I've always seen it is that God gave us free will so we're able to choose to make something of--or, alternatively--fuck up our own lives. People believe different things, though, and that's always been fine and dandy. If it weren't, then there wouldn't be such a thing as that nasty free will stuff

I very specifically remember asking my Religious Education teacher why bad shit happens to good people and he just shrugged and gave me the old "all part of God's plan" answer. And that was basically the point when I decided I wanted nothing to do with it. The church for years has been seen a bastion of ignorance and hypocrisy. Young people don't want to engage with it because odds are you go to church to listen to some 80 year old tell you about all the things you can't do or you'll upset Jesus.

Not really surprising imo I was raised Catholic, attended Catholic schools and went to Church each Sunday from a young age. But even so I didn't believe in god by the time I was 9 and I was an Atheist by the time I was 10 years old. As a little kid I really liked watching stuff like nature documentaries, and learning about space and other planets. Nothing super advanced, just the kind of thing you find in kids books, in Science class, on TV, or the kind of thing you glean from wandering around the Science and Natural History Museums in London as a kid. Even at my christian schools and Church, nobody I asked could really reconcile all of the things I learned with what I was supposed to believe about the world based on my religion. Why should I take these things on faith when all of this other information had actual evidence to back it up? It's much easier to apply critical thinking to your own beliefs without contending with the saturation of religion that some other countries, like America, have- it's not as easy to just take the existence of god for granted because you aren't constantly having that belief reinforced in every aspect of your life. I'm actually mildly surprised to hear Jesus mentioned on TV or the Radio around Christmas, Religion just doesn't seem to be the big deal here that other cultures make it out to be. And it certainly doesn't have the political power it enjoys elsewhere.

I don't understand why people think having religion or being a genuinely good person gives some sort of force field around their lives from "bad things" happening to them, and the lack thereof is the goal-scoringl fact as to why religion us useless or wrong.

I guess we're having a "how i discovered atheism" group therapy session here, here's mine: when I was a young boy my aunt got a divorce, and at the time i knew that divorce was a sin and sinners go to hell. and yet my aunt was still religious and went to church every week, why? you sinned, you're going to hell, you are done. I also thought about how dinosaur bones fit into the bible's tales and I was taught about the idea that "those parts were wrong, god actually created evolution" This introduced me to the concept of editing a religion and that made me think "what else was changed in time, what if the entire christian belief was edited?" later on I started thinking about santa clause. if a small child sees presents under the tree that weren't there last night when everyone in the house went to sleep they think "what an odd situation, this makes no sense how can this be?" then people tell them about santa and no matter how silly it sounds you know it's true because you are surrounded by hundreds of people who believe it to be true. This is the part where I tip my fedora and button up my trenchcoat and point out the same thing applies to christianity and how people don't understand how the universe was created and how we got here. Finally, I thought about the ancient dead religions that were practiced in rome and egypt. If I told people that the egyptian god Ra was my one true faith, people would look at my like i'm fucking retarded, but why? there is no difference between the belief of god or the belief of Ra, or even Zeus. there is absolutely no difference whatsoever. I can take a vacation to egypt and read hieroglyphics about religion that are older than the oldest bible. this was my final lightbulb going off moment where i discovered that people just don't like living in a world where things are unknown and they just make up stories to make things make sense, but things are only true if other people believe the same answers as well. not knowing answers to everything means you're not in control, and there is nothing more scary than that.

I'm not saying that anyone expects faith to automatically lead to a good life. But why should people dedicate their lives to the rules of an entity who's plan supposedly involves giving kids cancer and drowning refugees in the Mediterranean while the people that supposedly represent that God are showing up the news every week because of some new scandal usually involving diddling kids or saying that some natural disaster happened because we let the gays marry. Like people are still absolutely raised and live according to Christian values. Because society would break down without it. But there's just no belief in the spiritual side.

This is pretty much what it seems like. Countless times I have read the same story, "I asked why bad things happened to good people, got no answer, and became an atheist". I feel as if that were the crux of why you are an atheist, then you were most likely already one and just looking for an explanation to tell people why.