Thoughts of a Freethinker

I don't know how many readers have heard someone speak in tongues. A man in Fargo, ND, did so more than once at regular City Commission meetings when I was its mayor. It was just a brief moment. It flowed off his tongue like a native language. As I recall he had just made some point about anti abortion and, I suppose, wanted to give the impression he was hearing directly from God. Wikipedia says the practice is said to be a gift from the Holy Spirit and the speaker does not understand the language but through this super natural thing can speak it anyway. Here is an example. Speaking in tongues, explained in the Bible, was a thing back in the 1980's. I had a friend back then who was the head priest in a large Catholic church in ND. He confided there was a conflict there because some church members really liked to shout out speaking in tongues phrases during his Sunday sermon. Lots of other members found this annoying. There were three services each Sunday so my friend ordered th...

While there are many sites, written and video, about Christians in the U.S. leaving the faith, we don't have a good window into what is happening on other continents, One suggests a movement of young people out of the Christianity forced on ancestors during the slave trade and into traditi onal African religions.  In the link are stories of individuals in Africa who asked the local Christian preacher to pray for healing. They did not heal. Then they asked the local shaman to pray and do the rituals that slayed demons. They were healed. Another Christian leaves. This story was only a reporter's inquiry and was only in Nigeria. The complaints mentioned by Nigerians who left Christianity, or combined it with a native religion, are one heard across Africa and across the world for that matter. It is preachers becoming rich by tearful appeals to the faithful for money.  There are some super rich African evangelists in the poorest of areas.  From what I can tell, Christian strat...

Not that we can predict all future events, some patterns are attractive to read about. Before Roe was overturned, anti abortionists were rubbing their hands in anticipation of a series of statewide votes across the country. They were full of themselves bragging that their message of "murdering babies" was so clever voters in nearly all states would ban abortions. We know the opposite occurred. Now Trump's kiss of death will, it is expected, defeat the conservatives in Canada. Conservatives in Canada were polling ahead until Trump took office in the U.S. That said, there is a difference between the state abortion referendums and Trump's political situation. When the time comes to vote, voters need to have an alternative. In the case of abortion, most every woman who is pregnant knows about abortion. Nearly all know how to get an abortion or, in the case of medical abortions, where or how to buy the pills. In elections for candidates, there needs to be an alternative t...

Do you ever learn something new and realize it was right before your eyes since forever but you didn't see it? I'm embarrassed to say this happens to me often. One I'm mulling over just now is the role of Mormonism in driving or attracting people out of Christianity completely. I've come to see that the denomination of Mormonism has all the ingredients for a mass exodus and this could provide leverage that reaches deep into Christianity itself. Let's start with three huge denominations which have one thing in common. In the U. S. there are 6.8 million Mormons. There are 10 million U.S. Southern Baptists with three or so million that attend church. Some sources say there are roughly 50 million Catholics in the U.S. As I understand, numbers provided by Catholics are baptisms and includes those who have become inactive. What these denominations have in common is they treat women as second-tier citizens. Women cannot hold the reins of power including clergy. If a large ...

Looking at Christian websites for over a decade I have seen the view expressed countless times the those branches of the faith "that teach the Bible" will grow and liberal branches will close down. Certainly, liberal branches are not doing well. Conservative branches are not doing well either. I've predicted several times conservative denominations will die before liberal ones. This has not happened yet. Seminaries of conservative branches are closing or downsizing. Areas with large Catholic populations are closing churches and schools. The number becoming priests is declining. The old magic is gone. Denominations of the Christian faith could learn from electric automobile business. The first electric cars were luxury vehicles. During the last several years, pickup trucks were also luxury, outfitted to the nines. The public stopped buying both. Now car companies are bringing out cheaper models. Denominations have priced themselves out of the market in two ways. First, man...

Ovcr and over again Popes and Catholic spokesmen have declared a war on clergy in the denomination who practice sexual abuse. We are going to eradicate it they say. It has been reported that in his final years Pope Francis lost interest or just gave up on clergy abuse.  As the denomination seeks to stem the tide of losses in Europe and the U.S. by marketing in Asia and Africa more cases are coming from those areas. The link says the office in the Vatican that tracks the incoming cases admits it remains at about 800 cases per year. I don't have to mention that is almost three every day. One gets the impression the problem will never get much better than it is today. Can the denomination, or any denomination, survive with 800 new cases a year? Efforts have been made to correct the problem. Bishops are told to turn cases over to law enforcement instead of trying to hide them by transferring priests to other locations. The link says that even though those in high office know the rules ...

Just from my recollection, there have been ten discoveries of Noah's Ark. An article in National Geographic recently explained why none of the ten are actually Noah's Ark and none of the many yet to come are it either.  All the "discoveries" I'm aware of are pieces of lumber. Yet not a single one of them has markings linking it to the Ark. As the link points out, even if a piece of stone or petrified wood were discovered with the name "Noah" on it it might be another Noah or a different flood. The Bible describes the location of the Ark but no one know for certain what that location is today. If no one knows where to look how can it ever be found? As I have said here many times there is no geological evidence there ever was a world-wide flood. There have been many local floods in history just as there are today. One would guess many flood stories were told around fires in prehistory times. Before any form of light came along story telling in the dark was...

The Christian faith takes in billions of dollars which, in turn, is used to sell the faith to the public. Every week thousands of preachers/priests stand behind a pulpit talking about the faith. The collection plate is passed or pledges are paid and this keeps the economic engine running.  There was only a tiny amount of money available in the non believing world until perhaps the 1970's. When Madeline O'Hair protested prayer in her son's school and became famous. She published books and started American Atheists. About 20 years ago large publishing houses started producing books on atheism and an entire world of profit in non belief unknown until then opened up. Today sites like this one are so large those who produce them make a nice living. The link is a site where people who are experiencing complications with their faith discuss their issues on camera with a professional councilor. The host has a Ph. D. in psychology. He left the Mormon branch years ago and found many ...

Finally, charges were dropped against a young woman in Georgia who had a miscarriage and disposed of the fetus. The District Attorney advised police not to arrest her in the first place but for whatever reason they did so anyway. The DA eventually dropped all charges. This practice, local anti-abortion sheriffs and police chiefs deciding what state and federal laws mean and arresting local women they don't like, has been going on since Trump's first term. A woman miscarries and the locals make up scenarios and file charges. It's a product of legislators who know nothing about medicine passing laws and giving religious local officials a green light to run their area from the Bible. I recall about a dozen cases similar to the one in the link.  I've discussed here many times before the similarity between prohibition and abortion. It was possible to manufacture and sell alcoholic drinks undetached. Whiskey was distilled where there was no light except the moon, thus the nam...

Say what you will about Donald Trump, he is entertaining. If one wants to hear policy as stand-up comedy, he is the star. The stock market has been in free fall as we all know. While there are a gazillion pundits making comments everyday about the market there is one fact everyone agrees upon. It is that the stock market is about making money. When profits and high and interest rates and inflation low stocks go up. This is not every day, of course, but over some months. When individual investors are making money they have money to buy stocks.  And the opposite is also true, when no one makes money, or thinks they will make money, the market goes down. Trump has some simple but wrong ideas about the economy. He thinks China will pay the tariffs. The federal government will receive this tariff revenue; lower taxes and the stock market and economy will thrive. The opposite is happening because Trump has raised taxes instead of lowering them. Companies think their sales and profits wil...

Slowly, but surely, a bulldozer of change is pushing orthodox Christianity aside. The statistics are too powerful to conclude anything else. There is a theory expressed often on the web something will replace it. Sometimes what is said to replace it is called another "religion" and sometimes it is called something else. It could be there is, or will be eventually, no agreement on what the words "religion", "secular" or "no belief" mean.  Today two different views appeared, an article and a video, both grappling with new thinking in what we now refer to as "religion" or "spirituality." They both discuss what might come next after Christianity becomes ever smaller.  In the article  a wonderful writer tells of becoming so deeply Christian she became a Lutheran minister. After almost two decades of doing this, she left it behind. She simply no longer believed in the tenets of the faith.  She writes about looking for something bigg...

China has imposed a law against establishing new churches in China. Sarcastically, I'm calling for an "Amen." The ban and the reason given is exactly what the Soviet Union did against Christianity prior to WWII. The Soviets did not like potential of religion to organize against the ruling party politically so they tried to stamp out Christianity.  I can't stop my own conspiracy thinking from lighting up. If you were China and had been planning for a response to a Trump trade war for some years, what tricks would be in your quiver? You would have studied where Trump's political support comes from and take that support away from him. Any student of elections can see Trump was really popular in rural areas where grain prices rule. The Chinese know the grain business. They started buying more grain from South American during Trump's first term and U. S. farmers have never gotten that market back. Now, they have all but stopped, or threatened to stop, buying any U....

  Anyone who follows even a bit of sports knows every high school, college and professional team has a small army of people discussing who lost the game last week, we need a new coach, etc etc. Lots of people make a little or a lot of money with channels of You Tube and on talk radio discussing sports.  All this discussion of sports does not lead to some final answer. It does, however, served a purpose. It gives a set of people something to do, to engage in. It is a form of entertainment or diversion.  Christianity is identical to sports in this way. There is another small army of people who make part or all of their livelihood discussing religion. Perhaps there are as many You Tube and radio stations discussing religion as there are discussing sports. Picking at random now in the Easter and Passover season here is one discussing which body of water Moses and the Jews crossed when escaping Egypt. It comes to no conclusion; none fit the Bible's narrative. That does not mat...

There is a regular stream of studies by the Barna research group. This organization is Christian.  At least its founder and director, George Barna, testifies as such. Barna says he founded the organization because other survey groups were asking banal questions like, "Are you a Christian?" He wanted questions that dug into people's thinking, "Why do you believe this (or that)." His surveys have plotted the drop in orthodox Christian views. Perhaps a question remains as to whether views on gods, etc. have changed or that new questions are being asked that would have had the same answers years ago. The most recent Barna survey found people are establishing their own version of what is seen and unseen and what a good person does or does not do. While we cannot predict the future, there are things that are very unlikely to happen. One that I think very unlikely is the return of an influential church with influential leaders. To believe this part of the old orthodoxy...

Deep in China's hierarchy, experiments and trail balloons have been practiced beginning with Trump's first term in 2016. China began to realize U.S. politics could elect people who are bonkers. China studied carefully where the weak points are in the U.S. economy and made certain the U.S. could not pull off what Trump is now attempting to do. There have been several stories about China acquiring exotic mental needed in computers and other things. It could be they are in a black mail position. Perhaps the U.S. has some big cards to play but China definitely has some. I don't have much faith that Trump and his circle have the smarts to acquire and hold a good hand of cards. What we all have to wonder is how many losing hands Trump will play before he realizes he should not be playing poker with those smarter than he is. It seems like we are in for a long period of unpleasant events.  We all know it's possible Republicans in the House and Senate could unify to end what Tru...

Priests used to spend many of their working hours each week listening to the confessions of the faithful. Today, confessions are so infrequent some parishes offer them only upon appointment.   The confession ritual was done because the priest listening to the confession held high credentials. This came from what Jesus allegedly said to Peter, "Upon this rock you are to build the church." Clergy, and most of the faithful for hundreds of years, interpreted this as, "You men own the church. It belongs to you. This allows you to pass judgment on sinners as if you are God himself." Clergy admonished the faithful to fess up about their sins. Clergy then exercised power over the faithful by forgiving or withholding. Martin Luther was angry that some priests extracted money in exchange for forgiveness. We now know more recent priests have used confession to obtain sex.   The church leaders did not foresee the coming of the pill to avoid contraception. When it arrived, Catho...

  As I reviewed in a previous post, confession was practiced widely in the U.S. though the 1950's. It has fallen to a trickle. This, even though the Pope advises the faithful to continue the practice. The book I'm reading, For I Have Sinned, goes through the many reasons confession no longer works for most Catholics. Clergy have committed their own sins. People have become more suspicious of authorities. There are a host of other societal changes that are discussed in the book and many other places.  The book spends a lot of time reviewing written materials from Catholic parishes, local parish newsletters, official Catholic studies and other sources. A huge unresolvable problem for the practice of confession from both the perspectives of clergy and lay people has been birth control. Contraception is a major sin with no resolution. With almost all Catholics practicing contraception how can those who sin navigate confession? And, with the sin all but universal, how can clergy na...

  The newest fragments claim to be remnants of a battle mentioned in the Bible. In this case, and most all others I know about, some pieces of pottery, etc., have been found that are linked to the ethnic group involved in the Bible story. The objects found are not linked to the battle itself and could have been left by others living or passing through the area. Humorous examples of "finds" that attempted to verify Old Testament stories included the "Walls of Jericho." Remints of stone walls were found and celebrated. Then they were dated and could not have been the "Walls of Jericho." Then there was for costly search for evidence that Moses lived in the desert for 40 years. This search was paid for by the government of Israel. Nothing found there either. The stories live on, but they did not happen. So often I see highway billboards advertising a church. The billboard declares, "We are a Bible Believing Church." If there are things in the Bible t...

The wealth of the Catholic denomination, its ornate churches, other properties and helicoptered Popes, is noted by its members. They realize other causes in their circle need money more than their denomination. The denomination has amassed wealth because of its large membership, not the size of individual tithes. Now, its membership, while still huge, is dropping. The Vatican is not giving raises and has in place a hiring freeze.  In the U.S. Trump is dialing back the federal funding of social programs the Catholic denomination has contracted to run. The link says there is no source of reserves or savings to keep the programs running so people are being laid off.  President W. Bush when he was Governor of Texas started using religious groups instead of state agencies to save money. He brought the concept with him to the Presidency. I wonder if this visible and well known source of funds for Catholic agencies caused church members to conclude their church no longer needed the d...

When I read the paper this morning, I was struck by the unsolvable and seemingly unresolvable dilemma of housing coming at us. There is a tsunami of people approaching retirement with only social security and housing costs have outrun them. There is another set of homeless people and public money for them is evaporating. Then we all know about the sinking stock market and we all wonder how the tariffs, etc., will be resolved.  Historians, and of course every person and every family, have a view of "turning points" in history. Scrolling on sites today were discussions about a couple of periods that were, perhaps, even bigger that today. One was the Reformation. Shakespeare lived about that time and his plays reflected religious dilemmas he sensed were around him. His characters represented good and evil. Yet, he seemed not to be certain that evil was punished and good rewarded. At the time of the Referendum Catholic priests, at least some of them, represented evil. Luther came...

Apparently, a lot of Bibles are printed in China and if you buy one you will have to pay the tariff. Trump seems to be no friend of Christianity. If things follow their usual course, Trump will exempt Bibles but charge everything else.  Like all of you, I'm wondering what will eventually happen in all of this tariff war. Since no license is required to speculate about the eventual outcome, I'll be one of the millions who do it.  Because of a people I know where I live, I've been reading up on what is called "narcissism." As every reader knows, it is called a "personality disorder," not a mental illness. It is said by pundits who claim to know the disorder that one trait of those who have it is the inability to correctly discern the consequences of their behavior. That is to say, the narcissist's preoccupation with his/her own standing is so important calculation about the consequences or price of winning a particular competition is never made.  It ta...

I don't claim to be a historian, especially one in religion. But from my memory, prejudice and discrimination have always been the part of the Christianity remaining when changes happened. Surely we can conclude slavery and segregation, endorsed by parts of the faith, hurt and did not help it. How can discrimination against LGBT+ help the faith? Oh yes, I know well the argument those Christians especially in the South, who practiced slavery and later segregation, were not "really Christians." They did not, the argument goes read properly nor understand the Bible. Think about this. Slavery existed for about 400 years on our soil. For 400 years preachers told the faithful slavery was ok with God. And, there is slavery in the Bible. Now, with noses high in the air, there are Christians saying their view on sexual issues is correct and others are not. This has been going on for several decades now. It may take 400 more years before it, like slavery, is buried in the sands of ...

A guy from Australia was able to con a city and the state of Kentucky into helping pay for a "replica" of Noah's Ark. Mostly, Christianity has been really successful at getting people's money. The ruse that you are going to hell unless you give lots of money to the priests worked well until Martin Luther spoiled a good deal. Now, another really good idea did not work.  In 2013, a family in California decided they could live off the families of dead Christians by starting to build a mausoleum shaped like a cross. Families would pay a healthy price for a space--when all spaces were filled the huge cross shaped mausoleum would cost between one and two billion dollars. In 2014 there was a news story that the family who would own and collect the billion needed to sell 400 spaces before construction could begin. They were only able to sell 22.   Those in the Christian faith pay for a lot of private jets used by clergy. I've never seen a tally of how many of these airpla...

Keeping track of the newest technics for bamboozling the public is a never-ending task. Only a couple of years ago, Christians on the right told us there was an unstoppable movement to end all abortions. Women, it said, were coming to realize the one-cell fetus is a human being and abortion is murder. Then, the opposite turned to be the case. Keeping the myth of success alive meant keeping the cash flow alive and jobs secure.  Now, with polling and church membership showing that orthodox Christianity is sliding away, some new schtick is needed. And, the Christian right is test marketing one, "there is a spiritual awakening going on across the country." You will not find any concrete evidence about this, but who needs it? If crowds like to hear it, shout it out loud.   In the week's The New Yorker there is yet another of the drumbeat which has become quite constant. The article reviews the various ways intellectual thinking in the U.S. now finds actual evidence of a Jesus ...

The University of Portland has the term Catholic by name. Being a Catholic business, there is a requirement that all students take one of various courses offered by the Department of Religion. While formerly the requirement probably was a course on "Biblical Texts" or "Catholic Theology" now students can choose others and fulfill this requirement. One has the title "Queer Theology."   Looking at the course description of Queer Theology, it is apparent students will study the Bible. That is, instead of studying it under the course title of "texts", they will read texts in the Queer course. No doubt the previously required course touched on various meanings of these texts, including how Catholics interpret such material, the replacement options will include other interpretations as well.  How could a private university with "Catholic" in its name get away with this? Perhaps the way to answer that is another question, "How can a priva...

The most fun part of this blogging hobby is finding absurd things in religion and writing about them. Less fun is finding books and articles that say exactly what I say here over and over again. A book is just now going on sale by a sociologist at Notre Dame who explains the fall in numbers of the religious due to society no longer finding is relevant. No one who reads this blog would find that to be news. Yet, so many in the faith do not understand this. The author, at the Catholic Notre Dame, is himself a Catholic. Yet he can come to no other conclusion after watching society and the church grow further apart. As he says, the reasons for the split are complicated and many.  To me, the split follows a pattern we have seen since the beginning of human history. Think of the Greeks and their worship of their gods. How could the Greeks have ever left behind gods that were so revered. The same with Pagans. When Christianity first appeared outside the Middle East prominent people said i...

I read today another of the same articles that appear almost daily. I suppose the same message is repeated at many services, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish. Probably one could add Islam and Hindu and who knows what others. The message is the faith must stick with "orthodoxy" or people will leave. That the public is attracted to orthodoxy and nothing else.   The link's reasoning goes like this. Surveys show that those who remain in the faith hold to orthodox beliefs. For Christians this means people who go to church a lot and pray a lot also believe there was a Jesus who came back to life after being dead, there is a God, sin, heaven and hell. Those who are unsure about these things do not attend church as often nor pray as much. The conclusion, of course, is that if every church and denomination hammered home those tenets of the faith as true the decline of the faith would reverse and it would again grow.  A man who commented a lot on this blog years ago made the same po...

A year or so ago a multi church group in California founded by famous author, Rick Warren, left the Southern Baptist Convention over women behind the pulpit. Now another multi church group in South Carolina with 33,000 people is doing the same . How does any denomination or denomination-like group of churches think it can discriminate against women and survive? Beats me. The Southern Baptist Convention, Catholic Church and Missouri Synod Lutherans are three denominations that do not ordain women as clergy. Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination and are an association that churches join rather than one run by a denomination's home office as are the Catholics and Missouri Synod. The membership in all three is falling rapidly.  It is also true denominations that include women as clergy are falling also. The economics of churches, however, gives those who include women as pastors a fighting chance of hanging on. The larger the pool of people available to pastor churc...

Hopefully, this rational decision will stand. It is that the State Government of Alabama cannot prosecute those who pay travel expenses of women for out of state abortions. Several organizations are raising huge amounts of money to help women in these backwards states.   While certainly I'm not an expert on law and the Constitution, one hallmark I've understood to exist is that legal commercial business between states is to be permitted. In fact, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 came about because of letters between George Washington and John Madison both were disgusted with the colonies charging tariffs on goods coming into one colony from another. The emotional opposition to abortion blinds otherwise rational people into irrational votes and behavior. In other countries, opposition to abortion bans melted away when women went elsewhere to get abortions. This happened in Catholic Ireland where abortions were illegal but women got abortions in England. It happened in Chil...