Thoughts of a Freethinker

Poland is a country identified with the Catholic Church. While Italy is home to the Vatican, Poland has a long history of devotion to the faith. Recently, however, a conservative publication sounded the alarm that religious instruction in public schools is being lowered in importance and resources. When one reads the statistics of Catholicism, one can see why.  Only 1/3 of Polish adults say the attend weekly mass. As with all polling asking, "How often do you attend mass?" many, thinking no one keeps track, no doubt overstate how often they attend. The number of priests and those entering priesthood training is falling. The same thing is happening in Italy, home of the Vatican. Lots of tricks have been used to get people to church. Decades ago it was the guitar mass. In Protestant churches it was Christian rock and/or adding a contemporary service with little preaching and lots of music. While apparently are some exceptions, attendance keeps falling. The peculiar thing is tha...

It is widely known fertility rates have declined to below the replacement rate. There are groups with vested political and economic interests who hype this as a terrible thing and say send us money to stop this. Only occasionally does one come across a balanced view of the seemingly inevitable decline in the world population. One appeared recently in The Atlantic but I'm unable to link it. We all know the dilemma of fewer births. More old people drawing Social Security and money for healthcare and fewer young people paying in. No let up in the need for "blue collar" workers but fewer workers. Salaries/costs will rise.  The article reaches the same conclusion I have mentioned here many times. What we call the standard of living may well fall, the article guesstimates 10%.  On the other hand, there will be some offsetting benefits. Less traffic, shorter line and smaller crowds. Natural resources will last longer and the severe impacts of climate change will be less. Part of...

A Catholic site recently discussed the question of how long a member should spend in the confession session with their priest. The article asked if 30 minutes was too long? A while back I wrote here about a book published by the Catholic professor who found the practice of confession is much less popular today than it was in the past. The majority of Catholics do not go to confession. Yet apparently some do. Perhaps it is more popular in some parishes. Older members are more likely to practice it than younger. My late friend who was a priest said listening to people drone on about details in their lives was quite boring. Catholic friends I've asked about confession said they learned while children they were to think of something insignificant, hear they are forgiven and leave. But reading the link about half hour confessions gives me the impression some Catholics view confession as a counselling session. They don't see it as an opportunity to get their sins forgiven but a time...

Modern worship today is, apparently, really big on long songs that are not old hymns but written recently. There are conferences discussing seriously whether this modern music which eats up more worship time than the sermon is "Christianity"?  Some are wondering if Jesus would return playing a guitar. I've been at such a service and am baffled by this practice. This reflects, of course, my age and that I associate "worship" with the practices I have known in my lifetime.  None of this means my experience was "right" nor that modern worship that is closer to a rock concert is wrong. It merely shows that the entire enterprise of religion, its beliefs and its rituals, are man-made to fit what the culture reflects at any given time. It's a given that the worship I experienced would have seemed strange to generations before me. Many churches have two different kinds or style of services--almost two separate groups in the same congregation. Does the invi...

Anyone who watches the Supreme Court, including the Stare decisions made outside of court sessions, can see the term "religious liberty" means there are good versions of Christianity and not-so-good. The good versions, as conservatives see it, need favorable treatment. The long-standing ability of religions to get away with things that establish certain religious views as law has accelerated in this court. This court majority was appointed around the time of Covid. Attending church services had the obvious risk of spreading disease. Religions kept pounding on the church attendance. One can read on the web the series of decisions that favor religion. This included overturning Roe which as we know backfired. The New Yorker recently published a long profile of Chief Justice John Roberts. Its conclusion is that Roberts sees his mission as returning the Court to what it was in the 1950's. That is a court whose decisions reflect traditional views of religion and family. He some...

Readers know Moses came down from his personal chat with God somehow carrying stones upon which God had chiseled the Ten Commandments. He saw that his followers were worshipping and celebrating a calf made of gold. For reasons not explained in the Bible, Moses in his anger smashed the stones God had so carefully given him. If God carefully engraved stones with his wishes and gave them to me, I would treat them with great care, knowing they were rules that must be followed for eternal salvation. But not Moses, he just tossed them as if, "Yeah, God gave them to me, but you guys made me so mad I smashed them. It's your fault we don't know what God wrote." A more peculiar part of the story is the "golden calf." It says in the Bible  the gold for the golden calf came from gold earrings worm by the women Jews who had escaped slavery in Egypt. This got me to wondering how bad the slavery was for the Jews in Egypt if they could afford so many golden earrings that on...

The denomination called Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints former was known as the Mormons. They formally changed their name and scolded anyone calling them "Mormons." I'll use the name Mormon anyway.  While Mormons have many local churches that are doing well and have secretly squirreled away an amount guesstimated at as much as $100 Billion, things do not seem to be going the way its leaders want them to go. While the denomination has more money that it can find uses for, it is failing in the ways its leaders most want to succeed. We need to review the organization. It is run by 12 "Apostles". The head functions much like a Pope but is called The Prophet. The Prophet is the one who hears from God and whatever he "hears" is ordered as the denomination's position. This, of course, changes when a new Prophet comes on board which happened recently. The new Prophet and the 12 Apostles seem to see the denomination as in a point of crisis. Its offici...

If watching political theater is entertainment rather than frustration, watching Trump's Republican Party is as good as it gets. In many aspects, Trump and his Republican Congress have decided government needs to run the economy, as least the parts where there are lots of votes, and this old business of Capitalism needs to be buried in the sands of time.  This is happening in so many places it's hard to recall them all. We can start with the Federal Government buying a huge stake in Intel, the U. S. chip maker. According to something I read, the Federal Government is buying up shares in many companies each week. Does Trump, or others who do his bidding, think they are so brilliant they will be able to make these companies profit powerhouses? Or, do they think they can make manufacturing companies so successful they will hurt China?  A faction of the GOP is opposed to this expansion of "socialism" but of course they don't use that word. Socialism and "Communis...

The original film was called "The Passion of the Christ" cost $30 million to produce and grossed $300 million at the box office. Gibson, whose estimated net worth is $425 million, is making a sequel which should be named "The Passion of Profit." In the link , Gibson says dead people coming back to life is not all that unusual. He said 17 events of this have been "verified by historians." His task, he says, is making this one believable to skeptics. This will be all the more difficult if there are historians, like New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman who don't think the coming back to life story ever happened.  Believeability would be higher if one person had seen Jesus come back to life and wrote the he or she had seen this happen. No one, even in the Bible, claimed to have seen Jesus come back to life. Many religions have stories of the hero dying and coming back to life. Bill Moyers' several hours of interviews with the famous author Professor Josep...

Years ago on this blog I made up what I call the "Sin Leader Board." The "Leader Board", as many readers know, is used in golf events to list those golfers who are ahead. I thought of the "Sin Leader Board" as a metaphor for the way Christian leaders, especially conservative ones, exploit the fictitious idea of sin to build support for their particular churches and pastor celebrities. Whatever "sin" seems most egregious, most outside contemporary thinking at any particular moment in history, is moved up on the "Sin Leader Board" and becomes the sin that brings in more money than former sins that now are ignored.  Around 1918 a group was able to blame bars and consumption of alcohol as the cause of all societal problems at the time. Prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933. Husbands who drank at taverns after work ruined families. Men who missed work were automatically men who drank alcohol. Taverns were evil places and a few were physically...

The phrase in the title is attributed to showman PT Barnum. To his dying day, he claims he never said such a thing. I'll take his word for it. That does not diminish the wisdom and insight into human beings everywhere in the world encompassed in the sentence. Recently, the Governor of Massachusetts signed into law a bill allowing late term abortions when a doctor and patient agree this is the best or only alternative to the problem faced at that time. The bill had been passed by a big majority in State's legislature.   During the decades after the Roe decision when abortion was legal in every state, the anti-abortion industry told supporters, "Send us money and we will force abortion back to the states. They we will go state-by-state abolishing abortion in each one until the country returns to the state before Roe when there were no abortions." This position was dishonest in two ways. First, it was intended not to eliminate abortion but to attract funds from the gull...

There is so much discussion of a topic called, "Tiny Houses." Having been a mayor, I know well the problem of finding a spot for lots of small houses. People elected to office will face opposition from voters and use zoning to prevent them from being built. Today where I live there is a proposal that may happen to take a former school building site, land already owned and controlled by the public, tear down the school and build a small neighborhood of tiny homes.  "Tiny home" neighborhoods already exist in the form of recreational vehicle parks. These are usually privately owned and have water and sewer connections. People without much money but with recreational campers move into these places and live there permanently. These are often on the outskirts of cities or in rural areas. Opposition from voters keeps them out of neighborhoods. There are also "trailer parks" that are a bit larger. The idea of small permanent houses located in established city neig...

There are several disciplines in universities that have roughly the same mission. It is to destroy myths. Maybe it is more accurate to say their mission is to study what people believe to be true and raise doubt when it shows up. The disciplines I'm thinking of are those I'm most familiar with, humanities (history, literature, etc), social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, etc.) and others. The sciences also attack myths with new discoveries.   Challenging myths also happens outside academia. In fact, it is everywhere--we all do it all the time. There was a popular TV show, "Myth Busters." I think the general public has been forced into "myth busting" by an increase in advertising and messaging. We have to have our game face on all the time to keep our money and health.  This is why I think many studies about "belief in God" or "why people are dropping out of Christianity" miss the boat. One of many every week discusses again wo...

Every few years, civilizations older than the ones we knew about previously are uncovered. The result often is that what we thought was true about the thread of humans through time changes. Old ideas about human history go into bin called myth and new truths emerge.  This topic reminds me of an eccentric old man who used to drop into the Mayor's office to chat. His primary interest was what he called "ancient times." Ancient to him were stories from the new and old testament. These were not, of course, "ancient" but recent compared to other known sources of information. Stuff in the New Testament is dated something around 2,000 to 5,000 years ago. As discussed here often, the Bible stories have few artifacts to verify its stories.  Recently, the ruins of a complex in Turkey was unearthed that date to around 9,000 years ago. That dates historical evidence twice as far back as the Bible. Ironically, the evidence tells us more about people then then does the Bible....

When a doctor circles M or F on a birth certificate, religious conservatives cheer and pass laws this restricts where to person later can compete in sports. When the gender is M that person must be prohibited from ever participating in women's sports. The opposite switch does not seem to be of interest.  Returning to Michelle Obama having a white ancestor some generations back on both her mother and father's side reminds us there has not been a clear line between white and black people for hundreds of years. This did not stop religious conservatives with an economic or political interest in maintaining separation of the races from claiming a clear separation existed. They did it aggressively.  The same lines are drawn by the same religious conservatives today about gender. The doctor's decision shown on the birth decision does not recognize some humans carry part of two different genders. Science has not yet spent much time finding variations in how much of each gender indi...

I've known so many people from Iran I don't know the number. Like people everywhere, they are different from each other and, in some cases, did not like each other. I enjoyed knowing each of them and would like to visit Iran to see it for myself.   As we all know, the country has been under religious leadership for at least a couple of decades. Obama it seems was the only one of our Presidents who took the time to learn about its leadership, what it wanted to accomplish and how to fit what those leaders wanted and fit that in with the rest of the world. Some other countries in the  Middle East, along with political Israel, did not like it that Obama treated the leaders of Iran as legitimate and as a force that was going to remain in place for the feasible future. By the standards of practicality and reasonableness, Obama's approach was a success.  From Iran's point of view, they had an unsuccessful experience with Obama. There were still trade sanctions. They kept th...

I could not resist clicking the title on Chistian Post, "The Single Thing Causing Inflation." What a disappointment. The economics of Trump, Jesus and the Republican Party are not worth one's time.  The "single cause", according to a retired professor of conservative Christian theology, is the supply of money. This old theory, made famous by the late Milton Friedman, was never universally popular and was debunked by actual experience as the years went by.  Without going too far into the weeds, Friedman's theory was that the Federal Reserve should grow bank account balances at the rate the population and economy grew. This, he thought, would stop the rise in prices and wages. What few understood was that the theory assumed the rate or speed money flowed through the economy would remain constant. This did not happen. As time passed, inflation happened when the supply of money declined and visa versa.  The link's theology professor is mostly concerned about...

One of the most exciting and interesting political events are those where a candidate comes out of nowhere with are less money than the competition and wins. In the sports metaphor, it's the skinny kid at the end of the bench who comes in and wins the game. In Michigan yesterday, a Muslim with a tiny amount of money upset a more traditional Democrat to run for the U.S. House. The winner in one of the Michigan House districts is Abdul El-Sayed. He is a former state health official and talked of universal health care and several other liberal positions. My own instinct, like many others, is to be pessimistic about strong liberal positions and think more moderate candidates and ideas will appeal to independent voters. I'm no longer so certain that is correct, however. We have to remember there is always a set of voters who go to the polls to vote against someone or something. Not all of those voters care about the views of the one they cast for, they just want to cast against the...

  I've attached a YouTube video that is too long for most to watch. It illustrates why there is little hope for those parts of the faith that have intellectual influence and how the future of the faith will favor free lancers and churches that are for-profit businesses like, Lakewood, owned by Joel Osteen. I'll try to summarize the dilemma from the video. In the video, a young man, Carter, who lives in the town of Luverne, MN tells about the church his parents and his wife's parents were members of their entire lives. It is a church of the Lutheran Missouri Synod. Missouri Synod is a conservative branch of Lutheran that has funds accumulated in the home office and two or three surviving seminaries. In the past decade it has lost about a million members and falling rapidly. It requires churches have ordained male preachers. To be ordained, the guy has to attend one of its campuses for, as I recall, four years following a bachelor's degree. To become a preacher in that de...

In the early years of this blog, there were several Catholics who liked to argue with me in the comments. When I predicted a continued decline in Christian numbers, they would point out this decline would not happen in Catholicism. It would not happen because of the growth in Hispanic membership. That growth would happen, they said, because of continual immigration and a higher birth rate among Hispanic people. Every year since then, including this year, surveys show the same decline among Hispanic Catholics as among other Catholics and Christianity in general. This year was a little different because the decline was bigger among Hispanics than among non Hispanics. Member the Spanish phrase, NO MAS. It now applies to believing the old-time religion of Catholicism.  Female Hispanics are leaving faster than males. Why would reasoning among women of Hispanic heritage be different than the reasoning on women from non Hispanic heritage? When every place in their lives, opportunities exi...

When one sees what surely is political damage to Trump and Republicans from the on and off bombing of Iran and the higher oil prices that result, the question asked is "Why does he do this." It seems perfectly obvious Iran can keep sending missals around the Middle East no matter how many times the U.S. hits them. It seems obvious Trump cannot force Iran to give up its uranium. It seems obvious Iran now has the ability to extract fees from countries that use the Stright. To me, it's a good bet that if Trump had just moved on about a year ago and never mentioned Iran again he would be in a stronger political position than his is now. We're back to wondering, why is he doing all of this. Pundits have said for a long time what is on his mind and how his mind works. Now, another has pointed out this well-known trait of Trump's mind in this current dilemma. Trump does not care about the upcoming election nor elections after that. He does not care about the Republican ...

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth brings up Christianity in briefings about defense. President Trump brings it up in his political messages. When I'm traveling, I try not to engage a seat mate in conversation because I've been trapped into endless sermons. Here is one I have not encounters, however, someone standing up in the airline cabin and preaching during a flight delay.  The pilot announced a take delay of 20 minutes so Christian influencer, Whitney Lynn, took that as an opportunity to stand and began preaching. When she did not respond to the crew's request to take her seat and be quiet they called security. Whitney was escorted off the plane. On the campus where I taught for 40 years various versions of whack-a-mole showed up. One was the Giddeons handing out New Testaments to students in areas where there was lots of foot traffic. I noticed the nearby trash bins were overflowing with these little books. I've always wondered if the Giddeons fished out those book...