It is perhaps not surprising to find studies measuring various religious qualities in the United States. One from 2010 is aptly called the, “2010 U.S. Religious Census: Religious Congregations & Membership Study (RCMS)”. The report was the work of Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB). It provides detailed county by county information on congregations, members, adherents and attendance for 236 different faiths groups.
Where are the more secular cities and states? Again not surprising the research found them in the West and Northeast. The greater area of Portland, OR-WA was the least religious/most secular city with about 32 percent identifying as a religious adherent. States like NY and Rhode Island are about the same level. That’s less than half of Salt Lake or Mississippi which is the most religious state. DC came in as the 3rd most secular city.
It is a bit interesting that the surveys of religious observance provides an inverse look at secularity. It will be more interesting when we have funded surveys of the various forms of secularity and non-belief. Just as some surveys covers a wealth of religious sects, it would be interesting to see a bigger spectrum on non-belief. We might need a comparable large secular/humanist organization to fund such a detailed look, but it might be an important barometer to measure trends. We might just need a secular angel to fund it. Perhaps the next Reason Rally will generate enough interest to pull that off.
See a HuPo article for more on this topic.
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Secular City: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1396331.The_Secular_City
1 comment:
People today are still sticking to their beliefs and disbeliefs, rather than move onward toward the truth, thus they remain with the zone of less that truth instead. Others do the same via just remaining intellectually stationary.
In turn we see certain behavioral disorders.
"Reject before Inspect" is big these days. How can one see a complete truth if no one is not interested in looking at it in the first place.
Another problem is the limited size of today's typical attention span.
This too contributes to the general "Reject before Inspect" behavior, and does so since it forces people to believe that they can see an entirety by just by looking at a portion of the entirety.
Thus if an absolute truth of enormous scale is presented to mankind, it is rejected in a flash, and this occurs due to people having judged it before even having examined its entirety, and this rejection will most likely be based upon a pervious rejection of something else that is remotely related.
For instance,.....Bible Codes have been basically been rejected.
If you recall, back in WWII there were many Code Languages that were used by spies to smuggle information back to their home country. If one code language is cracked, then it must be replaced with another, and just because this one code language was cracked it does not mean that all code languages were therefore cracked as well. Different code languages, are different code languages. They are each separate.
Thus if one so called Bible Code language is examined and in the long run is regarded as being mere rubbish, thus it is a False Bible Code language, that in no way can speak for other possible Bible Code Languages that have yet to be examined.
But today, most folk are 100% convinced that if you prove that False Bible Codes are "False Bible Codes", then a True bible Code would also therefore be a "False Bible Code", since one code language speaks for ALL other code languages.
Meanwhile, it appears as though a real God character managed to place both proof of his existence, and proof of Jesus Christ's existence within the Bible, and did so in such a clever yet simple unique encoded manner.
To see this encoded proof, go to
http://www.outersecrets.com/real/biblecode2a.htm
Then click on the flashing words "Watch / Listen", and let the web page take you on a web page tour of such proof, and do so via automatic web page scrolling and complete audio coverage.
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