Showing posts with label Existence of God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Existence of God. Show all posts

Thursday 10 June 2021

Gradual decline by American Christians

When we see documentaries about the North American people we get a picture that they are 'very religious'.

Christianity, which was once shared by a majority of Americans, has seen a gradual decline as fewer people hold to the core tenets of the faith.

The latest research by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University continues the survey series American Worldview Inventory 2021 in examining biblical and competing worldviews of American adults.

According to the most recent release from the study, there has been a sharp decline in the status of Christianity across the nation in the past several decades. In 1980, more than 90 percent of Americans claimed to be Christian. That percentage dropped to 80 percent by 1990, in which the proportion lasted until after the turn of the millennium. By 2010, only three in four adults claimed to be Christians, with a further decline today as just under two out of three make the same claim.

In the previous century confidence in religion was still important.
About two-thirds of American adults had high confidence in religion in the 1970s. By the 1980s, however, that confidence was waning, and Christianity’s influence was declining.
At the start of the millennium, 56 percent of adults had confidence in religion. That number continued to decline, and now, barely four in ten adults hold a high degree of confidence in religion.

No wonder, you could say, when we look at how ministers used their institutions to gain money and trick people into their 'business'. Small personal family churches were taken over by mega churches where one got lost in the group and where there was not a special bond between teh believers.

A great problem is also that the majority of those churches are Trinitarian churches, where they worship Jesus as their god. Though people came to see the weakness of that person and the contradictions they can find in Scriptures, having a Jesus who can not do a lot of things and does not know a lot of things, whilst the Bible tells us God can do everything and knows everything.

The Bible is also increasingly rejected as a trustworthy and relevant document of life principles. Not many people want to know about the values and ethics presented in the Holy Scriptures.

In 1991, 86 percent of people believed in the existence of God as the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe who still rules the world today. Today, that percentage has dropped to 46 percent.

In a lot of the American churches there was not much time spend on the Word of God. Ministers only took some verses, often out of context, to bring a long sermon, often with a lot of shouting and crying about damnation and danger to burn into hell. Often people could not find a relation between the words of the pastor and the words written in the Bible. That undermined the relevance of the Holy Scriptures in the daily life.

Regarding the belief that the Bible is the accurate and reliable Word of God, the decline shifted from 70 percent in 1991 to 41 percent in 2021. On the topic of salvation, 36 percent of adults believed in salvation through confession of sin and accepting Jesus as Saviour in 1991. Today, that amount is 30 percent. The survey also noted that this measured as high as 45 percent and was 39 percent in 2011.

The percentage of Americans possessing a biblical worldview also significantly decline (12 percent in 1995; 6 percent in 2021).

Friday 6 November 2015

Mega church country loosing religous people

English: This map shows the percentage of the ...
English: This map shows the percentage of the U.S. adult population that affiliates themselves as Mormon in a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in 2007.http://religions.pewforum.org/ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is the general trend that more and more people are very secular. Certainly in the economically thriving capitalist countries we see that most people are not relating to religion or to a religious body.

For the United States it still looks bright, though the share of U.S. adults who say they believe in God, while still high compared with other advanced industrial countries, slipped to 89 percent in 2014 from 92 percent in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study. 

In that country where we can find lots of big churches and have places with mega churches more people have come to doubt the existence of a god or the God.
The proportion of Americans who say they are "absolutely certain" God exists fell even more, to 63 percent in 2014 from 71 percent in 2007.

On television we may still get the picture of regularly praying Americans but that seems to become part of history. Also the attendance of religious services regularly have gone down by small, but statistically significant measures, the survey found.
The trend is most pronounced among young adults, with only half of those born from 1990 to 1996 absolutely certain of their belief in God, compared to 71 percent of the "silent generation," or those born from 1928 to 1945.

On the other hand, 77 percent of Americans continue to identify with some religious faith, and those who do are just as committed now as they were in 2007, according to the survey. Two-thirds of religiously affiliated adults say they pray every day and that religion is very important to them, the survey found

The survey also found religious divides among the political parties, with those who are not religiously affiliated more likely to be Democrats, at 28 percent, compared to 14 percent of Republicans.
About 38 percent of Republicans identify as evangelical Protestants - the largest religious group in the party, the survey found. Catholics make up 21 percent of each major political party.

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Find also about the dwindling numbers in church:
  1. a little church
  2. Is your church small?
  3. The Big Conversation
  4. The Big Conversation follow up
  5. The Big conversation – Antagonists
  6. The Big conversation – Recognition and refocus
  7. Having a small church mentality
  8. Reasons why you may not miss the opportunity to go to a Small Church
  9. Follower of Jesus part of a cult or a Christian
  10. To remove the whitewash of the Jehovah Witnesses as being the only true Bible Students and Bible Researchers
  11. Vision blurred by cumulative burden of divisions
  12. Not words of any organisation should bind you, but the Word of God
  13. Why we do not have our worship-services in a church building
  14. Four Pressing Needs in Rural Communities, and How the Church Should Respond
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Wednesday 1 May 2013

Did the Inspirator exist

When we see those different Books who make up that one inspirational Book of Books, we can either see those 40 different authors, Hebrew or Greek writers from 19 different occupations (including shepherd, farmer, fisherman, tax collector, doctor, king)

Could it be possible that  those human writers all speak in the name of the same Spirit?


The Gutenberg Bible displayed by the United St...
The Gutenberg Bible displayed by the United States Library of Congress, demonstrating printed pages as a storage medium. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In these 66 books we hear them telling about history, prophecy, poetry, and theology. Despite their complexity, differences in writing styles and vast time periods, the books of the Bible agree miraculously well in theme, facts and cross-referencing. No human beings could have planned such an intricate combination of books over a 1,500-year time span.

The writers did live in different places and in different times. Strangely enough there seems to be one line in their stories. An astonishing 668 prophecies have been fulfilled and none have ever been proven false. An honest study of biblical prophecy will convincingly show the divine authorship of the Bible, the infallible Word of God. Furthermore, archaeology confirms or supports many Biblical accounts. No other holy book comes close to the Bible in the amount of evidence supporting its divine authorship.

Everything recorded in the Bible is true and factual, and you will also see that men of the Bible recorded things that they had no way of knowing, unless they had been divinely inspired by a greater being than any human being, namely God, the Creator of all things.

Nobody has ever seen God, so how can they know that He exist. "Hè" you could think and say to us "you say nobody saw God, but did not many people see and spoke to Jesus Christ". Then we would say: "Yes, many saw Jesus Christ"; But that Nazarene man who was a master teacher was and is not God; He is the son of God, which is totally different than "god the son". In case Jesus would have been God than all the people who saw him would have died straight ahead, because God is a man of His Word and never lies. So what He said many centuries before the birth of Christ would still happen at the time of Christ or thousands of years later. God who can not be tempted nor say something which is not true said about the nephew of John the Baptist that it was His "only begotten son". Jesus who could be tempted and was tempted more than once, did not sin, which also means that he never lied, so when he said he was not a spirit but a man of flesh and blood, and showed his wounds from the wooden stake where he was brought to death (while God can not die and is an eternal Spirit) Jesus did tell the truth.

Jesus his Father is the Only One God and Creator of heaven and earth.

In nature, in Jesus, in the men or prophets of God, in the people of God, we can see the manifestation of God. The trees, the flowers, the beauty of the natural world, the stars; none of these things can answer straight away, the question if that Creator God has an existing and  purpose.

All the things around us can show that there must be a Greater Power who made all this.

We may be sure that all the created elements show the world their existence and the secrets of the Maker behind it. By those incredible things in the world God His invisible attributes are clearly seen. Because all creatures are created in the image of God, all inherited parts of that godhead and received from Him the possibility to think and to understand where they came from. Either with many or with not many brains people still would have the instinct to get to know their Maker and to know what is good or bad. As such  they really are without excuse. Everybody received the possibility tho think but also to make their own free choice. So when people deceide to ignore what their heart is telling them they are responsible themselves for their choice and way of direction.

Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools … (Romans 1:19–22)

Paul was saying that what we see with our naked eyes of the natural world provides us with ample evidence that an almighty and eternal power exists which created and brought order to everything around us. We don’t need to depend on the thoughts of mankind: the latest scientific discovery or theory, or the continuing arguments of men. Evidence for the existence of God is all around us, if we are prepared to look and think about it.

Notice too that to deny the existence of God, since He has given adequate evidence to convince us, leaves us in the apostle’s words, “without excuse”. It is inexcusable to deny the existence of God, regardless of what current phi­losophy or polite society might think. Do we first need to believe the Bible to accept this proof? Not so! The Bible is pointing out that the evidence for an eternal power and Godhead is all around. If you can accept that, then clearly the Bible will have other good things you want to know about.

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Please do read the articles:  Belief in God &  

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Read also:

  1. Science and God’s existence
  2. Creator and Blogger God 1 Emptiness and mouvement
  3. My Beliefs and the World
  4. Trusting, Faith, calling and Ascribing to Jehovah #3 Voice of God #1 Creator and His Prophets
  5. On the Nature of Christ
  6. Hellenistic influences
  7. Politics and power first priority #2
  8. Politics and power first priority #3 Elevation of Mary and the Holy Spirit

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Friday 18 January 2013

Christianity is a love affair

We may not forget that Christianity is a love affair.

We are the beloved of God. This is the foundational definition of who we are. Everything else about us finds meaning in this fact. We do not earn or deserve God’s acceptance. He does not owe it to us. He gives it as a gift and therefore it will never be taken away from us.
If we deliberately reject it He will accept our decision. We can’t lose God’s acceptance by our behaviour or failure. We are totally and eternally accepted.

Too often we live as if God only tolerates us in the hope we will improve. We strive to gain His approval and make ourselves more acceptable.
We refuse to believe that he likes, loves, accepts and searches for us.
We read of the prodigal son and insist on seeing ourselves still in the pigsty rather than in the Father’s arms. We reverse creation and make God in our image giving Him all our difficulties in giving undeserved and unconditional love.

We forget that God is love. 


Early Christian ichthys sign carved into marbl...
Early Christian ichthys sign carved into marble in the ruins of Ephesus, Turkey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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2013 update:

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