I saw this choice bit of front-page Dally-bait whilst in the newsagents this morning buying my leftie rag. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... risis.html More people are seeing sense and rejecting religion. More large empty premises for Wetherspoon's to snap up, what's not to like?

I saw this choice bit of front-page Dally-bait whilst in the newsagents this morning buying my leftie rag. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... risis.html More people are seeing sense and rejecting religion. More large empty premises for Wetherspoon's to snap up, what's not to like?

There was a bit of a fuss made on local radio about this today as well, seems the consensus is that CofE is not attracting new customers or a brand loyalty and that they may have to look at offloading asserts soon.

All seemed fair enough to me, market rules and all that.

One vicar they spoke to did seem to have some awareness though but he didn't have a congregation at the moment (not sure how that works) but was saying that if he DID have a church then he'd be looking to use it every day , in fact it sounded like he wanted to run a cafe actually.

Oddly enough (perhaps), if I was to go voluntarily to a church service, it would probably be CofE – rather like the theatre of it and the music.

Sat at the back of Westminster Abbey a couple of years enjoying the choir.

Would have to tune out for any sermon, though.

But no – religion isn't dying, whatever Lord 'persecuted minority' Carey might claim. There's plenty around and I suspect that the more fundamentalist versions may be growing – perhaps in part because of the apparent homogeneity of secular options for making the world a better place.

There was a documentary a few years ago about rising Islamic nationalism, that pointed out that, in Egypt at Nasser's funeral in 1970, there were plenty of women in the massive crowd but even if you look at the pictures and film now, you don't see headscarves or the niqab. That's happened since, and the suggestion was made that part (at least) of the reason for the rise of Islamic nationalism has been the apparent failure of a secular alternative to the Western capitalist model.

You could certainly see that in Iran, too, where for decades, the secular opposition to the Shah's dictatorship was put down – often with Western help – until the point where something else rises up to take up the cudgels (and then purges those remaining secular forces that aided the revolution.

I'm not sure that we'll see such a rise in the UK, although it's interesting that politicians have been increasingly playing the 'faith' card in the last decade or so – but I don't think it's beyond the bounds of possibility that we could see further religious influence in the US.

To be fair, I should have said the C of E, rather than Christianity or religion, as being on the way out.
Ten per cent more in the UK are now stating that they have no religion than said so ten years earlier and I'm guessing that many would previously simply acceded to being termed as C of E even though they had no real affinity with it.

I am now pondering Mintball's point about the possibility of the failure of the pairing of secularism and capitalism to fill the gap and my first response would be that there are fewer evangelists out there preaching the word about simple, straightforward conscience without religion and, hence, religions are, to a large extent, freed from secular challenge and less hampered in putting forward their prescriptive versions of right and wrong.
The Church of England is way behind the other Abrahamic cults in terms of restrictive codes of practice about diet, observance and even daily dress ... and Conscience has very few, if any.
This is a drawback for them, if you want a really successful religion, it has to have elements of prescription and restriction in it so that people feel they are following an identifiable path via a code supposedly laid down by a higher being and a feeling of "belonging" with those of the same cult.
If the restrictions and impositions in diet, observance and dress make the adherent stand out from others, it can attract criticism and suspicion, ideal components for that feeling of persecution by outsiders which, in turn, increases the feeling of belonging and safety within the cult.

Simple right and wrong doesn't cut it for some people.

You could add into the mix reports over the last few years that some individual Catholic churches have been saved from total collapse by the arrival of migrants from eastern Europe in particular, who have bolstered congregations.

Then there is an increase in independent, evangelical churches – we've got several in our bit of London, most of which meet in buildings that were not originally churches. They do seem to be expanding. And there's an extent that you see that too in the emergence of groups such as London Citizens, which is a community-based group with a lot of faith-group involvement. And even candidates standing for elections on the basis of being a particular religion.

What is suprising is that as we have become better educated over the last few centuries, religion in general has not died out altogether.

Because whatever you, I or anybody else thinks about reason and enlightenment, it's about faith really, not a particular organised religion.

I don't understand how a rational adult can't see through the "god" myth in a second. But i have come to accept that billions around the globe cannot shake off the delusion, so effective was their brainwashing.

And so you have this strange mixture of a highly advanced and in many ways intelligent species, yet all prone to fall under the spell of assorted nutters, mystics, charlatans and the misguided, into "faith" in the most weird and wonderful panoplies of patent bullcrap.

And all convinced that, of the hundreds or thousands available, it is [itheir[/i god that's the boss.

"Faith"? Yes, the ultimate con-trick: reverse logic entirely. You can't prove a single word of your religious bullcrap, so here's a great wheeze, let's make a rule that to blindly accept and believe things of which there is no, nor ever will be, ANY evidence, is the BEST thing you can do, because precisely having this FAITH that it is all true is the highest thing you can achieve.

A mad world.

I think that many people find it comforting, while for others it may well be "the sigh of the oppressed". For others still, they like the spiritual aspect of religious belief/observance and for yet others, I think it's completely intertwined with how they perceive society and how they would like their ideal society to behave.

I've had debates on the [iTelegraph[/i forums with people bemoaning the death of Christianity in the UK, which they equate to the ruination of the country etc. Yet if you ask them which bits of the core Christian religion they accept as literal truth (virgin birth etc) they prove remarkably unwilling to say.

Which leads one to wonder whether that's the case with quite a number of congregants today, who may not actually believe all these things, but rather, they believe in the institution itself. And I suspect that's particularly the case with the CofE.

I was brought up going to church. I still go to church. God has nothing to do with it. My understanding of the bible as a book is that of many others that I know. I disregard the old testament as a Christian book. Christianity starts and ends with Jesus' teachings. Jesus wasn't the son of God, he, if anything, was a very intelligent man with the same ability as someone like Derren Brown. His teachings were about humanity treating each other fairly. That's it. The bible was written in a way to control the masses through fear.

I still go to church and take a Sunday school class to try and explain my version of understanding to the young people (without being too blunt).

When listening to a service, I look for moral teaching in the story. Sometimes there isn't any but most of the time there is. I usually disagree with the minister's theory but that is irrelevant. The main reason for most churches is nothing to do with religion but for a place for the community to meet and socialise. The congregation at my church is actually growing and is very healthy.

I can imagine that other churches are more formal and can't speak for them, but I know why I go.

I'll pop along to church at Christmas, as usual, and sing some festive hymms, although they should probably rotate the story a bit, maybe go with Elf this year, or The Grinch, even Dickens would make a change.

I have a friend who is heavily involved in the local CofE (I'm not sure of his exact function he might be a warden or a lay preacher or something along those lines), he admitted to me that he sometimes envys Catholics because there isn't the same sort of confusion over what it wants to be that there is in Anglicanism. It would be wrong to believe that the Catholic Church is unwavering in its dogma, even if that's how it likes to portray itself, but it doesn't have this kind of multiple personality disorder that Anglicanism currently suffers from. There is a bit of a joke in local politics around here that vicars tend to be Lib Dems as there's a sort of soft, woolly liberalism about a lot of them, but I don't think that really goes well with people who do religion, if they do formal religion they want a degree of certainty in their belief and if they are following "spiritual" or "neo-pagan" type beliefs then they want the sort of flexibility and individualism that doesn't work with mainstream organised religion.

I have an article from bbk magazine (Issue 27, Spring 2010) by a Birkbeck academic called Eric Kaufmann which suggests that "whilst secularism continues to dominate high culture, its demographich disadvantage means it must run to stand still", or in a nutshell the religious are multiplying faster than the non-religious, which is not neccessarily of concern to anyone, except that the fundamentalists are the ones who tend to have the biggest families. He points to London as an example where religious participation overall is actually experiencing a revival on the back of immigration (but in particular from those groups who tend to have larger families like fundamentalist Muslims who have on average one child more than moderate Muslim families).

You do realise mate that just as there is no God, there was nt a Jesus bloke either.
Are you happy knowing you are brain washing people into accepting your unfounded beliefs on others.
In my opinion, ALL preachers of ANY Religion should be jailed for at least spouting BS and at worse for brain washing.
Like smoking it should be banned for under 18s and then they can decide if they want to believe in your imaginary god/jesus/religion off their own back and not forced into it like those you preach to on sundays.

Here endeth the Sermon!!!

In all fairness, there is evidence that someone called Jesus existed. rlHistoricity of Jesus.rl