Category Archives: Atheist

As the hammer blows rain down on the freedom to conduct business in Hong Kong, the people wielding the hammer busy themselves with assurances that there is nothing to worry about.

To do so involves some exquisite contortions, a choice example was offered up by Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive in Name Only (CENO) who went into battle with logic to assert that the freezing of tycoon Jimmy Lais assets on grounds of national security would give business a boost.

She said, the move would not undermine Hong Kongs status, but rather reinforce it, as no one can make use of the citys financial system to carry out political missions or acts that endanger national security.

In the CENOs exquisite double speak it is asserted that a law giving widespread and unspecified powers to freeze assets and allow the police to invade premises without a warrant, will lead to rejoicing among other business people who will believe that a more secure environment has been secured.

If the principle of rule of law has any meaning, it surely is that its application is conducted with equality and without prejudice. It is precisely because companies have long feared that this principle does not operate on the Mainland that they preferred to conduct business in Hong Kong where the rule of law used to be sacrosanct.

The apologists for the new order seem to believe that selective application of the law is justified as long as it is applied to people and companies who are identified as being dissidents. This is the equivalent of saying that a building only needs partial foundations because it will remain upright, possibly a bit shaky, but strong enough to withstand most pressure.

The rule of law is much like a building in as much as it can survive fractures but the fractures have a habit of multiplying at which point the foundations crumble. Anyone who seriously believes that freezing Jimmy Lais assets is a one off event will also be expecting the Pope to declare that he is a closet atheist.

The reality is sufficiently apparent to obviate the need to speculate over whether this process of undermining the foundations of commerce by selective application of law is already well underway.

A chain of stores owned by a dissident businessman suddenly found itself engulfed by law enforcers allegedly searching for mislabelled goods and names of customers were taken, presumably to discourage patronage. Another store daring to display symbols of the democracy movement was evicted from shopping malls and investigated by the police.

These are relatively small scale examples but make it clear that the conduct of business in the New Improved Hong Kong is now very much the subject of politics.

Anyone doubting this assertion should address their concerns to HSBC which, like other major companies, was forced to publicly endorse the National Security Law. Companies no longer have the option of being politically neutral, their active alignment with whatever the state proposes is now a requirement.

And then there is the more recent case of the US-based State Street, which is both the sole manager of the Tracker Fund of Hong Kong and, via an associate company, a fund trustee. Its role in these matters is now under investigation following a very short lived decision by its American parent to review investments in Hong Kong companies which might breach US sanctions on companies and individuals named by Washington.

State Street is caught between its responsibilities under US law and a newly politicised Hong Kong Monetary Authority which is considering ending State Streets role as fund manager for the Tracker Fund. Even though the company quickly backtracked on its decision it is now a marked entity that at best will cling onto its current business and is highly unlikely to gain any other new business from the government.

Unsurprisingly, these developments are fuelling an exodus from Hong Kong of overseas business people. A recent survey from the American Chamber of Commerce said that over 40 per cent of those questioned were either preparing to leave or contemplating leaving. Even if only half this number carry through on these intentions, this would be an unprecedented blow.

Meanwhile Hong Kong is experiencing a sharp downturn in its role as an international arbitration business centre. This is because questions over the rule of law have convinced companies that they would be served better by moving their business over to Singapore.

The apologists might admit that there is some loss of confidence but insist that business as usual remains the order of the day. Every departure is treated as an exemption, every movement of assets out of Hong Kong is declared to be temporary and so on.

The reality is that the SAR will not cease to be an international business centre overnight but the seeds of its destruction are being laid with relentless determination by those, like the CENO, who insist that Hong Kong is immune to reality.

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Its business as unusual in the new Hong Kong and people are voting with their feet - Hong Kong Free Press

In October of 1992, singer Sinad OConnor was the musical guest on an episode of Saturday Night Live. She sang a cover of Bob Marleys War, and at the very end of the performance, unbeknownst to anyone on the show, she held up a picture of Pope John Paul II, said Fight the real enemy, and tore up his image on live television. (In dress rehearsal, she had held up a picture of a refugee child.)

It was her way of protesting the child abuse rampant in the Catholic Church, long before it was on anyones radar. But the outcry against her and NBC was intense, and she was treated like a pariah for a long time afterwards.

Its easy to see now that she was right all along. She understood the horrors inflicted by Catholic priests earlier than most everybody else at least in the U.S. and she used her platform to make a powerful statement about it. As she wrote in 2010, her only regret was that people assumed she was an atheist.

All I regretted was that people assumed I didnt believe in God. Thats not the case at all. Im Catholic by birth and culture and would be the first at the church door if the Vatican offered sincere reconciliation.

Now, in a profile by Amanda Hess of the New York Times, OConnor says that incident actually strengthened her despite the fact that it appeared to be poison for her career:

If you remember two things about her, its that she vaulted to fame with that enduring close-up in the video for her version of Nothing Compares 2 U and then, that she stared down a Saturday Night Live camera, tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II and killed her career.

OConnor doesnt see it that way. In fact, the opposite feels true. Now she has written a memoir, Rememberings, that recasts the story from her perspective. I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career, she writes, and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.

Im not sorry I did it. It was brilliant, she said of her protest against abuse in the Catholic Church. But it was very traumatizing, she added. It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.

They treated her with contempt, but in hindsight, she knew damn well what she was talking about, and she used her platform to draw attention to the problem. History will give her the credit she deserves.

By the way, OConnor converted to Islam a couple of years ago and also goes by the name Shuhada Sadaqat. If that gives her a better sense of peace, well, she certainly deserves it.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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Sinad O'Connor: Ripping Up the Pope's Picture Put Me Back on the Right Track - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

Reverend Coles joins fellow celebrities Toyah Wilcox and Sharron Davies on tonight's edition of ITV's Tipping Point Lucky Stars. Known as "Britain's most famous vicar", Rev Coles was initially a star as one half of pop duo the Communards during the Eighties, before being ordained in 2005. Since becoming a vicar, Rev Coles has been credited as helping modernise religion and regularly appears on TV and radio with his own shows.

But to many people's surprise, Rev Coles counts among his friends Prof Dawkins, who is highly regarded for his assertive take on atheism.

Atheism itself is described as being a "disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods", and Rev Coles and Prof Dawkins discussed the topic at length on BBC Newsnight in 2009.

Since then the pair have become friends, with Rev Coles admitting he "engaged" with Dawkins and now they follow one another on social media.

He described them as "both typical Aries", and the similarities between them were laid bare by Rev Coles during a piece he wrote for Penguin in 2019.

Alongside Rev Coles piece, Prof Dawkins also penned an article as the pair fiercely debated how people could "outgrow God".

Rev Coles noted how they "share a name, a fondness for dogs, and a birthday, March 26, which I discovered in the Newsnight Green Room when he Googled me before we went on air to argue about religion".

He continued: "I, of course, did not need to Google him.

"We are both public school-educated, and we both underwent the compulsory indoctrination inflicted on us in the chapel.

JUST IN:Rev Richard Coles admits partner David's death was 'full of comedy'

"Both, in our teens, protested by refusing to bow our heads in prayer when instructed to do so by those in authority, both adopted atheism. Typical Aries."

He jokingly then claimed that while Prof Dawkins would be taking part in The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, he was on Strictly Come Dancing, which left him feeling as "much David to his Goliath as Orville the Duck to his Malcolm Muggeridge".

And though Rev Coles admitted he was "not a fan" of Dawkins' bestseller The God Delusion, his rival was a "wonderful guide to the natural world".

He concluded: "His comradely solidarity with those who are waking up to the gap between what religious authority teaches and what actually is the case, presupposes that wakefulness requires a rejection of religious faith. It does not, clearly.

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"I dont think I have ever read any criticism of Christianity in Richards work that I have not thought of independently or encountered elsewhere.

"His description of the processes of change in the natural world I find persuasive and often brilliant but nothing in it causes me to doubt the faith I profess."

While Rev Coles has been a constant force in ensuring faith can still be appreciated and enjoyed within the 21st century, he has been highly critical of some of the practices the church still demands of its worshippers.

Among them is the rule of celibacy for those in the priesthood.

The act of celibacy means a clergy is forbidden from having sex outside a heterosexual marriage - a rule enforced within the church for centuries.

Rev Coles, who was speaking to The Guardian in 2014 regarding the issue, said he was only celibate for "pragmatic reasons", but argued "its not something that I think of as being that significant".

He described it as "the Church of Englands completely ridiculous position, which I think is daft and probably wicked, and all but intolerable.

He continued: I entered the priesthood thinking I was hors de combat I did think that I would be on my own, and not looking to stop being on my own and also not looking in lay-bys and bushes and so on but then I met David.

David was Rev Coles partner, and they entered a celibate relationship until the former passed away tragically in 2019.

Tipping Point Lucky Stars airs from 6.30pm on ITV tonight.

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Richard Coles' confession over friendship with atheist Richard Dawkins: 'Both typical' - Daily Express

Self-help books are consistently on the best-seller lists across the world. We can't seem to get enough of happiness advice, wellness gurus, and life coaches. But, as the Book of Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun. The Ancient Greeks were into the self-help business millennia before the likes of Dale Carnegie and Mark Manson.

From the 3rd century BCE until the birth of Jesus, Greek philosophy was locked into an ideological war. Four rival schools emerged, each proclaiming loudly that they alone had the secret to a happy and fulfilled life. These schools were: Stoicism, Cynicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism. Each had their advocates and even had a kind of PR battle to get people to sign up to their side. They were trying to sell happiness.

Many of us are familiar with Stoicism, a topic I covered recently, because it forms the foundation of cognitive behavioral therapy. Skepticism and Cynicism have become watered down or warped variations of their original forms. (I will cover these in future articles.) Today, we focus on the most underappreciated of these schools, the Epicureans. In their philosophy, we can find a surprisingly modern and easy-to-follow "Four Part Remedy" to life.

The Epicureans were some of history's first materialists. They believed that the world was made up only of atoms (and void), and that everything is simply a particular composition of these atoms. There were no gods, spirits, or souls (or, at most, they're irrelevant to the world as we encounter it). They thought that there was no afterlife or immortality to be had, either. Death is just a relocation of atoms. This atheism and materialism was what the Christian Church would later come to despise, and after centuries of being villainized by priests, popes, and church doctrine, the Epicureans fell out of fashion.

In the atomistic, worldly philosophy of the Epicureans, all there is to life is to get as much pleasure as you can and avoid pain. This isn't to become some rampant hedonist, staggering from opium dens to brothels, but concerns the higher pleasures of the mind.

Epicurus, himself, believed that pleasure was defined as the satisfying of a desire, such as when we drink a glass of water when we're really thirsty. But, he also argued that desires themselves were painful since they, by definition, meant longing and anguish. Thirst is a desire, and we don't like being thirsty. True contentment, then, could not come from creating and indulging pointless wants but must instead come from minimizing desire altogether. What would be the point of setting ourselves new targets? These are just new desires that we must make efforts to satisfy. Thus, minimizing pain meant minimizing desires, and the bare minimum desires were those required to live.

Credit: LOUISA GOULIAMAKI via Getty Images

Given that Epicureans were determined to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, they developed a series of rituals and routines designed to help. One of the best known (not least because we've lost so much written by the Epicureans) was the so-called "Four Part Remedy." These were four principles they believed we ought to accept so that we might find solace and be rid of existential and spiritual pain:

1. Don't fear God. Remember, everything is just atoms. You won't go to hell, and you won't go to heaven. The "afterlife" will be nothingness, in just the same way as when you had no awareness whatsoever of the dinosaurs or Cleopatra. There was simply nothing before you existed, and death is a great expanse of the same timeless, painless void.

2. Don't worry about death. This is a natural corollary of Step 1. With no body, there is no pain. In death, we lose all of our desires and, along with them, suffering and discontent. It's striking how similar in tone this sounds to a lot of Eastern, especially Buddhist, philosophy at the time.

3. What is good is easy to get. Pleasure comes in satisfying desires, specifically the basic, biological desires required to keep us alive. Anything more complicated than this, or harder to achieve, just creates pain. There's water to be drunk, food to be eaten, and beds to sleep in. That's all you need.

4. What is terrible is easy to endure. Even if it is difficult to satisfy the basic necessities, remember that pain is short-lived. We're rarely hungry for long, and sicknesses most often will be cured easily enough (and this was written 2300 years before antibiotics). All other pains often can be mitigated by pleasures to be had. If basic biological necessities can't be met, then you die but we already established there is nothing to fear from death.

Epicurus's guide to living is noticeably different from a lot of modern self-help books in just how little day-to-day advice it gives. It doesn't tell us "the five things you need to do before breakfast" or "visit these ten places, and you'll never be sad again." Just like it's rival school of Stoicism, Epicureanism is all about a psychological shift of some kind.

Namely, that psychological shift is about recognizing that life doesn't need to be as complicated as we make it. At the end of the day, we're just animals with basic needs. We have the tools necessary to satisfy our desires, but when we don't, we have huge reservoirs of strength and resilience capable of enduring it all. Failing that, we still have nothing to fear because there is nothing to fear about death. When we're alive, death is nowhere near; when we're dead, we won't care.

Practical, modern, and straightforward, Epicurus offers a valuable insight to life. It's existential comfort for the materialists and atheists. It's happiness in four lines.

Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

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Epicurus and the atheist's guide to happiness - Big Think

Heres something that didnt happen during the last administration: On Friday, White House officials met with the leaders of several atheist groups to hear their concerns. (The last time this happened was 2010.)

Melissa Rogers, Josh Dickson, and Ben ODell from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships hosted the conversation with members of the Secular Coalition for America.

The requests, as described by the groups, were fairly straightforward. None of them involved special perks for atheists; it was all about maintaining church/state separation and equality under the law.

We stressed the importance of rescinding harmful and discriminatory Trump administration actions, like the Faith-Based Social Services rules and Jeff Sessions Department of Justice memo, and urged that actions going forward better reflect the more historical and pluralistic vision of religious freedom. A suggested action we proposed was the support of judicial nominees with strong stances on religious equality as well as those who are nonreligious.

American Atheists got even more specific:

American Atheists will continue to advocate for more robust protections for Americans seeking services from religious providers to ensure that no one is turned away from a shelter, an adoption or foster agency, or denied access to any other basic service due to religiously motivated discrimination. And if this administration fails to live up to its obligations under the Constitution or its commitments to religious equality and representation for nonreligious Americans, we will hold them accountable.

Theres a legitimate argument to have about whether the government should do any kind of faith outreach, even if its inclusive, but if the office exists, then its important to reach out to the non-religious like the government frequently does with the religious. This may have been symbolic at best its not like those White House representatives have the power to rewrite policy. But the can set expectations and be at the table when high-level decisions are made. The last administration effectively ignored everyone except right-wing Christians. This ones at least not pretending like we dont exist. If nothing else, its a way to remind the administration not to play favorites with religious groups because were paying attention.

Now lets wait and see how many conservative groups flip out over the mere existence of this meeting. A decade ago, there were a number of unnecessarily angry reactions from the right. They acted like the White House had made some kind of secret deal with atheists. Well see what they say this time around, but remember that this was a conversation without promises. It was a chance to open a dialogue with people from the White House, not a way to funnel a godless agenda to the government.

Link:

The White House Faith Office Met with Leaders of Several Atheist Groups - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

Europe was the first continent to be Christianised and it was the first continent to be de-Christianised.

In todays Europe, most public discourse pushes religious matters to the margins or confines it entirely to the private sphere of personal beliefs. And at an individual level, increasing numbers of Europeans say they no longer believe, no longer attend church, and no longer practice their faith in meaningful ways.

This process of secularisation has been a subject of study and debate among sociologists for many years. Some considered it as the inevitable consequence of a rational scientific worldview which, together with the loss of the social significance of religion, would ultimately lead to the disappearance of religion in advanced societies. Others observed that many developed societies around the world seemed able to reconcile modernization and religious faith and that, in demographic terms, the proportion of religious people around the world is on the rise. So why not Europe?

Yet religious belief and practice are complex phenomena. We cannot measure secularisation by merely asking if someone regularly attends church, for example, there are many who continue to believe in God even though they no longer belong to a church, and in other European countries the opposite is true: people continue to belong, and occasionally attend, a state church even though they have no personal religious faith.

To complicate the picture further, similar complexities are evident among the nonreligious. Even in the most secularised countries, the percentage of those who are convinced atheists is relatively small. Self-defined atheism (irreligiosity) and non-belief in God (secularity) are not the same thing, as Kasselstrand and others have demonstrated.

One of the most widely used tools to track sociological trends is the European Values Study, a large-scale longitudinal survey across a wide range of human values including religious belief and practice. There have been five waves of research over a period spanning 1981-2017.

In 2010-2012, making use of the fourth wave of EVS data published in 2008, Vista analysed and ranked the relative secularity of countries, based on six measures of belief and practice

These six questions were chosen to explore the multi-dimensional nature of religious belief and behaviour. For example, someone may believe in God and pray frequently outside of religious services, but rarely attend or have confidence in the church. Or they may attend church but rarely practice their faith or even believe in God. The responses from the six questions were then normalised and combined into a single measure of secularity, what we called the Nova Index of Secularity after the then Nova Research Centre at Redcliffe College.

The publication of a new wave of data for the period 2017-2020 has caused us to revisit these questions and compare the results with those from ten years ago. We have also ranked countries according to their relative increase or decline in secularity and noted which countries have moved most significantly up or down in the ranking.

The new EVS data from 2017-2020 suggests that Czechia, Sweden and the Netherlands are the most secularised countries in Europe and that Turkey and Romania are the least secularised. When we compare the 2017-2020 NIS values with those from 2008 it is clear that, in the vast majority of countries, a degree of secularisation is continuing, and in some countries markedly so.

The countries showing the biggest change over this period were the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy indicating that these are the countries where secularisation is occurring most rapidly at present.

Only two countries show any significant opposite trend Albania, and most notably, Germany. This striking result caused us to do some further investigation and, in particular, to consider if there might be a sampling error.

Given the significant arrival of Muslim refugees into Germany and some other countries a quick check was made of the percentage of Muslims in the datasets from 2008 and 2017, and this was then compared with the Pew Research Center data from their 2017 report, Europes Growing Muslim Population.

The higher percentage of Muslims in the 2017-20 Germany sample relative to 2008 may help to explain some of the secularisation, but more generally, these percentages show a significant under-sampling of Muslims in the EVS when compared to the Pew 2017 study.

NIS1 Do you believe in God?

Sweden, Czechia and the Netherlands showed the highest NIS values for this question, though the high percentage of Czechs (16%) who did not give an answer may have skewed the numbers. 61% of Swedes, 53% of Dutch, 51% of Brits and Norwegians, and 50% of Czechs say they do not believe in God.

When we compare the two waves of EVS data for this question, we note that Great Britain, Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark have less belief than in 2008 but Germany appears to have more. Looking at the data in more detail we note that the number of those saying they believed in God in GB has fallen from 57.7% in 2008 to 47.8% in 2017-20, whereas in Germany it has risen from 43.3% in 2008 to 58.2% in 2017.

NIS2 How important is religion in your life?

As authors like Kasselstrand have observed, secularity is a complex phenomena and measures of indifference to religion are also required. Using our index, the top three countries on this measure were Czechia, Denmark and Sweden and the bottom three were Turkey, Greece and Romania.

Once again the longitudinal comparison throws up some interesting observations. The Netherlands, Denmark and Turkey show a lessening of importance of religion whereas in Albania and Germany the opposite trend could be noted.

NIS3 Do you consider yourself a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?

We might ask if this trichotomous question is really an effective way to explore religious (or irreligious) identity, but it does at least enable us to make comparisons. Sweden, France and Czechia show themselves to have the highest secularity on this measure whereas Romania, Poland and Greece show themselves to have the lowest. Yet here perhaps the raw data is more illustrative. Whereas Sweden shows itself to have the lowest percentage of people who self-identify as religious (26.7%) it is France that has the highest percentage of convinced atheists (22.7%).

The longitudinal comparison however reveals some even more surprising shifts. The country with the biggest NIS3 difference was Ukraine, which on closer inspection was largely down to a striking decrease in the number of people who say they are religious, down from 81,8% in 2008 to 59.3% in 2017-20. In fact, most countries showed a secularising tendency in this measure. The one exception again was Germany showing a marked rise in the number of religious people from 35% in 2008 to 52% in 2017. Some of this can be explained perhaps by the greater number of Muslims in the sample but once again, it runs against the general trend in the rest of the data.

NIS4 How often do you attend religious services?

This is a measure of religious participation which serves as another take on measuring secularity. At the top of the 2017-20 league table are Czechia, France and Sweden and at the bottom we find Poland, Romania and Greece. Whereas in Poland an astonishing 47.1% of people say they attend a religious service at least once a week, the lowest percentages of attendance are to be found in Denmark (2.5%), Finland (4.6%), Sweden (5.3%) and Norway (5.6%). What is interesting to note in the case of all of these Scandanavian countries is that, though they have the lowest weekly attendance, many still do attend church at some point during the year. The highest percentage of those who never attend a religious service is in France (63%), Czechia (61%) and Britain (60%).

Perhaps the most striking change between 2008 and 2017-20 corresponds to none of the aforementioned countries but rather to Portugal. There was a drop in at least weekly attendance from 32% in 2008 to 17.5% in 2017-20, and a rise in those who never attend a religious service from 18.5% to 31% over the same period.

NIS5 How much confidence do you have in the church?

The lowest level of confidence in the church, and therefore the highest degree of secularity, corresponds in this case to Czechia, Netherlands and Spain. Conversely Romania, Ukraine and Turkey show the highest levels of confidence.

When a longitudinal comparison is made between 2008 and 2017-20, Turkey, Romania and Croatia show the greatest decline, though in the first two cases this was from a very high level. Perhaps more interesting are the countries that show some recovery of confidence in the church since 2008: Greece, Finland, Norway and Sweden. In the case of the Nordic countries, it is notable that high levels of secularity, or even increasing degrees of secularity by some measures, do not necessarily mean that confidence in the church as an institution is also decreasing.

NIS6 How often do you pray to God outside of religious services?

Europe is frequently characterised as a secular continent, yet a striking number of Europeans continue to pray regularly. Even in the most secular countries, around one in every six or seven pray at least once a week: Czechia (15.1%), Sweden (15.7%) and Denmark (13.5%). Having said that, in all of those countries, more than half of the people say they never pray. The countries which pray the most are Romania, Albania and Turkey, with 79.8%, 79.2% and 77.5% respectively praying at least once a week.

Europe is frequently characterised as a secular continent, yet a striking number of Europeans continue to pray regularly

When we compare the latest wave of EVS data with that which was obtained in 2008, we note that prayer is becoming less frequent in Portugal, Turkey, Netherlands, Italy and Spain, and more frequent in Albania, Germany and Greece. Once again, a closer analysis of the actual data reveals fascinating details in these shifts. In 2008, 59.1% of Portuguese people said they prayed at least once a week but by 2017-20 this had fallen to 40.4%. Likewise, the number of those who said they never prayed in 2008 was just 15.8%, but by 2017-20 this had risen to 29.5%.

The 2017-2020 EVS data suggests that secularisation in Europe is continuing and it is occurring most rapidly in the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy. However, when we take a closer look at the six different secularisation measures, we get a more nuanced picture.

On that basis, the most rapid secularisation is taking place in Britain (NIS1 belief in God), Netherlands (NIS2 importance of religion), Ukraine (NIS3-self-identifiction as religious), Portugal (NIS4-attendance), Turkey (NIS5-confidence in church) and Portugal again (NIS6-prayer).

The German data raises a lot of questions and should perhaps be handled cautiously. Though some of the uptick in religiosity may be due to the arrival of significant numbers of migrants during 2015/16, closer inspection suggests that Muslims were under-represented in the sample in both 2008 and 2017. It is unclear how much of the apparent increase in religious belief and practice in Germany is due to a higher number of practicing Muslims being included in 2017 relative to 2008.

In conclusion, the data suggests that secularisation in Europe is continuing but that each country may well have its own trajectory. The most secularised countries are not necessarily the most atheist, suggesting that indifference to religion is the end result of secularisation rather than atheism.

Secularity and irreligiosity are not the same thing and this has significant consequences for Christian mission. Apologetics that is targeted on atheism is only reaching a tiny proportion of Europes population. The much greater challenge is reaching the huge number of unbelieving Europeans who are indifferent to Christianity and consider religion an irrelevance in modern life.

Jim Memory, church planter and lecturer in European Mission at Redcliffe College (UK). This article first appeared in the May 2021 edition of Vista Magazine.

Kasselstrand (2019), "Secularity and Irreligion in Cross-National Context: A Non-Linear Approach" in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 58(3):626-642

Pew (2017), Europe's Growing Muslim Population, https://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/

Memory (2010), Measuring Secularity in Europe in Vista 3:5,6 https://www.europeanmission.redcliffe.ac.uk/s/Vista-October-2010.pdf

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Secularity and irreligion in Europe - Evangelical Focus

*** Paul Strand is retiring from CBN News as a senior Washington correspondent. We repost his salvation testimony,first published on CBN.com, as we bid him a fond farewell.

COMMENTARY

CBN.com -In 1971, I was a 16-year-old smart aleck atheist and I took great pleasure in talking young Christians out of their faith. I would argue, "Why live by faith? By its very nature, you can't know what you believe is true." The only problem with my philosophy is that it was driving me into a deep depression. I would say, "If there is no creator and judge, and all we are is a product of evolution, why do good? Why be good? Why even be?"

That summer, feeling life was so bleak and depressingly purposeless, I was having a hard time figuring out why I should do anything or talk to anyone. My poor mother was panicking for me as I was slipping into a deeper and deeper funk. I was spending more time alone in my room and I was saying hardly anything to anyone.

I recently asked my mother whether it seemed strange that I went so silentduring the infamous summer of 1971.

"It certainly was," said my mom."You were the most talkative child I had seen in on all of my life."

And Mom was not the type to preach to her kids. But finally, one July day she slipped into my room, Bible in hand and I could see clearly she had a bunch of pagesbookmarked.

"I was going to share the scriptures with you," she said.

I never yelled at her before, but I said loudly, "Don't do it. Don't read to me from that book!"

"You became very belligerent," she remembered.

Little demons inside of me were just freaking out.

"Well, I suggested that you could listen to just one scripture," she said.

How did I respond?

"You threw me out of your bedroom," she said.

But my Mom never gave up.

"I just started praying harder than ever," she recalled, looking back on that moment.

At the time I was working at a county agency. It was one of those emergency hotlines that you call when you feel like you are going to commit suicide. And about a week after that wild encounter with my mom, some Jesus People moved into town. They lived in a nearby house. They came over to visit our hotline on a Saturday night. Some hotline workers who knew I hated Christians came running to get me and said, "Paul, there are Jesus Freaks in here."

I ran out and met them on astaircase and yelled, "Get out of here!" But then I looked into their eyes. There was so much love in them and something like the very presence of God. It undid me. I screamed at them and cursed at them and then I actually ran away. Those little demons were hopping around inside me again.

I couldn't stop thinking about those guys and that presence in their eyes. So, the next night, I went over to their place, called The Sonhouse. S-O-N. And I ended up talking to their 21-year-oldleader for about three hours. I could hardly understand a word this guy was saying about having a personal relationship with Jesus. But there was an utter peace about him. He set off this prickly itching inside of me that just wouldn't go away.

Five long days passed, the itchiness never stopped and I just couldn't take it anymore. Finally, out on a long walk, I issued a sort of challengeto the universe. I said, "Alright, we are going to settle this once and for all. If there is a God out there, He has until the end of the night to prove himself. If He does, I will give Him my life tonight. After all, if He is the Lord of the universe, I would be a fool not to. It's His universe. But if He doesn't prove himself tonight, then as a good atheist, I am never going to consider getting religious again."

About 9:30 that night I ended up back at the Sonhouse where the Jesus People lived and I shared my challenge with them. I said, "If you can prove God exists, tonight, then you have me. But if you can't, well then, I guess in your eyes, I'm hellbound."

We spent the next two hours and more battling and debating. They tried every argument. I rejected everyone. They kept bringing up the Bible. I said they couldn't do that because I didn't believe in the Bible. We went round and round and round. Close to midnight they finally gave up.

They said, "Look, Paul, there is no way that physical beings like us can prove the existence of a spiritual being like God." Then they announced they were going upstairs to bed.

Well, I was desperate. I begged them to keep on debating.

I said, "My eternal soul is on the line, right?"

They just kept walking up the stairs to their bedrooms.

I moved to their front door just bathed in self-pity. It was almost midnight as I began to walk out their doorway into the dark night, remembering my challenge to the universe: God had till the end of this day to prove Himself, or I'd never consider believing again. Now, though, as I started to cross that threshold, it felt as ifI was literally walking into Hell.

But at that very moment on that very threshold, I got the shock and surprise of my young life. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a Mighty Presence came upon me. It was powerful and terrifying and yet, at the same time, sweet and very appealing, full of peace and love.And He then spokein a voice that didn't make a sound and yet was so mighty it boomed in my head.

That voice said,"If you want to know I am real, why don't you just ask me?"

I was scared to death and trembling yet I managed to whisper, "Are you real?"

And it boomed, "I AM!" It was so powerful, it actually picked me up, spun me around and knocked me back into the house, down to the floor.

And that Presence out in the doorway swept into the room and began to swirl around it.

It was so pure andholy, that all I could feelwas the weight of my own dark sin. I was crushed flat to the floor with it. And I shouted out, "Lord, forgive me!I am sorry!"

And that swirling Presence came down and touched me gently on the back and said, "You are forgiven. You are free."

I began to weep because suddenly my body felt so light, itwas like I wasfloating off that floor. In gratitude, as I got onto my knees,I began to shout out, "Be my Lord! Be my Lord!"

The Presence said, "Just ask me in."

I said, "Come into my heart." Thenthat Presence sweeping around the room shot down my throat and filled my heart. I fell back down to the floor and began to weep and weep.

A few minutes later, the two Jesus People who had gone upstairs came back down, quietly came over to me and placed their hands on my shoulders. One of them asked, "Paul, would you like to ask the Lord into your heart?"

I replied, "Fellas, what do you think has been going on down here."

Well, that is what happened 50 years ago. About a year later when I was praying alone one day, God's voice returned and He gave me a wonderful prophecy. He said, "I am going to send you to a place called CBN News and you will explore a new form of journalism."

You know, maybe that is what this is.

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How the Booming Voice of God Turned This Veteran CBN News Reporter from Smart Aleck Atheist to Born Again Believer | CBN News - CBN News

For the BJP/RSS, Tamil Nadu and Kerala were more ideological battlegrounds than West Bengal, as Bengal politics was operating very much within the Dwija control.

Stalin was a Russian ruler who did not believe in god. He shaped the post World War II world. He died on March 5, 1953. Karunanidhi, the famous Dravidian leader, while mourning his death in a meeting declared that his just born son (born on March 1, 1953) would be named Stalin. In 1953, Karunanidhi was with the DMK . He was an atheist like his mentors Anna and Periyar.

That son of Karunanidhi's told the nation recently that Tamil Nadu is a Dravidian land that would not allow the BJP/RSS to take it back to the varna-caste system which has been hugely weakened by the Dravidian party's victory in the 2021 state Assembly elections. He defeated the AIADMK and BJP combine, and became the Chief Minister of the state at 68. Stalins ancestors were barber-musicians around temples, and his father became a famous writer, politician and five-time CM of Tamil Nadu.

In the south, the RSS is known as an Aryan organisation with a vision of putting the varna order into the proper Vedic form again in the country. If there is any movement that disturbed that order by giving marching orders to Aryan Brahmanism, it was the DK movement. The DMK is its political successor. Annadurai, Karunanidhi and now Stalin are its flag bearers. MGR and Jayalalithaa were actually trojan horses, and perhaps Jayalalithaa would be the last Brahmin to rule the state.

The BJP/RSS entered that state through the backdoor by using Jayalalithaas silent support to Hindutva expansion. Jayalalithaa played a double edged role in the state Dravidian in form, but Brahmin in content.

The BJP/RSS could not threaten Stalin as much as they did Mamata Benerjee in West Bengal, who also started running around temples and claiming that she was Bengali Brahmin beti. Granted, the atheist Stalin too had to pick up the Vel in his hand to counter accusations of being anti-Hindu. But the two are not comparablebecauseone inherits a Dravidian cultural history and the other inherits the Brahminic history.

The BJP/RSS, by using Shudra-Namashudra (Dalit) mobilisation, made the Bengali Bhadralok (Brahmin, Kayastha and Baidhyas) give up their secular-communist claims. The CPI(M) closed ranks in Bengal as it refused to see the existence of casteism among the Bhadralok. The BJP/RSS used the Shudra/OBC and Dalit aspiration to come to power in a state of Bhadralok unending hegemony and control after 1947. No Shudra or Namashudra or Muslim (Muslims constitute 27% of the states population) could become the Chief Minister of that state. The Kerala communist movement however went in the opposite direction and hence, it survived. The productive Shudra (they call avarna) and Dalits captured the communist movement after EMS Namboodripads era ended.

The BJP/RSS could not play their tricks in Kerala, the land of Narayana Guru and Ayyankali. Pinarayi Vijayan, who came from Gurus Ezhava community and became the commander of communist party, showed the door to Modi and Shah. He became the first communist leader to come to power for a second consecutive time.

Both Tamil Nadu and Kerala have made south India proud by telling the BJP/RSS that the south has a strong Dravidian-Shudra heritage. West Bengal on the other hand operated in the domain of Aryan Hindu casteist cultural heritage, without allowing the Shudra-Namasudra identities to come to the fore. In fact, the Bengali renaissance of Raja Rammohun Roy and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, operated on the same Aryan Brahmin controlpad. Whereas the southern renaissance initiated by Mahatma Phule (1827-1890), Iyothidasa (1845-1912), Narayana Guru (1856-1928) and carried forward by Periyar, brought about an anti-caste cultural revolution. Abolition of caste or weakening caste never were agendas of Maharastrian and Bengali Brahmanism. Whereas the Dravidian social justice ideology influenced the anti-caste and human equality movements across the country

Stalin and Pinarayi Vijayan represent that ethos. If the Kerala communists do not realise that, they too will go the way Bengal communists went, in future. It was the anti-caste movements that saved the communist ideology in Kerala.

Tamil Nadu has shown a post-colonial path for Shudra/OBC reservation as Ambedkars Mahar movement has shown a path for Dalit reservation in colonial times. Stalin has to carry that struggle forward.

Kerala has shown socialist democratic welfarism with an anti-caste implementation of those welfare policies. Such egalitarian welfarism proved to be a better model than Modis Gujarat model in every respect. Its Muslim and Christian minorities felt safe in Pinarayis hands than in Congresss hands.

The Congresss stand on Sabarimala womens equality proved to be disastrous. Shashi Tharoors unending claim that he is a better Hindu than Mohan Bhagwat and Modi by writing book after book on why he is a Hindu proved to be untrustworthy. He was trying to hide his Shudra (Nair) background and behaving like a Namboodiri himself. Such Congressism was disliked by all OBCs/Dalits and women of Kerala. After a massive anti-womens equality mobilisation of the Congress and BJP in Kerala, Vijayans winning is a game changer.

In Tamil Nadu the BJP/RSS played many tricks. They wanted a coalition of AIADMK and BJP to come to power and break the back of Dravidian political history. But Stalin has shown them the door. For the BJP/RSS, Tamil Nadu and Kerala were more ideological battlegrounds than West Bengal, as Bengal politics was operating very much within the Dwija control. Mohan Bhagwat did not hate Mamata as much as he hated Stalin and Pinarayi.

The next three years will be significant for India. With BJP/RSSs failure to stop the dance of death of corona with an army of superstition, that it built over 95 years by foregrounding myth and negating science, what will India do? There is an increased opposition to the BJP/RSS even in the northern states. If the south escapes with lesser deaths in the corona crisis, the whole north will also tilt towards science and medicine by moving away from myth. That depends on what kind of administration Stalin and Pinarayi provide in future.

(Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist. His latest book is 'The Shudras Vision For a New Path', co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy.)

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Why it's Stalin and Pinarayi's ideology and not Mamata's that India needs - The News Minute

BOSTON Before she entered the Daughters of St. Paul convent in 2010, Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble read a biography of the orders founder, an Italian priest who was born in the 1880s. He kept a ceramic skull on his desk, as a reminder of the inevitability of death. Sister Aletheia, a punk fan as a teenager, thought the morbid curio was super punk rock, she recalled recently. She thought vaguely about acquiring a skull for herself someday.

These days, Sister Aletheia has no shortage of skulls. People send her skull mugs and skull rosaries in the mail, and share photos of their skull tattoos. A ceramic skull from a Halloween store sits on her desk. Her Twitter name includes a skull and crossbones emoji.

That is because since 2017, she has made it her mission to revive the practice of memento mori, a Latin phrase meaning Remember your death. The concept is to intentionally think about your own death every day, as a means of appreciating the present and focusing on the future. It can seem radical in an era in which death until very recently has become easy to ignore.

My life is going to end, and I have a limited amount of time, Sister Aletheia said. We naturally tend to think of our lives as kind of continuing and continuing.

Sister Aletheias project has reached Catholics all over the country, via social media, a memento mori prayer journal even merchandise emblazoned with a signature skull. Her followers have found unexpected comfort in grappling with death during the coronavirus pandemic. Memento mori is: Where am I headed, where do I want to end up? said Becky Clements, who coordinates religious education at her Catholic parish in Lake Charles, La., and has incorporated the idea into a curriculum used by other parishes in her diocese. Memento mori works perfectly with what my students are facing, between the pandemic and the massive hurricanes. Ms. Clements keeps a large resin skull on her own desk, inspired by Sister Aletheia.

Sister Aletheia rejects any suggestion that the practice is morbid. Suffering and death are facts of life; focusing only on the bright and shiny is superficial and inauthentic. We try to suppress the thought of death, or escape it, or run away from it because we think thats where well find happiness, she said. But its actually in facing the darkest realities of life that we find light in them.

The practice of regular meditation on death is a venerable one. Saint Benedict instructed his monks in the sixth century to keep death daily before your eyes, for example. For Christians like Sister Aletheia, it is inextricable from the promise of a better life after death. But the practice is not uniquely Christian. Mindfulness of death is a tradition within Buddhism, and Socrates and Seneca were among the early thinkers who recommended practicing death as a way to cultivate meaning and focus. Skeletons, clocks and decaying food are recurring motifs in art history.

For almost all of humanity, people died at younger ages than we do now, more frequently died at home, and had less medical control over their final days. Death was far less predictable, and far more visible. To us, death is exotic, said Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, a Brooklyn-based enterprise that offers events and books focused on death, art and culture. But thats a luxury particular to our time and place.

The pandemic, of course, has made death impossible to forget. Since last spring, Ms. Ebenstein has conducted a series of memento mori classes online, in which students explore the global history of representations of death, and then create their own. Final projects have included a miniature coffin, a series of letters to be delivered post-mortem, and a deck of tarot cards composed of photographs taken by a husband who recently died. For the first time in my lifetime, this is a topic not just interesting to a bunch of hipsters, Ms. Ebenstein said. Death is actually relevant.

The Daughters of St. Paul, Sister Aletheias order, was founded in the early 20th century to use the most modern and efficacious means of media to preach the Christian message. A century ago, that meant publishing books, which the group still does. But now, modern and efficacious means something more, and many of the women are active on social media, where they use variations on the hashtag #MediaNuns. In December, Sister Aletheia appeared in a TikTok video created by the order, which posed cheeky Catholic matchups like evening prayer vs. morning prayer, and St. Peter vs. St. Paul. The video, set to Run-DMCs Its Tricky, was viewed more than 4.4 million times.

As a teenager in Tulsa, Okla., Sister Aletheia, who is now 40, listened to the Dead Kennedys and attended local punk shows with her friends. Her parents were committed Catholics; her father has a Ph.D. in theology and worked for a local Catholic diocese for a while. But she was a skeptical child and declared herself an atheist as a teenager, rather than go through the formal process of joining the church.

At Bryn Mawr College, she was the leader of an animal rights club. But she blanched at the animal rights movements arguments against speciesism. It seemed to her that there was a real, if difficult to define, difference between humans and other animals. But as a materialist atheist, I really couldnt find a reason for that, she recalled. I had this intuitive sense that the soul existed.

While working on an organic farm in Costa Rica after a stint with Teach for America, she had a sudden and dramatic conversion experience: God was real and she had to figure out his plan for her life. When her longtime boyfriend picked her up from the airport after the trip, she broke up with him and canceled her plans to go to law school. Within four years, she was wearing a habit at the convent, an unassuming blond-brick building that includes a publishing house, gardens and a small free-standing burial chapel where the nuns are entombed after they die.

Sister Aletheia began her memento mori project on Twitter, where she shared daily meditations for more than 500 days in a row. In October 2018, on her 455th day with the skull on her desk, she wrote, Everyone dies, their bodies rot, and every face becomes a skull (unless you are incorrupt).

At first, she had no particular goal beyond keeping herself committed to her own daily practice. But the tweets were a hit, and the project expanded. Now the order sells vinyl decals ($4.95, great Christmas gifts!) and hooded sweatshirts emblazoned with a skull icon designed by Sister Danielle Victoria Lussier, another Daughter of St. Paul. Sister Aletheia continues to promote the practice on social media, and she has published a memento mori prayer journal and a devotional that opens with the sentence, You are going to die.

The books have become some of the orders best-sellers in recent years, a boost to the nuns, whose income as a nonprofit publisher has declined sharply in recent decades. Sister Aletheia is currently working on a new prayer book for the Advent season, leading up to Christmas.

She has such a gift for talking about really difficult things with joy, said Christy Wilkens, a Catholic writer and mother of six outside Austin, Texas. Shes so young and vibrant and joyful and is also reminding us all were going to die. Ms. Wilkens credits memento mori with giving her the spiritual tools to grapple with her 9-year-old sons serious health issues. It has allowed me, not exactly to cope, but to surrender everything to God, she said.

For Sister Aletheia, having spent the previous few years meditating on mortality helped prepare her for the fear and isolation of the past year. The pandemic has been traumatic, she said. But there have also been small moments of grace, like people from the community knocking on the door to donate food to the nuns in isolation. As she wrote in her devotional, Remembering death keeps us awake, focused, and ready for whatever might happen both the excruciatingly difficult and the breathtakingly beautiful.

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Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remember You Will Die - The New York Times

From Passover Seders to Jewish foods and life-cycle milestones such as bar and bat mitzvahs, some aspects of Jewish religious life and culture are widespread among American Jews. But other religious expressions such as regular attendance at synagogue services and belief in God as described in the Bible are much less common, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

In fact, based on these more traditional measures of religious observance, Jews in the United States are far less religious than U.S. Christians and Americans overall.

Pew Research Center conducted this study to explore the breadth and diversity of Jewish Americans religious experiences. This survey represents the Centers most comprehensive, in-depth study of the subject, drawing on 4,718 U.S. adults who identify as Jewish, including 3,836 Jews by religion and 882 Jews of no religion. The survey was administered online and by mail by Westat, from Nov. 19, 2019, to June 3, 2020. Respondents were drawn from a national, stratified random sampling of residential mailing addresses, which included addresses from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. No lists of common Jewish names, membership rolls of Jewish organizations or other indicators of Jewishness were used to draw the sample.

The sample is nationally representative and was weighted to align with demographic benchmarks for the U.S. adult population from the Census Bureau as well as a set of modeled estimates for the religious and demographic composition of eligible adults within the larger U.S. adult population. Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and its methodology.

For example, 12% of U.S. Jewish adults say they attend religious services weekly or more often, compared with 27% of the general public and 38% of U.S. Christians. And 21% of Jewish adults say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 41% of U.S. adults overall and 57% of Christians.

There are even bigger gaps when it comes to belief in God. About a quarter of Jews (26%) say they believe in God as described in the Bible, compared with more than half of U.S. adults overall (56%) and eight-in-ten Christians. Jews are more likely than U.S. adults overall (50% vs. 33%) to say they believe in some other spiritual force or higher power, but not in God as described in the Bible. Jewish adults also are twice as likely as the general public to say they do not believe in any kind of higher power or spiritual force in the universe (22% vs. 10%).

Orthodox Jews who make up 9% of all U.S. Jews are a notable exception. They are among the most highly religious groups in U.S. society by these measures. For example, 86% of Orthodox Jews say religion is very important in their lives, as do 78% of Black Protestants and 76% of White evangelical Protestants, two of the most highly religious Christian subgroups. Orthodox Jews (93%) also are about as likely as White evangelicals (94%) and Black Protestants (88%) to say they believe in God as described in the Bible.

Conservative and Reform Jews, who together make up 54% of U.S. Jews, are much less religious than Orthodox Jews by these measures. A third of Conservative Jews and 14% of Reform Jews say religion is very important in their lives. Moreover, 37% of Conservative Jews and 18% of Reform Jews believe in God as described in the Bible.

In analyzing the survey results, Pew Research Center also distinguished between two sets of respondents: those who say their religion is Jewish (referred to as Jews by religion) and those who describe themselves religiously as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, but who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish and still identify as Jewish in ways other than religion, such as culturally, ethnically or because of their family background (referred to as Jews of no religion). By these definitions, 73% of U.S. Jews are Jews by religion, while 27% are Jews of no religion.

Not surprisingly, Jews of no religion are much less religious than Jews by religion, at least by some standard measures. Fewer than 1% of Jews of no religion say they attend religious services at least weekly, compared with 16% of Jews by religion. And while 6% of Jews of no religion say religion is very important to them, the share is much higher (33%) among Jews by religion.

The fact that U.S. Jews as a whole are less likely than Americans overall to say religion is very important to them does not necessarily mean their Jewish identity is not meaningful to them. In fact, twice as many Jews say being Jewish is very important to them as say their religion is very important to them (42% vs. 21%). More than half of Jews by religion (55%) say being Jewish is very important to them, compared with just 7% of Jews of no religion.

Both Jews by religion and Jews of no religion are more likely to engage with Judaism in other ways. Roughly six-in-ten Jewish Americans overall say they held or attended a Passover Seder in the year prior to the survey, including 74% of Jews by religion and 30% of Jews of no religion. Similar shares in both groups say they observed a life milestone such as a bar or bat mitzvah during that period. And about eight-in-ten Jews by religion (78%) say they often or sometimes cook or eat traditional Jewish foods, while roughly half of Jews of no religion (54%) say this.

Eating traditional Jewish foods is not to be mistaken with keeping kosher: Just 17% of U.S. Jews say they keep kosher in their homes, including 22% of Jews by religion and 3% of Jews of no religion. The vast majority of Orthodox Jews (95%) keep kosher at home, compared with 24% of Conservative Jews and 5% of Reform Jews.

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Jews in U.S. are far less religious than Christians and Americans overall, at least by traditional measures - Pew Research Center