Finally, a bit of good news

(First, apologies for not yet delivering the promised Part 2 of the material on Hillary Clinton — I’ll deliver it eventually. The severe insomnia continues, and I’ve been spending my energy finishing the first edit of Chris Mato Nunpa’s very valuable Great Evil. I hope to finish that tomorrow and get on with the second edit. As an aside, I did the first edit on screen, but will print out the ms. after finishing that edit, as it’s considerably slower to edit a printout, but I tend to spot a lot more than I do when doing all of the editing on screen.)

Anyway, here’s the good news: The Pew Research Center just released a new poll on religious affiliation in the U.S., “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.” The really good news is that the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as Christian declined by 12% over the last decade, but from 77% to 65%. That’s still far too high for comfort, but it’s a major improvement.

As well, self-identified Catholics declined from 23% to 20% of the population over the last decade, while “nones” (atheists, agnostics, spiritual but no religious, none of the above) increased from 17% to 26% since 2009 — and they (we) now considerably outnumber both Catholics and white evangelicals, who declined from 19% of the population a decade ago to16% today.

This is great news. Today, evangelical and conservative Catholics are doing their best to stifle democracy, prop up their utterly corrupt enabler Trump, and install a theocracy through whatever means at their disposal, no matter how foul (gerrymandering, voter suppression, foreign interference in elections). They probably won’t succeed, and if they don’t Christianity will continue its well-deserved downward spiral.

Once the authoritarian evangelists, Trump cultists, and other authoritarian religious fanatics are defeated (quite probably in 2020), we’ll likely (well, could) make some progress on climate change and other real social and economic problems, and move on to creating a more fair, peaceful, and sustainable world.

If the Christian religio-fascists don’t succeed in destroying democracy next year and cementing their rule, they’re doomed.

(At the risk of sounding like a mean, vindictive s.o.b., I wish we could disarm them, put them all on an island along with all of the Islamist religio-fascists, lace the water with contraceptives, and hand out machetes.)

Definition of the Day 10-9-18 (Agnostic)

AGNOSTIC, n. 1. An atheist who craves social acceptance; 2) A person who feels superior to atheists by merit of his ignorance of the rules of logic and evidence.

(Adding weight to the second definition, Pew Research Center just released a poll showing that agnostics were two-and-a-half times more likely than atheists to hold at least one irrational new age belief [“new age” being pronounced as a single word starting with “s” according to Penn & Teller] — in spiritual energy; psychics; reincarnation; and/or astrology. Agnostics were only slightly less credulous in this regard than Christians.)

* * *

— from The American Heretic’s Dictionary (revised & expanded), the 21st-century successor to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. (The link goes to 50 sample definitions and illustrations.)