When a recent survey found that 44% of adults have switched their religious affiliation, the Christian church realised that it has a bad case of declining “brand loyalty”. Now, in order to combat this, they have started to employ “mystery worshippers”.
The Wall Street Journal profiles Thomas Harrison, a mystery worshipper, and uncovers the strange—yet profitable—world of spritual consumerism.
Mr. Harrison belongs to a new breed of church consultants aiming to equip pastors with modern marketing practices. Pastors say mystery worshippers like Mr. Harrison offer insight into how newcomers judge churches. […] In an increasingly diverse and fluid religious landscape, churches competing for souls are turning to corporate marketing strategies such as focus groups, customer-satisfaction surveys and product giveaways.
via Rudius
Lewis Wolpert, the Emeritus Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology at UCL who gave the Is Science Dangerous? lecture (pdf) at the 120th Nobel Symposium, recently wrote the book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
In this book Wolpert explores the evolutionary origins of belief, and ABC News discusses this opinion in Why Do We Believe Impossible Things?
[O]ur wide range of beliefs, some of which are clearly false, grew out of a uniquely human trait. Alone in the animal world, humans understand cause and effect, and that, he says, led ultimately to the invention of tools, the rapid rise of sophisticated technology, and of course, beliefs. Even the earliest humans understood that many events that shaped their lives resulted from specific causes. Therefore, there must be a cause behind every event.
Searching for that cause, Wolpert says, led to the rise of religion because surely there must be some purpose behind all this, some ultimate cause at work in the universe.
A breath of fresh air:the Church of England is to officially apologise to Charles Darwin—126 years following his death—for dismissing his theory of evolution.
This apology coincides with the release of a new CoE website promoting Darwin and his views, released this morning.
The trouble with homo sapiens is that we’re only human. People, and institutions, make mistakes and Christian people and churches are no exception. When a big new idea emerges which changes the way people look at the world, it’s easy to feel that every old idea, every certainty, is under attack and then to do battle against the new insights. The church made that mistake with Galileo’s astronomy, and has since realised its error. Some church people did it again in the 1860s with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. So it is important to think again about Darwin’s impact on religious thinking, then and now – and the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth in 1809 is a good time to do so.
[…] the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests. Good religion needs to work constructively with good science – and I dare to suggest that the opposite may be true as well.
Playboy’s 1964 Ayn Rand interview in full; a deep and prophetic discussion.
PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?
RAND: Qua religion, no — in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very — how should I say it? — dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.
via Kottke
Yes, that is a real quote. It’s from Jesus Camp, an incredibly interesting—yet infuriating and disturbing—documentary recording the indoctrination of North Dakotan children to Evangelical Christianity.
I just had to search for The Creation Adventure Team after I saw a child watching the show in the film and came across this 3 minute segment – required watching.
According to the Bible, God created everything in 6 actual days. Yep; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And, uh, on the seventh, he rested. Huh, kinda like a week. And at the end he said, “This is good… very, very good.”