The Slow Death Of Christianity In The United States

Skwim said:

Of course it has to do with history, "events of the past," but what are the particular events you're referring to? The when and where this ebb and flow you speak of took place.

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Azusa Street - early 1900, John Wesley in the 1700's, John G Lake in the 1800's - and many others.

steveb1 said:

The decline is probably mostly due to the failure of the Christian paradigm to keep pace with modern ideas and modern people. As long as churches believe in fantasies about Christian origins and the infallibility of its scriptures, it is digging its own grave.......................

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Remember: MANY come in Jesus' name but prove false according to Matthew 7:21-23.
The fake 'weed/tares' Christians outnumber the genuine 'wheat' Christians until the Harvest Time (our time frame).
The decline is mostly due to the failure of false Christians to keep pace with the 1st-century teachings of Jesus.
Instead they often teach church traditions or church customs as being Scripture when they are Not Scripture.
So, you are going to be in for quite a surprise when the powers that be will be saying, "Peace and Security..." which is really the precursor to the coming great tribulation as mentioned at Revelation 7:14,9; 1 Thessalonians 5:2-3.
It will be the figurative haughty 'goats' who I find are digging their own grave / destruction - Matthew 25:31-33,37,40.

KenS said:

18 to 25 year olds getting the fire.............

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I find a lot in that age group is getting more of a 'political fire' then the 'fiery zeal' Jesus taught at Matthew 24:14; Acts 1:8

URAVIP2ME said:

I find a lot in that age group is getting more of a 'political fire' then the 'fiery zeal' Jesus taught at Matthew 24:14; Acts 1:8

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Time will tell. Louie Giglio is more of a fiery zeal as i listen to him

This generation young people and older too has had more addictions to chemicals then any other time, Meth is the devil. Sex and porn addiction is so high, some surveys say as much as half the men in America are porn addicts! We gave monsterous problems that we never use to have. But I am not a psychologist or religion specialist so I do not know what place the American church has in this.

KenS said:

Time will tell. Louie Giglio is more of a fiery zeal as i listen to him

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Is Louie zealously teaching 1st-century Christianity as Jesus taught, or man-made traditions _____________

URAVIP2ME said:

I find Messiah mentioned at Daniel 9:25-26 is about a future Messiah who proved to be Jesus.
Jesus instructed to teach about God's kingdom as mentioned at Daniel 2:44.
God's kingdom government in the hands of Christ Jesus for a thousand years will crush the statue's feet.
We are now at the statue's ' time of the toes ' or more like the ' time of the toenails ' before Jesus takes action.

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There was no Daniel....

sooda said:

There was no Daniel....

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Sure there is Daniel, he is located between Ezekiel and Hosea.

Skwim said:

But it's more than leaving churches, it's leaving the religion.

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That all depends on what and why a person is leaving the religion and church.

I didn't leave the religion, but the church.
I don't belong to any church.

URAVIP2ME said:

Sure there is Daniel, he is located between Ezekiel and Hosea.

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There was no Daniel. The book was written by committee during the Maccabean Revolt to give the Jews hope. Its NOT considered prophecy..

The name Daniel is based on Dan'el a popular character in Canaanite writings dating to 1500 BC.

PruePhillip said:

But, bit by bit, the amazing story of the Jews and Israel is slowly emerging from the mists of time.
Sure, the Jews didn't create monuments to themselves. And they were a tiny nation - like the bible
says. But the bible isn't a myth like the Greeks and Roman made myths.

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The bible is a mix of myth, like the Creation, the Garden, Babel, Noah, and as archaeological evidence suggests, likely the Egyptian captivity and Moses; and history some of which is close enough and some of which is unreliable or simply untrue; and good stories, like Daniel in the Lions' den and the Writing on the Wall (and, offstage, Susannah and the Elders); and the religious politics of the day, like Isaiah &c, devising the explanation that their god allowed the Babylonian captivity after he'd promised them all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, because it was all his worshipers' own fault; and it contains laws, rituals and priestly practice, songs, a play (Job), wisdom (Ecclesiastes, Proverbs), and much else.

It certainly contains its share of Bronze Age morality ─ invasive wars, massacres of populations and even animals, mass rape, slavery, women as property, slaughter of enemy children, religious intolerance to the extreme, and of course human sacrifices.

sooda said:

There was no Daniel. The book was written by committee during the Maccabean Revolt to give the Jews hope. Its NOT considered prophecy..

The name Daniel is based on Dan'el a popular character in Canaanite writings dating to 1500 BC.

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As it speaks of Rome destroying Israel, the temple and even the Messiah
I put it to you that Daniel was written by a committee of Catholic monks
in the 3rd or 4th Century AD - to give the people hope.

And as Jesus spoke of the Jews being outcast again and returning to
Jerusalem when the Gentiles are finished - I put it to you that the Gospels
were written after 1967.

And Ezekiel speaks of another return of the Jews to their homeland, and
suffering attack, that Ezekiel's account in Chapter 38 hasn't been written yet.

blü 2 said:

The bible is a mix of myth, like the Creation, the Garden, Babel, Noah, and as archaeological evidence suggests, likely the Egyptian captivity and Moses; and history some of which is close enough and some of which is unreliable or simply untrue; and good stories, like Daniel in the Lions' den and the Writing on the Wall (and, offstage, Susannah and the Elders); and the religious politics of the day, like Isaiah &c, devising the explanation that their god allowed the Babylonian captivity after he'd promised them all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, because it was all his worshipers' own fault; and it contains laws, rituals and priestly practice, songs, a play (Job), wisdom (Ecclesiastes, Proverbs), and much else.

It certainly contains its share of Bronze Age morality ─ invasive wars, massacres of populations and even animals, mass rape, slavery, women as property, slaughter of enemy children, religious intolerance to the extreme, and of course human sacrifices.

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Part of the problem with the Egyptian account is that a lot of archaeology is under existing cities.
And this nation is Muslim with no appetite to explore Jewish narratives. The account makes sense
as many immigrants entered Egypt, and at the time of Joseph this nation was ruled by the Hyksos,
a people more akin to the Hebrews than Egyptians.
The forty years in the wilderness was not forty years in a desert. In fact 38 of those years were
spent in one location, or traveling to and from that location. And Egyptians did not record defeats.

What impresses me a lot is the Bronze Age accounts that made no sense to Jews of later ages.
Ancient cultures which only came to light in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

PruePhillip said:

Part of the problem with the Egyptian account is that a lot of archaeology is under existing cities.
And this nation is Muslim with no appetite to explore Jewish narratives. The account makes sense
as many immigrants entered Egypt, and at the time of Joseph this nation was ruled by the Hyksos,
a people more akin to the Hebrews than Egyptians.
The forty years in the wilderness was not forty years in a desert. In fact 38 of those years were
spent in one location, or traveling to and from that location. And Egyptians did not record defeats.

What impresses me a lot is the Bronze Age accounts that made no sense to Jews of later ages.
Ancient cultures which only came to light in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

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The "Egypt did not record its defeats" is a Christian claim that does not appear to match reality since they did record their defeats.

Is there an example of Egypt recording defeat?

"There are a number of Egyptian defeats known to history - some of them come to us from contemporaneous accounts from neighboring civilizations, others from archaeological evidence, but many of them come from the Egyptian historical record.

In direct answer to your question, here is the Victory Stela of Piye, which documents the conquests of the Nubian kingdom of Kush in Egypt and Libya. It details battles in which Egyptians lose, and badly, to Piye's Nubian army. Piye's image has been somewhat inexpertly redacted by subsequent Pharaohs, but the text remains untouched."

Riders said:

This generation young people and older too has had more addictions to chemicals then any other time, Meth is the devil. Sex and porn addiction is so high, some surveys say as much as half the men in America are porn addicts!

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There's always been drugs and addictions. Alcohol is always popular and pushed by the culture. Opium used to be really popular in the 19th and early 20th century. The claim that half of US men are porn addicts is totally ridiculous on the face of it.

PruePhillip said:

Part of the problem with the Egyptian account is that a lot of archaeology is under existing cities.
And this nation is Muslim with no appetite to explore Jewish narratives. The account makes sense
as many immigrants entered Egypt, and at the time of Joseph this nation was ruled by the Hyksos,
a people more akin to the Hebrews than Egyptians.

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I think it's a reasonable guess that the Hyksos, apparently from northern Canaan, had something to do with the story; but I don't know of any evidence to support that.

PruePhillip said:

The forty years in the wilderness was not forty years in a desert. In fact 38 of those years were spent in one location, or traveling to and from that location. And Egyptians did not record defeats.

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Even in the 18th century problems with the narrative were remarked. If there was a captivity and if there was an exodus, it's proved impossible either to find any confirming evidence or to attach any credible date to it. It's far richer in hypotheses and assertions than in facts. It also has a number of background problems, like the story of finding baby Moses floating on the Nile, which is borrowed from the story told of Sargon of Akkad c. 2300 BCE. One of the various possible meanings of Moses is that it's the Egyptian word for 'son' eg as in Rameses, 'son of Ra'. And of course it seems improbable that the Seven Plagues would wholly have escaped history's notice if they'd actually happened.

Even so, I feel a kind of Punch-and-Judy-show appeal for the scene with Moses and Aaron arguing with Pharaoh and everyone turning the Nile into real blood and back, and so on ─ a model storyteller's yarn.

PruePhillip said:

As it speaks of Rome destroying Israel, the temple and even the Messiah
I put it to you that Daniel was written by a committee of Catholic monks
in the 3rd or 4th Century AD - to give the people hope.

And as Jesus spoke of the Jews being outcast again and returning to
Jerusalem when the Gentiles are finished - I put it to you that the Gospels
were written after 1967.

And Ezekiel speaks of another return of the Jews to their homeland, and
suffering attack, that Ezekiel's account in Chapter 38 hasn't been written yet.

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I have no idea what you are talking about. Post the verse in Daniel about Rome.

Skwim said:

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And why might it be happening ?



THE EVIDENCE.

So, what's going on here?

Why is the Christian religion, especially the Protestants, tanking so badly, and its members not fleeing to other religions, but to "nones" and "no religion," no less? And the Catholic religion really isn't doing much better; hanging on by its fingernails while its clergy takes a nose dive. .

In all, a pretty dire picture of Christianity in the USA.

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1. Note time frame when the internet became available to wide availability. 1990ish to 2010.

2. The internet was accepted and primarily by young college or educated at first, then elementary children of those couples, then elderly willing to experience social media.

3. Religions and science war really heated up in this time period due to wide unbridled media of the internet and not so much by the major 3 networks where ratings equate with profits.. except pbs and few cable channels.

4. When the war heated up we had more online debates and info media... guess which side is taking massive casualties? The onward now retreated Christian soldier now cant climb the mounting evidence of science discoveries. Especially in physics, cosmology, paleontology, and biology.

5. Protestants are realizing the bible is not infallible... the ask themselves so what is right about it? No six day creation, no Adam and eve means no original sin, death existed before the fall, no Noah, almost all of the old testament becomes questionable, new testament doctrines start unraveling, miracles are just made up fiction designed to validate the Gospel as something of God... etc..

6. So finally now the enlightened post Christians are falling into the gravity of science, faster and more as time goes.

7. To add to that, the free internet is also feared by North Korea, China, Russia, Iran... obviously for the same reason as Religions, its hard to argue against the obvious facts that are tested and proven.

blü 2 said:

I think it's a reasonable guess that the Hyksos, apparently from northern Canaan, had something to do with the story; but I don't know of any evidence to support that.
Even in the 18th century problems with the narrative were remarked. If there was a captivity and if there was an exodus, it's proved impossible either to find any confirming evidence or to attach any credible date to it. It's far richer in hypotheses and assertions than in facts. It also has a number of background problems, like the story of finding baby Moses floating on the Nile, which is borrowed from the story told of Sargon of Akkad c. 2300 BCE. One of the various possible meanings of Moses is that it's the Egyptian word for 'son' eg as in Rameses, 'son of Ra'. And of course it seems improbable that the Seven Plagues would wholly have escaped history's notice if they'd actually happened.

Even so, I feel a kind of Punch-and-Judy-show appeal for the scene with Moses and Aaron arguing with Pharaoh and everyone turning the Nile into real blood and back, and so on ─ a model storyteller's yarn.

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Indeed.

The Hyksos were a people of diverse origins, possibly from Western Asia, who settled in the eastern Nile Delta some time before 1650 BC. They were merchants and traders who introduced the horse to the Egyptians.

URAVIP2ME said:

Is Louie zealously teaching 1st-century Christianity as Jesus taught, or man-made traditions _____________

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In as much as he pulls from 1st-century scripture and directs it correctly, I would say as Jesus taught.