Dr Paul Allen

G.K. Chesterton once said, “When people stop believing in God , they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” This has proven true time and again in history. Now, we’re seeing it in America. A recent headline on MarketWatch .com announced that “millennials are ditching religion for witchcraft and astrology.” So, young people are not simply ditching spiritual beliefs. They are ditching belief in God for belief in witchcraft and astrology. An Increase in Secularization According to the report, “Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials.” Yes, “more than half of young adults in the U.S. believe astrology is a science, compared to less than 8% of the Chinese public. The psychic services industry — which includes astrology, aura reading, mediumship, tarot-card reading and palmistry, among other metaphysical services — grew 2% between 2011 and 2016.” To support this anecdotally, MarketWatch

Christopher Hitchens (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) College-aged millennials today are far more likely than the general population to be religiously unaffiliated. This is true when they are compared to previous generations as well. In fact, the Pew Research Center documents that millennials are the least outwardly religious American generation, where “one in four are unaffiliated with any religion, far more than the share of older adults when they were ages 18 to 29.” Just over 60 percent of millennials say that Christianity is “judgmental,” and 64 percent say that “anti-gay” best describes most churches today. In ministry circles, it has long been reported that of youth raised in homes that were to some degree “ Christian ,” roughly three-quarters will jettison that faith after high school. Just under half of this number will return to some level of church involvement in their late 20s or early 30s. It has long been recognized that experience with an earthly father deeply info

English: Alvin Plantinga after telling a joke at the beginning of a lecture on science and religion delivered at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) One of the most misleading headlines imaginable recently appeared over an opinion column published in USA Today . Tom Krattenmaker, a member of the paper’s Board of Contributors, set out to argue that there is no essential conflict between evolution and religious belief because the two are dealing with completely separate modes of knowing.   Evolution, he argued, is simply “settled science” that requires no belief . Religion, on the other hand, is a faith system that is based in a totally different way of knowing— a form of knowing that requires belief and faith. The background to the column is the recent data released by the Pew Research Center indicating that vast millions of Americans still reject evolution. As the Pew research documents, the rejection of evolution has actually increased in certa

LAST month I was in Accra, Ghana , to learn more about the African version of the new charismatic Christian churches that have become so popular in the United States and are now proliferating in sub-Saharan Africa , especially Ghana and Nigeria. What struck me was how much people spoke in tongues : language-like sounds (usually, repeated phonemes from the speaker’s own language) thought by those who use them to be a language God knows but the speaker does not. I went to services that lasted three hours and for most of which people prayed in tongues. People I interviewed spoke about praying by themselves in tongues for similar stretches of time. They said they did so because it was the one language the devil could not understand, but what I found so striking was how happy it seemed to make them. “We love to speak in tongues,” one young Ghanaian woman told me with a laugh. Some of the early Christians spoke in tongues. At least, the Apostle Paul writes about them in his first

English: Richard Dawkins giving a lecture based on his book, The God Delusion, in Reykjavik (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) 20% of Americans who describe their religion as “none.” It isn’t that the “ Nones ” (not to be confused with “nuns”) don’t believe in God , necessarily. 64% of them do. They just don’t want to affiliate with any “organized religion.” The statistics about “Nones” probably don’t include the number of self-described Christians who feel the same way. I know of some who haven’t found a church they can agree with or that is up to their high standards. So they don’t go to church at all. After all, with their “me-and-Jesus” theology, why do they need a church? But they do. The good news is that 40% of those raised as “Nones” drop out of their non-religion to join an actual religious institution. Hey, isn’t that about the same drop out rate, according to one measure, for young people raised in churches ? From Michael Gerson: An America that is losing faith with r

English: Barack Obama delivers a speech at the University of Southern California (Video of the speech) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) It's a growing trend that's sweeping the nation. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center , one in five adults no longer affiliates with a religion. That's not to say the group does not believe in God . Of the 46-million unaffiliated adults in America , two thirds say they believe in God, with more than one third classifying themselves as spiritual, but not religious. The study found that most of the unaffiliated are white, unmarried men under the age of 30. About three in 10 of the religiously unaffiliated have at least a college degree. Nearly every religion has seen a drop in affiliation in the last 10 years, but the Protestant religion has seen the sharpest decrease. Religious leaders are now left to figure out why their congregations are showing up in smaller and smaller numbers. "We need to listen. It's a shame

Rembrandt's depiction of Samson's marriage feast (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Many, perhaps most, couples will be entering their marriages with expectations that are inconsistent to reality. It is only a matter of time when reality catches up to their relationship. Houses do not long stand when their foundations are gone. This much can be assured in marriage - in time the winds will come and the water will rise. Only those marriages with a firm foundation based on reality will survive. This becomes abundantly clear when reading the first chapter of Tim and Kathy Keller’s book,  The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God . Two things are true about society’s attitudes toward marriage. First is a growing skepticism over the validity of the  institution of marriage . The  Pew Research Center  found in 2010 that  nearly 40 percent of Americans believe that marriage is becoming obsolete . And many, particularly the young, are acting ac