A long-serving Church of England bishop has predicted that the Church of England will cease to exist within a generation. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, the Right Reverend Paul Richardson said declining church attendance and the rise in multiculturalism meant that "Christian Britain is dead".
The Church is rapidly declining, with attendances at its services in freefall, a proposal on the table at the next General Synod meeting to cut the number of bishops, and huge holes in its finances due to the economic downturn and a lack of congregants to donate to the collection plate.
Richardson said that the Church had lost more than one in ten of its regular worshippers between 1996 and 2006, with a fall from more than one million to 880,000.
Dr. Myers does make the point that danger is that another whack-a-loon religion picks up the slack. It's a very valid concern.
To be sure.. I don't give a flying fuck what people "believe". I don't give a shit if it's Jesus or some mystical pasta savior. What does concern me is organized religion... because it's merely a financial sham that uses violence as it's tools of control.
Nothing positive comes from religion. Nothing.. nadda.. zip.. zero...
Despite the impressive gains in sanity in England, it's still not at the pace that would suit me. I'm hoping that the rate that people abandon religion accelerates, not stay at a steady pace.. so that we can see the closing of the churches soon, rather than later.
In their place.. we can see real humanism.. and the real addressing of the needs of society, rather than the ripping off of guilable people to feed the evil machine of organized religion.
In the US.. we need to step up our efforts.. but that's difficult to do when the economy is under stress. People always.. always.. turn to fairy tales when times are rough.. thinking some invisible man on the cloud will fix everything for them.
Only a person's effort, and maybe a bit of blind luck, can fix that.
