Chapter Eight; WHO IS ON YOUR TEAM? part thirty-five

So the top four areas of faith or lack there of, cover about 5 billion people. These are the best teams humanity has to offer for our posterity. To bad we cannot have head to head contest and the winners get the other adherents followers. A sort of “World Series of Belief”. Not so much to count numbers but to be educated in the others religion and judge it on its own merits.
Stephen Prothero in his book Religious Literacy makes the case for religion to be taught in the public schools. I agree fully with Prothero about this point and the benefit would be great to the civil mindedness of the common student. Imagine a person not getting upset because a person wears different clothes or dresses in a particular way because they realize that they may have a different but socially important belief system.
To me, the most important class on religion and World religions would be one on the effectiveness of prayer and miracles. Education in these two ares could help reduce the violence and prejudice between two groups from the beginning. Not only would this take the mystery and distrust out of religions that a person may not be familiar with but it would also give them equal footing in the discussion of relevance. This curriculum would have to be well made as to present it from a secular point of view. That is the only secular purpose that the government could have in this education. My hope would be to educate the religion out of someone.
The big mega-churches in the community would have their dogma reduced down to educational packets the same as the smaller groups of adherents. And at least while in the secular school, all things would be equal. And to me this would mean a diminishing of all of them because what would then be the most important is the education and knowledge of such things not the adherence to the beliefs themselves.
But Prothero makes several other good points for the teaching of a religious class in public school. There is much from our culture and literature that is based upon the stories and teachings in the Bible. Questions such as:
Who wrote the writing on the wall?
Who was Noah's wife?
Where does the phrase “go the extra mile come from?
What does, “From Dan to Bathsheba” mean?
What are the 10 Commandments?
What is the Golden Rule?

These are just a few from the numerous references of the literary aspect of the Bible. There are also from other religions and tribal beliefs that an education in religion would be helpful for.
The whole idea of learning about other religions is like learning the rules of the game. In order to be a fan or to play a sport you first must know the rules and goals of the sports. I see a good secular education in world religions to be similar to that. You are not learning just about your favorite team. You learn about them on your own effect but your learning about the other teams they may play against. It would be foolish to not have some clue about the team your favorite is getting ready to play. After all, before every game the commentators take time to highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of the match up and then let the two teams play it out on the field of play where the rules govern how the winner is decided.

Coming Next Time;

MY TEAM COMES TO PLAY part thirty-six

Chapter Eight; WRAPPING UP THE TOP TEAMS part thirty-four

The fourth largest group of adherents are the Hindu. Most of these adherents are from the India and Asian subcontinent. I have a visited a lot of hotels around the country and it seems like most of the Indian Hindu run these hotels. Oddly enough they all seem to have the last name “Patel”. I am not sure what it is about their religion or culture that attracts them to the hotel business but they do, indeed, seem to have an attraction for it.
After the Hindu, the rest of the World's adherents are far and wide but number under a billion and are spread across the planet. This area includes everyone to Norse Gods worshipers to indigenous beliefs, to Pagans and Jewish and Satanist and all the other Wide World of Faith.
When it comes to changes in religious belief, it isn't Jesus that defeated Zeus in The Colosseum to take over the Roman Empire. Jesus didn't defeat Thor in Sweden. It wasn't the Bedouin tribal religions that Muhammad destroyed but it was the followers of their teachings that converted by freewill or by force to change those nations into the followers they have now.
It has always seemed odd to me, even as a devout follower that if God is all knowing and all powerful and everywhere all the time, why would he ever need men to fight on his behalf? It seems really a sign of weakness on God's part. I guess if your using the team concept you could say that God is paying the players to play. But that does reduce the all powerful aspect of God and Allah too to just a rich team owner. But it could lend credence to the “money is power” saying. My view now is if your God is not powerful to do whatever you think he should do to me or others on his own then you need to change your God. Or at least reevaluate how powerful said god really is.
What is a god that wants or needs anything? It seems though he always wants money and your time and your thoughts and your clothing and your children and your anger and joy and all those things like he isn't God already. Imagine if you walked into work and you have a nice letter laying on your desk and it had your name written in gold calligraphy. You open the letter and it tells you that you have been promoted to God. I would be pretty happy myself. None of this silly fighting about which piece of dirt is the best or what to eat. I would just will it to happen and then we would all live in peace.
But maybe God doesn't like peace or isn't really able to cause it to happen. I know for my team, they like peace but they generally are not too powerful to make it happen. Seems there are to many adherents willing to do the work that their deity should be doing while they should just be marveling in his awesome power. This is actually a good point from the teaching of Jesus, “He who is without sin should cast the first stone.”

Chapter Eight; BELIEVE WHAT? part thirty-three

Growing fast and coming in third world wide is the section of non-adherents or unbelievers. This of course would be the most diverse group of all. I would also argue the only naturally occurring group that a person is able to reach without any outside influence. That is to say that being a unbeliever takes no more effort than just looking at how the world operates and rejecting what ever the dominate system of belief is.
As of this time, I am not aware of what could be called of a “Great Awakening” of unbelief or reason. I don't think it would be wrong to say that during the Cold War many Americans gained trust in the wonders of science. The space program and the build up of the military industrialized complex brought more Americans into the modern age with high skilled jobs. The idea of reaching the stars and using modern science and technology seemed to be the path for the future.
But with every great movement, there comes and end. With the age of science things such as the Vietnam War and The War on Poverty and Watergate began to turn people from anticipating what science would do next to, What is science going to do next?
In the 70's as people turned away from the marvels of science they turned to the old standards of religion again. Many of these new movements were away from the mainline denominations and more of the fundamentalist and or pentecostal type of movements. The movements generally brought the new adherents into new feel good churches where the preaching of people like Pat Roberts, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, was mirrored in the pulpits. Give to the cult of personality and God will provide all your needs. Thanks to the over the top antics of many of theses and other “evangelists” many of the followers stopped following them.
But in the mean time the religious center of America had been pulled to the right by these televangelist. So while the numbers of Americans that describe themselves as non-believers or agnostic or atheist has gone up in the past few years the center of America's religious identity has moved further to the right. What this shows is that while non-adherents are at an all time high, the believers are even more uneducated in their very own religion. Many of the people that are members of the Northern Oklahoma Freethinkers have stated that they were Christians until they began to read the Bible. So I always encourage people to study their Bible. It seems to be a good way for someone to leave their faith behind.
So worldwide adherents or non-adherents is about 1.1 billion people. Maybe that number will continue to grow in the United States and around the World.

Coming Next Time;

WRAPPING UP THE TOP TEAMS part thirty-four