We don't need to cook our meat over a fire in a cave anymore. We don't need to kill Mastodons to survive.

We don't need religion anymore either. Apparently we feel the need for some kind of community, but we don't need religion to provide that.

We don't need religion any more. But don't expect it to go the way of the Mastodon ... or maybe it will. Trumpeting complaints and sinking into the mud ... seems to be an accurate description of what is happening.

Rev. Schmidt offers one explanation, an entirely plausible one based on a recent Pew Research Center report, for why church attendance has declined. I don't necessarily disagree with the views he expresses. There are at least a couple of other possible explanations, though.

Religion and politics have become much too involved with each other, in ways that have alienated many people. Republicans and Conservatives, trying to persuade Democrats to defect and vote for Republican candidates, have spent the past couple of decades trying to persuade voters that only Republicans are sincere religious believers, and that all Democratic officeholders are either religious hypocrites or atheists. Some religiously conservative pastors and priests, liking this message of ostentatious public piety, have used their pulpits to urge their parishioners to vote for Republican candidates over Democratic candidates as the religiously correct thing to do. Some people don't like this.

Our country's Constitution protects religious freedom by prohibiting government from establishing an official government-sponsored religion. Many Americans are offended by the efforts of political figures to invoke religion for partisan political advantage. They are also offended by pastors and priests trying to tell them, as a matter of religious doctrine, that they can only win God's approval by voting for members of one political party, and that voting for members of another makes them pawns of Satan. Parishioners who are offended by such things don't necessarily speak up about it. They just stop coming to church.

A comparable situation occurs when either members of the clergy, or highly observant lay members of congregations, increase their emphasis on enforcing adherence to particular interpretations of orthodoxy in religious belief. When a formerly moderate church moves rapidly to enforce adherence to conservative religious beliefs, liberal and moderate members of the congregation often simply stop attending. Similarly, when a formerly moderate church moves rapidly to liberalize religious beliefs and practices, conservative members of the congregation often stop attending. Simply put, many people dislike being confronted by people who claim to be "holier than thou" and attach such claims to issues of religious doctrine or social practice.

Yet another factor may be that churches, in order to continue operating, generally seek financial contributions from their attendees. Regardless of whether parishioners view this as giving back to God in order to support God's work on earth, in our current recessionary economy, people who have seen their work hours cut back or have lost their jobs have difficulty maintaining their previous level of giving. Some are embarrassed enough about this to stop coming to church.

Again, I don't necessarily disagree with the explanation that Rev. Schmidt offers. I do think those other potential factors might be worth considering, though.

I think that it should be pretty obvious that many people go to church or don't go to church for many different reasons.

It seems as if when we can't present a definite "formula" to put people and what and why they do or don't do something into, that it bothers some.

From the sample questions given in the other posting, this survey seems to have revealed nothing more than the fact that people can come up with meaningless surveys.

Some people put their faith in God and are rewarded, sometimes in the present, with a little knowledge and some people put their faith in "surveys" and conclude that they know something about someone that they have not even met.

See you all in the Kingdom.

Take care, be ready.

Sincerely, Thomas Paul Moses Baum.

Certainly one can dispense Dogma, but dogma doesn't mean it is reasonable. Why did Jesus have to die, rather than God just forgiving people? Why is Jesus's death such a great sacrifice, when all people must die in turn, often under much worse circumstances? Why create the world with evil in it in the first place? Why punish us infinitely for our mortal deeds, which are ultimately, finite? How is it that God is a divided being? And what came before God?

There are explanations in religion, but these are hard questions, and frankly, none of the answers that I've read have ever been really satisfactory, and certainly there is no hard evidence. It seems quite evident that throughout history, it is just easier to shroud all of this behind authority and obscurity. The freedom from religion we have today means that if we are tired of the lack of answers, we have the freedom to walk away. These doubts and questions were always there, the only difference is that there is no legal penalty for realizing that its all human concerns projected on an uncaring universe. Its not a comforting answer, but at least it actually *is* an answer, rather than dodging the question entirely.