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A comment on Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time. Parent comment

Re:Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time by seoaeu on Monday March 29, 2021 @10:13PM (#26630631)
> I also grew up in a Christian house and am now atheist--I never understood how people could reconcile "church shopping" for a community that aligns with their views (e.g. not homophobic) with the notion that the core religious concepts are supposed to be infallible.

Couldn't you compare that to deciding between colleges? They all presumably will teach you information that is true, yet the academic culture and their perspectives on the more subjective aspects may differ between them. In academia, this sort of disagreement between schools of thought is generally considered a good thing. Not sure folks are as happy about disagreement when it comes to theology, but there certainly isn't a shortage of it there either.

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Re:Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time by eloisius on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @01:03AM (#26631407)
> Couldn't you compare that to deciding between colleges? They all presumably will teach you information that is true

Not even close. No one expects their college to impart infallible, ultimate, eternal truth. You expect to be trained in useful theories and practices, and for them to become outdated in due time. Academic disagreements are all part of the dynamic, living, changing reality of academic knowledge. Not so for final truths of what’s right and wrong, true and false.

Maybe that’s why fundamentalists make such lousy arguments in defense of creationism: “science is wrong a lot of the time so how can you trust it?” They’re evaluating academic knowledge through the lens of ultimate truth.

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