U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious

[Valley Oak]

Religion & Public Life
POLLING AND ANALYSIS

NOVEMBER 3, 2015

U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious

Modest Drop in Overall Rates of Belief and Practice, but Religiously Affiliated Americans Are as Observant as Before.

Is the American public becoming less religious? Yes, at least by some key measures of what it means to be a religious person. An extensive new survey of more than 35,000 U.S. adults finds that the percentages who say they believe in God, pray daily and regularly go to church or other religious services all have declined modestly in recent years.

But the Pew Research Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely attributable to the “nones” – the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith. Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment. Indeed, by some conventional measures, religiously affiliated Americans are, on average, even more devout than they were a few years ago.

The 2014 Religious Landscape Study is a follow-up to an equally extensive survey on religion in America, conducted in 2007. An initial report on the findings from the 2014 study, released in May 2015, described the changing size and demographic characteristics of the nation’s major religious groups. This report focuses on Americans’ religious beliefs and practices and assesses how they have changed in recent years.

Continue reading here: https://www.pewforum.org/2015/11/03/...ess-religious/

[bill shearer]

Maybe this crap will diminish too?
Dodie

Texas Supreme Court To Decide if Home-Schooling Parents Can Stop Educating Their Kids Due to the Rapture

November 2, 2015 by Hemant Mehta 175 Comments
Should homeschooling Christian parents be allowed to withhold education from their children because they believe the Rapture is imminent?
That’s a question the Texas Supreme Court will be deciding very soon.
The case involves Laura and Michael McIntyre. In 2004, they removed all nine of their children from a private school in order to homeschool them. But Michael’s brother Tracy said he “never observed the children pursuing traditional schoolwork” when they were supposed to be learning.

How homeschooling is supposed to work

The reason?

Tracy overhead one of the McIntyre children tell a cousin that they did not need to do schoolwork because they were going to be raptured.

It wasn’t until their 17-year-old daughter Tori ran away from home so she could “attend school” that the McIntyres were more closely scrutinized. When Tori’s high school needed to know her level of education and what curriculum she had used so they could place her properly, administrators contacted her parents, who refused to cooperate. They argued that a previous Supreme Court ruling let them off the hook from compulsory, regulated education for their children beyond eighth grade.

A lawsuit resulting from that clash was temporarily resolved more than a year ago when an Appeals Court ruled that the Supreme Court’s decision didn’t apply to this family:

The appeals court ruled that educational regulations did not prevent the McIntyres’ First Amendment right to “free exercise of religion.” The court said that 1972 court case which found that Amish did not have to send their children to school after the eighth grade did not exempt the McIntyres.
“No parents have ever prevailed in any reported case on a theory that they have an absolute constitutional right to educate their children in the home, completely free of any state supervision, regulation, or requirements,” the ruling stated. “They do not have an ‘absolute constitutional right to home school.’”

The family appealed the ruling all the way to the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, which will hear the case today and decide on it soon.

In court filings, the McIntyres say the district is biased against Christians and accuse its officials of mounting a “startling assertion of sweeping governmental power.”
Most of her children are now grown, but Laura McIntyre is still home-schooling her youngest.
“We are definitely looking for a little clarification,” Laura McIntyre said briefly by phone. She, her husband and other relatives subsequently didn’t return messages seeking further comment.

As far as homeschooling goes, Texas only requires that parents provide a written curriculum “designed to meet basic educational goals” in core subjects, but there’s no mandatory testing to see if the kids are actually learning anything.
Let’s hope the Court upholds the previous ruling. It doesn’t even matter that they’re waiting for the Rapture. Preventing children from being educated is a form of child abuse. The parents have every right to homeschool their kids, but if they’re neglecting that duty, someone needs to step in. When the Rapture doesn’t come, those kids are going to need a way out of the hellhole the parents are creating for them.