Scottish poll finds Christian belief in decline.

The proportion of people in Scotland who see themselves as Christian has fallen to 55%, a poll has found.

www.bbc.co.uk...

Bit of a silly poll due to only a thousand people being polled, but I do think Religion is slowly dying off in the UK.
I think the reasons why is the Church has not moved with the times and people are using their own mind to come up with spiritual ideas for themselves.
Thoughts?

reply to post by boymonkey74


Religion, for many people, seems to fill a need (whatever that need may be) and perhaps those needs aren't being fulfilled? If you strip away all the extraneous material away from Christian belief, it basically boils down to respect your fellow man, respect yourself and respect your creator/savior. Modern Christians are so far removed from a "creator/savior" figure that only the first two aspects apply. Hell, a good number of people couldn't care less about their own self-respect, let alone respect for anyone else. The advantage Muslims seem to have is a body of evidence to back the claim of their prophet having been a "real" person that is lightyears better than the what is posed for Jesus. There is, perhaps, a better feeling of "connectedness" to a higher power not seen in Christianity anymore.

I make no claims of fact, this is all just my speculation for sake of discussion.

reply to post by boymonkey74

I don't know about Scotland...

I know that in America we have raised generations to believe in false "Gods". Because we start our children early, teaching them stuff like this.


Can you imagine being a small child and meeting a GOD dressed like a rabbit and carrying a basket full of chocolate eggs?


What do you suppose that does to small minds?


You see the result. Now we believe in nothing, and everything... (we don't know what to believe).

And we raise our kids just the same. Bringing them to santa and the easter bunny. We have to... because everyone else does.

thank satan for that

reply to post by billdadobbie


Or free will and reason.

Originally posted by billdadobbie
thank satan for that

That's about it.. People will learn when those a/holes have take control of everything and there isn't free will and reason, even spirituality, just dictatorship.

Originally posted by boymonkey74
I think the reasons why is the Church has not moved with the times and people are using their own mind to come up with spiritual ideas for themselves.
Thoughts?

Thanks for this thread - a very relevant issue for many. The Church has definitely not kept up with the times - and that actually started with the institutionalization of Christianity that mainly Paul was responsible for. (Some of the following is part of a post I wrote a few days ago on another thread, but it is also relevant here.)

First I need to provide some background on my understanding of Jesus' original Christianity.

Jesus was not interested in establishing a religion based on rites, ceremonies, dogma, and all the rest of the religious trappings we can find in Christianity then and now. He taught a spiritual process that entailed both exoteric and esoteric practices.

His commandments of fully loving God with one's whole body-mind and spirit, and one's neighbor as oneself, were his moral instructions for daily living and for also preparing the body-mind through self-transcending love for his esoteric initiation given to his most devoted followers - so that they were "born to here from above".

This esoteric initiation involved Jesus' blessing of his disciples with the Spirit and drawing them up to the Divine Spirit Light Above (God the Father) thus transcending the body-mind. Such was the original ascension in Christianity. Through such ascension, the Spirit-blessed disciple would be "born from above" and that was also the Spirit-blessed disciple's salvation for he most directly saw that the mortality of the body-mind did not mean the end of one's very being.

This was Jesus' message, both exoteric (the commandments of love) and esoteric (his Spirit-Blessing). However, this message was misunderstood and revised for the sake of making Jesus' message much more acceptable to the masses. Thus the ascension was associated solely with the physical body of Jesus ascending into the heavens, and salvation (sometime in the future) was associated with simply believing or having faith in Jesus' physical resurrection and ascension.

Ascension was no longer associated with the initiate's mystical ascent to the Divine Light of God Above (God the Father) but was revised by the institutionalized version of belief-based Christianity that Paul particularly promoted.

So the physical ascension of Jesus' physical body was a man-made myth that has nothing to do with original Christianity. In my view the physical Ascension myth is of least importance to Jesus' true message because it was fabricated for the sake of spreading Christianity as a belief-based religion with the promise of salvation at a future time.

If Christians would come to understand and live the core commandments of love (the exoteric message) and even the process of ascension (the esoteric message), Christianity will be restored to its original form, and Jesus' intention will be fulfilled. Otherwise Christianity will continue in its decline, especially in this day and age, where, for example, the belief in the physical ascension of Jesus is much more difficult given our current knowledge of the cosmos.

People are more and more realizing that much of what has been propagated for centuries is myth and so do not trust the institution of Christianity nearly as much. But this is certainly not to say that Jesus' original message should also be thrown out nor that science/materialism be adopted as the only "god' to be understood and recognized as absolute truth.

I remember reading how Americans are losing interest in religion all together. As an atheist myself I feel religion will probably adapt some way to get believers. But a majority will lose interest all together because it doesn't offer anything.