As a Nicaraguan-born girl growing up in Miami, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez remembers going to church five times a week. Her father was a pastor, and their fundamentalist evangelical faith taught that a woman’s role was to serve her husband.
At the same time, Mojica Rodríguez saw how essential women were in keeping the pews filled and the church running. Ultimately, dismayed by the subservient role of women and the church’s harsh restrictions on girls, she would leave her faith – and her husband – in her late 20s.
“Women are less inclined to be involved with churches that don’t want us speaking up, that don’t want us to be smart,” said Mojica Rodríguez, who went on to earn a master’s degree in divinity. “We’re like the mules of the church – that’s what it feels like.”
Though the Nashville-based author and activist is now 39, her experience reflects a growing and, for churches, a potentially worrisome trend of young women eschewing religion. Their pace of departure has overtaken men, recent studies show, reversing patterns of previous generations.
That doesn’t sound like, “becoming less religious” to me.
The first time I read the whole bible was when I was doubting god as a teenager after half my family died and my extremely religious aunt kept going on about how they’re in a better place and I’d feel better if I went to church more.
Read the whole thing cover to cover in about a week.
It pretty much cemented my atheism.
Just because you research something or even invest time and money into getting a proper education on something, doesn’t mean you support it.
Studying something doesn’t mean you believe it or like it. I’ve read the Bible, Koran, and a lot of the Sikh holy scriptures. It did nothing but make me less religious.
I’ve read a quote that says something like “Study one religion, and you’ll be hooked for life. Study two religions, and you’re done in an hour.”
Demystification tends to do that.
Back in the medieval times, the church didn’t even want regular people reading the Bible. It was deliberately not translated from Latin or Hebrew to local languages.
Turns out they didn’t have to worry so much because most people wouldn’t bother even if they could.
Though I gotta admit that I find it baffling that so many people supposedly believe but so few take it seriously enough to even read the book they might even refer to as the greatest story ever told. Seems to me like the only logical positions are to believe and treat it as the most important thing in life, not believe and do whatever you want in life, pretend to believe to manipulate those who do believe, or pretend to believe to keep the first and third groups off your ass. Are those last two groups where most apparent believers are?
I’m a raging atheist because I study religion. Makes sense to me.
Atheists would be the best people to study religion as there’s no bias (unless they’re anti-theist as well.)
I had a Baptist minister tell me that he refused to get his masters. It involved learning to read source material. He said all of his friends that did became less religious, and he was afraid it would happen to him.
Nothing makes a good atheist better than actually reading the Bible in its entirety instead of just cherry picking it.
Doesn’t sound like he’s got much faith if he’s so worried that becoming more educated will result in losing faith. If something is true, broadening information generally shouldn’t challenge faith. And if it does, those contradictions would be worthy frontiers for scientific discovery.
There’s a reason why more education results in less faith, and it’s not brain washing (if it was, why hasn’t it been picked apart by now?).
A similar line of reasoning applies to higher education resulting in less conservative beliefs. There’s also a reason why religion and conservative beliefs are closely aligned about this.
Know your enemy.
Facts!
Survey: Atheists, Agnostics Know More About Religion Than Religious : The Two-Way
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/09/28/130191248/atheists-and-agnostics-know-more-about-bible-than-religious
I couldn’t think of anything that would make anyone less religious that taking that masters course.
I mean, how many pictures of yahweh with his horns and giant, novelty sized cock would someone need to look at before they realise that hes just a middle Eastern Zeus?
Even the part about popping down every now and then to pork a mortal under questionable circumstances, who births a popular demigod…