From the Barna Group Website, today: Posted on January 12, 2009 For much of America's history, the assumption was that if you were born in America, you would affiliate with the Christian faith. A new nationwide survey by The Barna Group, however, indicates that people's views have changed. The study discovered that half of all adults now contend that Christianity is just one of many options that Americans choose from and that a huge majority of adults pick and choose what they believe rather than adopt a church or denomination's slate of beliefs. Still, most people say their faith is becoming increasingly important as a source of personal moral guidance. Choosing a Faith The survey shows half of Americans believe the Christian faith no longer has a lock on people's hearts. Overall, 50% of the adults interviewed agreed that Christianity is no longer the faith that Americans automatically accept as their personal faith, while just 44% disagreed and 6% were not sur...
Comments
As useful as religious practice is for helping children and adolescents understand and practice a way of life that connects them with others in a deep and meaningful way, my own prejudice has been that one can only fully internalize moral principles by being critical of the principles one learns as a child - choosing ideas on the basis of their merit.
The idea that there is a universal moral code to which we aspire, I think, is an excellent one. The idea that we can completely and definitively define its details, however, can be very divisive and dangerous.
Jim
"The Universal Moral Code is not a set of principles that everyone follows successfully every day, nor a set of principles that each of us would apply the same way in every case. (Sometimes we disagree very strongly about how to apply them!)"
In my opinion, I think where things get "fuzzy" is that we (everyone) likely disagree about how to apply them more often than we agree ...