Zitat des Tages von Rodney Stark:
Most churches are run by preachers who went to seminaries, who decided to be preachers when they were 18, 19, 20 years old. These preachers never met a payroll. They don't know how the world works.
High testosterone levels have been proven to make men more likely to commit crimes. The tendency in men toward risky behaviour keeps turning up even where socialization is different, and so does crime and delinquency.
Many people who say they have no religion are simply saying they have no official religious affiliation. They may actually have strong personal beliefs.
A whole lot of Americans have never met a Mormon.
It can be demonstrated that in any society there is a distribution of religious tastes and concerns.
Regular church-goers are substantially more likely than non-attenders to read, to take newspapers and magazines, to listen to classical music, to attend symphony concerts, operas, and stage plays.
Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read, and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls.
The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity to better understand.
The great myth that many social scientists want to encourage is that there is an incompatibility between modern technology and traditional religion. This is absolute nonsense. If anything, it's the reverse.
The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress.
American churches work very hard at reaching out to people to bring them in.
Leading Christian theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas were not what today might be called 'strict constructionists.' Rather, they celebrated reason as the means to gain greater insight into divine intentions.
Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.