Stephan: This is a very interesting and important trend that is getting almost no media attention. Americans are abandoning Christianity in droves, by the millions. This data from Pew Research Center spells it out. Now why is this happening, and happening specifically to Christianity? The answer, in my estimation, is because christofascism has poisoned the religion. Religion should be about opening to nonlocal consciousness, sensing the unity of consciousness that religions call God -- what religions call spiritual consciousness -- achieved through prayer, meditation, joining in regular meetings and a compassionate wellbeing fostering mind set and behavior. That is what Jesus taught. But that is not what Christianity is about in the United States. Instead it is about male dominance, White supremacy, political attitudes and actions. It has become quite nasty, and it turns people off and they are walking away as the data shows quite clearly.
Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” This accelerating trend is reshaping the U.S. religious landscape, leading many people to wonder what the future of religion in America might look like.
What if Christians keep leaving religion at the same rate observed in recent years? What if the pace of religious switching continues to accelerate? What if switching were to stop, but other demographic trends – such as migration, births and deaths – were to continue at current rates? To help answer such questions, Pew Research Center has modeled several hypothetical scenarios describing how the U.S. religious landscape might change over the next half century.
The Center estimates that in 2020, about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” accounted for 30% of the U.S. population. Adherents of all other religions – including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists – totaled about 6%.1
Depending on whether religious switching continues […]
Stephan: I think it should be obvious to anyone that the way to deal with terrorism is not war. Had this amount of money been spent over those years fostering wellbeing in these countries then... well, the world would be very different today.
On the evening of September 11, 2001, hours after two hijacked airliners had destroyed the World Trade Center towers and a third had hit the Pentagon building, President George W. Bush announced that the country was embarking on a new kind of war.
“America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism,” Bush announced in a televised address to the nation.
It was Bush’s first use of the term that would come to define his presidency and deeply shape those of his three successors. The global war on terror, as the effort came to be known, was one of the most expansive and far-reaching policy initiatives in modern American history, and certainly the biggest of the 2000s.
It saw the US invade and depose the governments of two nations and engage in years- or decades-long occupations of each; the initiation of a new form of warfare via drones spanning thousands of miles of territory from Pakistan to Somalia to […]
Stephan: And here was have another sordid tale of MAGAT Republican corruption. I find it amazing that so many Americans can't seem to recognize that Republican officials at both the federal and state levels, be they men or women, don't give a damn for the people they represent and are supposed to serve. The only thing they care about is their own power, and their own wealth. This story makes the point very clearly. The Republicans, as this tale describes, are working to protect the corporations that are literally destroying the earth's ecosystems and the wellbeing of all humanity. And why are they doing this? For money and their continued power, of course. And they rely on Americans to not be smart enough to get that.
Business Roundtable has successfully sued the SEC in the past. Credit: Leigh Vogel/EPA
Republican officials and corporate lobby groups are teeing up a multi-pronged legal assault on the Biden administration’s effort to help investors hold public corporations accountable for their carbon emissions and other climate change risks.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed new climate disclosure rules in March that would require public companies to report the climate-related impact and risks to their businesses.
The regulator has since received more than 14,500 comments. Submissions from 24 Republican state attorneys general and some of the country’s most powerful industry associations suggest that these groups are preparing a series of legal challenges after the regulation is finalized, which could happen as soon as next month.
“I would expect a litigation challenge to be brought immediately once the final rule is released,” Jill E Fisch, a business law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Guardian. “They probably have their complaints already drafted, and they’re ready to file.”
Some opponents claim that requiring companies to publish climate-related information infringes on their […]
Stephan: The only way we are going to effectively deal with what climate change is going to cause is if all the nations of the world cooperate and profit stops being the primary consideration. We need a true united nations, and that is what all countries should be working on, because it isn't going to be easy to achieve.
Deforestation from coal mining in a tropical forest on Indonesia’s Borneo Island. Credit: Romeo Gacad / AFP / Getty
While more than 70 percent of deforestation worldwide is linked to agriculture, this isn’t the only threat faced by the world’s tropical forests. Another threat is industrial mining, and this could grow in significance as demand for rare-earth minerals rises due to the clean energy transition.
That’s why a team of researchers published the first-ever study Monday to consider how industrial mining contributes to tropical deforestation.
“The energy transition is going to require very large amounts of minerals — copper, lithium, cobalt — for decarbonized technologies,” study co-author and Clark University geographer Anthony Bebbington said, as Reuters reported. “We need more planning tools on the parts of governments and companies to mitigate the impacts of mining on forest loss.”
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at deforestation caused by industrial mining in 26 countries with wet or dry tropical forests between 2000 and 2019. To do so, the scientists looked at the coordinates of industrial mines and […]
Stephan: Here is some wonderful good news, child poverty, which means family poverty has declined. That means children are not going hungry to the same degree. It means children are getting healthcare they previously did not. It means American boys and girls are more likely to have warm coats this winter. That is just the best good news, and it should be noted that this good news is directly a result of the efforts of Biden and the Democrats. The MAGAt Republicans tried to thwart this trend at every turn.
America’s child poverty rate plunged in 2021, hitting a record low and accelerating a decadelong decline. That’s the main message from Census Bureau data released Tuesday.
Why it matters: Millions of children aren’t growing up in poverty today, thanks in very large part to government poverty-reduction programs.
The most recent decline can be linked directly to the increase in the child tax credit that was implemented in July 2021 but then expired at the end of that year — which means that next year’s number is likely to see a rare increase.
Between the lines: A reduction in child poverty goes hand in hand with a reduction in the number of poor parents — specifically mothers.
By the numbers: The number of women heads of households in poverty✎ EditSign declined to 4.95 million in 2021 from 7.8 million in 2020, per the census supplemental poverty measure, on top of the 3.4 million children who were taken out of poverty.
What they’re saying: The report is a “kids story but it’s also a women’s story,” said […]
