Incidentally, I’ve been to the creation museum and it’s good for a laugh. They say:
* Plants aren’t alive (this is to justify how people ate before the Fall brought death)
* Vultures ate “withered” plants before the Fall (not dead ones of course)
* Weeds didn’t exist before the fall because they are a nuisance and thus of the devil

… and so much more highly specific young-earth ad-hoc nonsense.

The main difference is that children today simply have better education materials than they did fifty years ago. Once I realized there were other religions as serious as Christianity I couldn’t stop reading about them until they all became ridiculous.

Many kids read up on the heathens in attempts to reinforce their beliefs, but they see too many similarities and the questions don’t stop unless they use pure emotion to say ‘it’s just true’ and stop asking questions.

Like print media, TV viewership, strip clubs and music stores; Sunday schools and churches are going by the wayside.

Anyone know of any study that shows such a correlation? (I suspose I should google this…)

I attended a UU church and sent my children to their RE program for about a year and a half. They thought it was the most boring thing ever, and so did I. I only did it because I felt that it was my responsibility to ensure that my children had some knowledge about different religions.

I think there is a massive failure of the entire church community to keep up with societal change. There is just nothing relevant going on there anymore. Walking into a church is like walking into a time machine that takes you back about 50 years or so. Every week I attended, I would enter the sanctuary and 90% of the people sitting there were over 60 years old.

On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be any replacement for church attendance in terms of community building, teaching children moral values, etc. Yes, there are couple of “free thinker” churches, but I do not expect that those will become widespread, because they are based on the same model as other churches. I only hope that within my lifetime, there will be some new movement or model or something that replaces the void left by churches in the community.

As a humanist and atheist who volunteers to teach in the Unitarian Universalist version of Sunday School (what we call “religious education” or “RE” for short), I’m not surprised to see the huge dropoff in adult attendance being reported by Ken Ham for adult who attended conservative Sunday Schools as children and youth.

The same trend has been observed in Unitarian Universalist congregations for many years even though we:

** embrace uncertainty and doubt

** don’t teach our kids that Unitarian Universalism is the “one true religion”

** affirm freedom of belief including the freedom to be an atheist or a humanist

** are sexuality-positive (many UU congregations teach comprehensive sexuality education that affirms sexuality, sexual orientation diversity, allowing youth and adults to make their own informed choices about premarital sex, masturbation as a positive thing, and more)

** are supportive of findings of science like evolution

Even though we are doing the opposite of what Ken Ham recommends (e.g. we are not indoctrinating children and youth with Biblical literalism), we still see the same dropoff in participation when our former children enter adulthood.

And the UU trend is also present in other religious traditions including the moderate and liberal Christian denominations who atheists may find common ground with on church-state separation issues and other social justice issues.

Generally, we are seeing children and youth who are raised in a religious community leaving and becoming “unchurched” as adults.

I would suggest that something is going on here that is more sociological than theological.

The US is moving from a society with a cultural expectation that people attend church to one that doesn’t. This trend started with the Baby Boomer generation and it’s not changing yet.

Several months ago, Hemant mentioned the parents that were forming “atheist sunday schools”:

http://friendlyatheist.com/2007/11/25/go-to-sunday-school/

It will be interesting to see if these groups morph into sustained communities where the former children raised in them maintain their involvement or if the former children leave when they become adults.

Based on what we are seing with other religious groups, I’m guessing that the “atheist sunday schools” will also lose most of their members when they become adults as well.

There’s a joke in there somewhere about how 1 in 3 is not actually 30% and how they should really say “Almost 1 in 3…” or “Approximately 1 in 3…”

Intelligence is not a common trait among people involved with creation museums.