I saw this choice bit of front-page Dally-bait whilst in the newsagents this morning buying my leftie rag. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... risis.html More people are seeing sense and rejecting religion. More large empty premises for Wetherspoon's to snap up, what's not to like?

I saw this choice bit of front-page Dally-bait whilst in the newsagents this morning buying my leftie rag. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... risis.html More people are seeing sense and rejecting religion. More large empty premises for Wetherspoon's to snap up, what's not to like?

There was a bit of a fuss made on local radio about this today as well, seems the consensus is that CofE is not attracting new customers or a brand loyalty and that they may have to look at offloading asserts soon.

All seemed fair enough to me, market rules and all that.

One vicar they spoke to did seem to have some awareness though but he didn't have a congregation at the moment (not sure how that works) but was saying that if he DID have a church then he'd be looking to use it every day , in fact it sounded like he wanted to run a cafe actually.

Oddly enough (perhaps), if I was to go voluntarily to a church service, it would probably be CofE – rather like the theatre of it and the music.

Sat at the back of Westminster Abbey a couple of years enjoying the choir.

Would have to tune out for any sermon, though.

But no – religion isn't dying, whatever Lord 'persecuted minority' Carey might claim. There's plenty around and I suspect that the more fundamentalist versions may be growing – perhaps in part because of the apparent homogeneity of secular options for making the world a better place.

There was a documentary a few years ago about rising Islamic nationalism, that pointed out that, in Egypt at Nasser's funeral in 1970, there were plenty of women in the massive crowd but even if you look at the pictures and film now, you don't see headscarves or the niqab. That's happened since, and the suggestion was made that part (at least) of the reason for the rise of Islamic nationalism has been the apparent failure of a secular alternative to the Western capitalist model.

You could certainly see that in Iran, too, where for decades, the secular opposition to the Shah's dictatorship was put down – often with Western help – until the point where something else rises up to take up the cudgels (and then purges those remaining secular forces that aided the revolution.

I'm not sure that we'll see such a rise in the UK, although it's interesting that politicians have been increasingly playing the 'faith' card in the last decade or so – but I don't think it's beyond the bounds of possibility that we could see further religious influence in the US.

To be fair, I should have said the C of E, rather than Christianity or religion, as being on the way out.
Ten per cent more in the UK are now stating that they have no religion than said so ten years earlier and I'm guessing that many would previously simply acceded to being termed as C of E even though they had no real affinity with it.

I am now pondering Mintball's point about the possibility of the failure of the pairing of secularism and capitalism to fill the gap and my first response would be that there are fewer evangelists out there preaching the word about simple, straightforward conscience without religion and, hence, religions are, to a large extent, freed from secular challenge and less hampered in putting forward their prescriptive versions of right and wrong.
The Church of England is way behind the other Abrahamic cults in terms of restrictive codes of practice about diet, observance and even daily dress ... and Conscience has very few, if any.
This is a drawback for them, if you want a really successful religion, it has to have elements of prescription and restriction in it so that people feel they are following an identifiable path via a code supposedly laid down by a higher being and a feeling of "belonging" with those of the same cult.
If the restrictions and impositions in diet, observance and dress make the adherent stand out from others, it can attract criticism and suspicion, ideal components for that feeling of persecution by outsiders which, in turn, increases the feeling of belonging and safety within the cult.

Simple right and wrong doesn't cut it for some people.

You could add into the mix reports over the last few years that some individual Catholic churches have been saved from total collapse by the arrival of migrants from eastern Europe in particular, who have bolstered congregations.

Then there is an increase in independent, evangelical churches – we've got several in our bit of London, most of which meet in buildings that were not originally churches. They do seem to be expanding. And there's an extent that you see that too in the emergence of groups such as London Citizens, which is a community-based group with a lot of faith-group involvement. And even candidates standing for elections on the basis of being a particular religion.

What is suprising is that as we have become better educated over the last few centuries, religion in general has not died out altogether.

Because whatever you, I or anybody else thinks about reason and enlightenment, it's about faith really, not a particular organised religion.

I don't understand how a rational adult can't see through the "god" myth in a second. But i have come to accept that billions around the globe cannot shake off the delusion, so effective was their brainwashing.

And so you have this strange mixture of a highly advanced and in many ways intelligent species, yet all prone to fall under the spell of assorted nutters, mystics, charlatans and the misguided, into "faith" in the most weird and wonderful panoplies of patent bullcrap.

And all convinced that, of the hundreds or thousands available, it is their god that's the boss.

"Faith"? Yes, the ultimate con-trick: reverse logic entirely. You can't prove a single word of your religious bullcrap, so here's a great wheeze, let's make a rule that to blindly accept and believe things of which there is no, nor ever will be, ANY evidence, is the BEST thing you can do, because precisely having this FAITH that it is all true is the highest thing you can achieve.

A mad world.

Brilliant sales job though - imagine if the likes of Apple could achieve such a thing...

I think that many people find it comforting, while for others it may well be "the sigh of the oppressed". For others still, they like the spiritual aspect of religious belief/observance and for yet others, I think it's completely intertwined with how they perceive society and how they would like their ideal society to behave.

I've had debates on the Telegraph forums with people bemoaning the death of Christianity in the UK, which they equate to the ruination of the country etc. Yet if you ask them which bits of the core Christian religion they accept as literal truth (virgin birth etc) they prove remarkably unwilling to say.

Which leads one to wonder whether that's the case with quite a number of congregants today, who may not actually believe all these things, but rather, they believe in the institution itself. And I suspect that's particularly the case with the CofE.