Pharyngula

In an attempt to reverse those numbers, Focus on the Family on Saturday hosted "The Big Dig," a conference aimed at teens and youth leaders.

Excellent, name your program after Boston's incredibly over-budget tunnel project which has already resulted in the death of one person from a ceiling tile falling on her due to corruption and/or incompetence.

Somehow all that fits really well with a Focus on the Family initiative.

Posted by: cm | August 13, 2007 1:12 PM

Tools? "God did it" is a tool?

What we as participants in humanity should be concerned about is that some of these people revert back to such nonsense. After all, most of the population believes in a god, in Heaven, in Hell, in whatever other ridiculous notions come with theism. Something happens after these people get out of college that turns them back to ignorance. We need to figure out what that is and come up with some "tools" of our own.

Posted by: Tom @Thoughtsic.com | August 13, 2007 1:18 PM

(.)(.)

Posted by: wÒÓ† | August 13, 2007 1:23 PM

One of the SciBlings was pretty influential in my turning away from religion; and I'm extremely grateful.

But you want to know the primary reason college kids abandon religion? Any higher being that tries to put your hormones in check when you're in college is bound to get left in the dust. At a certain point you either realize it's completely bogus and go get your kicks, or you do it anyway and become a hypocrite republican.

Posted by: Mike P | August 13, 2007 1:28 PM

This is absolutely wonderful. Teach them to value academic methods, and I suspect they'll be even more vulnerable to academic criticism when they get into college.

Posted by: G. Shelley | August 13, 2007 1:35 PM

I'd be especially interested in knowing what the comparative statistics are between kids who graduate from Christian high schools and go on to a secular college vs Christian kids who were already in a secular high school setting prior to college. I would speculate that the numbers of defections are probably fewer from the first group (deeper indoctrination) although they probably have a higher curve of defection as years in college progress.

Posted by: John B. | August 13, 2007 1:40 PM

As for reversions back to religion, don't underestimate the power of guilt. Some people really enjoy it...

Posted by: Cynthia | August 13, 2007 1:47 PM

PZ wrote: "Well, and to be perfectly fair, they also discover friends and parties and beer and sex. Those are pretty persuasive, too."

A few years back, I was living in Europe, and got to watch a lot of Discovery Channel Europe, which shows some more... ahem... adult themed documentaries. One night they had on 'The History of Sex', and the overall (unspoken) theme of the documentary is that Christianity ruined everyone's fun. A paraphrased version of the documentary:

Narrator: "The Romans had great, open, happy sexual existences."

Me: "Yay."

Narrator: "And then the Christians came."

Me: "Boo."

Narrator: "The Greeks had great, open, happy sexual existences."

Me: "Yay."

Narrator: "And then the Christians came."

and so on...

Posted by: gg | August 13, 2007 1:48 PM

The answer, Rey Fox, isn't less closed-mindedness, it's less-clothes-mindedness.

Posted by: Mike P | August 13, 2007 1:52 PM

The great evacuation?

(Boiling tea honked down the nose.)

Isn't evacuation also a euphemism for shitting in the US?

I'm in pain, but it was worth it.

Posted by: lunartalks | August 13, 2007 1:55 PM

Dustin: "I'll bet you're all kinds of fun to sit next to on long flights."

LOL

Rey Fox, you might be right (I'm not even going to bother to look it up), but I'd like to point out that the opposite of "open" can also be "close" - depends on the tense.

Posted by: John B. | August 13, 2007 2:05 PM

Teach them to value academic methods, and I suspect they'll be even more vulnerable to academic criticism when they get into college.

Why do I get the feeling that this "more academic method" the FoFites are talking about is more properly described as "ignore the academic method more"?

Posted by: John Pieret | August 13, 2007 2:13 PM

Re: #16

I had a similar experience in my highschool ancient civilizations class. We were learning about Roman culture and how they had public brothels, then the Christians came along and closed them down. That, along with other early Christian actions such as defacing pagan temples, etc, lead to the catchphrase for the class to be a muttered "damn Christians." And it wasn't just popular among the students; the teacher indulged in encouraging the phrase now and again.

Now, about the fact that I went to a Catholic highschool...

Posted by: King Aardvark | August 13, 2007 2:14 PM

I had pretty much given up on religion and the supernatural when I entered college, but the couple of inane Campus Crusade meetings an old friend convinced me to attend were the nail in the coffin.

I expect The Big Dig will have a similar effect for many students.

Posted by: notthedroids | August 13, 2007 2:16 PM

"but I'd like to point out that the opposite of "open" can also be "close" - depends on the tense."

As a verb, yes. As an adjective, no.

You understood what he meant, so what's the problem?

Posted by: tsg | August 13, 2007 2:27 PM

Hey, I just blogged on this - it's amazing when you read Misquoting Jesus and find that Ehrman was warned by fellow fundies, not against studying evilution at Berkeley or something, but against studying the Bible at an evangelical college, because it was too liberal, and he'd have trouble finding Real True Christians there.

Basically I think going away from your parents' house, meeting lots of different, new people, and learning how to think about stuff is very destructive of fundamentalist Christianity.

That, and the sex.

Loyalty to literalist Christianity and abstinence until marriage were pretty easy when people couldn't read and got married at 14. Not so much in your modern college environment.

Posted by: Cogito | August 13, 2007 2:30 PM

Aaron - Do tell.

Bob

Posted by: Bob O'H | August 13, 2007 2:42 PM

Let's just say that the more anyone educates themselves, sees the inconsistencies and out-right untruths they were brought up on - is a guaranteed formula for breaking the chains of religion.

Unless FoF is going to start recommending that their congregations either not send their child to college or, if they do, to a biblical college, they have no hope of winning against this particular apostasy. And even if they settle for biblical college - the fact is that you can only go so far with that type of education.

If you don't understand the fundamentals of Darwinian evolution you will never become a professor in any of the biological or medical fields - except maybe at those same biblical colleges. We know the ultimate effects of that brand of in-breeding, don't we?

Posted by: John B. | August 13, 2007 2:50 PM

I imagine that a sizable percentage of those reported as leaving their religion in the first year of college had technically done so in the years leading up to it, but were prevented from being open about it by family pressures. How many of them had been putting off the exodus through the later years of high school until their parents weren't hovering over them with expectations of church-going?

I decided halfway through my Confirmation classes that Christianity was an unpleasant thing to believe and I wished/hoped it wasn't true, but I went through with the Confirmation because it was unthinkable for someone to drop out---I'd have gotten an immense amount of shit from my family, the church, the community, and relatives whom I'd never met before, all of whom would take it as a huge, personal, deliberate insult that I'd rejected God, and I was two or three years away from adulthood. So I faked my way through the ceremony and went to church with my parents and daydreamed about Star Trek through the sermon, or sketched angels on the service programs (which made my mother happy and let me practice faces and bird wings in some degree of peace, yo-yo-ing up and down for the Gospels and so forth aside). And if anyone were taking notes on when I left the faith, everyone would assume it was my third year of college (the first year away from home), if ever, since I didn't bother to quit officially, just quietly stopped going. Less of a hassle that way, and I stay safely off any "reconvert" lists (and at least some of the evangelical churches leave Christians of other similar churches alone, which they don't do with the heathen and godless and non-Christian religious types.

Posted by: Kyra | August 13, 2007 2:53 PM

And why wasn't I informed?

Could be that you, like most sane people, stopped watching the History Channel a long, long time ago.

Posted by: Dustin | August 13, 2007 2:56 PM

Marcus,

Yes.

Posted by: Brownian | August 13, 2007 3:00 PM

...of course I meant James Dobson is a tool...but then again they all look the same to me anyway. Focus on your own damn family. I like that they're calling it a big evacuation. Reminds me ofthe judge in Pink Floyd's The Wall being filled with the urge to defecate...

Posted by: AlanWCan | August 13, 2007 3:04 PM

I agree with EnzoAntonius, take these numbers with a grain of salt.

If you guys don't believe the bullshit religion preachers about souls and wine becoming Jesus' blood, why do you believe them when they say this stuff:

Studies have shown at least 50 percent -- possibly as much as 85 percent -- of kids involved in church groups will abandon their faith during their first year in college.

You've got to ask yourself, "what studies show that?" Studies that I've seen do not say that. I've got a post on those studies on my blog here:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2007/06/numbers-ive-got-good-news-and-bad.html

Here's a bit of data from the Barna Group:

adult Mosaics 18-22 -- 19%
Busters 23-41 16% 14%
Boomers 42-60 8% 9%
Elders 61+ 4% 6%

Currently, the adult Mosaics, basically college kids, ages 18-22, are only 5 percentage points more unbelieving than the Busters, ages 23-41, who are 5 percentage points more unbelieving than the Boomers.

Remember the episode of Star Trek Next Generation when Scotty explains how he got a reputation as a miracle worker?

You lie about how big the problem is and then when what what normally can be expected to happen, happens -- you'll be considered a miracle worker.

Posted by: Norman Doering | August 13, 2007 3:20 PM

Once you accept one type of authoritarianism, you are susceptible to many other things...if you are willing to blindly follow some sky-fairy minister, then, when he says, "Step into my office for some grop..i mean private conversation" you are more likely to do what he says.

Posted by: PalMD | August 13, 2007 3:34 PM

Well Bob, Behe came to Dartmouth College to give a talk in the spring of '05. At that point in my life, I was on rocky ground with my theology but still looking for a way to reconcile faith with science, and Intelligent Design sounded like it might do the trick. So I listened to Behe's lecture with an open mind. Some of his claims were interesting, but I wasn't entirely swayed, so I continued the search online. What I found was that scores of scientists had responded to Behe's claims, but Behe had failed to address any of their (legitimate) criticism. That's when I really started to realize where the burden of proof lay.

Posted by: Aaron | August 13, 2007 3:53 PM

But, as 1,600 kids and leaders from as far as Jamaica learned historical evidence of Jesus

They've set themselves quite the challenge, since there is no historical evidence that Jesus of Nazareth existed.

Personally I don't see any reason to think he didn't; it seems reasonable to assume he probably was a historical figure (I make the same assumption for Socrates). But you can't legitimately claim there is historical evidence for it.

That's one thing that strikes me about this. It highlights that they'll be including deliberate deception in their program. It's one thing to talk about how Jesus was this, that, or whatever, but to say there's historical evidence he existed crosses the line between stating an opinion and saying what just isn't so.

Posted by: Leon | August 13, 2007 3:57 PM

I haven't seen any basis (anecdotally or from a research perspective) to support the FOTF claim. Has anyone seen such a "study"?

#4: "What we as participants in humanity should be concerned about is that some of these people revert back to such nonsense. After all, most of the population believes in a god, in Heaven, in Hell, in whatever other ridiculous notions come with theism. Something happens after these people get out of college that turns them back to ignorance. We need to figure out what that is and come up with some 'tools' of our own."

Based on this piece (http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/7827212.html), it appears that evolutionary inevitabilities turn folks back. Per #37, The Authoritarians agrees (though I haven't read it).

#33: "...take the cultist away from the cult for long enough, and they'll come around. it's not what you tell them, it's that they see that what they've been told before was a lie."

Which was why the neo-cons invaded Iraq.

#36: "Let's just say that the more anyone educates themselves, sees the inconsistencies and out-right untruths they were brought up on - is a guaranteed formula for breaking the chains of religion."

You may be right, but sociologists are much less convinced of this idea than they once were.

Posted by: Sinbad | August 13, 2007 4:04 PM

John B. wrote (#36):

Let's just say that the more anyone educates themselves, sees the inconsistencies and out-right untruths they were brought up on - is a guaranteed formula for breaking the chains of religion.

Posted by: Glenn | August 13, 2007 4:32 PM

Hank Fox, #1: "have an 'oh, shoot' moment where they realize 'Hey, this actually all makes sense. Creationism is crap.'"

I did not have "a moment", but yes, that's about how it came about over some 3 or 4 years of fighting against the "theory" of evolution, among other things. There was some point where I officially told myself I didn't believe in god anymore, but I was simply voicing what I'd known was bound to come for a very long time.

Blake Stacy, #13: "So if the religion itself begins making less and less sense, it fails by the very criterion that it set up to show its superiority"

That's pretty much what happened for me. After YEC failed miserably, the hole was just too big to ignore, and religion collapsed around itself. Now, I realize that god could still exist alongside the Big Bang and Theory of Evolution, but the fact that such huge tracts of what I'd been indocrinated with from birth were shown to be so completely wrong, caused me to abandon the entire set of stupid ideas and start over from an agnostic point of view.

arachnophilia, #33: "between lying to children, having hate-filled agendas that would make jesus christ himself roll over in his grave, and rampant "holier than thou" hypocricy..."

And this is why quit the church early on. "Jesus saves all, except that whore over there." "Jesus forgave me for molesting kids, but drug users are unforgivable." "Love everybody, but only if s/he's the opposite sex." Asinine hypocrisy.

Anybody who thinks sex is really a major contributor to losing one's faith: I agree that abstinence is one of the first things to go out the window, but it's just double-think. I have two younger, unmarried-at-the-time, steadfastly-Christian sisters with kids, yet I've never had so much as a girlfriend. While they're out drinking underage, experimenting with illegal substances, etc., I stay to myself, more-or-less out of trouble. This holds true all over the place. Go to any very religious back-country part of the US, and you'll find kids who sleep with anything that moves, but will turn around and say "that's blasphemy" when you make a little joke at the expense of god.

To be clear, my reasons for not sleeping with every girl who ever hit on me are not religious; I simply don't want to catch everything they have, can't afford kids, and plain don't like most of them. And, of course, the qualities that turned me into an atheist are the same ones that keep me from finding girls I do like: I'm a geek, through-and-through, and would much prefer to post rambling comments on random blogs than be bored to death at a bar or club. Plus all the girls at the racetracks come with their boyfriends--that doesn't help my cause much.

Posted by: MichaelS | August 13, 2007 4:41 PM

"Reasons are multiple for the religious falloff by freshmen, said Bob Waliszewski, Focus' interim youth outreach director. Some leave churches because they find their beliefs incompatible with moral failings they have..."

Oh I see, it's the kid's "moral failings" that cause them to leave. I don't which is sadder, the juvenille "blame the victim" mentality or that they think reason and self-determination are moral failings.

Posted by: Todd | August 13, 2007 5:03 PM

To Sinbad and Glenn: Here is the evidence I will cite for my statement, "Let's just say that the more anyone educates themselves, sees the inconsistencies and out-right untruths they were brought up on - is a guaranteed formula for breaking the chains of religion."

1. The topic of this post. Some pct. of kids start falling falling away from religion. When? When they go to college. Before anyone starts their "correlation/causation" posts, let me continue, because this is just a piece of datum I'm including.

2. The pct. of Phds who believe in a personal god vs. the pct. of general population. (If you haven't seen these studies, I suggest you Google it).

3. The pct. of Phds in the relevant sciences (biology, physics, etc) to those who have PhD in something like computer or engineering.

These studies can lead to only one conclusion. Now, I'm NOT SUGGESTING that everyone who gets a good education will drop the superstition OR that everyone who is not well educated (I'm one of them) is superstitious. What I am suggesting (ok, you can start right NOW!) CORRELATION.

So, I have reword my original statement - It's a guaranteed formula for getting a higher pct of people to break the chains of religion.

Posted by: John B. | August 13, 2007 5:31 PM

I've often wondered if some of the private evolution-deniers who work so hard to learn about evolution in order to create reasonable-sounding creationist arguments don't sometimes have an "oh, shoot" moment where they realize "Hey, this actually all makes sense. Creationism is crap."

Hank, that's pretty much how it was for me. What I still don't understand is how it took less than a semester to come to that conclusion, but another 12 years or so to figure out that the rest of it was crap, too. I guess early indoctrination can do a pretty good snow job on a person's brain.

Posted by: Carlie | August 13, 2007 5:50 PM

Sinbad, what would be a data set that would lead you to feel comfortable with my modified statement? It seems to me, and admittedly I could be wrong, that at some point you accept the data that higher education equates on some level with throwing off the yoke of superstition. I know how counter intuitive things can be in science, but it would be stunning to me if there is zero correlation.

Posted by: John B. | August 13, 2007 6:04 PM

Yes, John B., that's about right. But it seems to me the main factor at work (I think someone mentioned this above)--more important than freedom from authority, parties, socializing, etc.--is just that when kids go to college, they're exposed to a much, much bigger world than any they've seen before.

It's easy to have black-and-white beliefs when your world is small and your available choices are limited. It's also easy to believe in oddball superstitions that are tailored to a local area, if you spend your whole life in that area. Tribal religions are a good example: take the Gagaju (Aborigine tribe) creation story. The creator was over there (they're within pointing distance of the physical location) and walked over there. He got stuck in the mud. And so (for no apparent reason) he created everything around him.

Now, if you live your whole life in that area, it might never occur to you to ask questions like: what about X, Y, Z, etc., ad infinitum species that aren't even on this island? Were there other creator beings? If not, did the same one create them all, and if so, why did he make people look so different? And why create different species on different continents?

Posted by: Leon | August 13, 2007 6:16 PM

"But it seems to me the main factor at work (I think someone mentioned this above)--more important than freedom from authority, parties, socializing, etc.--is just that when kids go to college, they're exposed to a much, much bigger world than any they've seen before."

That's possible, but my (admittedly anecdotal only) experience as a student and a professor suggests that your view risks giving the students too much credit for seriousness. Some students give their religion up for intellectual reasons (I thought I did, but I'm now convinced I didn't). But I think it more likely that other reasons (including simple disinterest or focus elsewhere) are more prominent.

Posted by: Sinbad | August 13, 2007 6:22 PM

The thing that turns some of them back is having kids of their own, apparently.

Huh. That was actually the tipping point for me becoming an atheist - realizing that I was responsible for teaching somebody about the world and wanting to make sure that I was actually teaching them the truth. I could no longer in good conscience ignore all the doubts I'd rationalized up till that point.

Posted by: Fatboy | August 13, 2007 6:27 PM

The thing that turns some of them back is having kids of their own, apparently.

NB That was mostly back towards a more authoritarian attitude in general and not specifically just towards any previous religion.

However, for most people having kids means getting family help which in turn means coming back under the relevant tribal peer pressure again (whereas students are somewhat free of it). Plus, with that additional burden (of time and emotion), there's the fact of having less time to think at all, let alone critically, about things and of there being more of those things going on and demanding immediate attention - for which religion can be a quick fake fix.

Posted by: SEF | August 13, 2007 6:47 PM

Sinbad, you said, "And, since women and blacks are far more religious than men and whites, one should be particularly careful when making a causation assertion." Is this not another bit of sub-data supporting the education claim (though not the intelligence one)?

Women and blacks have been historically excluded or minimized in higher education.

That's changing and I would love to see statistics on these two groups specifically for how they compare to their own larger groups, if they are among those who have been fortunate enough to go on to University level studies.

I'm have a strong opinion on what we would find. At least I hope I'm right.

Posted by: John B. | August 13, 2007 7:00 PM

Brownian #35 said:
"To Dustin, Rey Fox, tsg, and the rest:

Oh, for Pete's sake.

You're wrong, all of you. The opposite of close-minded is far-minded, though the word 'teleological' is more commonly used (tele- from the Greek for 'far' and -ological, an Irish insult meaning 'know-it-all'.)

Words that start with tele- are usually used perjoratively, as in 'television' (from the Greek meaning "there's nothing good on") or 'telephone' (Greek for "are you considering changing your long-distance provider?"), and teleology is no exception, being an empirically-unsupported and assumptive philosophical position. It's opposite is naturalism, a position most here would subscribe to.

Thus, to a scientific and rationalist crowd, to be called 'close-minded' is not an insult but a compliment."

Anyone else think that the above deserves a "Molly"?

Posted by: SimonC | August 13, 2007 7:18 PM