shocking parsed news

"across all religious upbringings, roughly three-quarters of those who have become unaffiliated say religious people tend to be hypocritical and judgmental rather than sincere and forgiving"

The interesting part is looking over the reasons people leave religious affiliations. It does not look like, in the suspicious attitudes of hardline religious people in all corners of America, there's some sort of atheistic revolution underway. It looks more like there's a revolt against organized religion and overtly religious peoples. When you get down to something like "modern science proves religion is just superstition" and see a very small percentage relative to something like the hypocrisy of other religious people or the influence of money and power on organized religion, or especially with the fast growing disagreements with various institutional rules and dogma, then you're not seeing the sort of Richard Dawkins brand of atheism take any shape.

The more relevant conclusions were the displeasure with religious doctrines relating to homosexuality and abortion. I've seen the preposterous claim that somehow younger people are "pro-life" and that this is how social conservatives would get them back involved in their causes. Based on something like this (along with general polls on abortion itself), I'd say that's quite funny if that's the plan. Good luck with that. When that beats out birth control as a complaint of former Catholics (and in case you missed it, the Catholic Church is big on being anti-birth control), something is wrong with the assumption that these are wedge issues that will involve people in an overriding ideological stance.

The more unusual statistics are in the following of "unaffiliated" peoples. The apparent concern that people will hold to these sort of absent practices, given that they're not reaching these conclusions from the perspective that any religious institution is flawed or based on superstitious nonsense, is probably unfounded. In fact, if the goal and perspective of the "unaffiliated" was a larger movement toward atheist tendencies generally, then it would appear to be failing wildly (for the record, I have no such ambitions to "convert" others, I just find the conversations amusing). It looks more like the same religious institutions that would be in competition for this population are failing faster at attracting them back into some institutional faith as the actual issue. The issue would then be that there's less of a parsing of data to determine whether "unaffiliated" actually means much of anything. I usually see polling data with something like "spiritual, not religious" and "agnostic/atheist" rather than "unaffiliated". The latter term is pretty broad, and provides a good deal of hope for the religious institutions that people have fled to recover some of these lost goods. If they have the ability to be more "flexible" in their moral teachings and have less hypocritical/judgmental worshipers at least. I suppose in some sense I can live with the population awakening to these flaws at least. They do tend to be the most glaring problem with human spiritual practices.