Why do teenagers and young adults hate Christianity ?

Francis 1928 said:

What do they mean by young adults? Im 43 ,am I a young adult?

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You're a "young adult," if the issue is abortion.

You're a "child," if the issue is a school shooting.

Jesse Dornfeld said:

None of those things means that Christ is not risen.

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The point I was hoping to make is that what youth see and are exposed to has a lot to do for why they reject Christianity.

bèlla said:

Many people were reared in the environment you described and elected not to impose their beliefs on their children. That doesn't mean they were wholly ignorant of its tenets or moral correlations.

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Actually it means that morality is now subjective and relative to the situation. At least with God people were united under the same moral code. Now it depends on what human made ideas morality represents. Which we know is fallible.

bèlla said:

You'll find cotton wooled specimens on both sides of the aisle. Christians don't have a monopoly on good parenting. Their children are equally clueless and wayward.

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I don't think young people were cotton wooled in the past. Yes today both sides are guilty. But I don't think Christians are. They are brought up on Gods word regardless.

Studies show that children brought up in Christian and religious homes do better across a number of measures.

bèlla said:

You don't need a God-centered culture to keep your children on the straight and narrow. Good instruction is anticipatory and sticky. The world shouldn't unravel a foundation you had 18 years to form.

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Its not so much about what code we live by but that we are united ubder that code. Modern relativist society can never be unified under any moral code because that would be imposing a moral code which is exactly in opposition to relative morals.

bèlla said:

~bella

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Thanks Bella

dlamberth said:

The point I was hoping to make is that what youth see and are exposed to has a lot to do for why they reject Christianity.

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I'm not denying that. But those things in no way make Christianity true or false. All Christians could be like Hitler and Christianity could still be true.

Jesse Dornfeld said:

I'm not denying that. But those things in no way make Christianity true or false. All Christians could be like Hitler and Christianity could still be true.

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It’s things like that that turn a lot of young people off.

Jesse Dornfeld said:

All Christians could be like Hitler and Christianity could still be true.

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Yes. But it then wouldn't be a religion worth following.

Bradskii said:

Yes. But it then wouldn't be a religion worth following.

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If every single Christian was so disobedient to their Saviour that they all behaved like Hitler, then that would cast doubt on their belief. However, he worthiness of Christianity ultimately depends on whether Jesus Christ is worth following, not on Christians.

David Lamb said:

If every single Christian was so disobedient to their Saviour that they all behaved like Hitler, then that would cast doubt on their belief. However, he worthiness of Christianity ultimately depends on whether Jesus Christ is worth following, not on Christians.

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Actually my opinion of Christianity depends on the behaviour of Christians. My opinion on Jesus has nothing to do with the behaviour of Christians.

Hans Blaster said:

The rural strain of Catholicism I come from has little time for the mystical or ornamental.

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I hear you. I don't go in for mysticism either.

Hans Blaster said:

While he certainly wasn't referring to our times and knowledge of the natural world, he was insisting that all would see the handiwork of *his* god to the exclusion of others, and continues from there.

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Paul was insisting that all "DO" perceive God on some level, which for me is unfortunate because I usually don't think I perceive much in the way of any direct evidence for God's existence (hence the reason I keep saying that I'm skeptical and existential in my outlook).

It's taken a long time, but with the help of hermeneutics and historical study, I think I finally came to understand that whatever Paul's theological referents were, he was talking within the conceptual paradigm of the people of his time. It wasn't just his own Jewish brethren who assumed a revelatory immanence existed in the minds of human beings at that time. In various ways, the Greeks did too and Paul knew this. In contrast, we don't know this, today.

Going back to what I said earlier, being that we're scientifically minded products of the 20th and 21st centuries, it's not easy to recognize or temporarily place ourselves into an ancient mental envelope that contained the ways in which people 2,000 years ago saw the world, or the gods.

Hans Blaster said:

I don't feel bad, but if people are going to make these kinds of arguments in times of modern knowledge then they are going to need better material.

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This is why I harp on scholarship and academic inquiry, as the Critical Realist that I am. It's needed.

Hans Blaster said:

I grow tired of being hammered with this square peg. I judge those with hammers appropriately.

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Oh, my bad! I didn't explain my metaphor of the hammer well enough. What I meant with the hammer metaphor was to describe the "hammer of effort" that we all each individually possess in order to workout, work through, and understand a conceptual problem, whether in math, in science, or in disambiguating some bit of prose in an ancient, foreign piece of religious literature (like Romans chapter 1).

This is something that as an educator, I think everyone, especially the young people of today that we're talking about in connection with this thread, need to learn to wrap their minds around rather than all too casually and subjectively dilly dallying in things like Tik Tok or Wicca or even fideistic Christianity. People need to learn to do some science and philosophy, and do it without all of the blustering and the confirmation bias that all too easily goes along with whatever everyone wakes up to feeling like doing each day.

Jesse Dornfeld said:

I'm not denying that. But those things in no way make Christianity true or false. All Christians could be like Hitler and Christianity could still be true.

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This thread is about the youth rejecting Christianity.
What the youth see and experience goes a long way towards their accepting Christianity or not.

dlamberth said:

This thread is about the youth rejecting Christianity.
What the youth see and experience goes a long way towards their accepting Christianity or not.

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Yup.

Especially mom & dad putting their kids on a church bus, so they can get rid of them for awhile, vis-à-vis the whole family going to church together to worship God.

David Lamb said:

If every single Christian was so disobedient to their Saviour that they all behaved like Hitler, then that would cast doubt on their belief. However, he worthiness of Christianity ultimately depends on whether Jesus Christ is worth following, not on Christians.

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You can tell the value of the teachings by the followers of those teachings. If a people are behaving like Hitler, that throws light on the teachings that the people are receiving.

Hans Blaster said:

The rural strain of Catholicism I come from has little time for the mystical or ornamental.

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Without the mystical, Christianity makes little sense to me.