Thursday, October 11, 2012
How to Choose a Religion if You're a Godless, Hipster Heathen
Posted by Kristin Iversen on Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 1:35 PM
A new study has come out from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life that shows that young Americans are all a bunch of devil-worshipers. No, just kidding. Worshiping the devil is still a type of religion, however unorthodox, and what the study actually found was that 32% of Americans under the age of 30 count themselves as having no religious affiliation. Atheist website Patheos tells us that what this means is "more people are atheist, agnostic, or unaffiliated with religion than ever before. (In fact, 46,000,000 Americans are religiously unaffiliated, by Pew’s count.)"
And while this is certainly an interesting trend in a country where the word "god" is still thrown around with wearying frequency by everyone from Superbowl-winning athletes to the President, we think that what is missing is the acknowledgment that maybe, just MAYBE, the problem with all these godless young people isn't that they don't WANT to believe, it's just that they don't want to believe in the same boring old monotheistic religions as everyone else. Young people want variety. They want to do something new and different. And being an atheist isn't so cool anymore, not now that Ricky Gervais has co-opted it. Ricky Gervais is a man who never learned when enough is enough, you know? Not cool.
So I've come up with a list of pros and cons of other, lesser-known religions that the youth of today can latch onto in their hours of distress or on the night of their Grammy win. You know. When we all need religion the most.
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The 10 Best Author-to-Author Insults
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About The Author
Kristin Iversen
Kristin Iversen is the Managing Editor at Brooklyn Magazine and the L Magazine. She has been described as "a hipster buzzword made flesh." This seems pretty accurate.
