thoughts on Easter Sunday

 

 

Today is Easter Sunday, but we are not planning to go to church, and there are also a LOT of Americans who will not be in church today either.

 According to Gallup, 31% of our population never goes to church at all. Not surprisingly, 79% of the atheists and agnostics never go to church, but that is also true of a loosely organized group called “other”. Mormons are the MOST likely to go to church.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx

The next most religious group is Protectants. 30% of them go to church on a weekly basis.         

For Catholics, weekly mass attendance is mandatory, but only 23% of them go to mass every week. 18% of Catholics NEVER go to church. Failure to attend mass is considered to be a mortal sin, but here is where it gets complicated.

What IS a mortal sin?

Catholics are not supposed to receive communion if they are in a state of mortal sin, but it you read the article below, you will realize that very few Catholics should receive communion:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2019/11/so-what-is-mortal-sin.html

Although church attendance in general has declined 12% in the last 20 years, the attendance in Catholics has seen the largest drop-off.

Among religious groups, Catholics show one of the larger drops in attendance, from 45% to 33%, while there are slightly smaller decreases among Orthodox (nine percentage points) and Hindu followers (eight points). There is also a 24-point decline for “other” religious groups, generally those not large enough to report separately as their own group or those that are difficult to categorize based on respondents’ answers.

In contrast to most religious groups, Muslim and Jewish Americans have shown slight increases in religious service attendance over the past two decades.

I should be quick to point out that I am not criticizing people who go to church on Easter, since its message or rebirth should be a comfort to all of us.

Few people, of course, know that Easter is based on a pagan holiday, which is also true of Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2014/04/do-you-believe-in-easter-bunny.html

I have previously written about artificial intelligence, so this morning I asked AI to paint me a picture of a family going to church on Easter, and this is what I got.

 

 

Obviously, Easter IS a special day, so feel free to celebrate it however you want. After all, He is risen!