Tell Me Something I Don't Know

“If you think culturally, socially, after about 67 we run out of narrative as to what to do,” he (Joseph Coughlin, the director of MIT’s AgeLab) explains. “There’s only so many cruise ships that you can enjoy norovirus on, only so many golf games, so many daughters to walk down a wedding aisle.”

G. Clay Whittaker

We’re Not Ready for a Population That Lives to 100

The most obvious culprit here is the Catholic obsession with the sinfulness of sex for pleasure, especially homosexual sex, along with a peculiar sexual proscrip­tion for clergy: celibacy. Intentionally or not, the celibate priesthood specifically attracts applicants who are at best confused or conflicted about their sexuality, and at worst deliberately seek positions conducive to sexual exploitation of the vulnerable. Although Catholicism condemns homosexuality, priests appear to be disproportionately gay. The prevalence of homosexuality among priests has not yet been properly measured via random sampling, but when 101 American gay priests were asked to estimate this prevalence, most of them guessed 40 percent or more—a rate far higher than in the general population. A different study of a thousand priests found that 20 percent of them were in homosexual relationships, and another 20 percent were in stable relationships with women. Most of these were verified by interviewing the sexual partners. Aside from being an ineffec­tive sham, the doctrine of celibacy for the priesthood apparently attracts young Catholic homosexual men, either as a means of suppressing a sexual orientation they perceive as evil, or—in certain Catholic subcultures—as a safe venue for hooking up with other gays.

Excerpted from “The Illusion of God’s Presence” by John C. Wathey.

According to the New York Times, over half of all American women under 30 who give birth are unmarried. When adjusted for levels of education and economics, the numbers skew dramatically higher.

According to the Washington Post, 25 percent of millennials don’t affiliate with a faith-based tradition and almost twice as many don’t belong to a church. More so, a Pew Research study suggests that an astonishingly low number of youth believe in the existence of a God. As religious participation, affiliation and even belief wane in both post-Christian Europe and the Americas, atheism is now among the fastest-growing affiliations among young adults who have turned anti-faith into its own kind of faith.

This is the end of marriage, capitalism and God. Finally! My fellow boomers might mock millennials, but what if the new generation has the big questions absolutely right?

Jeff DeGraff