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29% of Americans say religion ‘out of date’

A Gallup poll of Americans’ attitudes towards religion released on Christmas Eve found significant recent increases in those responding either that they have no religious preference, that religion is not very important in their lives, or that they believe religion “is largely old-fashioned or out of date.”

Only 78% of Americans now identify as Christian, while 22% describe their religious preference as either “other” or “none.”

Most of these changes have occurred since 2000 and represent the first significant shift since a sharp decline in religious adherence during the 1970s. Over the last nine years, the number with no religious preference has grown from a level of around 8% to 13%. The number for whom religion is not very important has climbed from just over 10% to 19%. And the number who believe religion is out of date and has no answers for today’s problems has jumped from slightly more than 20% to 29%.

These changes do not appear to have affected the majority of Americans who still consider religion “very important” in their own lives. That figure remains at 56% — roughly the same as for the last 35 years — while 57% still say religion has answers to most of the world’s problems.

The biggest difference is that in the late 1990s, up to 68% of Americans though religion had answers to the world’s problems — even though only about 60% said religion was personally very important to them. It seems as though over the last ten years a significant number may have gone from believing that religion is a positive factor in the world, even if they’re not particularly religious themselves, to seeing religion in a far more skeptical or even negative light.

Of interest is those claiming ‘No Religion’ make up the third largest group in the United States.

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Sarah Silverman’s ambitious plan for feeding the world.

Ok Granted the entire scientific community isn’t 100% on board with all of this but it’s still fascinating. Dr. Michio Kaku is fascinating to listen to…

If you want access to your Gmail from your desktop without running an email client or without using the web based Gmail, now you can download the Gmail Google Desktop gadget. First things first, you need the free Google Desktop software installed. After that you can dock your Gmail gadget to the desktop to read, search, send, and star messages. The gadget has the same keyboard shortcuts that web-based Gmail offers and you can even open multiple instances of the gadget and log each into a different Gmail account. The Gmail gadget is a free download and works in conjunction with Google Desktop 5 for Windows only.

You can grab the gadget from Google Gadgets.

Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven’t been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we’re launching today, there’s a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There’s even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers — it’s not exactly practical, but it’s great for testing out your geek cred. We’ve also done a minor facelift to Gmail’s default look to make it crisper and cleaner — you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

Note that so far this has not shown up on the Google Apps version GMail. Bummer…

Original GMail blog post here.