Official vs Unofficial. What matters to you?

Last week we talked about the different sorting systems for religions and how you can have different subcategories within a religious category. Pulling up the map on pewforum.org was very interesting to see the differences between states and how they are different in a religious manner. I specifically looked at the “nones” category because that was the highest in WA and Oregon. This caused me to think about the earlier reading that says people always lie on polls about how much they attend church. I went out on a limb to consider that either the pacific northwest is not religious at all or is that just the region of the country that includes people that tell the truth more on the polls. The states affiliations aren’t much higher then between 30-35% which is only a few percentages higher than any other place.

The readings from Chapter 4 of McGuire’s book talks about religion and non-religion. I was interested to see how they gave a formal definition to official and non-official. Official is basically the same as unofficial except it is accepted by a group and practices on a regular basis compared to unofficial. You must go through an initiation process for most religions to be considered “one of them” and a part of the group. Being apart of an official church organization is a lot like a frat. There is something that you must do to get into the organization whereas and unofficial religion is more just like a group of friends hanging out with the same interest. A more accepting environment but not recognized by the outer world. But do we really care what others think of us? Depending on the person, the way outsiders view us is everything while to others they know their morals and what is important to them.