Irreligion in Today's Culture: How our culture today is affecting our religion and is holding us back from being religious.

Today, we live in a world where cultural values are becoming more dominant than religious values. “Do what feels right” seems to be the answer to many inner struggles people, especially teenagers, go through on a daily basis. However, why are people turning their back on religion? Well, some think of religion as a pointless practice perused only for spiritual satisfaction. Others do not believe that they get rewarded for being religious, not even after death. Mainly, though, a lot of people are so caught up with the culture they live in that they base all of their thoughts, beliefs, morals, and values on that culture. For them, religion becomes useless, and most importantly, outdated to a point where it pushes people a way from being religious. These ideas are reflected in David Kupelian’s “Killer Culture” and Noah Feldman’s “Schools and Morals.” Both essays focus on how today’s media and schools affect our religion and can sometimes hold us back from being good Christians.

Media today has become a major part of our daily lives. Whether we are studying, communicating with friends and family, or even just sitting at home, media is certainly involved one way or another. However, what many of us fail to realize is that media can have disadvantages and sometimes become harmful, especially to youngsters who are going through a period of confusion and self-establishment. In his essay, David Kupelian quotes a documentary that talks about how major production companies play with children’s minds to sell their products. “what emerges in the following sixty minutes is a scandalous portrait of how major corporations – Viacom, Disney, AOL/Time Warner, and others – study America’s children like laboratory rats in order to sell them billions of dollars in merchandise by tempting, degrading, and corrupting them” (Kupelian 650).

Thus,