Thursday, October 15, 2015

Paradigm Shifts

As all of us who have lived any amount of time have realized that our world is not static. Everything, especially the way that we think, is constantly being changed. We have seen this all throughout history. Our world is obviously very different than what it was even twenty years ago. We call the mental climates paradigms, and a change in society's collective paradigms over trends are paradigm shifts.

It has taken me quite a long time to come up with adequate, yet somewhat interesting ideas, but I think I have two fairly good ideas. The first idea for my paradigm shift is the rise of atheist/agnostic/unaffiliated individuals in the United States. In just 2007, only 16% of the United States population identified as religiously unaffiliated, while last year the percentage shot up to 24%. I have seen people handing out free bibles across Penn State at least three times now since I have moved in, and this is a clear reflection of the slight fall of Christianity in the United States.

A 6% increase is a very steep increase for only a period of 7 years. For my research paper and TED talk, I would like to examine what else is changing that correlates with the decline in religion, and what this overall change means for our society. (Photo Credit)

Another very prevalent paradigm shift that we have seen in just the past decade is the changing climate for the LGBT community. Just fifty years ago it was almost unheard of for an LGBT individual to bring their sexuality to the forefront, while now LGBT pride is getting more and more popular. I would like to discuss how our social environment has changed to make it a little bit easier for an individual to be proud of their own sexuality in public, and what this means for civil rights as a whole.

I am not yet sure if I will use either of these topics, but they are indeed a good, tentative start....
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2 comments:

  1. UnknownOctober 16, 2015 at 5:28 AM

    The topic of religion is stronger in comparison to the idea of the LGBT community because it is a topic that is typically a taboo and therefore an idea that many people would be surprised to hear the stats of.

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  2. AnonymousOctober 16, 2015 at 5:33 AM

    I personally love your topic about change in number of people who are categorized themselves into unaffiliated religion because that topic is not common to many audiences, and religion always has been very important topic for people. And I can see that you are very interested about this topic as well (Since you already have the data related to this topic!) I personally want to hear about unaffiliated religion from you!

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