4 ms·

This is exactly my point: you mix up 20 centuries of christianity with 20 centuries of specific christian institutions and worldly regimes that existed in chris

This is exactly my point: you mix up 20 centuries of christianity with 20 centuries of specific christian institutions and worldly regimes that existed in christian societies. And then you cherry pick some terrible, big historical events. You completely miss the 20 centuries of Christianity that inspired a vast cultural patrimonium and provided courage, justice, moderation and dignity to its laymen and clergy. Unlike what you say, abandoning this patrimonium has only started recently. Definitely not centuries ago. For instance, where I live, there is still an annual Christian pilgrimage. Attendance started dropping only a few years ago. I'm not sure if it will still exist in a few years. A lot of us are fascinated and sometimes even a little envious when learning about foreign cultures. Yet when our own culture is dying or has died, we shrug. Some even want to beat on the corpse. Also: "we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" sounds to me like a pretty accurate description of mankind, including Christianity itself. Other ways of saying the same thing are: "don't be too satisfied with yourself" or "try to do better next week". I'd say the first version packs more punch but that's a matter of taste. (Then again, as I implied earlier in this thread: maybe this matter of taste is an important part of modern Christianity's problem.)

eesmith 9y ago
When you say "only started recently", you mean since at least the deists of the 1700s, yes? As in Jefferson, whose quotes include: - "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity." - "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." Or near-deists like Thomas Paine who wrote: - "The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally paid to the sun." - "The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing, and it admits of no conclusion." I am one of many who recognize that the many good things came from Christianity, but argue that the bad outweighs the good. Please do not mistake that for absolutist portrayal of someone who "completely miss[es]" the good. We also have good things that came from the Ancient Greeks - including things which continue to provide "courage, justice, moderation and dignity" to modern people. And we don't need faith in their gods to enjoy them. You wrote: "where I live, there is still an annual Christian pilgrimage". Sure, and in New Mexico there are people who to the pilgrimage to Chimayo. I've seen them walking along the highway, and it makes the news every year. The number of people who do that pilgrimage is not decreasing. 301,000 people made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela last year. That's far more than went a generation ago. But go back to what I wrote. A large fraction of the adult population used to go on long pilgrimages in the medieval era. It ended up being banned in some countries, to force the people to work more. You been talking about this long grand historical period, so doesn't it makes sense to look at the changes in pilgrimages over that entire span, and not some fluctuation in your area in the last generation or so? Do you have any better numbers to show the dying off of pilgrimages? Something stronger than my counter-evidence, which also includes things like "Pilgrimage is enjoying a huge revival across Europe", quoted in https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/countryside/5126285/Easter-2009-top-five-pilgrim-routes-in-Britain.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/countryside/5126285/E... , and from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-pilgrimage-walks https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-p... (emphasis mine): > The poet Edmund Blunden wrote in 1942: "We have been increasingly on pilgrimage." We are once again increasingly on pilgrimage. A revival is under way worldwide, with pilgrim numbers rising even as church-going figures fall. Medieval hostelries on the roads to Santiago de Compostela, closed for centuries, are reopening to cater to the volume of travellers. In 1985, 2,491 people received the certificate of completion known as la autentica; more than 270,000 did so in 2010. On the little north Norfolk village of Walsingham – site of an 11th-century vision of the Virgin Mary, recently self-branded as "England's Nazareth" – a quarter of a million pilgrims now converge each year, including participants in the "children's pilgrimage", the "youth pilgrimage" and the "Tamil pilgrimage". You edited your text, did you not? You had a mention of the oppressive power of the "State" in it, which is why I wanted to point out Gustav Vasa's decree from nearly 500 years ago. I don't think you can point to 50 years ago as some recent high water mark when that was only an echo of what it was 800 years ago. "Doing the best we can in this confusing, muddled world of ours" is also a pretty accurate description of humanity. Personally, I can't figure out what "sin" means because that requires a transgression against divine law, and neither "God" nor divine law exist. So no, I don't think Romans 3:23 is at all an accurate description.
- unknown_apostle 9y ago
  The whole thread, for me at least, is about confirming the Guardian article, that Christianity is declining in Europe. I'd say especially in NW-Europe. I'm not talking about deist intellectuals and their opinions, or academic theology, or about places other than NW-Europe (New Mexico?), or a few big tourist tickets like Santiago. I'm talking about the popular Christian day-to-day practice of regular people of NW-European communities, of which I can witness the last strange hours in my own community. It's hard for me to come up with numbers beyond the kind of polls shown in the Guardian article or the drop in callings. It's not like we have centuries of headcount records for all the local events, cults and customs that used to exist here, the amount of tresses tied to chapel walls, or logs detailing the time and effort the local farmers, notables and grandmas spent decorating chapels. There have been no double blind control studies of how going to the village church made people's daily behavior slightly more mellow or made the community tighter here. By now there's mostly old pictures, living memories (less every year) and a rapid dwindling of what little remains today. The edited stuff you refer to was a sarcastic quip along the lines of "Now that Christianity is gone, I'm sure celebrities or the state will tell us what to do." I removed it because, reading it back, I thought it detracted both in style and content from my main point. Namely my prediction that future people in my community will regret current people having turned their back on this heritage so recklessly. They may try to reconstruct some of it, but it will be hard without continuity. I can see that happen even if Christian belief itself never bounces back. (Which would actually put such efforts at risk, by making them prone to political recuperation.)
  - eesmith 9y ago
    Well, yes, Christianity had been on the decline in NW (and N) Europe for a long time. What's new is "as default is gone." I'm from the US. My experience with pilgrimages is in the US context. I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the local big pilgrimage is to El Santuario de Chimayo. Not a big ticket pilgrimage. Because of this discussion, I remembered that there's also the pilgrimage to San Juan Capistrano, https://www.rcbo.org/year-of-mercy/pilgrimage-oc-sites/ https://www.rcbo.org/year-of-mercy/pilgrimage-oc-sites/ . You say now that you are not talking about "places other than NW-Europe". Thing is, you brought up "20 centuries of Christianity", and since it took a few hundred years until Christianity reached NW Europe, I think it's fair to believe you were talking about all of Christendom. I understand that you are talking about the practice. My point was that you see importance in the connection to 2,000 years of religious faith, but that faith has not been constant over the years. I'll quote again what I quoted earlier: > In the late Middle Ages the congregation sat down on the job and there was a drastic change in Christian worship—perhaps the most important in history. People, in effect, became custodians of individual spaces which they occupied throughout the service, and social distinctions made some spaces more privileged than others.” NW Europe is mostly Protestant, and it's only been 500 years since Luther. Sure, it's connected to the older Catholic faith, but that's then connected to the Jewish faith, and that is connected to the Canaanite and Babylonian religions. Your last paragraph is absolutely true. Look at the modern druids or the Asatru, who lack the continuity with the ancient Celtic and Norse religions, or the Slavic Native Faith. I wonder why we don't have that continuity, or even good records of what it was like then. Could it be that the Christians fought hard to expunge alternate (and ancient) religious practices, and didn't want to make and preserve those records over the centuries? Or, perhaps you could you tell me about the preservation efforts that Christians did during most of those 2,000 years, for the cultures that it replaced? By comparison, the current secular world seems much less likely to destroy traces of what came before. There will be books, movies, art, blogs, recorded sermons and more, by the bucket-full, for those trying to understand what a late 20th century NW-European Christian life was like.

eesmith 9y ago

When you say "only started recently", you mean since at least the deists of the 1700s, yes? As in Jefferson, whose quotes include: - "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity." - "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." Or near-deists like Thomas Paine who wrote: - "The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally paid to the sun." - "The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing, and it admits of no conclusion." I am one of many who recognize that the many good things came from Christianity, but argue that the bad outweighs the good. Please do not mistake that for absolutist portrayal of someone who "completely miss[es]" the good. We also have good things that came from the Ancient Greeks - including things which continue to provide "courage, justice, moderation and dignity" to modern people. And we don't need faith in their gods to enjoy them. You wrote: "where I live, there is still an annual Christian pilgrimage". Sure, and in New Mexico there are people who to the pilgrimage to Chimayo. I've seen them walking along the highway, and it makes the news every year. The number of people who do that pilgrimage is not decreasing. 301,000 people made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela last year. That's far more than went a generation ago. But go back to what I wrote. A large fraction of the adult population used to go on long pilgrimages in the medieval era. It ended up being banned in some countries, to force the people to work more. You been talking about this long grand historical period, so doesn't it makes sense to look at the changes in pilgrimages over that entire span, and not some fluctuation in your area in the last generation or so? Do you have any better numbers to show the dying off of pilgrimages? Something stronger than my counter-evidence, which also includes things like "Pilgrimage is enjoying a huge revival across Europe", quoted in https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/countryside/5126285/Easter-2009-top-five-pilgrim-routes-in-Britain.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/countryside/5126285/E... , and from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-pilgrimage-walks https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-p... (emphasis mine): > The poet Edmund Blunden wrote in 1942: "We have been increasingly on pilgrimage." We are once again increasingly on pilgrimage. A revival is under way worldwide, with pilgrim numbers rising even as church-going figures fall. Medieval hostelries on the roads to Santiago de Compostela, closed for centuries, are reopening to cater to the volume of travellers. In 1985, 2,491 people received the certificate of completion known as la autentica; more than 270,000 did so in 2010. On the little north Norfolk village of Walsingham – site of an 11th-century vision of the Virgin Mary, recently self-branded as "England's Nazareth" – a quarter of a million pilgrims now converge each year, including participants in the "children's pilgrimage", the "youth pilgrimage" and the "Tamil pilgrimage". You edited your text, did you not? You had a mention of the oppressive power of the "State" in it, which is why I wanted to point out Gustav Vasa's decree from nearly 500 years ago. I don't think you can point to 50 years ago as some recent high water mark when that was only an echo of what it was 800 years ago. "Doing the best we can in this confusing, muddled world of ours" is also a pretty accurate description of humanity. Personally, I can't figure out what "sin" means because that requires a transgression against divine law, and neither "God" nor divine law exist. So no, I don't think Romans 3:23 is at all an accurate description.

unknown_apostle 9y ago
The whole thread, for me at least, is about confirming the Guardian article, that Christianity is declining in Europe. I'd say especially in NW-Europe. I'm not talking about deist intellectuals and their opinions, or academic theology, or about places other than NW-Europe (New Mexico?), or a few big tourist tickets like Santiago. I'm talking about the popular Christian day-to-day practice of regular people of NW-European communities, of which I can witness the last strange hours in my own community. It's hard for me to come up with numbers beyond the kind of polls shown in the Guardian article or the drop in callings. It's not like we have centuries of headcount records for all the local events, cults and customs that used to exist here, the amount of tresses tied to chapel walls, or logs detailing the time and effort the local farmers, notables and grandmas spent decorating chapels. There have been no double blind control studies of how going to the village church made people's daily behavior slightly more mellow or made the community tighter here. By now there's mostly old pictures, living memories (less every year) and a rapid dwindling of what little remains today. The edited stuff you refer to was a sarcastic quip along the lines of "Now that Christianity is gone, I'm sure celebrities or the state will tell us what to do." I removed it because, reading it back, I thought it detracted both in style and content from my main point. Namely my prediction that future people in my community will regret current people having turned their back on this heritage so recklessly. They may try to reconstruct some of it, but it will be hard without continuity. I can see that happen even if Christian belief itself never bounces back. (Which would actually put such efforts at risk, by making them prone to political recuperation.)
- eesmith 9y ago
  Well, yes, Christianity had been on the decline in NW (and N) Europe for a long time. What's new is "as default is gone." I'm from the US. My experience with pilgrimages is in the US context. I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the local big pilgrimage is to El Santuario de Chimayo. Not a big ticket pilgrimage. Because of this discussion, I remembered that there's also the pilgrimage to San Juan Capistrano, https://www.rcbo.org/year-of-mercy/pilgrimage-oc-sites/ https://www.rcbo.org/year-of-mercy/pilgrimage-oc-sites/ . You say now that you are not talking about "places other than NW-Europe". Thing is, you brought up "20 centuries of Christianity", and since it took a few hundred years until Christianity reached NW Europe, I think it's fair to believe you were talking about all of Christendom. I understand that you are talking about the practice. My point was that you see importance in the connection to 2,000 years of religious faith, but that faith has not been constant over the years. I'll quote again what I quoted earlier: > In the late Middle Ages the congregation sat down on the job and there was a drastic change in Christian worship—perhaps the most important in history. People, in effect, became custodians of individual spaces which they occupied throughout the service, and social distinctions made some spaces more privileged than others.” NW Europe is mostly Protestant, and it's only been 500 years since Luther. Sure, it's connected to the older Catholic faith, but that's then connected to the Jewish faith, and that is connected to the Canaanite and Babylonian religions. Your last paragraph is absolutely true. Look at the modern druids or the Asatru, who lack the continuity with the ancient Celtic and Norse religions, or the Slavic Native Faith. I wonder why we don't have that continuity, or even good records of what it was like then. Could it be that the Christians fought hard to expunge alternate (and ancient) religious practices, and didn't want to make and preserve those records over the centuries? Or, perhaps you could you tell me about the preservation efforts that Christians did during most of those 2,000 years, for the cultures that it replaced? By comparison, the current secular world seems much less likely to destroy traces of what came before. There will be books, movies, art, blogs, recorded sermons and more, by the bucket-full, for those trying to understand what a late 20th century NW-European Christian life was like.