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To: jailbird

Well, the picture that I posted is of the Compendium, which is a lot more straight-to-the-point than the regular Catechism. However, I think you have a good point. You have a lot of Europeans going to Buddhist, Hindu, and Inca sites around the world, when their is so much culture at their doorstep. It shows that they know what Christianity is, and have rejected it.


80 posted on 12/26/2005 7:22:48 PM PST by Pyro7480 (Sancte Joseph, terror daemonum, ora pro nobis!)
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To: Pyro7480
It shows that they know what Christianity is, and have rejected it.

No - there I disagree.

I would argue that they don't have a clue what Christianity is. Indeed, I would argue that almost no one I'm aware of has any idea either, BECAUSE ALMOST NO ONE HAS EVER SAT DOWN AND READ MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE, OR JOHN.

The degree of cultural [in this case biblical] illiteracy on the part of Westerners [Western Europe, Australia/New Zealand, North/South Americans, even church-going USA-ian "Christians"] is absolutely appalling.

And the sad thing is that a child could read M, M, L & J in little more than an afternoon - it's just about impossible to imagine that they [M, M, L & J] could have been more succinct than they were.

90 posted on 12/26/2005 7:29:01 PM PST by jailbird
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To: Pyro7480; x

"You have a lot of Europeans going to Buddhist, Hindu, and Inca sites around the world, when their is so much culture at their doorstep. It shows that they know what Christianity is, and have rejected it."

There are a lot of reasons for this.
One is that Christianity in Europe was responsible for the deadliest wars in European modern memory until the 20th Century. The 30 years war depopulated Germany by one-third.

Burnings at the stake are horrific crimes against humanity, and they were religious affairs in both the Catholic and Protestant countries. The Spanish Inquisition... the Albigensian Crusade... there has been so much bloodshed on religious grounds. Of course the Church was also part of government, collected taxes, had its own courts and authorities. People always resent government, and the Church - of whatever flavor - was government in the modern era. It has not been that long, and the polemical attitudes and history still prevails. Think about some of the wilder accusations made by Protestants against Catholics, or vice versa. What period does this stem from? The wars of religion. They are not that long ago.

So, there is that overhang of bloodshed and oppression on the part of the established Churches of Europe which has left a deep mark upon the European psyche. It's not an imaginary mark. A lot of people died, and hatreds run deep. Catholics and Protestants in Ireland are still at war; the wounds there are still very fresh. Christianity in Europe does not have a particularly peaceful history, and does have a history of political power. That is part of the problem.

Another part of the problem is the perception that religion has been perpetually at war with science, going back to Galileo. Now, in some cases (such as the case of Galileo himself, actually) this perception is exaggerated or outright wrong. However, Christianity in Europe has not been monolithic, but in civil war since the 1500s. Therefore, it has always suited Protestant detractors of the Catholic Church (remember that Italy, Poland, Southern Germany, Austria and France, where Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and so many of the great mathematicians lived and worked are all Catholic countries) to point to an alleged hatred of Catholicism for science and learning. It isn't really true (voir: all of the inventors and discoverers who were Catholics), but that doesn't matter. To this day, those who are opposed to the CATHOLIC Church (half of Europe) will unthinkingly trot out Galileo as proof that Christianity hates science.
In the north of Europe it was not really any better. Cromwell shut down everything artistic during his long and brutal dictatorship. So, you have the ability to make serious accusations across the Christian divide, and people have done so (to bolster their own position) for about five centuries. Trouble is, those arguments were made against the backdrop of a European world that was generally Christian and wanted to believe in Christianity. Throw doubters and cynics in the mix, and remove from them the fear of torture, horror and death which all Christian churches inflicted on those who challeneged them across a few centuries of European history, and you have arguments against Christianity in general, as antithetical to science, which can be cited by anyone who doesn't believe against all brands of Christianity the like. The Catholics and Protestants bitter bickering and polemics between them has left vast libraries of polemic literature, each depicting the other as benighted blackguards, hostile to all learning and science or freedom of thought. Both sides were always exaggerating and outright lying in order to bolster their positions. But all of that literature sits there. And it gave the ammunition to the atheists, and the scientists, and the Marxists, when the time came, to pick it all up and simply assert it, against Protestants and Catholics alike, proving - by their own words against each other - that BOTH sides were a bunch of ignorant, violent, oppressive, anti-scientific Luddites. The angry rhetoric of Christian division and factionalism among Christians was picked up by people who are no friends of Christianity to prove - in the Christians own words - the immorality and dishonesty of BOTH sides of the Christian house.

Now add to that the effects of two Revolutions, in France and in Russia, and Marxist and Darwinian thought, and nationalism which accepts no organized authority above the state, and you have more weights on the scales against Christianity in many European minds.

It is difficult to know precisely where to pick up the thread of Christianity for a European. All across Protestant Europe, the national churches are in deep decay. The Church of England is ordaining women and has become so "tolerant" that it practically doesn't teach anything. The Church of Sweden is disciplining ministers who stand against the homosexual movement. There is no "Church of Germany", but the Lutheran north is matched by the Catholic south in being not very observant. The only strongly believing Protestant country in Europe is the northern part of Ireland...and Ireland stands as a reminder to everyone in Europe of how discreditable, really, Christianity can be. Believing Protestants and Catholics in Ireland are still blowing each others' brains out. Everywhere else, the flames of faith have cooled so much that nobody cares enough to blow somebody else up.

Nor does it work to argue that the Irish troubles are not a Catholic/Protestant thing. The combattants themselves say that it is, and one need only read the arguments spewed by either side to see it. Ireland is sort of a running sore that is a reminder to Northern Europeans of what they got away from when they stopped believing their religions all that intensely.

Southern Europe is Catholic, in the West, or Orthodox (and Muslim) in the East. The Balkans are another example to Europeans why religion, strongly held, is a bad thing. The whole Middle East is another reminder. America is full of sincere believing Christians who separate the violence done by Christian people from their Christianity, and who separate Christianity and Islam from each other. But Europeans do not have much faith in the old religions, and they look at religious violence as just that: religion - the inevitable result of what happens when people believe passionately, to the death, in old religious fairy tales.

Catholic Europe is not in precisely the same position as Protestant Europe, because the Protestant Churches in Europe were state Churches, and they dimmed with the dimming of nationalism and national monarchies. The Catholic Church is international, and has its own monarch and government and organization. But country by country, Catholicism has not fared well among the young. In Spain, there is long overhang of Franco's very rigid Catholic dictatorship, with the parallel structures in Portugal. The Spanish and Portuguese have gotten rid of their rigid dictators, and are still in the period when many living adults suffered terrible oppression at the hands of a church-state alliance. The Catholic Church is held accountable in people's minds for this, and rightly too. Nobody can escape the accountability for the acts of his close allies and benefactors. In France and Italy, there is still residual Catholicism, as a social custom, but particularly in France it does not have a lot of force. Protestantism isn't going to get anywhere in France or Italy.

There are the signs and symbols of Christianity everywhere, but with them come a lot of disagreeable and terrible memories of the past as well. In the present, people live in a socially free and comfortable condition. Protestantism has no force (Europeans are simply not going to start believing the Bible - they lose the thread on Genesis; everyone knows that the world is billions of years old and wasn't formed in 7 days. If one HAS to accept that creation story as literally true in order to even enter into the Biblical Protestant sphere, well, that's the end of that for most Europeans), but Catholicism has some very strong social stances which modern people dislike. Particularly, the very strong stance against artificial birth control. Europeans, like Americans, want to have recreational sex. Birth control makes that possible. Nobody in Europe is going to stop having sex because the Pope says so. And nobody wants to get pregnant and have children when they're not ready, or when they're not MARRIED in places like Italy and Spain, where THAT aspect of Catholic culture still overhangs. Italians and the Spanish have sex outside of marriage, but they don't have kids out of wedlock very much.
So, you have the opposition to birth control. Europeans in Protestant countries will ignore the teachings of the hereditary Catholic enemy (while not, themselves, being devoted Protestants either). Europeans in Catholic countries also ignore the teachings of Rome on that critical issue.

Likewise abortion. Abortion is more restrictive in Europe than in the US, because there it was established by law but in the US, by sweeping judicial fiat. Europeans in general see a sharp difference between a baby after several months in the womb and a blastocyst after fertilization. The Church is categorical in its rejection, and the Europeans aren't interested in the anathemas of that old, dictatorial institution. Rome can't burn them anymore, and they are just not going to take orders from those men down there anymore, even if they are Catholics.

And so it goes.

But there remains in people a thirst for the spiritual, a hunger for contact with God and the supernatural. The native form of it, Christianity, has discredited itself in European eyes by too much violence, too much oppression, too much corruption, too much high-handed dictatorial exercise of power, and too much opposition to science to really be an option for most Europeans. They are willing to be VAGUELY Christian, but will reject, wholesale, most of the doctrines of any Christian denomination you present to them.

The flaws of Islam are obvious to Europeans too. But Islam does have a few things going for it. It doesn't have a history of violence and oppression within Western Europe. It has the good press of the romanticized (and exaggerated) accounts of the flowering of tolerant Islamic civilization in Spain, etc. It is not anti-scientific, and it does have a strict moral code which does not, however, forbid birth control.

Finally, there is the rebelliousness element. Many Europeans have the sense that their societies are broken and struggling. And some, especially the young, are not just disatisfied with the legacy religion, but with the civlization itself. Nothing is a greater act of rejection and rebellion than to join up with Islam.

Those are all the reasons, and there is no earthly solution to them.


191 posted on 12/27/2005 10:56:51 AM PST by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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