How the West Really Lost God

Real Clear Politics ^ | June 22, 2007 | Mary Eberstadt

[Alex Murphy]

For well over a century now, the idea that something about modernity will ultimately cause religion to wither away has been practically axiomatic among modern, sophisticated Westerners.1 Known in philosophy as Friedrich Nietzsche's famous story of the madman who runs into the marketplace declaring that "Gott ist tot," and in sociology as the "secularization thesis," it is an idea that many urbane men and women no longer even think to question, so self-evident does it appear.2 As people become more educated and more prosperous, the secularist story line goes, they find themselves both more skeptical of religion's premises and less needful of its ostensible consolations.3 Hence, somewhere in the long run -- perhaps even the very long run; Nietzsche himself predicted it would take "hundreds and hundreds" of years for the "news" to reach everyone -- religion, or more specifically the Christianity so long dominant on the Continent, will die out.

As everybody also knows, much about the current scene would seem to clinch the point, at least in Western Europe. Elderly altar servers in childless churches attended by mere handfuls of pensioners; tourist throngs in Notre Dame and other cathedrals circling ever-emptier pews roped off for worshippers; former abbeys and convents and monasteries remade into luxury hotels and sybaritic spas; empty churches here and there shuttered for decades and then re-made into discos -- even into a mosque or two. Hardly a day passes without details like these issuing from the Continent's post-Christian front.4 If God were to be dead in the Nietzschean sense, one suspects that the wake would look a lot like this.

Moreover, practically every other modern titan credited or discredited with shaping the world of ideas as we know it....

[Alex Murphy]

This is a HUGE (almost 9,000 words) but interesting article.

[weegee]

People are distracted by the modern world. Churches spontaneously filled following the 9-11 attacks (that night, people went to pray, not to be seen, but for community).

[LiteKeeper]

My ministry focuses on training teenagers/youth groups to defend their belief in the very existence of God (Heb 11:6). Sunday School and Youth Group meetings may talk about the nature of God, but they can't defend their belief in His existence. I am passionate about teaching kids about this.

Our workshop sets up a "CSI" lab on the stage, and we spend 4-5 hours working out the implications of Rom 1:18-20. The first hour is spent analyzing a pencil...and learning critical thinking skills.

Bottom line, people are not convinced that God exists...and it plays out in the way they live their lives!

[stuartcr]

How can the west really be lost, when God created everything, knowing what was going to happen?

[Uri’el-2012]

There will be a falling away just before the end.

[Coleus]

.

[Cicero]

Yes, an interesting article.

It doesn’t actually prove its case—that belonging to a natural family makes you religious, rather than religion making people have larger families. But it certainly offers food for thought.

As a Christian, I believe that religion comes from God. It is the result of grace as well as of free choice. But the natural impulse to marry and have children also comes from God, as Genesis suggests.

Rather than saying that one comes before or causes the other, I would suggest that both are the result of a positive response to God’s offered grace, whereas the absence of faith and the absence of family are the result of turning away from or refusing God’s grace.

I hadn’t looked at French demographics, but I find that interesting, because the first place in modern Europe where large numbers of people turned away from God was France, at the Revolution. And that was also where you see the first signs of consciously chosen destruction of family.

[Lexinom]

Hello agin LiteKeeper. To have self-awareness with no rational cause, to possess a soul which animates the body and whose presence distinguishes it from a corpse, to have this soul completely unnameable to scientific inquiry leaves only an irrational explanation as the alternative to a purposeful God. I would gently remind these folks of the absurdity of this alternative, reminding them they are in effect sawing off the branch on which they expect to be perched for the purpose of even making observations about this or that...