Posted on 11/07/2015 12:00:37 PM PST by BlessedBeGod
The "let's-destroy-Christianity" project has been underway for more than three centuries now, but it is only in the last half-century that the anti-Christians discovered their most effective weapon.
The project began around 1700 with the emergence of Deism as an alternative to Christianity. Deists came in a number of varieties. Some (e.g., Voltaire and Tom Paine) detested Christianity. Others (e.g., Jefferson and Kant) didn't detest Christianity. They just considered it an inferior system of belief, a system that contained not only some fine moral principles but also some pernicious superstitions. Voltaire tried to destroy Christianity (calling for the elimination of "the infamous thing," -- Ecraszez l'infame) by making fun of it: see his Philosophical Dictionary. And since he was a very witty man, he had a fair degree of success. Jefferson tried to destroy Christianity by showing what a fine fellow Jesus was -- once you freed the image of Jesus from the many superstitious extras that Christians had hung on him, the way you might hang ornaments on a Christmas tree. See Jefferson's The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, which is literally a scissors-and-paste editing of the New Testament.
Attacks of this kind caused some people to defect from Christianity, but not vast numbers. For to be affected by attacks of this kind you had to read books, and read them with some attention. In other words, you had to be an intellectual or a semi-intellectual.
In the second half of the 1800s came another great attack on Christianity. This time the anti-Christians used Darwin's theory of biological evolution, Spencer's philosophy of agnosticism, and the German "higher criticism" of the Bible to batter the old religion. Once again, this was a somewhat intellectual attack, appealing to persons who read books and serious magazine articles. However, thanks to the great growth in economic prosperity during the 19th century, the world had many more intellectuals and semi-intellectuals than it had a hundred years earlier. And so this fin de siecle attack produced a great many defections from the old religion. Nonetheless, Christianity continued to be, by far, the dominant belief system in the European-American world.
A byproduct of this Victorian-era attack was liberal Protestantism, which believed it was adapting Christianity to make it more palatable to modern man, but led in the first sixty years or so of the 20th century to vast numbers of defections from classical Protestantism, many of them unwitting. For if you were a liberal Protestant you could gradually drop one after another article from the traditional Christian creed -- such articles as the Virgin Birth, the Divinity of Christ, the Atonement, and the Resurrection -- while still calling yourself a Christian, and more or less honestly believing yourself to be such. (Another liberal byproduct was Catholic Modernism, but this was effectively killed in its cradle by Pope Pius X.)
The greatest blow against Christianity, however, the blow that appears to be largely successful in reducing Christianity to minority status in the European-American world, was the sexual revolution that commenced in the 1960s. You didn't have to be an intellectual or a semi-intellectual to participate in the sexual revolution. You didn't have to read books or magazine articles or attend learned lectures.
All you had to do was to commit what the Christian world had hitherto called a sexual sin -- while at the same time feeling that what you had done, far from being a sin, was in fact a good deed. And you didn't even have to commit this "sin" personally. All you had to do was to give your approval to such sins. The revolution was only in part a great change in sexual behavior. Even more it was a change in the moral evaluation of sexual behavior, changing the minus signs to pluses.
Of course, liberal Protestantism (joined after Vatican II by neo-Modernist Catholicism, which had recovered from the apparent death-blow Pius X had hit it with at the beginning of the 20th century) did its usual thing, saying that you can be a Christian even while repudiating a Christian sexual morality that went back to the earliest days of Christianity. In an astonishing act of self-deception, many Protestants and Catholics have actually succeeded in convincing themselves that this is true. But this self-deception has little staying power. It is so obviously ridiculous that it's not the kind of thing you can pass on to succeeding generations.
We are living in an era when Christianity, like the Cheshire Cat, is gradually fading away in the world's most modernized countries. The Cheshire Cat left only a smile behind. Liberal Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, is also leaving something like a smile behind, a smile that says, "I'm a great fan of Jesus, the guy whose deathless message is summed up in the magnificent words, 'Judge not, that you may not be judged.'"
Bflr
I agree with the post except the part that it cannot be passed to one’s children. I’ve known people who bring the significant other into their single-parent homes and then they break up. Repeat the cycle enough and the children learn how these relationships are only about scratching an itch.
Importantly, the *reason* for the effort to destroy Christianity goes way back. Specifically, to Moses speaking to God on the mountain, where God identified Himself as “I AM THAT I AM”. This is not a simple statement, but an extraordinary philosophical thesis.
In effect, among many other things, it says that God is in charge, the creator of reality. And going back to Adam, the purpose of man is to *label* the reality that God has created, *not* to create reality himself. Man’s tools to do this are endless abstract ideas, like mathematics.
But for a lot of people, especially in an industrial and technological age, the idea that they cannot create is intolerable. So they jump headlong into the first sin, vanity, and proclaim that they *can* create things.
“Cogito ergo Sum.” (I think, therefore I am.)
This quickly turns into war against God, and these people soon decided they would in effect rewrite The Bible, displacing God and putting mankind in that position.
Tremendous arrogance which eventually became socialism. That is, socialism is an atheist parody of Christianity.
Where Christians go wrong is when they confuse the two. Since socialists preach things that sound vaguely Christian, it is assumed that it shares the means and the ends of Christianity. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Even the current Pope seems to be unclear about the differences between Christianity and socialism. And this is a dire place to be, because the effort of Christianity is virtue and morality; but socialists embrace the seven deadly sins as their sacraments.
Another great job pointing out how we got into this mess, but we need roadmaps to get out! Practicing the true faith yes, but folks in the trenches need specifics.....don’t have sex before marriage, don’t live together, don’t use birth control, don’t get divorced - work it out, stop whining, think ahead of your impulses and actions.
Use your brain!
I think the post is exactly correct. Non-faithful Christianity cannot be passed on to succeding generations and that single thing is killing Christianity in the west.
What I see is church going non-faithful grandparents (divorced and remarried) making their non-church going offspring force the grandkids to take CCD until confirmation. Then the grandkids and their parents disappear. I highly doubt that the kids of non-church going grandparents will make anyone go to church for anything. End of the line.
The protestants I see have the same issue except it seems to happen faster.
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