The Resistance

I propose that Christianity will inevitably fade away over time. It just seems natural that no lie can perpetuate itself indefinitely.

But I was wondering, what historical event do people here think hurt Christianity the most?

A couple of ideas...

1. The Roman emperor make Christianity the offical religion of the empire. Our first seperation of church and state issue. Historically, any merge of church and state has caused problems, people learn about that, and Christianity slowly loses integrity in the eyes of the masses.

2. The Crusades. The alledged religion of peace and love doesn't tend to create many pacifists.

3. Spainish Inquistion. Not as well known, but has a darker image than the Crusades.

4. The Protestant Reformation. My personal vote. Christianity breaking into two, then several, then hundreds? of pieces. Resulting in bloodshed of Christians killing other Christians saying they weren't Christians because they didn't believe exactly as they did. You gotta love when the bad guys knock themselves off.

I submit that as evidence that evil, almost by defintion, will eventually destroy itself.

5. The invention of the printing press. Books become cheaper, thus become available to the masses, they grow educated, and Christianity can't handle that.

6. The age of reason. Do i really need to mention how that could hurt Christianity?

7. Industralization. People become less poor, thereby being less prone to the "don't worry about this life, the next life will be better" attitude. Granted, not everyone will shake off that argument, but many do. Got the idea from Orwell.

8. Any others...?

I think these are all factors, but do you think there is a particular one that stands out?

I ate Pascal's Wafer

Well, I'm not too sure that 1, 2, and 3 really sent Christianity spiraling into the toilet. It seems to have grown some since those days. However, I think 4 was a very big one.

Xianity split up into several parts, rather than just two. Before the RCC and the Orthodox church were the only big games going in Christianity. Once the protestants came by we had the previous two plus several different denominations ranging from replicatholic to cultish. I think this may have caused some to realize that there really were several different ways to interpret the Bible, and this may have led them to think that the Bible just might be fallible. Once one is open to the fallibility of the Bible, any vestige of Xianity seems to slip away.

5 is definitely a large factor. Perhaps it's not a direct cause of Xianity's decline, but the printing press certainly didn't hurt. It made it so much easier for people to learn more about the world around them. With so many discoveries since then it was only a matter of time before they were published and large amounts of people could read them.

6 is a given. I think that as people begin to think for themselves and critically examine issues there will be less Xians. In fact, I would postulate that a large number of average Xians would shed their faith if they pointed their reasoning skills to their faith. Many are very bright, but simply haven't critically examined their beliefs. If more and more people start doing so I imagine more would become Deists or Atheists.

7 is a possibility as well. However, industrialization is also a result of increasing knowledge about the world, so I think it ties in to other points.

I think another reason Xianity will kill itself is the extreme fundies. Many Xians now simply accept the Jesus story as fact and just assume that certain parts of the Bible (YEC or the flood story) are just allegories or parables. If it weren't for the fundies they wouldn't examine this. However, as the fundamentalists preach that the Bible should be taken literally they may inadvertantly deconvert some people. In fact, this is partly what happened to me. If it weren't for the Biblical literalists telling me that I had to take the Bible as inerrant I may not have examined my faith to the extent I did. So I think that fundies are definitely among the worst things to happen to Xianity.

Well, I think they are all factors to an extent as well. I happen to think that the fundies are Xianity's biggest threat right now, but I don't think there is one single event which is the direct cause of Xianity's downfall.

-Nick

gsx1138

Well most people seem to think that contact with an Alien race will kill religion in general. But as long as there is a person who doesn't want to think for themselves there will be a person who is willing think for them.

Veil of Fire

Unless the aliens are religious.

Perchance

The age of reason, with "modifications."

I think that- possibly, with the right leaders guiding it- Christianity might have been able to handle reason. There might have been some merging of reason with faith that, while perhaps changing the character of the religion from within and eventually making it something other than what we recognize as Christianity, would not kill it completely. In a way, Christianity would "die," but it wouldn't have suffered as violent a loss as it did when ramming headlong into reason.

Unfortunately (well, for the Church, anyway), it had leaders who resisted scientific innovations, who persecuted people just for theories (like Galileo), and who couldn't handle the competition for power. So their Church started dying.

As to whether there's any way that Christianity could have survived the age of reason the way it is, and even continued to spread and grow... I don't think so. Mind you, I don't think there's anything "destined" about the crumbling of Christianity before reason, but there might be factors within the religion itself, like dogmatic attitudes, that serve the same purpose as biological destiny. Maybe if the "genetic defects" had been somehow strengthened or rooted out it could live, but they weren't.

-Perchance.

[ October 14, 2002: Message edited by: Perchance ]</p>

sullster

My initial vote is for the Protestant Reformation. The splitting apart of catholic Europe ultimately led to a lot of breathing room for other types of thinking. If the popes could be resisted, then so could a lot of other types of powers and ideas.

YET, my buddy Friedrich Nietzsche, brought up a view of the Reformation which always has been in my mind. He thought that the Reformation actually saved the religion of christianity from destruction, even though it broke into many sects.

Nietzsche's argument is that the Renaissance catholic church was so corrupt, worldly and led by virtual crime families that it may well have internally destructed by itself. He claims that Luther's Reformation, although costing the Catholic Church millions of believers, actually saved it, by forcing it to return to orthodoxy. In the post-Reformation we have a smaller catholic church going strong, and all the little protestant sects rolling right along.

Mecha_Dude

Ever read Childhood's End?
(edit for grammar)

[ October 15, 2002: Message edited by: Mecha_Dude ]</p>

Solsticin

Ouch! Brain cramp! Stop that!

Imagine the implications of this. What if they all followed Zues or something? What if their version of religon was the exact opposite of the mainstream veiw (devil is god, god is the one that got thrown out, etc.)?

Ack, brain hurts.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: Solsticin ]</p>

Ronin

The discovery and common practice of fellatio.

Lord Asriel

I would say the translation of the bible from Latin, which (correct me if I'm wrong) lead to the Reformation. Once the ceremony lost all the magical resonance of Latin as was revealed to be a load of bollocks, it was the beginning of the end.

Of course, it initially made it more popular (especially combined with the printing press), but the genie could not be put back in the bottle.