Worst Pope Ever

[andrewducker]

I'm actually pretty pleased in some ways - by moving, in many ways, even further in a conservative direction the church has made it more likely that it will lose members in the west, and possibly even provoke a schism.

Comments

[adders.livejournal.com]

America lags behind

People tend to assume we're on some straight line from a place of mass belief in religion, to a post-religious society. In fact, these things tend to go in cycles, with a massive growth in rationality and atheism in the early 19th Century, followed by a religious revival in the late 19th and early 20th century, for example.

So'd I'd say that America is just at a different point in the cycle to us.

[andrewducker]

Fair enough point. Although I would argue that the 19th century atheism was largely amongst the middle classes - which were then much smaller - and not nearly so widespread as they are nowadays.

People seem to have an inbuilt need to believe _something_ and I doubt that we'll every get away from a majority of people believing in the mystical nature of the universe - most people find it just too depressing to believe anything else.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

We're social animals basically. We need to be part of something and to defer to something bigger than us. Whether that comes from religion or something else depends on the individual.

I stand by an earlier statement that humans cannot possibly ever deal with the universe because we're not mentally designed to cope with it.