Why did Westerners stop attending church? What eroded the power

>>1037662
Jews and science.

What a stupid question.

>>1037664

Science and religion seem to represent different domains, though

Common sense

>>1037679
To you or me or other sensible people, sure. The average person doesn't get it.

>>1037662
It stopped having percieved moral authority in the wake of social change.

Literally the sexual revolution
You see women would have to stay at home to take care for their kids and the house and were a bit limited in the things they could do and where they could go(you see people even back then liked sex so they usually had a lot of children to take care of)

So what did they keep themselves busy ? Reading books, listening to radio, chatting with other women in the neighborhood etc. and of course religion!

Religion kind of filled a void in their lives and women were usually the ones to drag their husbands(who were more busy with their jobs and generally cared less) to church, after anti-conception they weren't as limited anymore and started going out more and having kids later, which resulted into them going to church less and less.

And since their wives weren't forcing them to go to church nearly as often as in the past the men didn't go a lot either.

Access to education.

>>1037841
I think I got autism reading that, thanks.

The west lost faith in authority. The church was bundled up with the state and its decisions in very many countries. With better media that exposed more faults in authority figures, huge, horrible wars, and a complicit clergy, people just stopped believing in all sorts of authority you just had to place your faith in and traded it in for utopianism or consumerism.

File: 1440549097091.jpg (20KB, 306x306px) Image search: [Google]

20KB, 306x306px

>>1037841
>there are people that actually believe this shit

>>1037841
My Grandfather smoked his whole life. I was about 10 years old when my mother said to him, "If you ever want to see your grandchildren graduate, you have to stop immediately."

Tears welled up in his eyes when he realized what exactly was at stake. He gave it up immediately. Three years later he died of lung cancer. It was really sad and destroyed me.

My mother said to me,"Don't ever smoke. Please don't put your family through what your Grandfather put us through." I agreed.

At 28, I have never touched a cigarette. I must say, I feel a very slight sense of regret for never having done it, because your post gave me cancer anyway.

>>1037841
While is problems and the ends are fairly accurately diagnosed, it's hilarious to connect it the the Frankfurt school or some orchestrated phenomena.

It's just the natural course of civilizations separated from natural reality by their infrastructure. People love a good conspiracy though, putting a face on something saves them from the terror of the randomness and inevitability of it all, as it seems like something that can be fought or understood more easily.

>>1037662
The Churches both protestant & catholic discredited itself with shitty religious wars and interference in politics.

And then came the secularism of the 18th century.

>>1037871
This.

Church only makes sense if you are going to volinterially take everything the priest says to heart. If you consider yourself able to understand religious matters with personal study than the church is just a social club. The priest's role becomes pointless in a society that values personal choice and indivual self-development. After people stopped seeing priests as being no more moral than anyone else it stopped making sense to see them as authority figures on morality. With the huge amount of options for staying social there isn't even a very good reason to pick the church over something else.

Classical mechanics

>>1037897
Not even religious but I do like the concept of confession at least. Some things just need to be said before you can accept them and grow or move on and the availability to do that without judgement is pretty bro tier.

A pattern that I see in the history of religion is that people's worship of a deity is subordinate to the results associated with it in their lives.

Successful deities become more popular, unsuccessful deities lose worshippers.

Examples of a substantial size being Roman pagans feeling abandoned by their gods and abandoning them in turn for Christianity, and the Jews going atheist after the Holocaust.

God is less popular than today's deities, because he contributes less to the average man than the competition such as State, Money and Sex.

>>1037662
pedophilia

File: fellay-1.jpg (25KB, 580x400px) Image search: [Google]

25KB, 580x400px

sede vacante

>>1037897
>>1037871
I agree with this, mostly.

Cataclysmic devastation for hundreds of years brought on by a series of wars and things like disease ruined people's faith in authority and order in the world. WWI and WWII sealed the deal as the most devastating wars in history for the west, but it started centuries earlier.
The religious institution that brought people together was also threatened by the progress of science. Starting in the Renaissance, the protestant reformation, through the enlightenment, people began to think more independently, especially after the series of revolutions that resulted in secular governments being established around the 1800s. This eroded the traditional bond between a man and his church, which previously provided all sense of security, hope, social order, etc. After seeing that (historically the Catholic church) wasn't able to guarantee these things, they moved on. First to other churches, then to whatever it is we have today. Consumerism and nationalism, perhaps would be our modern alternatives.

>>1037890
You know, it's actually really refreshing to see at least one other person with clear vision on this shithole of a board (and the internet in general.)

All too often it's easy to get depressed when virtually everyone you come across on these boards buys into some form of unified, concerted effort to undermine society.

>>1037968
There's also the fact that a lot of the shit the church spouts just does not make sense logically. Science has shown us it to be factually incorrect when taken literally, as many still do. This doesn't help their case. People are skeptical to take things they know to be false based on something as immaterial as faith. In previous times it really wasn't an option, if you didn't attend church like a good Christian you were shunned by your community.

>>1037841
>>1037890

during the Crisis of the Third Century Romans thought it was the gods' wrath that was bringing hell upon the crumbling Roman Empire


With the death of God in public discourse, perhaps people increasingly see conspiracy theory manifest in place of pointing to divine wrath causing all their problems

the release of the nintendo 64 was the beginning of the end. i didnt actually get full liberty for another five years though

>>1037882
>we 9gag now

>>1037679
Science keeps explaining things we used to need god for

>>1038103
Monotheism cannot survive in a scientifically explained world.

This is because monotheism is designed to provide absolute morality by this logic "There is only one God, he is the source of all things, as a result he designed things to function a certain way. This is the natural law which all morality must stem from"

But if things are the result of non-God forces, say natural laws of nature, than God's morality is thwarted. The new morality stems from adopting to whatever the natural laws are.

>>1038103

Science and god used to work together hand in hand for quite some time, not religions fault people have the fedora misconception that one can't exist in harmony with the other.

>>1037662

Have a look at history: christians were persecuted in Rome, but strangely enough it was alleged "devil" worshippers the ones persecuted in witch hunts and so on, and in the modern age we have "insane" people.

I'm sure you have noticed now that jesus is the antichrist and you shouldn't trust the bible a single bit, and you should hate your enemies, as most people in the world are actually devils, why love them? why be humble? why serve them? are you retarded?

And who told you that sex is bad if not the guy that wants to ruin mankind, the devil? Didn't GOD place lust for anal sex and a prostate in your butt? And then place a desire for it in there? Well? Isn't it HIS will then?

And notice how the faggots that pretend to be devil worshippers in here will take good care to defend that piece of shit jesus. Don't they claim to be wizards and pagans and shit? What fellowship would they have with jesus? And in a place with cp occasionally of all websites.

People steer away from that church for a reason.

>>1038246
This is the craziest post I've read in a while. Nearly at the level of the clearly mentally ill person that used to post semi-regularly on /ck/, congrats.

>>1038263

>y-you're crazy.

Oh? What thing did I say that was a lie?

Wasn't there Roman persecution of christians and then persecution of "witches"?

Well?

Faggot.

And look at how easily you prove my words calling me mentally ill.

Well? Isn't the persecution there, faggot?

>>1038217
If religion didn't want to be painted as anti-science, maybe they shouldn't have interfered with science so much. The fact that "the chart" is inaccurate doesn't mean that historically religious authorities have not tried to intervene.

World War 2.
Europe had significant athiest groups for a while there, but the two World Wars is what really killed religion.
People just lost their faith, how could God let this happen, how could he let the Holocaust happen to His Chosen People?
That was the general thing that did it.

>>1037841

What political system would you suggest if democracy is the problem? I would combine absolute monarchy with a directly elected legislature and a pan-European (Pseudo-Roman) nationalist ideology.

>>1038246
sublime

>>1038279

>People just lost their faith, how could God let this happen, how could he let the Holocaust happen to His Chosen People?

We're talking about Christians here. Jews are not the chosen people in Christianity.

>>1037662

Science. Church itself lost its practical purpose, which was to spread information as communications improved. Before the 20th century churches were regularly used for news, declaring decrees from the ruler and other such things.

Oh and probably Marx had some influence too.

>>1038293
Pan-Europe sounds nice but look at the EU. Awful thing.

>>1038301
Christians believe in the Old Testament. Jews were chosen by God in there.
They also believe in the New Testament thing and how salvation is open to everyone not just the Jews anymore. Kind of the crux of it all, but the point is still there.
The Holocaust was seen as too horrible a thing to have occurred under a loving God by many in Europe.

>>1037662
Christianity is not the natural religion of Europe. Without violence the people will not follow it.

>>1037971

There is no unified conspiracy, it's just progressives pushing their ideology to its natural end. First, they want freedoms. I can agree with this. Next, they doubt authority. This is where the knot begins to unravel. After this, they try to destroy authority. The knot is now unravelling at an accelerated rate. Finally, they destroy their culture and sensibilities. The knot has unravelled, and society has fallen into anarchy.

For some, the goal is anarchy, while for others, its a dictstorship based on their infallible ideals. Their are those whose goals lie in between, but they seem to be few in number. I personally believe that a strong monarchy and a nationalistic ideology is necessary to govern humans, but I could be wrong.

>>1038308

God destroyed cities left and right, was an arrogant, jealous, anally retentive bitch, who tried to drown the world, canonically leaving only two humans alive. The Bible is a justification for the policies of the kingdom of David, as well as a basic "build-your-own-society" kit. The likes of Peter and Paul were duped into believing it by a crazy preacher who rebranded Judaism to appeal to pagans and Zoroastrians.

>>1037679
>Science and religion seem to represent different domains,

That's just modern damage control.

>>1038340

And then fucking Constantine picks it up in order to reform the Roman Empire and justify his own rule. He'd experimented with portraying himself as Apollo/Sol incarnate in the years before his conversion, but their belief systems were too vague to work and Christianity had the kind of radicalism he wanted.

>>1038347

He needed a national belief system, and paganism was far too varied to work, so we got Constantine the Nicene Christian. Julian the Philosopher had the right idea by trying to reform pagan practices.

>>1037961

Bishop Fellay is not a sedevacantist.

That said, Modernism is the answer to OP's question.

>>1038131
Your explanation of "monotheism" contains a lot of things that aren't necessary to monotheism, per se.

>>1039872
Wrong Jesus thread, the evolution shitposting is in the other one

>>1038308
The New Testament talks about the Jews losing their "chosen" status as a result of rejecting Christ.

Baptized Christians are the spiritual Jews.

>>1037961
stop this meme

>>1038340
>drown the world, canonically leaving only two humans alive

Please cite where in the Bible God drowned all but two people in the world.

>>1039942
I gave the same answer before him.

>>1039853
>Modernism

I guess it was the radio, and later television. With people hearing what they want to hear from the media, they had no need to attend religious sermons except as a social event.

>>1038131
>I'm a high school student that doesn't understand monotheism
This is why this board is absolute shit

File: Red Pill.png (3MB, 4622x3683px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 4622x3683px

>>1037841
>>1037841
>>1037841

TYPICAL COMMIE CENSORSHIP

THE TRUTH WILL NOT BE SILENCED

SEMPER FI

>>1039960
>"And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie"

Wait, God misleads people in order that he can justify punishing them? What a cunt.

>>1040230
Here. I'll walk you through it.

Let's say God has a certain teaching on something biological: urges, sexul conduct, maritial relatship.

Now let's say science comes a long and declares that the nature laws of biology have worked to make humans do the opposite of God's teachings: say we learn that women have an innate desire to cheat on men to maximize their offspring's quality and quantity, let's say we even find the gene for it.

This now has God in a puzzling state, he is supposed to be the author of the world but the world is specifically constructed against him. God's authority has been undermined by natural laws and the people with the authority to measure these laws (say scientists and philosophers) hold the leesh on God's collar.

There are various theological ways around this. You could say human women did not always have the adultry gene but it was added there by Satan or that it was added when Eve ate an apple. This might work once or twice but the more band-aids you need to put into theology the harder it is to maintain. And every band-aid added makes the religion look more and more pathetic.

As a real life example the very idea of Eden is clumsy to reconcile with evolution. Pschology discovering sex in a non-biblical manner is the natural state makes it harder to accept Christian ideas about sex.

It starts to look like that God is lying about having made anything.

>>1040291
It gets worst. Satan is God's right hand man, who intentionally tries to get people to sin. At least that's how he was in the OT.

>>1039912

My bad, it was Noah and his immediate family down to his grandsons, so around ten to twenty people survived, alongside seven pairs of every clean animal.

And then something something go forth and multiply.

>>1037662
I would too if my church looked like that.
Shit looks depressing and downright spooky, famiglia.

"Westerners" is a broad category that includes people other than Christians. Think Jewish people, western Muslims, western Buddhist converts, etc but I'll bite

In general, it's because of the separation between church and state in the United States and an emphasis on freedom of belief and practice in North America and Europe that was very visible in the mid twentieth century, where not everybody decides to follow their parents' traditions. Not just atheists, but also neo-pagan faiths, agnostics, people following a hodgepodge of foreign traditions, people who would rather just not think about religion, became more visible around the 1960s and onwards, mostly visible in the urban arts communities for a time and then mainstreamed

One thing that keeps people who leave religious traditions away, or edges away converts is: pushy Christians. Religion can be great and Christianity is a great religion but if you're raised secular or want nothing to do with Christian parents, you're not really going to be brought into the Christian fold by Jehova's Witnesses, Chick Tracts, Kirk Cameron movies, or the weird guy yelling about hellfire and brimstone in a college courtyard. Some people judge all Christianity, or all religion as a whole, by these things.

>>1037823

ITT nonsense.

The history of southern Europe is full of promiscuous people who were also devout Catholics.

>>1039872
>he posts a bunch of shit videos because he's too autistic to make a real argument
>he pretends that he's not an edgy 15 year old teenager even though this is exactly what those kinds of people do
is there a religious equivalent of r/atheism cause I think you'd fit right in

>>1041945

r/catholic, for whatever reason, has a lot of angry political rants that are a much better fit for r/conservative

>>1039872
Shitposting 4 Jesus

File: 1460024353069.gif (886KB, 175x144px) Image search: [Google]

886KB, 175x144px

>>1041884
>"Westerners" is a broad category that includes people other than Christians. Think Jewish people, western Muslims, western Buddhist converts, etc but I'll bite
Jesus fucking christ, you knew what he fucking meant.

File: Decline In Religiousity.png (29KB, 1860x198px) Image search: [Google]

29KB, 1860x198px

>>1037662

>>1041884
I fucking love Chick Tracts

I have a sizable collection.

File: dark-ages.png (194KB, 1251x585px) Image search: [Google]

194KB, 1251x585px

>>1038271
Religion and the church is the entire reason why we are as scientifically advanced as we are, dumbshit. Science until recently was the study of god's creation, and to many it still is. Fuck off with your stupid science vs religion fedora bullshit, it's like pitting veganism against stoicism or peanut allergies to archaeology.

>>1045259
Science has shown us God is no creator. Any religious view beyond some vague Deism or Spinozian Pantheism is completly unsupported by the scientific world. Miracles by their very definition are a break in the laws of nature and anti-science.

>>1045372
>Science has shown us God is no creator.
no it hasn't. Stopped reading there.

File: 1444629325990.gif (1MB, 292x278px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 292x278px

>>1045372

>>1038346
You seem to think science and the religious can't mingle

Dont forget the scientific method was created by a muslim
The big bang theory by a priest

>>1045372
Gonna need sources and the "science" you claim that did this.

Where is your proof?

File: megachurch-1440587093489-banner.jpg (324KB, 620x318px) Image search: [Google]

324KB, 620x318px

>>1037662
That might be true for Europe
But it other places in the world this is false

>>1037662
Shit is boring as fuck.

>>1037662
Cuz there's no God you faget

test

When man started recording the horrors he wrought in the name of his God did his faith begin to shake.


For me it was in Yemen, when I realized that the guy shooting at me and I were praying to the same God for a hit and a miss respectively. It really puts it into perspective

>>1045717
Agnostic here
Can you prove it?

burden of proof
phrase of burden
1.
the obligation to prove one's assertion.

Dont try to redefine atheism or not be held to your own standards

Provide facts and sources to back up your claims I will not accept a question begging epithet because it is not a argument

if you can do this I'll believe you

>>1037662
If we look at Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, by George L. Mosse, it happened after WW2. Every culture who fought in WW1 had a rise in complex national funeral practices. Mosse does not say this but it looks like it was religion directly declined as part of the fall out in trying to demonize everything our fallen foes did, even if we did the same things. It is natural that the writer of that book did not say as such because he was out to demonize said practices.

To put it very simply, people lost the fear of Hell and no longer attended Church (as they were no longer afraid).

Increased literacy and education
>inb4 something about sipping from the glass of knowledge makes one an atheist, but drinking it fully makes one a christian again
>inb4 I met a Jesuit with a biology degree once

>>1037662
France rise to cultural dominance.

>>1037662
You do realise that when westerners attended chuch they were drunk and talking over the sermon and basically it was nothing like the stuffy and bleak quietly sitting still bullshit that you see nowadays.

>>1037882
Your mom sounds like a bitch. Waited too long and just let your grandfather die. Then she has the audacity to guilt trip you over it.

>>1046024
You're right

People were wiser when the stars were fixed in our dome that is the sky, disease was caused by immorality, political leaders were divinely appointed/approved by God, and pregnant women consuming alcohol was totally ok

>>1038103
>he talks about religion in terms of cosmology instead of spiritual development and mysticism
S H I G G Y D I G G Y

>>1046056
>Responding to ancient copy/paste

>>1039872
>There is much variation in bacteria. There are many mutations (in fact, evolutionists say that smaller organisms have a faster mutation rate than larger ones17). But they never turn into anything new. They always remain bacteria.
>they never turn into anything new. They always remain bacteria.
>They always remain bacteria.
There's gold in them there shitposts