Roman Catholic Church feels Europe slipping from its hands

[DemPGH]

It's really interesting. As long as the church could 1) write history, 2) define knowledge in the absence of technology (and that's the big one, and on which everything else hinged), and 3) wield secular power through kings and magistrates, it could enforce whatever ideology it chose. This is the Church's problem: it is now an artifact, in and of itself. It's going to struggle to make itself relevant and meaningful in societies that are not developing, that are already developed - because those developed societies derive their knowledge from other sources at this point. It's evolutionary, and it's to be expected. Ultimately, the fate of religion is to be an obscure, kind of esoteric sense of personal spirituality. Not a set of dogmatic instructions, insights, and decrees handed down from On High.

[DemPGH]

It's really interesting. As long as the church could 1) write history, 2) define knowledge in the absence of technology (and that's the big one, and on which everything else hinged), and 3) wield secular power through kings and magistrates, it could enforce whatever ideology it chose. This is the Church's problem: it is now an artifact, in and of itself. It's going to struggle to make itself relevant and meaningful in societies that are not developing, that are already developed - because those developed societies derive their knowledge from other sources at this point. It's evolutionary, and it's to be expected. Ultimately, the fate of religion is to be an obscure, kind of esoteric sense of personal spirituality. Not a set of dogmatic instructions, insights, and decrees handed down from On High.

And that is what makes people horrible today: their uppity aversion to authority.

What DemPGH is describing and predicting is, insofar as the prediction part is accurate, a social and historical process that has very little to do with conscious choices on either the individual or the 'generational' level to accept or reject different types of authority.

Yeah, I really do see it as a type of evolutionary process, perhaps in social psychology. Sure, there are elements of society that are less religious than they used to be, but I think what's really happening is that notions of spirituality and edification are evolving. There's a good chance that it's because people know things they didn't used to know, so God now is more personal or perhaps individualized than in centuries past. To me that's logical. But the desire to believe in something bigger and grander isn't going anywhere, IMO - that "something bigger and grander" just isn't as easily dictated to the masses as in the past, which again I would expect because our knowledge has multiplied exponentially. Now, when I look at the scale of the cosmos and its laws it's hard for me to think that looking at that scope of things would not excite someone's awe and wonder, a drive to figure out what it means, where it came from, and where it's going. That drive to order and understand the physical world is probably the one thing that faith and other kinds of knowledge, like science, absolutely have in common.