CHRISTIANITY / THEOLOGY / UNBELIEF
Just saw this following excerpt in a newsletter I subscribe to.
The author talks about a simple conversation he had with a Catholic priest after the Catholic abuse crisis began to surface:
"In my case, the anguish I felt over the abuse scandal, and the way the institutional Catholic Church reacted to it, was more than I could handle. I guess a lot of this has to do with the kind of man I am, and my own history. Whatever. The point I want to make in this particular discussion is that when Catholics see their priests, and even their Pope, behaving in certain ways, especially with the liturgy, it signals to some of them that these men don’t really believe in Catholicism. As a matter of fact, I remember in the first year of the scandal, asking a Catholic priest friend of mine how on earth the bishops could have done what they did, with all the cover-ups and the punishing of victims and families. I’ll never forget where we were walking on the street in New York when he answered: “Because they don’t believe in God.” "
I've seen scandals and abuses by church leaders, government leaders, people in private industry, and just about everywhere else during my life. Yet it especially hurts when you see it in the church, regardless of which denomination. Church officials preying on children, or involved in illicit affairs of all kinds. This is not just a problem amongst Catholics, but amongst the entire Christian world: Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant.
So why does this evil stuff keep happening in the church? Because many of our "Christian" leaders really don't believe in the stuff they are selling to us. Even as a child, I was very much aware of this hypocrisy, and wondered seriously if the whole "God" thing was just a another clever ruse like the "Santa Claus" narrative: just a story we were told to keep us in line, to keep us docile, to keep us from chopping off the heads of the idiots who were running the country.
Well, as an adult, it's obvious to me that there are, in fact, many in leadership in Christianity as a whole, who really don't believe in God. But they get a paycheck from their denomination for pretending there is, so they keep at it, because it's a living, after all.
There are also some really good priests, pastors and leaders in the various denominations who know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there are leaders, if not a whole bunch of leaders, in their denominations who are, in fact, corrupt. But they can't say an honest word about it, because if they do, they will be cast out like yesterday's garbage, without a dollar to show for it. So they keep quiet, as their livelihood depends upon it.
Hence, since the mid 1960's to this very day, we have seen one of the greatest decline in Christianity in world history, in Western Civilization. Church historians have compared this current epoch to the famous Arian heresy of 300 AD. But, at least with the Arian heresy, everyone stayed in church, unless they were excommunicated! But today's crisis in Christianity is much worse, because the church in the West is losing people quickly, not because of a single heresy, but due to a lack of faith in God that is evident everywhere in the developed world. If there is a heresy that is at the core of this crisis, it would be modernism, which made atheism intellectually respectable for the first time in history.
So, here we are, in the 21st century, and never in the history of Western Civilization has Christianity looked so horrid and ragged as it does right now, and things seem to be just getting worst.
Is there any hope that things will get better? Not really. Our only hope, is the return of Jesus to earth, and using his Second Coming as a means of cleansing the church. Anything short of that, and we are doomed.
