I honestly don't understand what killed Christianity in the west, was it WW1?
>>18325135It was the collapse of the institutional authority of the church in Europe with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 that really set that decline in motion. Once Kings stopped feeling the need to answer to the Pope, subjects realized the authority of the church was a man-made construct and the collective faith inevitably dwindled.
it was modernity in general
>>18325140But people were religious without authority pressing on them? They even went counter authority with their various movements.
>>18325142It doesn't matter. Once the Church's authority stopped carrying political weight, the idea of religious authority in general necessarily dissipated. There was a time when Pope's could topple entire Kingdoms, you don't think that impressed upon the average prole a greater degree of religious fervor?
>>18325144No, the proles eagerly joined stuff like the Cathars and Waldensians and other such counter authority movements.
>>18325135Materialism and modernity.Christianity is extraordinarily well equipped to battle paganism, Islam and various other spiritual movements in theological, social and even mystical fronts. But as it became the dominant religion and slowly ossified into a rigid (mostly) top-down institution, it could temporarily afford to scorn and dismiss whatever ideas were trendy among the plebs. So when materialism and various forms of positivism started gaining traction, Christianity dropped the ball and let it go so far that in the 20th century you would be hard-pressed to find a priest in the West who wasn't marked by features of materialist or positivist thinking.You could argue that WW1 and especially WW2 were the nails in the coffin for pre-modern, participative ways of thinking. So yes, the world wars definitely escalated a tension that was brewing in Europe and especially in Germany (Luther, Heidegger...) for centuries. But it's a tension that will necessarily go away.
There is no brother/sister combo. Stop using this image here or in /lit/Get over it.Never cared for that series either. Too straight and lesbianic.
>>18325135Science killed Christianity.The average person gained an understanding of reality that made stories of giant arks and talking snakes appear ridiculous.Even in ancient Greece, Aristotle attempts to explain the nature of rain and thunder and lightning, because he is smart enough to know that the concept of Zeus is ridiculous.
>>18325161Those exceptions don't negate the rule
>>18325213What scientific study marks the transition from "talking snakes are chill" to "talking snakes are ridiculous"?
>>18325135Read the protocols.
>>18325214If your rule has literally hundreds of exceptions it isn't a good rule to follow.
>>18325213Science and Christianity fit together nicely.
>>18325295You can shoehorn them together, tape them up in some abomination, but the Bible does make some claims that seemingly contradict established science. There's a reason flat earthers are extremely religious, mostly Christian.
>>18325224The discovery of various principles that contradict the Bible. We don't live in a flat rock with endless waters below and the firmament above.
>>18325135Global transportation. When your fellow Christians are just the dudes in your town and the next town over, everything works fine. When your fellow Christians are African that have nothing in common with you, what the fuck are you doing?
>>18325313Be specific, what principle in what study made it so that "snakes talk" became ridiculous when beforehand it wasn't?
>>18325140Pretty much this.
>>18325364Probably the discovery that snakes don't have vocal cords, and thus cannot speak.
>>18325313>We don't live in a flat rock with endless waters below and the firmament above.Good thing people knew Earth wasn't flat for millennia now and the only contentions were around which objects orbit the other.
>>18325135The honest answer is simply that it clearly is not true and too many people become too literate and educated to believe in it despite the fact that it clearly is not true and has been objectively disproved. There is a reason why it's correlated with being lower IQ, less educated, and higher levels of obesity.
>>18325540>"objectively prove" a theology falseWow *tips fedora* great point fellow Amazing Atheist! Are you euphoric in this moment?
>>18325540Is that also why you believe man can turn into women?
>>18325503Is that the 19th century, 18th century? Before then people presumably thought snakes have vocal cords?
>>18325799People were in fact very superstitious in the past. Did they believe all snakes could talk? Unlikely. Did they believe in a story where an evil spirit takes the form of a serpent and talked? Yes.
>>18325818Okay, then which study makes the idea of spirits taking animal shapes ridiculous? See, I always hear people make these self-congratulatory posts implying that they don't believe in talking snakes because science taught them better. But when I want to take a peek at this science, the papers are nowhere to be found. It's got nothing to do with science. Snakes talking, beings appearing out of thin air, people surviving in the middle of a fire, all these things are inherently fantastical and subject to ridicule by those who can't cope with the extraordinary in another way. The change was the morbid insistence on things being ordinary, which eventually morphed into things being material and ordinary in all cases.
>>18325835To this day there hasn't been such study since it's unfalsifiable. The point is that the advancement in science as well as mass literacy helped to drastically reduce superstition.
>>18325837Again, it's got little to nothing to do with actual science as the studies either happen to not exist or necessarily don't exist (as in this case). It's got to do with the wave of materialism that happens to accompany scientifically minded people for better or for worse.
I think it's underestimated how much of an impact widespread acceptance of evolution has had. For most of history the existence of so many incredibly complex forms of life across the world was much more mysterious and almost demanded a supernatural explanation, which left the door open for a lot more supernatural stuff. Now, with that problem dramatically reduced, it really is starting to look like almost everything could be explained by simple, perfectly consistent laws of physics playing out over time.
>>18325857*maybe not perfectly consistent with the quantum whatever but I'm not up to date on that
>>18325135Education
>>18325857Laws are patterns. There is no opposition between super-natural reality and observable patterns in our world. It would only come to be if we could perfectly predict reality by material factors alone. Which we can't. Evolution BTFO'd one particular take on one particular "explanation". It has had a lot of impact, but the 'science vs religion' framing was added almost entirely post-hoc by recent "thinkers".
>>18325135Old age, also it was dead since the 1700s
>>18325135Christianity in the West began to fall really due to Martin Luther despite his good intentions of attempting to fix the Catholic church all he did was weaken their power and control over Christian doctrine allowing for independent ideas to form around morality and faith helping the rise of indavidualism that stands against the communal ideas of Christanity and faith, the fall of Christian faith begun then but with the rise of aethistic thought with no strong church to counter the ideas were allowed to grow and devolp into the secular society of today
>>18325913>Martin LutherI still can't fucking believe his name means "Holy army of Mars" proof that nominative determinism is real
>>18325135>was it WW1?Yes, particularly in Germany and Russia. German Lutheranism had become tied to the Kaiser in the same way that the Anglican church is tied to the king of England. When the Kaiser abdicated and a republic was declared this left a religious vacuum within Lutheran Germany.This was even more true in Tsarist Russia because many of the old Tsars were considered to be saints. The monarchy in Russia was considered to be a venerable institution supported by God. The revolution of February toppled the Tsar and challenged the Russian soul. The revolution of October toppled the provisional revolutionary government and the atheist Bolsheviks came out on top after a bloody civil war. Before those events Russian Orthodox Christians constituted maybe 10% of all Christians worldwide.
They didn't know virgins can't give birth. They didn't have Science™ so it was impossible for people before the 18th Century to know it was fantastical.
>>18325295>Um ACKSHUALLY it’s all an allegory chud .Why do modern Christians use this to defend the Book of Genesis being ahistorical when they would have been branded as a heretic in the Middle Ages for saying this.Historically the vast majority of Christians including all of the church fathers believed that the events of Genesis happened as literally described and that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Hell, Jesus himself spoke of the events described in Genesis as if they were historical events. They might have all believed the story had a deeper meaning, but they still believed it was recording a historical event. Augustine straight-up claimed that Egyptian pagans were frauds purely because they believed the earth was older than just a few thousand years (and with modern science we know the Egyptian pagans were right about the age of the earth, not Augustine).Even if we accept the allegory explanation as true, then what is it all an allegory for? What did Jesus die for if Adam and Eve eating the apple didn’t happen?
>>18325974Didn't you make a thread around this exact post where you got dunked on? Not a single person was branded a heretic for this.
>>18325975NTA but>Grandstanding
>>18325135
>>18325842>muh materialismThe average rural fag (the supposed 'vanguard' of real tradcatholicism and the likes (tm)) was always a superstitious materialist prole.Check how many 'relics' christianity purportedly has. The whole iconoclasm debacle is further proof.
>>18326653>superstitious materialistSo... believing in magic and disbelieving in magic?
>>18326671>materialism is when you dont believe in magicThe point is that they had low motives for believing in magic. They werent hermetics or gnostics looking for higher truths. Did I really have to spell that out?
>>18326684You'll have to spell out a whole lot more to make "magic materialism" believable regardless whether the magic is a higher truth or a lower one.
>>18326688Conflating materialism with rationalism I see.
>>18326692Rationalism isn't restricted to materialism at all. Many supernatural ideas (even in the superstitious bucket) might be completely rational. But they cannot be materialist. A "superstitious materialist" is a contradiction in terms. I sorta kinda see what you mean because there is some research indicating that Western people will yield to magical thinking if the stakes are high enough, so there are indeed materialists that abandon materialism at certain points. But at that point we can start calling them brave cowards or weak strongment... but ancient plebs were none of these. They were unapologetically supernaturalist.
>>18326695People would 'believe' that Zeus turned into a swan or piss over mortal women if they were truly guaranteed that praying to his statues and sacrificing animals would ensure harvests, victories in war, good trade etcThat's about the objective level of the vast majority of 'religious' people's beliefs. That there were genuinely superstitious people is another issue, but even back then there were tendencies of indifference towards the gods even if not as widespread as today. To assume that 'materialism' and atheism were invented during the Enlightenment or some very recent era thereof is inane.
>>18326698When you say 'materialist' you mean 'motivateed by material gain'?
>>18326702To an extent it's a mixture of both meanings.I know it's capeshit, but take the example of Beckett from the PoTC:He has seen supernatural stuff, he acknowledges that they exist and uses them, but their existence and pursuit of such as its own goal doesnt perturb his mindset of being a ruthless politician, They are just means to an end. That's more or less how any sane man has seen the supernatural even back then.
>>18326707But then even a literal mage conversing with spirits and casting spells is a 'materialist' if his end goal is to be the richest man on Earth. When I say that materialism killed Christianity I don't mean this, I mean a general denial of spiritual reality in general.
>>18326715Spiritual existence has just been commodified to other forms like niggerball and tv shows and games and shows and ecelebs etc Capitalism and ease of life did that which I suppose are indeed materialistic.
>>18325517>>18325517You're delusional if you think that the ancient Jews writing the Bible knew that the earth wasn't flat. Just look at other ancient religious systems like the Egyptian cosmology, or the Mesopotamian one. They didn't consider the world to be a sphere, wrote down an incorect view of material reality, and this was then copied by the Israelites.
>>18326715And what is "spiritual reality". If i pray to god for rain and it rains, is this my material desire manifesting itself, or am i focusing on spirituality by attempting to help my fellow man with the crops? The problem is that material conditions are linked with spirituality for 99% of humanity. Most people pray and believe in gods for material gain. Even when you pray for the sick it's still a material desire to see a loved one live longer in the material world. I would say that even a monk that dedicates his life to purely spiritual persuits has material desires if he hopes to receive a reward for his piety.
>>18326722>material conditions are linked with spirituality for 99% of humanityI wouldn't be afraid to claim a nice round 100 on that one. Humans are body and spirit after all. Which runs us into trouble here:>is this my material desire >it's still a material desireAssuming desires are material because they have a material component is like to assume a literal ghost is material because he might give off light. It isn't, it's a spirit with a material component. To shove all these things under the materialist label inflates the category so hugely that the term essentially loses its meaning. I can just as well turn all of this on its head by saying that anything with a spiritual component is supernaturalist and all desires for wealth are just proxy desires to share God's unlimited nature and voila, everyone is a supernaturalist. But it would be a move that obscures insights rather than mediating them.
>>18326724Spirituality in the past was directly linked to the material world. We would explain natural phenomena by saying that gods did it. The issue I have is that now we know how a lot of the world functions. The sun isn't a god driving a chariot across the sky. Spirituality today has lost that material aspect and now it's seen as a way to mend a persons soul, which you could claim is the psychological issues a person has being looked into. If you take a materialist view on this last part where god is hiding, you could argue that we don't understand the human brain as much as we would like to, so god is still there, being used as medicine for the soul.
The collapse of the old orders and ideas+ Horrors of modern war (Big one) + Horrors and other woes of modern cities and unregulated, young, highly exploitable forms of capitalism + growing pride in science and engineering + Secular institutions disconnected from churches but still ran by religious people will eventually attract or by coincidence accumulate more and more secular people that teach their ideas to others + about a million other reasons. This was something long coming, inevitable even. HUGE stack of dominos. We could go on and on about this forever. Thats not to say one side is better equipped to survive our current age than the other though. It only takes a little bit of critical thinking to realize that theology/theism, whatever banner it may be under, goes hand in hand with the physical and natural sciences. Redditors just love to swing their tits around when religion, which scares them, is brought up. Most actual "atheists" are just people who don't think about it (Probably actually agnostic, and agnosticism is the first step towards becoming spiritually aware of yourself) And that specifically is a product of modernity
>>18326761Spirituality was only marginally tasked with providing explanatory mechanisms for material phenomena. To a polytheist, the sun still IS a deity regardless of whether its body is a shiny flat disc or a ball of burning gas. The material and the spiritual are two halves of one whole, just like a human being has a body and a soul. That many of us today restrict our understanding to the former doesn't mean all ancient plebs who respected matter shared similar biases.
>>18326832Most retards today are soulless automatons; and deserve to become biofuel. That being said, this doesn't automatically make religions anything more than codified local superstitions.
>>18326720And there's a good 2000 years that have gone on between the ancients Israelites and the 18th century.
