And catholicism has been conquered by secularism thoroughly. Orthodoxy still stands strong even against the tide of Islam and communism. Meanwhile the Pope has removed catholic confessional states and claims muslims and catholics worship the same god.
Pretty sure they just canonized nearly a dozen saints victims to the secularism and atheism of the soviet state, who had ties to the legionary movement.
I'd argue that with the onset of further societal and economic decline, you would naturally see a return to religion as a means to sate the populace following their lack of distraction caused by paramount decline. Nothing to the extent where it'd have driving political force but enough to where that could once again be a possibility in the future due to a general rise of spirituality and decline of secularism among the regular individual. As you stated in your article, consolation is ever-present in the modern day with the accommodations and niceties we currently posses. In a hypothetical, perhaps near-present future where those consolations are taken away from the people, would we not naturally see a rise in religion once more? Especially a resurgence of monotheism which has been abundantly made clear to be a primary instinctual want.
Sociologist Rodney Stark seems to have good evidence to claim that Christianity in the first place spread from the bottom up. I suggest we try to stop looking at this from a modernist mechanistic mindset/paradigm/world view where we track the apparent social forces impacting the rise and fall of religiosity over time and instead try to look at it with a mindset of a faithful Catholic. It seems that if we submit to God's will and work hard to be faithful and true about being a credible witness to Christ's teaching, we can be a part of a resurgence of Catholic faith in the modern era if God wills it. Either way, we will have the benefit of the joy of a heart filled with God, the protection of God and the good company of faithful and inspiring people in the lifeboat.
The flaw in the argument here seems to be the assumption that a return to spirituality among Europeans must necessarily consolidate on a single solution, measured by something archaic like "weekly church attendance" or "a non-platonic paganism".
It's far more likely that we will see balkanization of creeds along racial, ethnic, and even geographical lines as central authority breaks down across the west. This is the essence of folkishness, and in that sense would represent a return to tradition.
If Europe is balkanized geographically in regional pockets of one dominant creed or another that could work, but it won't be. Having a marketplace of faiths creates the spiritual equivalent to the language case of God's punishment for trying to build the Tower of Babble: dysfunctional chaos. To have a shared functional society where collective work can be taken to a high level, we need a shared language, culture and moral operating system, for lack of a better way of describing it. I think Christians have to see Protestantism for the hubris filled project is was and return to Catholicism. Roman Catholicism in the West and Orthodoxy in the East, and if we are serious and faithful enough and God wills it, we can help bring these two branches back into communion as one united, true Apostolic faith, One Church founded by Christ. This is the foundational belief system of European Civilization and our heritage. For the pitch we might make to full on moderns - atheists, agnostics, hedonists, nihilists, believers in scientism and progress, and the generally thoughtless and superficial - I think E Michael Jones provides some strong practical evidence for the dangers of hubris and abandoning Christ. I think everyone who wants to be a beacon for Christ can get a lot out of Pascal's "Penses" since he was a genius and he did a great job grappling with the weaknesses of these belief systems in their earlier stages of rolling out. I am reading Peter Kreeft's presentation and discussion of what he felt was the best of this material under the title "Christianity for Modern Pagens: Pascal's Penses." Would love to hear thoughts of others who have spent time with Pascal's Penses.
Greece and Rome were not "dysfunctional and chaotic", and were able to incorporate regional ancestral cults and animist expression within a common administrative structure. As Keith points out, its actually the church with its exclusive claims on salvation that represents an impediment to unity, as demonstrated by the many intra-european wars over doctrinal minutiae.
E. Michael Jones believes that Africans can become Germans if they study the Catechism hard enough. It's a self-discrediting worldview.
Curious if you are Catholic... Curious what your self-affirming world view is. If you have a Catholic or even Christian world view, you understand there is a difference between pre-Christian paganism and post-Christian paganism. If Christ was God incarnate, than His presence on earth marks an important change in human history. So while paganism practiced by sincere people who were not rejecting Christ could be a vehicle of order and logos, it is not as possible when you have rejected The Christ. If you have a materialist world view, then may God protect you from hedonism, narcissism and nihilism and adopting Jewish values. While using disasters and incentives to weaponize immigration to scramble people all over the earth into Babble chaos with no shared culture and language is just as Satanic and evil as undermining Christian faith and dividing people that way with skepticism, hedonism, materialism, scientism and nihilism, I still feel having a shared set of morals is the most important common ground to build community on. And I think you can stand up to the demonic social engineers without losing sight of the sacredness of every human being made in the likeness and image of God. In other words, how does it save our culture and civilization if we adopt Jewish morality to protect ourselves from the Jews? That is another way for those living by their ideology to defeat us. Christ is King. And we can't defend anything if we think we don't need to follow the morality He outlined. I know, we moderns got used to being our own God and it is hard to submit, but I honestly believe Jones is on the correct track and that with greater submission to God we can have the best chance of fending of these demonic plans by the enemies of the entire human race. This is a spiritual battle, so, imo, it would be unwise to fail to use the best spiritual weapons available that have been preserved and passed down by the wisdom of our forebears. Catholicism provided an immune system to predatory parasitic communities. That was part of its otherworldly genius. We drop that at our own peril.
As the current pope made clear, and in keeping with modern Roman Catholic dogma, they do not believe that Christianity is the only way, but one way among others. That there is protestant hubris is without doubt. But modern Roman humility is so humble it backed away from the truth.
I do think it is true that there is some truth in all major world religions and that truth is a transcendental, a pathway to God, and I hope the Pope as only being sloppy and not intentionally trying to undermine Catholic teaching and Dogma which does say Christ is the only path to salvation. Our Pope has problems and our Popes have always had problems since they are human beings and fallen like the rest of us, but the way to make our Church better is to be more faithful to God and Christ's teaching, do your part to stand up for Christ's teaching, respectfully stand against error in our Church, respectfully stand against slanderers and defamers of our faith, and pray for God to help us. This is what it seems to me a sincere Catholic person can do to strengthen our Church.
First of all, never ever make predictions about the future because nobody knows the future. Yes, people are too selfish and materialistic for religion, but they always have been selfish even when they were religious. There’s no such thing as a bottom-up change. All change is enforced by people who have power. I agree that religion can’t compete with secularism, but secularism itself is coming to an end as the state is increasingly appealing to semi-religious ideas in order to silence dissent. Ask yourself how much science is being censored in the name of tolerance and equality? Little by little, empiricism and rationality gets sidelined. Individual freedom itself is being eroded under the total state. Once individualism is done away with, religion (whichever type) can make a come back.
- "If your religion is an attempt at spreading a worldview that you think will moralise people to accomplish the political goals you want, then it’s not a religion, but a political project." So... Judeo-Christianity. To a tee.
- "Paganism is already extremely niche, and it’s hard to imagine any one of these niche subsects achieving breakout growth." Was not the same thing said of the first 12 apostles? What makes it any different to apply this logic to Paganism?
- You also mentioned "So few [Pagans] that this would not warrant discussion if not for the bullish predictions of a pagan future from dissident thinkers who are worth taking seriously". You already linked a Guardian article on the topic which contradicts your point. And here is another Guardian article on Pagan growth (from 2023), one year newer than your linked article. "scholar of British paganism professor Ronald Hutton investigated in the 1990s, he came up with 110,000 – much higher than the contemporary census total. “Most of the pagans with whom I’ve kept in touch do not enter themselves on the census,” he also notes. [...] a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center estimated at least 0.3% of people in the US identified as pagan or Wiccan, which translates to about one million people. That number is expected to triple by 2050." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/27/dawn-of-the-new-pagans-everybodys-welcome-as-long-as-you-keep-your-clothes-on#:~:text=While%20less%20than%20half%20the,census%2C”%20he%20also%20notes.
Everyone lives by a theory of everything (origin, meaning, destiny, purpose; moral compass; tripwires for blasphemy & rectitude). As such, religion never declines, it just swaps "gods". Secularism is a 'god': false, cold, and cruel... but functioning as such for many. True religion (of the One, True, living Triune God of Scripture who made and sustains everything) is also not "inherited". "You must be born again," says Jesus to the ethnic guy who thinks he picked it up from his parents, his learning, his culture, his rituals. "No one comes to the Father but by Me." Secularism says: NO! That impulse will not end well. Secularism will be shown for the sham that it is when Jesus returns, in judgment.
Genetic analysis is probably not going to cut it here. Religion, especially Christianity, is about conversion. In a large sense you would wonder why anyone became religious to begin with if you start with genetics. You'd wonder why revivals happen or why Egypt and many other cultures were turbo religious. You can't speak about the qualitative interaction between philosophy and religion (e.g. Aristotle and Scholasticism/Plato and augustinisnism) or between religions and religions (why did Christianity succeed over Manichaeism or entrenched Roman, Greek, Norse paganism) and even what intrareligious movements develop. I'm definitely of the opinion that religiosity varied more widely than ppl supposed throughout history but secularism is a rather liberal phenomenon. The negation of religion is not in itself a thing.
There are also tangible effects of religion on law and personal behavior which really can't be parsed "genetically" (there are no "secular" genes right?). In any case, those kind of studies more so try to re-affirm what we are already on shallow metrics. They don't really capture what's happening.
You discussed paganism here. Firstly, I’m not sure if paganism sees religion and politics or the “church and state” as mutually exclusive anyway.
Secondly, you talked about how in our current paradigm, worshiping ‘the gods’ is superficial as it doesn’t have a basis in a lived tradition and hasn’t had so for a very long time.
With tribalism on the rise, or ‘folkishness’ as Imperium Press and Co. would call it, do you see any potential for a reanimation of pagan traditions in the spiritual void we’re headed for? Even if it doesn’t take the same, or even takes a very different form, to the religion of the adherents of Odin and Zeus?
I think some clarification about what happens when would help clear up some things. I believe in 10-50 years things will become more secular, but after that I think the genetic/religious/reproductive affect will kick in and start making itself felt in the 50 year and beyond range. At least for awhile anyways. Looking too far in the future is impossible
The rise of religiosity in the United States is the beginning of the 5th Great Awakening. Interesting to note the differences between this revival and that of the 4th Great Awakening, in which more traditionalist aspects are being hailed (aka the increase of attendance in Latin Masses in the Catholic Church) in contrast to the mainly protestant evangelical Awakening of the 1960s.
“But even then, the culture itself cannot merely return. The way we feed the soul cannot and rather will not revert back to its previous mean throughout human civilization. The culture must instead expand its consciousness to fully digest the inheritance of the postmodern world: that being the capacity to perform cross-analysis of all human anthropology to identify what a generalized Human anthropology might be…”
The new spirituality will not merely be a return to angels and demons and gods and devils. It will need to justify itself and subdue reasonable and rational doubt.
Appreciate "books could be written", but a bit more exploration of New Age spirituality might have been productive, and a reference to Integral Theory rewarding
Secularism can only be prevented by the Orthodox Church ☦️
Islam already conquered Orthodox.
And catholicism has been conquered by secularism thoroughly. Orthodoxy still stands strong even against the tide of Islam and communism. Meanwhile the Pope has removed catholic confessional states and claims muslims and catholics worship the same god.
Nobody cares about whatever Jew desert sect you follow
Wow that's so insightful please enlighten me more on your amazing understanding of religious history.
It doesn't seem like the Orthodox Church is preventing secularism in Romania.
Pretty sure they just canonized nearly a dozen saints victims to the secularism and atheism of the soviet state, who had ties to the legionary movement.
The Catholic faith is the only solution to every problem on earth.
I'd argue that with the onset of further societal and economic decline, you would naturally see a return to religion as a means to sate the populace following their lack of distraction caused by paramount decline. Nothing to the extent where it'd have driving political force but enough to where that could once again be a possibility in the future due to a general rise of spirituality and decline of secularism among the regular individual. As you stated in your article, consolation is ever-present in the modern day with the accommodations and niceties we currently posses. In a hypothetical, perhaps near-present future where those consolations are taken away from the people, would we not naturally see a rise in religion once more? Especially a resurgence of monotheism which has been abundantly made clear to be a primary instinctual want.
Christian revival only happens among brown groypers on twitter. It has no bearing on reality.
And for the best as all the Christian churches are anti white and no one takes this stuff seriously anymore
Sociologist Rodney Stark seems to have good evidence to claim that Christianity in the first place spread from the bottom up. I suggest we try to stop looking at this from a modernist mechanistic mindset/paradigm/world view where we track the apparent social forces impacting the rise and fall of religiosity over time and instead try to look at it with a mindset of a faithful Catholic. It seems that if we submit to God's will and work hard to be faithful and true about being a credible witness to Christ's teaching, we can be a part of a resurgence of Catholic faith in the modern era if God wills it. Either way, we will have the benefit of the joy of a heart filled with God, the protection of God and the good company of faithful and inspiring people in the lifeboat.
The flaw in the argument here seems to be the assumption that a return to spirituality among Europeans must necessarily consolidate on a single solution, measured by something archaic like "weekly church attendance" or "a non-platonic paganism".
It's far more likely that we will see balkanization of creeds along racial, ethnic, and even geographical lines as central authority breaks down across the west. This is the essence of folkishness, and in that sense would represent a return to tradition.
If Europe is balkanized geographically in regional pockets of one dominant creed or another that could work, but it won't be. Having a marketplace of faiths creates the spiritual equivalent to the language case of God's punishment for trying to build the Tower of Babble: dysfunctional chaos. To have a shared functional society where collective work can be taken to a high level, we need a shared language, culture and moral operating system, for lack of a better way of describing it. I think Christians have to see Protestantism for the hubris filled project is was and return to Catholicism. Roman Catholicism in the West and Orthodoxy in the East, and if we are serious and faithful enough and God wills it, we can help bring these two branches back into communion as one united, true Apostolic faith, One Church founded by Christ. This is the foundational belief system of European Civilization and our heritage. For the pitch we might make to full on moderns - atheists, agnostics, hedonists, nihilists, believers in scientism and progress, and the generally thoughtless and superficial - I think E Michael Jones provides some strong practical evidence for the dangers of hubris and abandoning Christ. I think everyone who wants to be a beacon for Christ can get a lot out of Pascal's "Penses" since he was a genius and he did a great job grappling with the weaknesses of these belief systems in their earlier stages of rolling out. I am reading Peter Kreeft's presentation and discussion of what he felt was the best of this material under the title "Christianity for Modern Pagens: Pascal's Penses." Would love to hear thoughts of others who have spent time with Pascal's Penses.
Greece and Rome were not "dysfunctional and chaotic", and were able to incorporate regional ancestral cults and animist expression within a common administrative structure. As Keith points out, its actually the church with its exclusive claims on salvation that represents an impediment to unity, as demonstrated by the many intra-european wars over doctrinal minutiae.
E. Michael Jones believes that Africans can become Germans if they study the Catechism hard enough. It's a self-discrediting worldview.
Curious if you are Catholic... Curious what your self-affirming world view is. If you have a Catholic or even Christian world view, you understand there is a difference between pre-Christian paganism and post-Christian paganism. If Christ was God incarnate, than His presence on earth marks an important change in human history. So while paganism practiced by sincere people who were not rejecting Christ could be a vehicle of order and logos, it is not as possible when you have rejected The Christ. If you have a materialist world view, then may God protect you from hedonism, narcissism and nihilism and adopting Jewish values. While using disasters and incentives to weaponize immigration to scramble people all over the earth into Babble chaos with no shared culture and language is just as Satanic and evil as undermining Christian faith and dividing people that way with skepticism, hedonism, materialism, scientism and nihilism, I still feel having a shared set of morals is the most important common ground to build community on. And I think you can stand up to the demonic social engineers without losing sight of the sacredness of every human being made in the likeness and image of God. In other words, how does it save our culture and civilization if we adopt Jewish morality to protect ourselves from the Jews? That is another way for those living by their ideology to defeat us. Christ is King. And we can't defend anything if we think we don't need to follow the morality He outlined. I know, we moderns got used to being our own God and it is hard to submit, but I honestly believe Jones is on the correct track and that with greater submission to God we can have the best chance of fending of these demonic plans by the enemies of the entire human race. This is a spiritual battle, so, imo, it would be unwise to fail to use the best spiritual weapons available that have been preserved and passed down by the wisdom of our forebears. Catholicism provided an immune system to predatory parasitic communities. That was part of its otherworldly genius. We drop that at our own peril.
As the current pope made clear, and in keeping with modern Roman Catholic dogma, they do not believe that Christianity is the only way, but one way among others. That there is protestant hubris is without doubt. But modern Roman humility is so humble it backed away from the truth.
I do think it is true that there is some truth in all major world religions and that truth is a transcendental, a pathway to God, and I hope the Pope as only being sloppy and not intentionally trying to undermine Catholic teaching and Dogma which does say Christ is the only path to salvation. Our Pope has problems and our Popes have always had problems since they are human beings and fallen like the rest of us, but the way to make our Church better is to be more faithful to God and Christ's teaching, do your part to stand up for Christ's teaching, respectfully stand against error in our Church, respectfully stand against slanderers and defamers of our faith, and pray for God to help us. This is what it seems to me a sincere Catholic person can do to strengthen our Church.
First of all, never ever make predictions about the future because nobody knows the future. Yes, people are too selfish and materialistic for religion, but they always have been selfish even when they were religious. There’s no such thing as a bottom-up change. All change is enforced by people who have power. I agree that religion can’t compete with secularism, but secularism itself is coming to an end as the state is increasingly appealing to semi-religious ideas in order to silence dissent. Ask yourself how much science is being censored in the name of tolerance and equality? Little by little, empiricism and rationality gets sidelined. Individual freedom itself is being eroded under the total state. Once individualism is done away with, religion (whichever type) can make a come back.
- "If your religion is an attempt at spreading a worldview that you think will moralise people to accomplish the political goals you want, then it’s not a religion, but a political project." So... Judeo-Christianity. To a tee.
- "Paganism is already extremely niche, and it’s hard to imagine any one of these niche subsects achieving breakout growth." Was not the same thing said of the first 12 apostles? What makes it any different to apply this logic to Paganism?
- You also mentioned "So few [Pagans] that this would not warrant discussion if not for the bullish predictions of a pagan future from dissident thinkers who are worth taking seriously". You already linked a Guardian article on the topic which contradicts your point. And here is another Guardian article on Pagan growth (from 2023), one year newer than your linked article. "scholar of British paganism professor Ronald Hutton investigated in the 1990s, he came up with 110,000 – much higher than the contemporary census total. “Most of the pagans with whom I’ve kept in touch do not enter themselves on the census,” he also notes. [...] a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center estimated at least 0.3% of people in the US identified as pagan or Wiccan, which translates to about one million people. That number is expected to triple by 2050." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/27/dawn-of-the-new-pagans-everybodys-welcome-as-long-as-you-keep-your-clothes-on#:~:text=While%20less%20than%20half%20the,census%2C”%20he%20also%20notes.
Everyone lives by a theory of everything (origin, meaning, destiny, purpose; moral compass; tripwires for blasphemy & rectitude). As such, religion never declines, it just swaps "gods". Secularism is a 'god': false, cold, and cruel... but functioning as such for many. True religion (of the One, True, living Triune God of Scripture who made and sustains everything) is also not "inherited". "You must be born again," says Jesus to the ethnic guy who thinks he picked it up from his parents, his learning, his culture, his rituals. "No one comes to the Father but by Me." Secularism says: NO! That impulse will not end well. Secularism will be shown for the sham that it is when Jesus returns, in judgment.
Genetic analysis is probably not going to cut it here. Religion, especially Christianity, is about conversion. In a large sense you would wonder why anyone became religious to begin with if you start with genetics. You'd wonder why revivals happen or why Egypt and many other cultures were turbo religious. You can't speak about the qualitative interaction between philosophy and religion (e.g. Aristotle and Scholasticism/Plato and augustinisnism) or between religions and religions (why did Christianity succeed over Manichaeism or entrenched Roman, Greek, Norse paganism) and even what intrareligious movements develop. I'm definitely of the opinion that religiosity varied more widely than ppl supposed throughout history but secularism is a rather liberal phenomenon. The negation of religion is not in itself a thing.
There are also tangible effects of religion on law and personal behavior which really can't be parsed "genetically" (there are no "secular" genes right?). In any case, those kind of studies more so try to re-affirm what we are already on shallow metrics. They don't really capture what's happening.
You discussed paganism here. Firstly, I’m not sure if paganism sees religion and politics or the “church and state” as mutually exclusive anyway.
Secondly, you talked about how in our current paradigm, worshiping ‘the gods’ is superficial as it doesn’t have a basis in a lived tradition and hasn’t had so for a very long time.
With tribalism on the rise, or ‘folkishness’ as Imperium Press and Co. would call it, do you see any potential for a reanimation of pagan traditions in the spiritual void we’re headed for? Even if it doesn’t take the same, or even takes a very different form, to the religion of the adherents of Odin and Zeus?
I think some clarification about what happens when would help clear up some things. I believe in 10-50 years things will become more secular, but after that I think the genetic/religious/reproductive affect will kick in and start making itself felt in the 50 year and beyond range. At least for awhile anyways. Looking too far in the future is impossible
The rise of religiosity in the United States is the beginning of the 5th Great Awakening. Interesting to note the differences between this revival and that of the 4th Great Awakening, in which more traditionalist aspects are being hailed (aka the increase of attendance in Latin Masses in the Catholic Church) in contrast to the mainly protestant evangelical Awakening of the 1960s.
Bro can write
“But even then, the culture itself cannot merely return. The way we feed the soul cannot and rather will not revert back to its previous mean throughout human civilization. The culture must instead expand its consciousness to fully digest the inheritance of the postmodern world: that being the capacity to perform cross-analysis of all human anthropology to identify what a generalized Human anthropology might be…”
The new spirituality will not merely be a return to angels and demons and gods and devils. It will need to justify itself and subdue reasonable and rational doubt.
Appreciate "books could be written", but a bit more exploration of New Age spirituality might have been productive, and a reference to Integral Theory rewarding
Rock and Roll, Satan and McDonald’s are here to stay as well, so what's your point?
The secular worldview is a stain upon society; that is the more note worthy thing to say.