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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 03/10/2009 : 17:58:43
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Hat tip to PZ Myers for his link to this utopian opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor by a Christian and former evangelical: An anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin. But out of the ruins, a new vitality and integrity will rise.
By Michael Spencer
from the March 10, 2009 edition
Oneida, Ky. - We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.
Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the "Protestant" 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.
This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
Edited by - HalfMooner on 03/10/2009 18:01:18
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 03/10/2009 : 19:04:50 [Permalink]
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And jeez, I thought the Christian monitor was rather moderate, apparently, they are more the kind of Rapture ready nutjobs.
I agree that the Evangelical Christianity is on its way out (although I'd expect it to take more than 20 years) but anti-Christian?
It did not happen in Europe. Christianity will merely become mostly irrelevant and people will not care, they certainly will not go out of their way to persecute Christians...
But the rest, of the article is more reasonable. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
| Edited by - Simon on 03/10/2009 19:07:48 |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 03/10/2009 : 19:31:32 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Simon
And jeez, I thought the Christian monitor was rather moderate, apparently, they are more the kind of Rapture ready nutjobs.
I agree that the Evangelical Christianity is on its way out (although I'd expect it to take more than 20 years) but anti-Christian?
It did not happen in Europe. Christianity will merely become mostly irrelevant and people will not care, they certainly will not go out of their way to persecute Christians...
But the rest, of the article is more reasonable.
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Being ignored, being made to look silly and irrelevant to society as a whole, must seem much worse than actual persecution to many fundy types. So they must deny that humiliating reality and pretend that what is happening to them is actually persecution. Every smirk from an atheist becomes a genocidal hate crime in their minds.
Oh, how they must mightily yearn for the glory days of martyrdom in Nero's Rome, when the persecution was real, and yet their numbers were growing!
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 03/10/2009 19:32:52 |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 03/11/2009 : 07:45:51 [Permalink]
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| There is a link between the two, as 'Revelations' was written in the context of these persecutions. Some modern Christians fail to see it as a product of these times and see it as prophetic, as such, they expect these persecutions to happen before the end of times. Any time now. Really. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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The coming evangelical collapse
