The post Did we kill everything we value? appeared first on Anglican Mainstream. by Effie Deans, Lily of St Leonards: For a while we had something called New atheism fighting against what remained of Christianity in the West. It...
The post Did we kill everything we value? appeared first on Anglican Mainstream.
by Effie Deans, Lily of St Leonards:
For a while we had something called New atheism fighting against what remained of Christianity in the West. It resembled nothing so much as Richard Dawkins going into the tomb of Lazarus and giving the corpse a kick. It was very careful of course not to go into anyone else’s tomb and give the corpse there a kick lest it become a corpse itself.
New Atheism resembled very much old atheism. Christianity has been in decline since the middle of the nineteenth century when it faced a pincer movement from people like David Friedrich Strauss (who investigated the historical Jesus and stripped him of everything divine), and Charles Darwin. The New Testament unlike other religious texts was analysed sentence by sentence and criticised very ably.
The result was a better understanding of the texts, but also a sense that every sentence could be doubted and was anything other than divinely inspired. Again, this was only done to certain sacred texts, others remain hardly criticised, even hardly analysed partly for the reason above, but more because the original texts were destroyed, and all variation eliminated.
Modern science began to have an explanation for the origin of humanity and then for everything else. Dawkins could reduce us to a selfish gene, God became a big bang and everything else was atoms and electrons. When science explained everything why bother with Christianity?
The social pressure to conform to Christianity collapsed in the 1960s with the sexual revolution. No one believed it was necessary to get married before you had sex, which for the first time had become possible with the invention of the pill. But if you didn’t believe one rule of Christianity why believe that it was necessary to go to church? So, the only people left in churches are people who grew up before the 1960s and they are getting fewer by the year.
The post Did we kill everything we value? appeared first on Anglican Mainstream.
