Pope warns of falling belief in West | Reuters
VATICAN CITY | Thu Apr 21, 2011 8:45am EDT
(Reuters) – Pope Benedict lamented the widespread abandonment of religion in Western countries in a Holy Thursday homily, saying the heartlands of Christianity were turning away from their faith.
This put me in mind of an article of which I made note back in March of this year:
Study Finds Religion May Be Heading for Extinction in Parts of World, March 23, 2011 | FoxNews.com.
Excerpts from the article:
The study, conducted by the American Physical Society, finds that religion is dying out in nine countries.
The findings unveiled at an APS meeting in Dallas show that religion may become extinct in Australia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Canada, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
“In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40 percent, and the highest number was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60 percent.”
The study also found that “Americans without affiliation comprise the only religious group growing in all 50 states.”
“In 2008 those claiming no religion rose to 15 percent nationwide, with a maximum in Vermont at 34 percent,” the study says.
The reason that the first article caught my attention and reminded me of the second is that the Pope and secular statisticians see the same trend.
As one who shares God’s point of view that all who do not share his point of view have an inaccurate and foolish point of view, I put no stock in “trends”, and in the findings of the foolish – which includes the Pope, those who conducted the APS study, and those who are motivated by the conclusions to counter the alleged decline. Though the conclusions are not authoritative, I find them neither alarming nor disappointing.
My indoctrination in the predominant religion of Americans, which is widely identified as christianity, has been the single most significant obstacle to my own salvation. (In my childhood, Catholocism was not included under the umbrella of christianity. There was protestant and catholic, and christianity was protestant, not catholic. And christianity’s umbrella certainly did not cover Mormonism and other non-protestant beliefs which were regarded as cults, or the offspring of cults.) By his good intentions and kindness toward me, and through the gift of faith in Jesus Christ, God accomplished my salvation by liberating me from religion in the knowledge of The Truth; and in particular the religion of lies known as christianity.
Religion is man’s acknowledgment of his differences with God. People speak of no other relationship to a living being of their own kind as religion. Eternal life – God’s life will not be found in any religion. Salvation from spiritual death is in knowing the living God as he has revealed himself in his firstborn son, Jesus Christ.
So as in my case, the decline of religion might result in an incline in the salvation of souls caught in the death trap – the tangled web of lies spun by the self-righteous in their religions.
Religion: The outward act or form by which men indicate their recognition of the existence of a god or of gods having power over their destiny, to whom obedience, service, and honor are due; the feeling or expression of human love, fear, or awe of some superhuman and overruling power, whether by profession of belief, by observance of rites and ceremonies, or by the conduct of life; a system of faith and worship; a manifestation of piety; as, ethical religions; monotheistic religions; natural religion; revealed religion; the religion of the Jews; the religion of idol worshipers. [1913 Webster] — From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
God’s children will concede to the concept of religion only if it is viewed as their devotion to their relationship to God.
