(December 30, 2017 at 10:01 am)vorlon13 Wrote: I wonder what really defanged so many of the blood lusting christers?
That's a good question and I wonder if there are any history buffs around who could properly answer it.
If I were to take a guess, I would say the printing press got the ball rolling. I see the printing press as a primordial internet. It allowed many people from different regions to communicate different ideas to masses of people. Before that you had to copy books by hand. Ideas were slow to move. Copying a book was very labor intensive and all it took was one church official to put fire to it, and all that work went down the drain.
And of course the printing press sparked the Age of Reason--the name alone had to send shivers down the theocrats' spines--which created a space for figures like John Locke to share unique ideas concerning justice and freedom. Liberal democracies to come into prominence in the West. These liberal democracies supported a free exchange of ideas as well as freedom from religious authorities.
So religion could exist but no longer had its precious powers of coercion. Add to this the ability of people to freely exchange ideas and you have a defanged Christianity in the course of a couple centuries. Of course new innovations and cultural phenomena (the sexual revolution, the internet) periodically spring forth and further divorce people from their traditional modes of thinking.
So long as people are exposed to the other side of the story, religion has a hard time selling its shtick. That's my guess anyway. Of course you have some religious movements acknowledging the atmosphere of free thought and adapting their doctrines accordingly. IMO religion will always have a place in society. It sates genuine spiritual impulses in people that, for all we know, are natural.
It's folks like the fundies and evangelicals who simply can't cope in free society-- so we see them dig in their heels and gnash their teeth and desperately hold onto what's left of their coercive power.
