Murder mystery: what killed Christianity in Europe?

[Anomalocaris]

When I think "crazy religious people" in America I tend to think Utah... Das jus me though

Pentecostals have the Mormons beat.   "Everyone believe in some dumb book made up by some scoundrel and swindler" is par for the course in the lamentable cesspit of human religions.  

But "Everyone believe in whatever incoherent shit they can blurt out on the spot" is a bold new, penultimate, step towards the bottom on the path of devolution from human religious idiots towards howling apes.

[Minimalist]

When I think "crazy religious people" in America I tend to think Utah... Das jus me though

No, darlin'.  The mormons are sedate compared to these crazy motherfuckers.

[vorlon13]

Your Mormon on the street has not been made aware of all the batshit crazy in their religious writings, and is not encouraged to go snooping by the LDS poobahs, lest he get confused.

[DeistPaladin]

Agreed on the Mormons not being the craziest religious people in America. Pentecostals also get my vote for that award. 

[Cyberman]

Here in the UK we caged it, basically. We made it respectable and so took away its teeth.

Yeah, you toss your problem across the pond.

It was their idea for the most part. Everything else was merely a happy accident.

We hold our hands up about Australia though.

[Polaris]

Leaders using religion as an excuse to cover their own political ambitions. I would have to say that the Thirty Years' War was a good a start as any.

[Jericho]

America is just a huge cesspool of hateful and overzealous theists.

[Minimalist]

Leaders using religion as an excuse to cover their own political ambitions. I would have to say that the Thirty Years' War was a good a start as any.

Learn some shit, will you, Polecat.  You'll seem less dense.


http://www.history.com/topics/thirty-years-war

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) began when Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II of Bohemia attempted to curtail the religious activities of his subjects, sparking rebellion among Protestants.

[Polaris]

http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/content/CX...4.abstract

"place greater emphasis on structural causes, interpreting the war as the culmination of a ‘General Crisis of the seventeenth century’ attributed to social, economic or environmental factors. "

I am getting tired of your simpleton websites.

[Razzle]

Centuries of top-down imposed government sponsored religion and the resulting 'divine' conflicts against other equally devout populations probably engendered a sense of mistrust towards religion, and eventually people realized they simply didn't need it.

Religion flourishes in America precisely because there is no 'official' religion, so the marketplace of ideas is up for grabs (for better or worse).  The results are that you get the craziest ideas like creationism and scientology being spread around, but also the extreme critiques and dissections of those ideas without any interference from the government, something that wasn't possibe in ye olde Europe.

My problem with the "free market" hypothesis is that non-state funded churches have no more obstacles to overcome in springing up or growing than any church does in the US, (apart from the disinterest of the population, of course), and most of them never did. In fact unlike in the USA , they can even open state schools with a "religious ethos" of any recognised religion they choose, accepting only children from that religion, etc. A very significant minority of state schools are Catholic, and there are a few Hindu, Muslim and Sikh state schools. It also doesn't explain why the Church of England, the state-funded and official religion, is among the denominations that has long been suffering the worst decline here. Catholic and evangelical church attendance rates have seen increases in recent years (a weaker trend than the decline of overall church attendance), in part because of immigration. 

The two world wars happened, what was valued in actual tangible human society was brought to edge of destruction, and the dawning realization that both the cause and solution to such an actual tangible existential problem lay with humanity and not some figment of imagination born of Bronze Age superstition?

But the USA has had its fair share of suffering, too. The Great Depression, for example. Isn't it the case that many people actually starved to death during that? And although they weren't fought on your own soil, you've also got generations of men with a very high rate of having been either maimed or traumatised by war in Vietnam and Korea, and the rest grew up living in fear of being conscripted into one or going to prison for refusing, and seeing from returning veterans the state they might come back in if they did get forced to go. You also have far more and worse natural disasters than Northern and Western Europe. Incarceration rates, security regarding basic needs, average health and life expectancy, and other measures of quality of life, are also worse in the United States than in most of Northern and Western Europe, which some people suggest is what drives Americans to be religious, for comfort. And look at Ireland, the most religious country in the region: they experienced horrific mass starvation and disease in the potato famine in the 1800s, and have also been through a far worse level of violent conflict and political oppression directly caused by religion than the UK has, for centuries. None of it seems to have turned many away from religion. 

In the UK, Christianity got fat and lazy. It featured churches where followers gathered on Sunday to mumble some boring hymns and listen to boring vicars who gave boring lessons. The result was nobody took it seriously and Jesus died a slow lonely death. 

Go to any megachurch in America and you see how evolution has taken its course. You hear rock music, witness pomp and pageantry, hear professional speakers offer soaring oratory and experience other razzle dazzle. Give Christianity its due. The followers of Jesus in America know how to put on a show. Typically, these megachurches offer many social services, such as singles mixers. As a businessman who studied marketing and business strategy in school, I have to stand in awe of the marketing genius. 

Having separated church and state, America ensured that it would always be a theocracy.

Having made Christianity a state religion, Britain ensured that it would be a secular nation.

So to my freethinking friends across the pond, don't think of your tax resources going to the church as any burden. Think of it as an inoculation against the Jesus virus. Really, it's a small price to pay to keep Christianity fat, lazy and content in its gilded cage.  

I'm confident that the "gilded cage" the Church of England let itself get too comfortable in, is a major factor in why that particular denomination has failed - just not all the others, most of which were never made illegal and weren't at a disadvantage compared to their American counterparts, that I can see. 

Only in recent years have Church of England clergy shown signs of panic and noticing just how bad the situation is for them. For hundreds of years they've had a fairly low fixed salary, and have had no financial incentive to fill the pews. This would have prevented people becoming vicars in order to make lots of money. As you suggest, those kinds of people are exactly the ones who are often the most unscrupulous and talented at marketing. You don't get Church of England vicars performing fake healing stunts or otherwise manipulating their audience emotionally - what would be the point? Despite the C of E officially subscribing to the Nicene Creed, I never get the impression that many of their vicars, or their congregations, believe that all non-Christians above a certain age are automatically hell-bound, removing another major incentive to attract followers by any means necessary. Apparently, neither did most American Christians in the 1800s. The most common denomination back then was Universalism (everyone will eventually get into Heaven), so I've read. (Can anyone confirm or deny that with a reliable source?) I wonder if the financial incentive that all Christian churches have in the US of growing their congregation, explains the explosion of fundamentalist views of hell in the US since then; fear sells, and fear of burning forever has to be one of the most powerful fears there could ever be.