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~zampano

To be clear, the modern Church(es) have done a poor job of adapting to societal change. But I'm worried we as a society (referring to the more general West here) may have over-corrected. Humans are spiritual beings in some form or another, and we need to figure out what forms that should take. Even atheists.

My point is more that when people talk about the de-religioning of a place, they're not just being ridiculous or ignoring reality or whatever. There is a point, and there is a loss, and at the least we need to figure out how to retain the benefits. Again, the big churches especially need major reform (regrettably they're just digging their heels in for the moment).

Catastrophe would certainly bring change, but I don't think we can count on predicting what forms that change will take.

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~marginalia wrote (thread):

Is it really the churches' job to adapt to change?

Take for example the catholic church. It's among the oldest continuously operating organizations in human history. They can trace their history of operations all the way back to the apostles. Most of their history is chronicled in the same language the pope *tweets* in today, Latin (a language that has in its written form mostly has remained the same since the Romans spoke it). The church has stood by as empires rose and fell, they've been a persecuted minority, and they have been at the very apex of European power, they've seen not just medieval plague, but they remember the plagues that came before it, they've seen dynasties emerge and wither, they've seen bloody revolutions, economic booms and downturns; they've been around nearly two millennia and have seen more societal change than any of us can imagine, for the most part unflinching (although they did implement some extremely radical changes in the 1960s).

The greatest part about the church, for its many flaws, is just how resistant it has been to change, and we desperately need a connection to the past history to not completely lose ourselves in the whirlwind change of the present.