Christians, You Are Not The Center of The Universe
Do you honestly think the world will fall apart if fewer people go to Church?
Christians/Catholics/Evangelicals/Etc…anyone who does the whole Christ thing. Let’s chat.
You are not the first religion, you will not be the last one, and the world will not end when people stop buying into your belief system.
It didn’t get swallowed by sand when people stopped believing in the Egyptian Gods, it didn’t get destroyed by a scorned Zeus/Jupiter when people stopped believing in the Greek Gods, or when Rome stole and renamed the Greek Gods because Romans, as industrious as they were, didn’t mind co-opting ideas from everyone they conquered. The planet kept spinning when Mayans and Aztecs decided to stop sacrificing people to their gods.
Plants and animals kept on doing their things after the Druids got wiped out. There wasn’t even a rumble when the Norse disappeared and the Gods of Thunder and Lightning were no longer being praised.
I could go on listing gods/goddesses that have long since faded, but I think you get the point.
I don’t see Jews, Buddhists, or Hindus writing articles about how “troubling” it is that people are turning away from their faiths. I am sure they are out there somewhere, but it seems of all the faiths worried about their futures that Christians are the most self-centered about it.
There’s this repeated theme about how “troubling it is” that people aren’t going to church, about how it’s a “red flag” that people don’t trust pastors, that it’s some Defcon 1 emergency that “only 81% of Americans believe in God.”
Tell me, exactly, what do you think is so troubling about this?
Is it that people are more willing to use logic?
Or perhaps less willing to be part of a belief system that has shown itself, again and again, to be perfectly happy to accept that pastors, priests, believers, and members of the hierarchy carry out atrocities in the name of its “Savior.”
Or maybe it’s the fact that all of you are making less money, fewer donations to your coffers. Maybe the priests and pastors are worried they will need to find jobs where they’re held accountable.
Or perhaps, it is simply that the world-ending smiting that you all assumed would come heavy on the heels of a precipitous drop in belief isn’t happening.
Yes, the world is fucked up right now, but it’s all humans’ own doing, it has nothing to do with divine smiting. It’s just humans being idiots.
In all the various articles of “concern” I have seen written over the years by pearl-clutching religious types, not once, in any of them has there been an actual hard and fast factual reason that less religious believers are a bad thing.
Many countries currently have far fewer people who attend church than we do in the States, and, as of yet, none of been swallowed whole by avenging angels, overrun by demons, grounds for mass slaughter (well, other than the USA, where we’re slaughtering each other quite frequently. Aren’t we due for another mass shooting in a month or so?) As a matter of fact, many of those countries with fewer people visiting churches are ranked much higher in places that are safe and pleasant places to live in than the countries that are highly religious.
Maybe that’s the real issue, isn’t it, pastors and priests, that you’re afraid people will realize that you don’t bring joy, happiness, or really anything at all? That they don’t really don’t need you at all. That has to hurt after centuries of being revered, respected, and worshiped, of never being questioned, of being deemed special and somehow above everyone else.
For all these millennia, you thought you were the center of the universe, didn’t you? Turns out, you’re just like the rest of us and you will suffer the same fate as all those other gods your churches condemned as heathens, false and evil. You will simply be seen as the product of a people trying to explain the world around them, relics of a bygone era.
Perhaps one day churches will be museums or turned into schools where logic and critical thinking are taught. Would be one of the few times in their existence that they served a useful purpose.
