Coming from a country - Portugal - which was very Catholic not that long ago, I would say that the children of Catholic parents went through a great process of “self-reflection and criticism” and dropped Catholicism.
The religion itself is pretty much as backwards as ever.
What happened is that the number of actual practicing Catholics (you know, people who actually go to church and spend time thinking about that stuff) has fallen steeply, even if there are still many who just because they got baptized (which is something one has no choice on), get counted as religious.
Even with the Christian sects dominant in places like the US and Brazil trying to get a foothold over here, there’s nowhere the level of dominance of religion in public life there seems to be in the US. It’s funny that a country which maybe 50 or 60 years ago was, IMHO, very socially backwards compared to the US, is now more socially evolved than it.
My kind interpretation of the previous poster’s comment is that he or she may have confused the latter with the former: looked at highly religious places, saw them moving forward in social terms and thought it was the religion moving forward when in fact it was the people dropping the religion and thus moving forward.
Coming from a country - Portugal - which was very Catholic not that long ago, I would say that the children of Catholic parents went through a great process of “self-reflection and criticism” and dropped Catholicism.
The religion itself is pretty much as backwards as ever.
What happened is that the number of actual practicing Catholics (you know, people who actually go to church and spend time thinking about that stuff) has fallen steeply, even if there are still many who just because they got baptized (which is something one has no choice on), get counted as religious.
Even with the Christian sects dominant in places like the US and Brazil trying to get a foothold over here, there’s nowhere the level of dominance of religion in public life there seems to be in the US. It’s funny that a country which maybe 50 or 60 years ago was, IMHO, very socially backwards compared to the US, is now more socially evolved than it.
It sounds like Christianity didn’t go through self-reflection, it sounds like Christians did and many of them stopped being Christians.
Exactly.
My kind interpretation of the previous poster’s comment is that he or she may have confused the latter with the former: looked at highly religious places, saw them moving forward in social terms and thought it was the religion moving forward when in fact it was the people dropping the religion and thus moving forward.