I won't pretend I'm jumping with glee or anything, just smiling and nodding in appreciation of a population that is slowing wising up to reality.
Of course we're also getting in to more "New Age" nonsense to backfill for the people who apparently have some kind of supernatural void when religion is taken away, and it does lead to the death of innocents occasionally, but closing churches will always make me hopeful.
“When I was a kid, you never missed a weekend church service. You just had to be there. Today there are hardly any kids going to church. Families used to have six or seven kids, but not anymore.”
Well, that really tells the whole story, doesn't it?
The church used to work pretty hard at opposing birth control; hard enough that their parishioners really didn't use birth control. By 1982, 91% of Catholics were actually okay with using birth control. In 2005, in the U.S. 75% of Catholics felt the Church should change its position. The Church won't, naturally. And now the demographic is playing out. People are having two or three kids instead of seven or eight.
Worse yet is the tendency in modern times to reduce the strictness of child raising. Children, even at very young ages, are not forced to go to church. They're given the choice. And a lot of them say, no, I'd rather sleep in.
Quite simply, the Catholic Church no longer has the frightening stranglehold of "The Devil Will Get You" that it used to have and its parishioners have wandered in to rationality.
It's a lot like third world countries, really. If we would just stop propping up crazy right-wing dictators, they actually do quite well all by themselves. By the same token, former Catholic families quickly become non-religious if they aren't constantly brainwashed.
Score one for the good guys.
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