Y
Young_Thinker
Guest
I would not leave myself my country just because it is unpleasant right now. You will never find a Paradise on Earth, so why run?
- Status
Y
Young_Thinker
Guest
It is too bad, though, not even children can still grow up with Hans Christian Andersen and Pippi Longstocking. And the Germany of today, for the most part, is not exactly the land of Grimm brothers. No more Christian values, just those of Mephistopheles. I wonder when the angel come to save Faust from Hell.
W
Warrenton
Guest
Western Europe has enjoyed a little holiday from history, in which it has grown rather rich. It’s problems are no worse than rich people have always suffered.
This will change, sooner or later. Probably sooner.
As for the Church in Europe, I am put in mind of an old hymn, which reads “What God hath wrought to show His Power, He evermore sustaineth.”
Be of good cheer!
This will change, sooner or later. Probably sooner.
As for the Church in Europe, I am put in mind of an old hymn, which reads “What God hath wrought to show His Power, He evermore sustaineth.”
Be of good cheer!
S
Samuel63
Guest
We can be cheerful knowing we have gained our salvation, I grant.
As the moral base in this greatest nation on God’s green earth decays, we ocassionally pause and look around for a good example to follow and to lead us out of the morass.
This may be why we wonder about europe and scandanavia. We are looking for a good partner on the journey that provides the moral support we can cling to and nurture in this day and age.
The problem is, there is no country we can count on today. Scandanavia is just plain sad. Our great Pope Benedict XVI spoke recently on the demise of europe.
We have no choice. We have to look to God as our King.
These countries on the other hand, will desperately need us in the coming decades to lead them in the moral dimension.
Cheerio! Lets do our best.
As the moral base in this greatest nation on God’s green earth decays, we ocassionally pause and look around for a good example to follow and to lead us out of the morass.
This may be why we wonder about europe and scandanavia. We are looking for a good partner on the journey that provides the moral support we can cling to and nurture in this day and age.
The problem is, there is no country we can count on today. Scandanavia is just plain sad. Our great Pope Benedict XVI spoke recently on the demise of europe.
We have no choice. We have to look to God as our King.
These countries on the other hand, will desperately need us in the coming decades to lead them in the moral dimension.
Cheerio! Lets do our best.
P
PAboy57
Guest
Thank you for sharing your knowledge. May God Bless you and guide you on your journey. Take care.Good question…
And no, the OP can say it… Scandinavia is really very extremely unreligious.
Why? Because the Christians are staying in their own comfort zones. The Catholics and Protestants alike are sleeping. Afraid of evangelising and are not proud of Jesus. Thats the problem. There are some groups that I am proud of in my country for reaching out, but its few.
Eg. an Evangelical couple picking up their kid from day care one day, and the day care lady said she had breast cancer and soon couldn’t work anymore. The Christian man said to her: “we believe in a God who has borne sickness to the cross”. They prayed for the lady and she was instantly healed. We have some humble Evangelicals who pray for unbelievers and believers alike, and people get healed in numbers… I think these people are in the front line.
Also my message with this: It hasn’t got anything to do with Protestant or Catholic. Its about being on fire for the Gospel.
- Subtle Socialistic influence. Scandinavia has never forced itself to acknowlege the crimes of Communism like we did with Nazism…
We were not strangled by Communism for decades like our eastern neighbours, and the cultural/ media-elite have been flirting with/setting the agenda of socialism in many ways.- The societies are rich. Rich people have generelly the temptations to leave God behind because they think the scientific and materialistic world view give answers and provide all their material needs. We really have good well-fare systems…
- Scandinavia are like little villages… when there is one paradigm its difficult to break out from under it. Right now practical atheism, under the flattering words of tolerance and objectivity are the trend.
- Because Scandinavians buy into a lot of the **** that comes out of America in the form of movies full of ungodliness, materialism, lookism, new age and pornography.
Peace to you from a person who is Scandinavian, but running away from the Scandinavia for the reasons listed above.
P
PAboy57
Guest
From some of the posts these words ring loud:
Matthew 7:
13 Enter through the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many go that way.
14 How narrow is the gate that leads to life and how rough the road; few there are who find it.
So much work and prayer is needed here and abroad to turn the tide. Continue to use our Rosary and Divine Mercy Chaplet often.
Matthew 7:
13 Enter through the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many go that way.
14 How narrow is the gate that leads to life and how rough the road; few there are who find it.
So much work and prayer is needed here and abroad to turn the tide. Continue to use our Rosary and Divine Mercy Chaplet often.
P
Persuader
Guest
This is an interesting question. As a Scandinavian, I can say something about the educational system and culture that might be contributing to this. First of all, there is religious education from kindergarten to the end of high school. That means you get general religious education where you learn facts about the different religions and what they believe. In principle, no religion is to be preferred over another. They are to be presented equally, which means an attentive person will be clued in on skepticism pretty early. Obviously, if all religions claim to be true while simultaneously contradicting each other, at least some must be false. If they are all equal, there is no reason to think one is more likely to be true than another, so the conclusion follows logically (can you guess it?). In the same class, you will also learn about moral philosophy, humanism and other enlightenment ideas. When I had this class a few years ago, I remember class discussions invariably favored secular ideas. Personally, I believe this has some relation to the strength of the arguments, but I have some bias. In any case, this is the sense I have gotten from other people I have spoken to as well. I cannot really draw any general conclusion from such a limited sample size, but my sense is that this is what is most normal. I might be wrong.
Second of all, there is a certain societal climate which is quite disparaging towards religious ideas. If you try to justify your opinion with religion, you will generally be looked at with incredulity. Attempting to establish religious premises or arguments to forward a political or moral position is considered to be politically incorrect and is rarely done in public forums like TV or newspapers. The Muslims have attempted it to some extent, but they have not been very successful.
Third of all, it seems to me that there is little intellectual religion to speak of. When I met with a professor of theology at my university to get some advise on good reading material about Christianity, we had a conversation about what is actually taught in theology classes. I have had similar conversations with students of theology on this matter, and as you might suspect, these people are not traditionally religious. You can look up “any” article on Wikipedia about the historicity of the Bible, and you will notice what is the majority view among scholars. They don’t really believe it. When I asked the professor if he believed in God, he asked me what I meant by using the word, to which I replied: “an intelligent creator of the universe”. His answer: “I don’t know what that is.” He subsequently went on to say that he didn’t consider the Bible to be literally true. He considered it allegory.
Fourth of all, it is almost certainly true that Christianity has been liberalized under the rule of the state. Christianity has been a state religion in Scandinavian countries for several hundred years, and still is in Norway and Denmark. This has made it possible for state representatives to push for reform. The state churches are now relatively liberal (probably very liberal by American standards), and will marry homosexuals (except for Denmark who has a different contract between same-sex couples. The church blesses the union of homosexuals instead.). Additionally, the churches have no issue with birth control and are pro-choice.
Religious conservatives (people opposing homosexuality etc.) will generally get hammered by the media. We even have a word for these religious conservatives, and it translates to “dark men”, and means approximately: “against enlightenment and freedom of thought”. Obviously, being called a dark man does nothing good to your public reputation. A certain subset of religious people will therefore struggle to attain any credibility in the public sphere. For the sake of Christianity , it might be just as well. I don’t think conservative religion has a chance here.
As far as the nature of the church goes, it is not clear if the church has any strong position on anything, which can tend to make it unattractive. I think this might be one of its biggest problems. The church seem to be washed up and irrelevant, and the church-buildings are simply used as ceremonial locations for weddings and funerals. Most people don’t really hold to the views expressed by the priest.
If I am to speculate, I’m not sure if any of these suggestions really explain it. There is probably a whole range of factors. I tend to think religion has been left behind because people don’t need it. If you’re struggling, you can get help from the government. If you’re not struggling, you don’t need it in the first place. If you want to experience spirituality, there are several New Age fads to explore. If you don’t like the mumbo-jumbo part of it, you may be interested in meditation, which has a strong presence on university campuses. However, the sense of community offered by religion has not been replaced by a secular alternative yet. This might be the only thing offered “exclusively” by the church. So, if religion is to grow here, it needs to sell this message to the people. It doesn’t, though. In any case, even if the church wanted to sell this message, I don’t think the church has the money or resources to push a message like this hard enough for it to work.
G
GraceDK
Guest
Persuader… I think its important to understand that the lack of sound religious education offered in Scandinavian schools is simply the end consequence of a history of events.
My mother who is a teacher says that it started at the first world war, and I tend to agree with her. The disillusion and cynicism with which atheism views man is based on something deeper.
However even right after the 2.nd World War there was a Church revival in Scandinavia, the Church was a natural gathering place of celebrating the victory of good over evil.
Yet the sense of order was distabilized already, the 68 revolution with its me-culture, swept over the Western world and caught on to people who were poorly taught in the spirituality, even if they had seen the form of religiousity in older people.
The 68 revolution was carried by ideas that had already been present in philosophy for decades and centuries: Descartes wrong insistance that man can manipulate matter - including his own- which has no intrincic form ( This trend is carried out in bioethics. In the ethics-debate Scandinavians are running around like chickens, having no objective good to point to outside the criteria of pleasure to judge if something is good or bad).
And Kant: You may never treat another person simply as a means, but always as an end.
Karol Wojtyla and other thinkers saw that what he promoted was individualism - also a very very strong Scandinavian sickness - and Woytyla and others rewrote it:
You must always treat another person respecting that he/she has ends of their own.
At the same time the industries had discovered that young people started to have a couple of idle coins in their pockets. A market was made of sex, drugs and rock and roll… which to this day trains teenagers in hedonism, greed, self indulgence, and weakens societies and the families these young people eventually try to establish.
The sexual revolution in the 1960s had its way paved by the Kinsey reports. Kinsey being a biologist who made a huge fraud study on generel sexual behaviour and concluded that all orientations are equal, that all orgasms are equal and that people in secret indulge in so much more sexual activity than they admit. It was ground breaking… On fraud studies, what was until then thought to be gravely immoral perverse behaviour was now promoted as normal and the “scolarly world” started promoting what is now thought of as “normal” sexual activity.
if you read the latest book of Dinesh D’Sousa who disproves the rhetorics of new-atheism, you have him document how many Western thinkers in the last decades admit they refrain from taking religion seriously, because they fear they have to give up their sexual behaviours if they do. they do not think themselves capable of doing so. Its the same with many young people today… they are bombarded with the objectifying and degrading images of sex everywhere, and the message that abstinence is sick. Their struggles to remain pure in our societies leave many of them disillusioned and they leave the church.
… sorry for spelling mistakes…
My mother who is a teacher says that it started at the first world war, and I tend to agree with her. The disillusion and cynicism with which atheism views man is based on something deeper.
However even right after the 2.nd World War there was a Church revival in Scandinavia, the Church was a natural gathering place of celebrating the victory of good over evil.
Yet the sense of order was distabilized already, the 68 revolution with its me-culture, swept over the Western world and caught on to people who were poorly taught in the spirituality, even if they had seen the form of religiousity in older people.
The 68 revolution was carried by ideas that had already been present in philosophy for decades and centuries: Descartes wrong insistance that man can manipulate matter - including his own- which has no intrincic form ( This trend is carried out in bioethics. In the ethics-debate Scandinavians are running around like chickens, having no objective good to point to outside the criteria of pleasure to judge if something is good or bad).
And Kant: You may never treat another person simply as a means, but always as an end.
Karol Wojtyla and other thinkers saw that what he promoted was individualism - also a very very strong Scandinavian sickness - and Woytyla and others rewrote it:
You must always treat another person respecting that he/she has ends of their own.
At the same time the industries had discovered that young people started to have a couple of idle coins in their pockets. A market was made of sex, drugs and rock and roll… which to this day trains teenagers in hedonism, greed, self indulgence, and weakens societies and the families these young people eventually try to establish.
The sexual revolution in the 1960s had its way paved by the Kinsey reports. Kinsey being a biologist who made a huge fraud study on generel sexual behaviour and concluded that all orientations are equal, that all orgasms are equal and that people in secret indulge in so much more sexual activity than they admit. It was ground breaking… On fraud studies, what was until then thought to be gravely immoral perverse behaviour was now promoted as normal and the “scolarly world” started promoting what is now thought of as “normal” sexual activity.
if you read the latest book of Dinesh D’Sousa who disproves the rhetorics of new-atheism, you have him document how many Western thinkers in the last decades admit they refrain from taking religion seriously, because they fear they have to give up their sexual behaviours if they do. they do not think themselves capable of doing so. Its the same with many young people today… they are bombarded with the objectifying and degrading images of sex everywhere, and the message that abstinence is sick. Their struggles to remain pure in our societies leave many of them disillusioned and they leave the church.
… sorry for spelling mistakes…
P
Persuader
Guest
I agree with you that secular ideas, inspired by enlightenment thinkers, are the current paradigm in moral and political theory. If you want to say that Christianity has lost power due to the influence of secular ideas, I would agree with you. I think that is very obvious. However, I think it is important to notice why these ideas got the kind of foothold they did. They have had enormous influence on the west as a whole (especially in academia which is very secular even in the states), but it has not been the case that every Christian nation has abandoned religion equally. Of course, United States is an anomaly of sorts, but even compared to most European nations, it seems to me that we are less religious.
PS: Atheism isn’t exactly a view of life, although it sets certain limits for what your view of life might be. A view that is compatible with atheism is humanism. Do you think humanism is disillusioning or cynical. Søren Kierkegaard is a famous Christian humanist. Do you think he is cynical of disillusioned, or is that something that emerges from humanism if coupled with atheism?
PPS: I think ethical debate in bioethics is pretty good. I don’t really understand what you claim to be a problem. If you are addressing the issue of moral ontology, you need only check out the Euthyphro-dilemma to notice the religious problem with moral ontology. I certainly think other moral views have less ontological issues than the Christian one, and it surprises me a bit that you think the question of ontology is a hard problem for a secular account or even especially relevant to bioethics.
Well, I think it is a clear mistake to say that society is weakened. There has been substantial increase in living standards since world war 2. The Scandinavian countries are actually among the most stable and prosperous countries on earth (I’m sure you know that). I don’t think we are especially greedy, self indulgent or hedonistic either. We are among the most egalitarian nations on earth. If we are greedy, self indulgent or hedonistic, what does that make other countries? It has been suggested that Scandinavian countries are run in a manner that is somewhat in spirit with Jesus Christ. It is some truth to this, I think. It is, after all, the case that poor people and the disadvantaged are better off here than anywhere else. Scandinavian countries also give the most in foreign aid. And I could go on.
I will need some credible source that shows how the Kinsey reports are fraudulent. Any controversial work will have its detractors. That doesn’t make it fraudulent.
I’m not familiar with D’Souza, but I seriously doubt that his ideas about American intellectuals are applicable to why young people are leaving churches in Scandinavia. Nevertheless, I will agree that there is some pressure to have sex. There is certain social status associated with having sex, and teenagers will notice this. That might make it more difficult to abstain, and I agree that there shouldn’t be any pressure. However, I don’t think anyone actually think people should be pressured into it. If you ask people, I am sure they will say that you should wait until you’re ready. So, does the practice of premarital sex actually make people leave the church? I don’t really think so. It is not as if you will be judged by the church in this matter anyway. Premarital sex is accepted by the church, as far as I know.
S
spirit4life
Guest
WRONG!
Chastity is taught by the Catholic church, and always has been.
‘premarital sex’ is fornication - highly contrary to Chastity.
So is masturbation, contraception, homosexuality, adultery, and the such - all are contrary to Chastity and the teachings of Christ.
C
Catmando
Guest
When is “ready,” though? I haven’t met a single person outside of this forum in quite a while who says that marriage ought to be when people engage in sex. In fact, I’ve been seeing a ton of messages from people saying just the contrary. An extremely radical liberal from Britain told me he believed that all stigma from sex should be removed and that children should learn about it as early as possible, and furthermore that the age of consent should be done away with completely, and that the children should try sex as soon as they are biologically capable. It’s probably the most radical opinion on premarital sex I’ve ever heard, but I’ve also heard a lot of more watered down versions, some claiming that they should just get free condoms and go about their business when they think they’re ready and such.
H
henrikhank
Guest
Just my own reflection: many people, famous people, who read about the histoy of Scandinavia seem come to a very important conclusion. Scandinavian was Christianized by Catholics and not by Lutherans and thus they leave Protestantism for Catholicism. Unfortently there are some people who read about the history of Scandinavia and still don’t become Catholics.
More and more people leave Protestantism for Catholicism which is very good. Thanks be to God.
But yes, Scandinavia is still very anti-Chistianity. The Lutheran anti-Catholic helped Scandinavia become anti-Christianity in many ways although we still have some Christians left.
More and more people leave Protestantism for Catholicism which is very good. Thanks be to God.
But yes, Scandinavia is still very anti-Chistianity. The Lutheran anti-Catholic helped Scandinavia become anti-Christianity in many ways although we still have some Christians left.
A
anjoh66
Guest
It is because we are not doing our job to evangelize, even though it is difficult to evangelize such a secular society as the one we live in.
E
Earnest_Bunbury
Guest
With the family name of “Öhman” I can speak from a Scandinavian sensibility, but as I see it it is not just a Scandinavian issue as one that can affect everyone, it is mediocrity. This is a level averageness, ordinariness, and normality that is distinct from the Magnanimity of Jesus and His disciples and it is this trait that leaves people mired in complacency.
Now this complacency is not what we try to gain in Christianity but we are given a serenity and joy as a fruit of the Holy Spirit united with the spirit of God in us. We seek the best, the greatest good, but the averageness of complacency is merely at peace with lesser goods and I think this is what affects Scandinavia as well as others also. It is the institutionalization of this mediocrity in government, culture, and society that affects negatively the religiosity of the Scandinavian people.
Now this complacency is not what we try to gain in Christianity but we are given a serenity and joy as a fruit of the Holy Spirit united with the spirit of God in us. We seek the best, the greatest good, but the averageness of complacency is merely at peace with lesser goods and I think this is what affects Scandinavia as well as others also. It is the institutionalization of this mediocrity in government, culture, and society that affects negatively the religiosity of the Scandinavian people.
- Status