Why is the West losing Christians?

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edwest211 said:
Doctors, meaning psychiatrists, were the people you went to with any problem relating to mental health, including homosexuality. Those doctors, at the time, had decades of experience dealing with homosexual persons. It’s as if none of their writing survived the 1950s and 1960s. Which is false. So if the police or private citizens read these accounts, what were they supposed to think? That these doctors were not doing their best?
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One thing that people might think is that these writings from the 1950s and 1960s are flawed. One of the most influential books on homosexuality from this period was Irving Bieber’s Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals from 1962. Writing in 1988 in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality, Kenneth Lewes stated that Bieber’s book was full of methodological errors. According to Wikipedia’s summary of what Lewes had to say:
In his view, the most important error is the sample [used by Bieber], which consisted of patients in analytic therapy. Since these subjects had been preselected for psychopathology, the question of the emotional disturbance of the homosexual population at large could not be addressed. Bieber diagnosed the sample as follows: 28 were schizophrenic, 31 were neurotic, and 42 character disordered. While similar proportions obtained in the control group (although only eighteen percent of the controls were diagnosed as schizophrenic), Bieber’s comparison in effect involves two groups of moderately to severely disturbed males. Of the homosexual sample, 90% were “eager to conceal” their sexual orientation and 64% wanted their homosexuality “cured”. Bieber and his colleagues ignored the difficulties of obtaining a “normal” homosexual sample, which had been pointed out by Kinsey and other writers, and while this omission was criticized at length, Bieber did not accept the objection.
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Also, a lot of what Irving Bieber had to say on homosexuality is based on issues concerning Freud’s theory of an Oedipus Complex, and I think that this theory of an Oedipus Complex has fallen out of favor among most psychologists so that they wouldn’t use it as any sort of explanation for homosexuality.
 
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I mean people worship themselves. What is important to them is that their own needs are met, they are happy, and they do what feels good for them. They don’t believe God supplies them with anything or that they need God at all. They believe that they are in control. They make idols of themselves. They are their own false god. They have no humility and will not give up their false sense of control. Many people also only think of others when it serves their purpose. They only do for others when somehow they benefit from it.
 
Ok. I suppose some people are like that. Are you also implying not worshipping god means worshipping self? In other words could people simply not worship anything or anyone?

Lastly, my theory is we all help others for our benefit. I do so because helping feels good and is a step towards making the world work how I believe it should. A Christian might help others because they feel commanded to or simply to emulate Jesus in some way as part of that relationship. (I’m probably butchering the concept, sorry)
 
For the last 30-40 years or more, it’s become more and more popular to “live your own truth” aka moral relativism. The fact that sin is hardly ever talked about, even in church, is compounding the issue and breeding ignorance. Many younger people honestly don’t know who God really is or what He expects of us as people.He is an afterthought. So people are “spiritual” and are living their own truth, rather than being Christians.
 
No. I think that we live in a time in our country in which we’ve had it pretty good generally speaking. Most of us have never experienced hardship in any significant way. I believe that this comfort has an effect on society in general. We are not as likely to be grateful for what we have, we don’t have as much respect for others or for life in general, and we become more self centered and narcissistic. Especially now with modern social media and access to things which indulge us and isolate us emotionally. We are told we deserve things. Look at advertising. It makes it sound like we have a right to have whatever we want and if we don’t get it someone has cheated us. Most people think being an activist is posting their thoughts on facebook, but if they’re required to actually do something they can’t be bothered unless it gets them attention. We live in a society that feeds our ego and tells us being famous, popular, and having material posessions is what makes us good. As another poster said, we also live in a society that thinks feelings are more important than truth and truth is subjective. They don’t believe in any absolute truth. It’s a recipe for unparalleled narcissism paired with a lack of personal accountability. When people suffer as a society it often humbles them and brings them back to God. This is a pattern repeated over and over again throughout history. I’m not wishing bad things on people. I just know that hardship creates humility, compassion, a clearer sense of priorities, and often makes absolute truth more obvious. The bible says that wealth corrupts and we are an extremely wealthy society in many ways. We have become corrupt and have many idols. The most common idol is the self. Aslo, someone mentioned relativism. Chris Stefanik has an excellent video about that on youtube. Check it out. Also, I think God asks us to do things for one another just out of compassion and empathy. Out of love. I suppose we do gain a feeling of purpose and pleasing God we do what is right, but I think that should be enough reason to do it.
 
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I think that’s utter nonsense. I grew up with a mom and dad in an average middle class neighborhood and went to good public schools. And I still ended up being gay. I know my life and I can tell you there was not an absence of love in my upbringing.

Edit: I was always gay. I never felt attracted to girls and I felt attracted to guys.
 
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I’m really glad you had a positive and affirming childhood. It’s not my intention to demean anyone or the suffering that they have had to go through or point out how their life was not better. Far from it.

All I’m saying is that there are many studies that have no found any genetic basis for someone becoming homosexual. The same scientists do believe that if they ever found such a gene it would only at most predispose someone to same sex inclination and not cause it (look up the studies by catholic medical association in homosexuality and hope). Environmental factors can shape those predispositions a lot.

Studies have also found a correlation between absent father-son relationship and a homosexual inclination.

Again this i point out not to demean anyone or stigmatize them . We all live in a fallen world and many ‘straight’ people are predisposed to disordered inclinations (porn, murder etc) .

However, I use this info to have a better relationship with my own kids (even absent father figures can predispose someone to atheism ). That’s all.

I don’t suppose to know your struggles, but if you are faithfully carrying your cross in this life , God will have a great reward for your in the next. Much greater than all the straight people as we never had to carry this cross while being faithful to Jesus.

I wish you well.
 
I think trying to take something as complex as sexuality and boil lit down to a few generalized causes is faulty reasoning at best. There are genetic components and environmental components to such behavior, and correlations in most cases are moderate at best (for instance, gay men strongly tend to be younger brothers, so it may not be genetic so much as developmental in some cases).

At the end of the day, homosexuals, when they are in an environment where they are not persecuted in one form or another, can be as productive and as well self-managed as heterosexuals, which strongly indicates that homosexuality does not lead to mental illness, but that there is as confounding factor; that when homosexuality is stigmatized, gay people, like any people who suffer unreasonably due to prejudice, will have greater instances of anxiety, depression and other similar conditions.

So when I read through these pages and see people railing on about how the “gay lobby” made psychologists change the DSM, or even just go around calling gay people “disorderly” and “mentally disordered”, I think you can get a window on why so many gay people over the ages have suffered so greatly.
 
Jesus is our role model. He links Himself to the poor and “the least of these.” Life isn’t just about feelings. We are servants, all the way up to the Pope.
 
It’s talked about but people either don’t know or refuse to listen.

Pope Benedict XVI goes on to say:

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires. The church must defend itself against threats such as “radical individualism” and “vague religious mysticism”. [emphasis added]

Commentary by the Practical Catholic:

“Pope Benedict does not play language games, he is unconcerned with the postmodernist’s corner on untruth. Neither should we be. Notice how he calls relativism a “dictatorship” instead of agreeing that no values and no Truth are the way forward for society. What many fail to recognize is that imposing nihilism and arbitrary tribalism is a form of dictatorship. Where untruth or half truth is the common order, there can only be oppression. Political correctness has asked us to abandon our value-laden language and to pick up a new language proper to the secular forum. However, this secular newspeak is value-laden against the traditional claims of the Western world and as such, is a poison rather than a new order. We can and should bring our own conviction laden language to the table, if we’re going to have any sort of real dialogue at all. Misinformation and restrained convictions are not the proper building blocks for a democracy.”
 
“Radical individualism,” whether they realize it or not, is how some people live. It is a bad/wrong way to live.
 
Do you think that there are some within the Church that do demean gay people when they call it a mental disorder?
 
I am a big EU fan and ardent supporter of the West, but look at the latest political news from Hungary.


In fact, religious conservatives from the populist Eastern European parties, Hungary and Poland, are concerned about the “Christian” future of Europe, and are of such concern that they are undermining the foundation of the EU.
They are concerned with - secular processes, the neglect of the traditional idea of the family, the invasion of Islam…
Someone thinks that European Christianity has already outlived itself, but in fact it is impossible not to notice it. Neglect of traditional Christian values will not lead to good.
 
“undermining the foundation of the EU.” Nonsense. The EU is nothing more than creating a United States in Europe with money of their own. Trade between Western and Eastern Europe could have happened along simpler lines but a middleman was created to dictate terms of membership in its little plan. I applaud Hungary and Poland.
 
Orban uses the rhetoric that helps to win. This is rhetoric for the crowd. But I mean it works.
Look, today, the educated Hungarian and Polish youth can work in West and earn more than most West Europeans. ( I mean those educated people who work for big companies)
Even the millions of Hungarian and Polish villagers can work on the West Europe on factories, farms and constructions and support their families at home.
United Europe is power!
But there is a weak point in the EU philosophy, and populists use these weak points. People think that they are choosing Christian values, and in fact, life becomes much worse afterwards.
Pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, Moldova, the Balkans have been using this weak spot of the West for decades, namely, neglect of the Christian heritage.
Instead of the promised “Christian state”, people usually get more corruption, destruction, authoritarian tendencies and more poverty.
That is why the spiritual rebirth of the West is very important! I believe that the Apostles went to Europe for good reason. I believe that the West received the mission to carry Christian flags on its ships.
 
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The EU is a soft dictatorship. It is unnecessary. Their Conditions for Membership and Strategy Papers spell this out.
 
Around the world, including in the Muslim world, among young people, a lot of liberation movements are fighting for Western democratic values. Even the secular west is a landmark opposing pseudo-theocratic systems.
Why? Because democratic Western values can change life for the better.
But at the same time, it is disturbing that a person in the West gradually sets himself on the place of God and neglects the spiritual foundation and God-given mission.
 
Justice that is able to protect the little man from the tyranny of the oligarchs.
Human rights to freedom of speech, to a decent life in a society protected by laws.
Equality of all before the laws, respect for the human unit.
These values are not features of the pseudo-theocratical authoritarian states who opposing the West.
 
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