Planning a future that still believes in God, is looming before us with new-age philosophies

I have written several articles that delve into the very scenario of the belief we grew up with regarding Christian values that would probably remain intact. It would have been almost heresy if we would have promoted the idea that our Christianity and all its tenets would be changing. Yet, here we are maybe 40 or more years since I was a young man and approaching holy orders with dreams of becoming one of many who would follow Christ in the Church and evangelize people with spiritual needs.

Today’s Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette printed an article titled “Where is American religion going?” The author has investigated and confronts each of us with the very falling away of too many one-time believers, many Catholic, who are now, and for some time seek many of the available avenues that call themselves Christian but use a different adjective to identify themselves.

They speak of self-love with prophets as Oprah Winfrey preaching a gospel called “the divine self”, A God within spirituality that risks making selfishness a virtue. It has a church of prosperity with figures like Joel Osteen as its bishop, and insists that God desires nothing more for his selection than American capitalistic success.

In the past, not too far removed from current societal thought, it has churches as politics , preaching redemption through political activision.

Do we see some of the results of brain-washing techniques, not with adverse attacks but subtly entering the everyday capacities of Christians who have left the Church using senseless reasons and succumbing to these approaches in a faith that has no substance.

New Years Eve, my wife and I were invited to a neighbors home for a short visit and community friendship. At some point the discussion became church attendance and the one couple mentioned they don’t bother with church attendance and did not feel any remorse. They are not a minority and we have some adult children who simply ignore church as well. Some excuses do not hold water and we just shake our heads in disbelief because of their own children who were baptized to satisfy grand-parents insistence. What prognosis their religious education will be like is a mystery. Most of them do not spread the philosophy of the new-age, but their very actions or lack of portrays a dismal future right before our eyes.

There have been other reports that predict before another 40 years the Christianity we know and love might be a past history with a lost faith too great to believe. Remember that Jesus said when the Son of Man returns will he find any faith. We may be approaching that very scenario,

Before we go too far into this discussion let’s look at the identities of the philosophy of this new-age attraction that wants to proselytize weak Christians. The newest term Woke which has little substance that really has a sense of anything worthwhile. We sometimes laugh as news media passes along the terms made-up. Is there an answer?

What reason do we use to close the attraction of Catholicism and other Christian denominations that mean so much? Some people blame the Church because of the pedophilia. They collectively are throwing the church under the bus for the transgressions of a few (even though there were a lot of priest perpetrators it still was a few in retrospect). Why has Ireland, a once stallwark of Catholicism, become now a leader of anti-Christian attitudes, relentlessly abandoning the theology of the Holy Trinity’s adherence to morality?

Simple answer to all the ugliness that is attacking beliefs in Christ, his Church he promised that the realm of hell would not destroy is under siege through sin!

Because sin was the reason God chose the Incarnation of his Son to redeem every one of us, so because of sin we as the human race will help create a world of self-destruction unless we turn back to God and the beliefs we were raised with.

Ralph B. Hathaway