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As much as a lot of us complain about Pope Francis's progressivism, we can't deny that the Church has been seeing somewhat of a renaissance over the last few years: https://www.ncregister.com/news/easter-2025-new-catholics-by-the-numbers
The Pope Francis critics will say that this is despite him, but it's difficult not to see that his grace, and his kindness, likely also have an effect on the way that people view The Church.
I mean... anecdote and all, but my wife and I are trying to find a church right now, not because Pope Francis made Catholicism more progressive, but because that was nearly the last straw. We feel like all the promises of a secular, expert run society we were promised in the 90's just opened up fresh new horrors we could have scarcely imagined, and are ready to try to retvrn and believe in Christ. I find myself questioning 40 years of staunch atheism by the fruits it's bore, and am totally ready to just start going to church and see what happens.
And in that search, Catholicism is virtually the top sect we are most hesitant to consider, behind "Unitarian" which at least near us codes to "Whatever goes man" loosey goosey "spiritual but not religious" non-faith.
Then again, we've encountered a lot of very conservative Catholics near us that have invited us to services with them next week, so we'll see how that goes.
What fruits did you expect not believing in a god to bear? This seems like a strange reason to change one's belief in the nature of reality. I don't think god exists, but I don't expect to gain anything from that belief. I just know that life is meaningless and we're all just atoms, and nothing happens after we die. Whether I benefit from that or not is irrelevant, it's just how I think things are.
Since you're choosing to believe, why not retvrn a little farther and believe in your culture's traditional religions? Unless you're actually from the middle east, that is.
Assuming he is a white American, his culture's traditional religion is Christianity, and it has been since before there was his culture.
Well it depends how far back you go. White Americans came from somewhere, and there were plenty of European traditions before Christianity displaced or co-opted them. Returning to the "tradition" of Christianity seems a little unsatisfying, considering that it's really a generic set of traditions that are practiced by Christians all over the world, rather than something unique and local to a particular culture. It seems like the idea of traditionalism is that "our ancestors were right." Christianity says that our ancestors were all wrong, for thousands of years, and then a guy in the middle east figured out the truth, and from that point on it's been a steady march toward enlightenment as the Truth is spread throughout the world. That seems like the antithesis of tradition.
No, this is definitely not what Christianity says. Not that our ancestors were all wrong, and not that a guy 'figured out' the truth.
So our ancestors who believed in multiple gods weren't wrong?
The bible literally says that the pagan gods are a) real and b) demons. The traditional Christian position would be that there is no difference between Asatru and satanism, not that Asatru is hilarious larping ridiculousness.
The Abrahamic tradition indeed allowed and allows for missionaries to tell pagans that the ‘gods’ they worshipped existed in some metaphysical sense, but were vastly inferior to the God, yes. Nevertheless, since many if not most pagan traditions had an ultimately powerful God or interrelated concept of an infinite being in some ways analogous to omni- qualities of the Christian god (still extant in eg. Hinduism), it is categorically incorrect that Christianity allows for a world in which all pagan gods are real but just less powerful than the Abrahamic God and/or more malicious than him.
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