Comments by "Snack Plissken" (@snackplissken8192) on "How Pope Francis Hopes to Win 400 Million New Believers" video.

  1. The African Catholics are booming for the same reason as the Salafist Muslims, and European and American Catholicism is busting for the same reason as Sufism. In trying to compete with progressive atheism, the latter have lost the vital elements that drive people to actively participate in religious practice and pass those practices on to their children. Having unchanging rituals and rules that bind communities together across time and across the world are integral to religions, providing the faithful with a sense of belonging and purpose that being a two holiday a year religious practitioner does not. "Cultural" religious practice all over the world is dying out, but the traditional brand of the world's religions that Visual Politik so is afraid of is growing because it still provides the connection and meaning that people in cultures across the world have embraced religion for all of human history for. Traditional religions give people a stronger sense of identity, but that identity necessitates differentiating them from other religions or irreligion, and that will necessarily breed tensions. Despite modernity's best efforts to turn us into highly evolved interchangeable widgets, it turns out that we tribal bipedal primates still mostly feel a deep emotional need to be tribal and not free floating citizens of the world.
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