The Empty Cathedrals of Europe

[kpete]

The Empty Cathedrals of Europe
Europe's cathedrals sublimely evoke the absence of God. They are temples that have decayed into museums. Tourists, not worshippers, fill their naves, driven by curiosity, not faith. One does not pay alms anymore but admission fees. The altar is roped off, not because it is sacred, but fragile. The silence of emptiness has replaced the silence of holiness.

Wandering past vacant pews and pulpits among guidebook-toting spectators, I become briefly nostalgic for the cathedrals' sacred past, until, opening my guidebook, I study that past and find nothing sacred. The glittering walls and shrines are decorated with ill-gotten gold, stolen relics, and war booty. The soaring domes and spires were raised to heaven not from piety but ambition, to outdo nearby cathedrals and show that Florence was better than Pisa, as modern Malaysian and Shanghai architects compete to build the tallest skyscraper. The niches are filled with the tombs of the rich, not because rich men were holy then but because they wanted to buy the best salvation for themselves, as today's rich use their millions to nuzzle up to power and buy the best laws and policies for themselves. In the cathedrals' history as opposed to their aura, I recognize the same political machinations, class inequality, greed, and immorality that rule the world today—the trademark signs of man curiously grafted onto religion. Life has left Europe's cathedrals, but God was never there.

A secular and a religious society are equally profane, for a secular society banishes the sacred, while a religious society defiles it with the human.

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[Quixote1818]

1. I don't think a "secular society" is profane or banishes the sacred at all. We have a church

on every other street corner here in America and they are all filled to the brim. This just goes to show that if the state tells people to be religious they don't want to be told what to do. If the state doesn't tell you to be religious and it's tax exempt, then religion takes off, especially if it can line the pockets of a shit load of preachers.

[ananda]

2. Umm. Going to church has very little to do with sacredness these days.

Meaning that sacredness is something that one can have without a
church. Sure it's nice if the church experience is also sacred, but
I see very little of that nowadays.

[Quixote1818]

3. But in a secular country founded on freedom of religion, there are many

spiritual people who don't go to church as well. As James Madison put it: "And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion & Gov will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together;
Secular countries allow for those who have spiritual beliefs to have them in an honest more "Pure" way as Madison put it. Don't know why the author sees this as "profane".

:shrug:

[Sarah Ibarruri]

8. Yep. Good point. nt

[LiberalFighter]

15. You exaggerate too much.

I don't find a church on each corner in the city that proclaims itself as a city of churches. The nearest church to where I live is more than a mile away.

[WinkyDink]

4. The greatest architecture of the Western World (and I have visited a huge number). This is an incal-

culable shame.

It's not so bad to be old in these sad days.

[Silent3]

5. I'm fine with cathedrals becoming museums

The architecture is beautiful, and I certainly wouldn't want it to fall into disrepair, for it to be lost to history, but I'm quite happy to see the religion practiced in those cathedrals, and all other religion, become a curiosity of the past.

If only the US were as far along as Europe in that regard.

[BlueMTexpat]

10. +1000! nt

[customerserviceguy]

14. In full agreement here. n/t

[Vogon_Glory]

6. Just How Attractive Is The Image of Practicing Christianity These Days?

I've often wondered if part of the reason for Christianity's continuing decline in most of Europe this last half-century has been that its image is very unattractive.

Face it, the established churches in most of Europe have an unattractive legacy. As often as not, they served as pillars to reactionary and repressive governments through 1918 in many countries and have unpleasant associations with fascism and Falangism in places like Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, and France. That's a hell of a legacy to overcome in itself.

With the rise of widespread secularism, active Christianity has continued to decline. It's just something that people don't do.

More recently, Christianity has gained an ugly image problem courtesy of the USA. When Europeans turn on their televisions and radios, what sorts of Christianity do they see? They see the yobbos, yahoos, and ideology-bound ignoramuses of the American Radical Right.

And the American Religious Right's effect causes collateral damage. It's not just the missionaries American religious righties send to Europe, but establishment churches, churches with far more liberal social views than those of the Robertsons, the Lands, the Fallwells, and other right-wing outfits get swiped with the revulsion and loathing.

Is it any reason that most sane Europeans choose to turn away?

[Quixote1818]

7. It's on the decline in the US as well. The problem for religion is science is out of the bag

and they can't put it back in. They are trying but it's a slow losing battle for them.

[sabrina 1]

17. I've never understood why religions deny science.

If anything, science should only serve to enhance their beliefs. Why not accept each new scientific discovery, eg that there is life on other planets? If anything, that only confirms the greatness of the God they believe in.

It is the rigidity of thinking that is causing the decline, imo.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

21. Most denominations DO accept science

It's the megachurch types who don't.

[Sal Minella]

11. Unfortunately, the number of butts plopped onto church pews

one day a week is no barometer of "practicing Christianity" -- but wait, are we talking about "practicing" as a verb (behaving like a Christian) or adjective (professing to belong to a group that professes to be "Christian") -- ?

[jwirr]

13. VERY good point. I can do that without going to church. In fact I find

it easier to practice in a secular situation where I can use my own ideas of what is helping and not follow the leader.

[FarCenter]

9. In a couple decades science will fully explain the mind and it will be all over for religion

The mind is an information system running on an electrochemical computer.

There is nothing else.

[Silent3]

19. To me the important thing is not filling the gaps in our understanding...

...with superstition. You don't have to be certain that science is going to fully explain the human mind, or fully explain anything else for that matter, to accept the idea that saying "I don't know" is a better answer than supposing gods and spirits and angels and demons solve everything we don't yet understand.

While I'd agree that what you say about the human mind is likely true (more so about what the mind is, less so about the expected future pace of our discoveries), it's hard to justify emphatic certainty about it. You can exercise a little humility in accepting our current scientific limitations without going mystical in the process.

[FarCenter]

20. Religion is largely an attempt to explain, propitiate or control the unexplainable

As science explains more and more, there is less and less for religion to claim as its own.

For example, a cosmological concept of God as the thing which started the universe and continues to provide the laws by which it operates is very different from a personal concept of God as a being who communicates with individual humans.

The cosmological God is unlikely to be contradicted by science.

However, the idea that there is something special attached to human life (a soul?) which communicates with God and which lives on after the body dies is an idea that science is likely to contradict as information theory, theory of computation, neuroscience and neurophilosophy continue to advance. It will be a bigger issue for religion than was evolution.

[begin_within]

12. God hates religion.

[customerserviceguy]

16. Monuments to man's folly. n/t

[Odin2005]

18. Let them become museums, momuments of the West's first flowering as...

...a distinctive civilization.

Western Civilization has exhibited an architecture that for it's whole existence have followed a greater theme of Western culture: the search and grasping for infinity, to break the bounds of what is possible. There is a direct line from gothic cathedrals to skyscrapers and the moon landing.

[War Horse]

22. I've got a 1000 year old church within walking distance

I have no attachment to it for any religious reasons myself, but I do think we have a responsibility to take care of these buildings for posterity, just as we do for any historical monuments.

Some still find solace there, I have zero problems with that. Good for them. And I think even the majority of regular church goers are quite aware the duality.

And I don't mean to be U.S. bashing at all, but as a Scandinavian it's sort of ingrained in me that church pews are supposed to be as uncomfortable as possible. The U.S. mega churches seem rather foreign to me in that regard :)