re: #989 Aceofwhat?

Well, there’s an anthropological problem.

Adherents of a religion claim that the religion now is the religion of old— a Catholic now is the inheritor of a true tradition of faith. To anyone not of this religion, they can see huge and manifest differences in every way— from the actual way the church operates, the doctrine, the practice of it, etc.— between the old church and the new church. And yet the adherents of a religion ascribe these differences to human frailty and mis-perception becoming improved over time. They claim there is still a thread of the being of the church running through that whole history.

To someone outside the church, attempting to claim the full history of the church a valid while rejecting the differences in the way the church used to be causes these kinds of inconsistencies. Europe was in near-constant war over religion for hundreds and hundreds of years, and the reason that abated was not the influence of the religions, but the influence of humanism and the enlightenment.