This is a question I've been racking my brains about recently : why is it that as the world becomes more secularised & some religions wish to adapt to this zeitgeist, the religions which are surviving and growing are the ones who are decidedly not going along 'with the programme as David Cameron once said about the Church of England women Bishops issue. I wonder why that this the case, because the rationale for religions to move with the times is (so I understand) to help religion 'survive' current times. Yet in our own faith the liberal-reform movement is not doing well, but the other extreme, Haredi Judaism is growing the fastest. It is not just the Jewish religion, for example, Evangelical & non denominational Christianity, all sorts of non established movements, such as new age, paganism etc, last but not least the growth of -for want of a better word- Islamic fundamentalism.Are all doing well.
My own immediate answer is that when people follow a religion, they want fire in their belly, not doubt; certainty, not confusion. They want answers, not a load of difficult questions as to whether or not things really happened in the way their texts say they did. They want community, not isolation, in so much as I think human beings will on the most part always follow the crowd. They will thrive under real or perceived persecution. Such as the rational reasons. Others would invoke their god. But then the problem with that is it doesn't explain why someone else's god is also seemingly making their religion grow as well (although of course you can invent the devil to explain these things).
Discuss.
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