Materialism and self interest wins the contest for hearts, and science offers the excuse.

The State panders to those personal priorities with an electoral system designed to maintain wealth and wellbeing.

The Church moved sideways to accomodate personal preferences, and became an NGO in welfare services for profit.

The Church is dead, not God I’d suggest!

Dan.

There are so many big issues, not least environment, over-population, violence, inequality. But "traditional churches" are hugely identified with undermining women, gay and trans, abortion, assisted dying, and same-sex marriage.

With that spiteful agenda, no wonder they're "dying". They're just another right-wing party, but they lack the courage to run their own candidates. Instead, they scurry across party lines, to the parliamentary prayer room.

At least we turfed Morrison - Howard's direct political protege. I hope we'll never have a "devout" PM again. They simply cause far too much damage.

All good things...........

Perhaps many people do not need supernatural crutches but feel that such belief is a manifestation of a pre-scientific age. Prescriptive ideologies such as Marxism which incorporate a quasi-religious view of history may also join religion on the dustbin of discarded revelations. Perhaps many humans will continue living in a pre-scientific world and the crutches of religion and ideology will survive. Perhaps our potential to eliminate our species will be realised, and we will become extinct as other species have done

Old news. Organised Christianity and its bureaucrats lurched left long ago. Just like conservative politicians thinking that they can attract lefties, they have been rejected by their base. Christian beliefs are now a private matter, as they should be.

Historically, churches were a meeting place for all sorts of people, whether or not they were truly interested in God. Apart from their spiritual mission, churches also had social functions, even national functions, and now those functions were taken over by different institutions (including also the "happy clappy churches").

Nothing to cry about because the number of people seeking God has never dwindled.

---

Dear David F.,

«Perhaps many humans will continue living in a pre-scientific world»

There never was a "pre-scientific world" because people always aspired to know, people always researched. All that changed in the last centuries was that people in general became more materialistic, thus placed their hopes and aspirations in the material world and therefore turned their attention more to material science and less to spiritual science, that's all.