Just Thinking Out Loud

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With all of the shuttling I've been doing in the past month, I'm spending loads of time in the car. I'd lose my mind if it weren't for EWTN radio. I thank God for it every day when I get in the car and turn the key.

Yesterday when I was dropping somebody off, or picking somebody up, it's all a blur, I caught part of "Reasons for Faith." The hosts were discussing a Pew survey which showed that 44 percent of Americans practice a faith different from the one they grew up with,or abandoned the faith they grew up with altogether. Hmmm.

What does that say, do you think? Apparently this number is much larger than it's ever been in the past -- a much greater number of Americans have switched religions than ever before. Can we assume that Americans today are much smarter than they have ever been before? Can we assume that they figured something out that very few before them did? Maybe they discovered the key to happiness, unlike their ancestors who stumbled blindly through life practicing the "wrong" faith.

I have also heard, from several sources recently, that the vast majority of people today do not believe in Satan. Do you think maybe the two statistics go together?

Tell me why would a person (the Pew survey showed that the majority of those individuals who switched religions did so before age 24) decide that the faith practiced by their parents, and usually extended family, is the wrong faith? My guess is that in choosing another faith, he thinks himself smarter than his parents (I have chosen the masculine pronoun here for no other reason than I had to pick). He thinks he has made a better choice than his parents. And in doing so he would be guilty of the sin of Pride.

How better to bring a person to sin than through his own faith in God? I've mentioned before my belief in the existence of Satan, and that I think Satan works in the most underhanded way. If he can cause one to doubt the validity of his particular faith, then certainly he can cause trouble. When a child, even an adult child, leaves the faith in which he was raised, what does that do to the parent? My guess in most cases is that it wounds them deeply, and thus causes a rift in the family, whether openly admitted or not. Maybe the parent then gives up his faith to smooth things over. Or maybe the child does. Or maybe they just quit talking about God to avoid hard feelings.

Satan may be a lot of things, but he is not stupid. And by not recognizing his ways we fall right into his trap. He may not get us to doubt God's existence outright, but he'll work around that. He'll manage to keep us from binding together in God's love.

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