Too many people today are fed with physical food but not spiritual food; formed in the mundane sciences but not the sacred sciences. The result is a post-Christian era in which, sadly, most people are forced to endure a trying five-step process:
1) Being raised by agnostic parents and/or receiving abysmal catechesis from the church
2) Believing in God vaguely as a child, since the religious sense natural to every soul remains alive even when unformed
3) Falling into sin in adolescence due to this lack of formation, from not being able to withstand the pressures of the world.
4) Directing one’s vague sense of God in one of two ways: a) creating a god who is okay with your sins and ensures that everyone goes to Heaven, or 2) denying God altogether to assuage the guilt and shame that makes living with oneself uncomfortable. Either way, finding affirmation in others going through the same thing usually follows.
5) Encountering in adulthood the great crossroads that forces one to choose either to: a) humbly repent and become a revitalized ‘revert’ with renewed hope and peace, or b) dig deeper into one’s denial to become an angry abortion activist, “LGBT” apologist, angry feminist, and/or culture-of-death Democrat.
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The spiritual/cultural war is not simply a battle between right and left. That’s a simplistic, incomplete manner of expressing it. More specifically it’s a battle between the repentant and the non-repentant. And in the big picture, this is the difference between Heaven and Hell.