One of the things that characterises an adult is scepticism about anyone's claim of goodness. We learn from harsh experience that everyone û and every institution, which after all is made up of fallible human beings û is capable of behaving badly under the proper circumstances.
The faith of true believers dies hard. But that's only because their desire to believe that their particular faith is beyond reproach exceeds their willingness to face facts.
Modernism itself is an overwhelming, unmitigated repudiation of the specious claims of religion that it knows the unknowable. The spirit of science asks for facts, and withholds judgement until they are convincing. Religion, on the other hand, asks for faith, which is a notoriously poor way of estimating reality. But fear of death, parental and peer pressure enforcing conformity, and a lack of moral courage and critical thinking skills lead millions of people to accept the impressively self-righteous pronouncements of religious functionaries without question.
The history of the Christian religion, like that of most other religions, is characterized by the flow of rivers of blood. At first the Christians were unmercifully martyred in great numbers by the Romans, starting with the stoning of Saint Stephen (Bainton p.58). But by the time of the First Crusade launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, the Church had long ago left the moral higher ground, and was no longer anyone's victim (174). There had been a long series of wars between Church and state, which the Crusades were in part designed to alleviate by uniting Christians against the so-called Islamic heathen who had seized control of Christianity's holy places in the Levant.
The central symbol of Christianity is a depiction of the violent murder of its culture-hero Jesus. His body and blood are symbolically consumed in the Eucharist, a kind of metaphorical cannibalism. Open a book on the art of the Middle Ages and you will ...