by James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler:

The world turns and things change. Everybody knows that. But the turnings and changings throw off sparks, which light fires. The intellectual turnings of the European Renaissance lit fires in the lumbering bureaucracy of Roman Catholicism, burdened as it was with abstruse theology larded with lingering, age-old superstition. Witch hunts, inquisitions, and persecutions ensued, even as the authority of the old order wobbled and frayed. The gross cruelties of the people in charge didn’t bolster their prestige, and a few centuries later you see the result: belief is dead.