We often assume that morality is a product of rational thinking, but I don’t believe it is rooted in epistemology at all; it comes from somewhere entirely different. When institutions attempt to modernize, they often fall into The trap of giving up religion for science by trying to justify themselves on Enlightenment terms. This reflects a misunderstanding of what a tradition is, as seen in the broader look at why religion went obsolete when it ceases to be a container for things that don’t need to be rationally explained.
Catholicism lost its grip the moment it allowed itself to be subjected to the same criteria as secular thought, effectively folding under the pressure to conform. By trying to change what the institution essentially is to match the modern world, it inadvertently invited a second reformation. This mirrors the failed secular revolutions where the competition with worldly metrics only serves to erode the specific survival heuristics that religion once provided.
In our current landscape, the source of good behavior has become increasingly difficult to pin down because people wrongly assume it is intuitive. They forget that human behavior is much more sociocultural than they care to admit, which is why performance vs. belief remains such a vital distinction. We ignore the reality that It Is Hard to Explain Why Traditions Exist when we treat every practice as an argument to be won rather than a mystery to be lived.
There is a growing danger in abandoning the unquantifiable aspects of life, as people often undervalue the power of mystery. When everything is forced into the box of rational sense, we lose the very thing that made tradition worth preserving in the first place. We would be better served to recognize that We forget how radical Christianity actually was in the ancient world and stop trying to strip away the sacred to satisfy a world that will never be satisfied by a diluted version of the truth.