David Carlin at The Catholic Thing goes crazy

And wonders if prayers might actually be effective.  In fact, he doth blaspheme our Secular age by suggesting the problem with mass shootings isn't too many guns, but too few prayers.  

Wow.  I feel like Carlin said he just saw Elvis working on a road crew in Houston.  It's amazing when you see something like that, which is A-B-C level Christian believing, and realize how radical it is, even within our churches.  When so much basic level Christianity is rejected and condemned by so many believers today.  But then you realize something else.  Many believers today are effectively atheistic in all but name.  Save for an hour or two on most Sundays, they increasingly seem to accept perspectives from a decidedly secular/atheistic point of view.  

So much so, that when the godless condemn 'thoughts and prayers', how many religious believers (and, indeed, their leaders) join the chorus of condemnation and mockery?  If we wonder why young people are leaving the Faith, and not a few older ones are joining them, I think the answer is easier than we make it. 

Since so many who grace the doors of the local church today don't appear to believe in the historical Faith in any practical sense, why should anyone?  The constant attempt to reshape the Faith to fit the latest - when on any given day we can be hit with a hundred new latests - mixed with constantly condemning the first 2000 years of believers as the irredeemable reprobates they were, is no doubt a big part of the problem.  

But no less is what a youngster said at a youth group years ago.  When asked why young people are leaving the faith, the answer was to the point: because most adults in churches don't seem to believe it, why should they? When you consider how many 'believers' employ the atheistic contempt for prayer and our relationship to God as a solution to our nation's (and our world's) problems, that sentiment makes sense. It might be tragic, but it's honest and does answer a lot of questions.  

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as men do.”  Matthew 16.23