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What do you see as the main challenges to religions today?
The main challenges are first of all the creation by and for modern man of a world that is based on the forgetting of God, a world that man has made and removed from virgin nature by means of a technology that is based on the quantification of the natural world, and therefore creation of spaces, of forms, in which people live every day and of sounds that they hear that are all cut off from the Divine Origin of things. Such a world therefore makes the reality of religion in a sense alien or unreal in everyday life, especially for those who live in urban environments, completely cut off from the world of nature, where the realities of religion are manifested in every natural form for those who can see. This element is complemented by the domination over the modern and now post-modern world of the modernistic paradigm (to which also the post-modern world really belongs), that is, a worldview in which at best God is a deistic God, originator of things but now far away. And at worst, of course. His reality is denied completely.
The challenge to religion is a worldview in which everything is envisaged within a closed material universe independent of transcendence, you might say, that is, the presentation of the view of a universe that is expected to explain everything and encompass everything without opening unto transcendence. There is much to say about this matter philosophically that I cannot go into now, but let me just say that the paradigm, worldview, Weltanschauung, as the Germans say, that was forged in Europe during the Renaissance and in the seventeenth century, and which became crystallized during the Age of Enlightenment, especially in France, this worldview has a relation of enmity visà-vis all authentic religions, because it is based on the self-sufficiency of the material, physical world. It does not see and therefore refutes the ontologica! dependence of the world in which we live upon the Divine Principle. And even if it accepts the Divine Principle, that Principle and its ontological independence are considered to be secondary and more or less irrelevant to man's everyday life. It is not accidental...