When you say "only started recently", you mean since at least the deists of the 1700s, yes?

As in Jefferson, whose quotes include:

- "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity."

- "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."

Or near-deists like Thomas Paine who wrote:

- "The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally paid to the sun."

- "The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing, and it admits of no conclusion."

I am one of many who recognize that the many good things came from Christianity, but argue that the bad outweighs the good. Please do not mistake that for absolutist portrayal of someone who "completely miss[es]" the good.

We also have good things that came from the Ancient Greeks - including things which continue to provide "courage, justice, moderation and dignity" to modern people. And we don't need faith in their gods to enjoy them.

You wrote: "where I live, there is still an annual Christian pilgrimage".

Sure, and in New Mexico there are people who to the pilgrimage to Chimayo. I've seen them walking along the highway, and it makes the news every year. The number of people who do that pilgrimage is not decreasing.

301,000 people made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela last year. That's far more than went a generation ago.

But go back to what I wrote. A large fraction of the adult population used to go on long pilgrimages in the medieval era. It ended up being banned in some countries, to force the people to work more.

You been talking about this long grand historical period, so doesn't it makes sense to look at the changes in pilgrimages over that entire span, and not some fluctuation in your area in the last generation or so?

Do you have any better numbers to show the dying off of pilgrimages?

Something stronger than my counter-evidence, which also includes things like "Pilgrimage is enjoying a huge revival across Europe", quoted in https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/countryside/5126285/E... , and from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-p... (emphasis mine):

> The poet Edmund Blunden wrote in 1942: "We have been increasingly on pilgrimage." We are once again increasingly on pilgrimage. A revival is under way worldwide, with pilgrim numbers rising even as church-going figures fall. Medieval hostelries on the roads to Santiago de Compostela, closed for centuries, are reopening to cater to the volume of travellers. In 1985, 2,491 people received the certificate of completion known as la autentica; more than 270,000 did so in 2010. On the little north Norfolk village of Walsingham – site of an 11th-century vision of the Virgin Mary, recently self-branded as "England's Nazareth" – a quarter of a million pilgrims now converge each year, including participants in the "children's pilgrimage", the "youth pilgrimage" and the "Tamil pilgrimage".

You edited your text, did you not? You had a mention of the oppressive power of the "State" in it, which is why I wanted to point out Gustav Vasa's decree from nearly 500 years ago. I don't think you can point to 50 years ago as some recent high water mark when that was only an echo of what it was 800 years ago.

"Doing the best we can in this confusing, muddled world of ours" is also a pretty accurate description of humanity. Personally, I can't figure out what "sin" means because that requires a transgression against divine law, and neither "God" nor divine law exist. So no, I don't think Romans 3:23 is at all an accurate description.