Or…try this on for size…they did, and by repeating claims like this you are actively discouraging people from converting to or actively participating in Christianity.
Because, work with me for a minute here…from around 500 AD until the 1980s and early 90s, when the Greatest Generation and the War Babies / Korean War vets retired, Christians absolutely dominated the engineering and scientific communities, Christian churches had profound, beautiful traditional music, whether the organ-accompanied chorales by Martin Luther, Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley in Protestant churches, set to music by composers such as Joseph Haydn, to the exquisite Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Byzantine, Georgian, Romanian and Church Slavonic chant in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches, written by the likes of St. Romanos the Melodist and St. Theodore the Studite and composed largely in antiquity, but also in more recent times by composers like Komitas, Rachmaninoff, Bortniansky and Michaelides, to the Gregorian, Renaissance and Baroque Latin masses in Roman Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches by hymn writers such as St. Ambrose of Milan and Thomas Aquinas and composers such as Palestrina and Bach, and finally the breathtakingly beautiful Syriac Aramaic hymns and metrical homilies written in a dialect of the very language spoken by our Lord by St. Ephrem the Syrian, St. Jacob of Sarugh, Mar Narsai, and others, sung with virtuouso skill by priests and deacons, selected as much on their singing abilities as their preaching skills, in ancient melodies, slowly altered through improvisation over more than 1,650 years.
And what do we have today? Electric guitars and banal, theologically barren “praise and worship music” dominates our churches, whose services have all the dignity and reverence of a heavy metal concert, and laity rather than designing spacecraft to fly to the moon rather vie with one another to see who can express with the most defiant and folksy rhetoric a litany of well rehearsed suppositions in order to convince people that the polite, well-dressed WWI, WWII and Korean War veterans who occupied those same pews they now sit in until just a few decades ago did not actually conquer space and facilitate interplanetary travel but were merely confidence men in an infinitely vast and pointless conspiracy that by its very nature would have contradicted everything these same men fought, bled and in some cases died for in the deserts of North Africa, the bombed towns and forests of Europe and Korea, and the steaming malarial swamps and jungles of the Pacific.
