"The great tragedy of our age is the fact that there are so many godless Christians -- Christians whose religion is a matter of pure conformism and expediency. Their 'faith' is little more than a permanent evasion of reality -- a compromise with life. In order to avoid admitting the uncomfortable truth that they no longer have any real need for God or any vital faith in him, they conform to the outward conduct of others like themselves.

And these 'believers' cling together, offering one another an apparent justification for lives that are essentially the same as the lives of their materialistic neighbors whose horizons are purely those of the world and its transient values." Thomas Merton