Current Events > Hot Take: Religion is fine, but the church isn't.

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Religion is essentially the teachings of an enlightened individual or group of people/saints/gods. You have a book with stories and parables and guidelines on how to live your life, and an optimal relationship with your religion would involve applying the rules of your religion to your life for increased spiritual enlightenment. There's nothing wrong with that - if the rules of your religion make you feel good, and help you to lead a better life, then that's good for you and arguably good for society.

But religion falls apart once you bring churches into the picture.

Congregating with other religious folks is fine, you're creating a network of like-minded individuals who you can bond with over your shared beliefs. But I think it's counter-intuitive to introduce a leader with whom is expected to lead a congregation, to interpret the Lord's will by their own worldview and disseminate it as the truth to other people. I think that churches fracture religions, with people who follow marginally different interpretations of the Lord's word going to war with each other.

With Christianity, you have a man who lived his life teaching about acceptance and love, who saw people profiting from holy temples and chased them out with sticks for defiling the holy walls with their human greed. A man who spent time with prostitutes when society was content with throwing them in the gutter, who let a believer wash his feet against the wishes of his rich, upper-class hosts because she was a prostitute. This same man is used by divisive bible-beaters who hate gay people and non-white people, who use the narrative of unwashed heathens and barbarians to harp against immigration and to justify the murder of minorities. They go to church every Sunday and they follow their interpretation of the Lord's word, which is disseminated to themselves and the body of their church by a Southern priest who sees nothing wrong with this narrative. These churches offer bigots and hypocrites a moral shield, and it flies in the face of what religion should be.

And then you have mega-churches, these giant, gaudy buildings with wide-screen TVs and heated pews, a capitalist nightmare funded by the American standard of "bigger is better". These places of worship that entertain the human vice of greed, who don't have to pay tax because they're classified as a religious institution. A holy place that, by all means, has been tainted by human evil.

You have Islamic people killing each other over different interpretations of the Quran, with different schools of thought leading to the subjugation, enslavement and murder of other people who follow less extreme teachings of the same religion. You have the split between Roman Catholics and Protestants contributing the tensions between Northern and Southern Ireland. These churches that branched off from the main religion, causing division within what is essentially the same religion with regional differences.

When a religious school of thought becomes an institution, when it has a leader and a power structure with global influence, you have an organisation with great power and the opportunity to abuse that power for the well-being of its worst, most sinful parts. The Catholic church continues to protect pedophiles and shield them from legally ramifications, with tens of thousands of Catholic leaders around the world being protected by the Catholic church. The church is protecting sinful people from being punished for their sinful deeds - by all means, painting the whole institution as an institution corrupted by human evil.

Religion at a base form is pious and good, a force that people use to better their lives. Gatherings of like-minded people can lead to a stronger community of well-doing people. But when that gathering inhabits a place of worship and elects a leader, when it elects a structure of power to run things, that's when religion can become tainted by personal bias, greed and human evil. Religion is fine. The church is not.
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A lot of YouTube preachers reject the church.
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the bride (us, the church) is a shrew
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Neither religions nor their institutions are fine.
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MrMallard posted...

But when that gathering inhabits a place of worship and elects a leader, when it elects a structure of power to run things, that's when religion can become tainted by personal bias, greed and human evil.

As a religious person, I would argue that those problems are due to people doing the electing, and not God

How familiar are you with the system of caliphate? (Actual caliphate, not what some Muslim leaders called themselves without justification in an attempt to legitimise their rule)
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teepan95 posted...

MrMallard posted...

But when that gathering inhabits a place of worship and elects a leader, when it elects a structure of power to run things, that's when religion can become tainted by personal bias, greed and human evil.

As a religious person, I would argue that those problems are due to people doing the electing, and not God

How familiar are you with the system of caliphate? (Actual caliphate, not what some Muslim leaders called themselves without justification in an attempt to legitimise their rule)

I agree that these problems are due to people doing the electing. The main point I was trying to make was that the church is essentially a vessel for humanity's evil while religion as a concept is a pure enough concept - more like a philosophy than anything. The corruption of religion is facilitated by shitty people.

And I'm not familiar with the system of caliphate.
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Bump
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MrMallard posted...

With Christianity, you have a man who lived his life teaching about acceptance and love, who saw people profiting from holy temples and chased them out with sticks for defiling the holy walls with their human greed. A man who spent time with prostitutes when society was content with throwing them in the gutter, who let a believer wash his feet against the wishes of his rich, upper-class hosts because she was a prostitute.

Yeshua ben Nazareth was the Fred Rogers of two thousand years ago.