Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I would say I have a complicated relationship with institutionalized religion.
Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.
Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business.
Religion has for too long been placed on the back burner of history, when it may be one of the driving forces in history.
When state and religion are one, religion becomes a means for the powerful to remain in power.
If organized religion has become less relevant, it's not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs - it's because they've held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.
Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.
You know what the fastest growing religion in America is? Statism. The growing reliance on government.
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
Religion has become so many different things. Religion is an economic thing for some people. Religion is a gun.