Thursday, April 2, 2009

Organized Religion

I had an interesting talk the other day about religion. After an hour or two of discussion I decided that there are some problems with modern organized religion in my home community.

A few that bother me
1 Lack of fiscal responsibility
2 Competition amongst perishes

1. This is by no means universally true of all religions and may only be a problem in my home town. Many perishes of different sects of christianity are having severe monetary problems. The biggest of those being the inability to pay the absurd mortgages on the 15 million dollar buildings. The churches should not have assumed that the perish would be able to pay for such large monthly costs. This does not help people, but adds additional expenses to perish members families. In a time when many families are tight on money this strikes up moral issues with me. Once a month or so, my family will receive a letter for one of many local churches asking for a large donation in order to pay off church debts. This could have been avoided had churches not had impressive building wars.

2. When the economy was riding high and donations were up, local churches decided it would be an excellent idea to expand, and built enormous, lavish, and unnecessary buildings. There are now multiple 10 million dollar and up churches in a community of about 25 thousand. There was no need for any of the perishes to expand, and certainly no need to double or triple current capacities. They expected the new buildings to draw more members and increase donations to pay for the expansions. Very few new members joined the perishes, now the perishes are poor, and are leeching off of the community.

Ur-religion must have been happily without the problems of modern religion. Their places of worship were caves or just outside. Things were only as lavish as the bands could make them. Spending excess resources could have easily meant the end of the tribe. I think modern religion needs to step back and take a look at the needs of the members. What happens if the people can't survive? Ultimately to church fails. The needs of the members out weigh the needs of the church.

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