Xhieron

Tech support!

How about telling the poor that if they work hard eventually they’ll be millionaires? Or telling them that a lower capital gains tax will improve their spending power? What about telling them that cheap drugs are penalized 100:1 to more expensive drugs?

The law enriches the rich, and politics convinces people to vote against their own interests. Call it a tithe or a tax, and enforce it with the threat of state violence or social opprobrium, but the result is the same.

Jesus of Nazareth said you should take care of your neighbors, because the religious institutions and government won’t, and those religious institutions and governments killed Him for it. That the American church is hard to distinguish from the First Century Jewish priesthood is no accident.

That’s not a problem unique to Christianity. For example: “The Constitution says whatever the SCOTUS justices say it says.” or perhaps you prefer “The news says whatever Rupert Murdoch says it says” or even “Lemmy says whatever the admins say it says.”

Point is, any institution suffers the risk that its leaders could dictate its message or pervert its original intent for their own benefit. But Christianity–like the news, the law, and federated communities–is not a monolith. The Lakewood Church might adopt doctrines that are specially tailored to enriching Joel Osteen and his entourage, but that instance of corruption isn’t an indicator that Christianity–which existed for 1900 years before it–is inherently corrupt or somehow uniquely predisposed to manipulation by conmen.

By all reputable historic accounts, early Christian communities were socialistic, and its popularity among poor and marginalized Jews, Hellenistic Jews, and pagans is largely responsible for its spread during the first two centuries of its existence. The Christian texts we have today still resonate with the poor because their authors wrote them for the poor of their day, and it turns out poverty isn’t terribly different in the 21st Century from the 1st.

The Catholic Church used Christianity to make boatloads of cash. So did the Greek Orthodox Church, the Reformed Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and most other large institutions. So did other institutional religions (and non-religions). That’s not a problem with Christianity. It’s a problem with people. The overwhelming majority of church pastors I’ve known personally had to maintain a separate full-time job, because running churches is not a money-making enterprise unless you’re a corporation, an especially gifted and morally bankrupt businessman, or you inherited it.

All of that is to say that the problem with Christian institutions is the same problem with all institutions: greed. For the love of money is the root of all evil.

It’s not about religion. It’s about class. No war but the class war.

No put down the paw right now! Stop it!