Why have religion when we can all just be spiritual?
My defense of institutional religion
Recently, I was asked why I tend to defend institutional religious organization instead of recognizing such things as inherently corrupt monstrosities that should be done away with in order for everyone to become free and spiritual at their personal leisure.
Jesus didn’t advocate institution churches, so why should they exist at all? So much evil has been made possible by organized religion (religious wars, crusades, inquisitions, etc) that shouldn’t the institution itself be held to blame for this evil?
It's such an important question that I decided to make it a very brief public post.
To put it as simply and objectively as possible, religious institutions have emerged within the context of a very real battle against a powerful globally extended priesthood of mystery cults controlling private banking and military power, which means structure is needed to do battle in the real world against this, and the form it took is the highly flawed set of compromises that came out of the Council of Nicea and the formal aspect of the Church in the early 4th century.
Before Christianity, the previous most dominant monotheistic religion was Judaism, and even though it too was extremely corrupt by the time Jesus entered the stage of history, it was born within the specific context of a major battle against pagan mystery cults controlling world civilization.
As I documented in my previous post, within the books of the Old Testament, there are some of the earliest and strongest condemnations of child sacrifice to pagan deities like Moloch and Baal in recorded history.
Approach it from the standpoint of the battle against the pagan mystery cults that required human sacrifice as a normalized behavioral custom across the ancient world, as well as a denial of any moral imperatives or unity to a creator, then you can find alot of points of importance within the Old Testament, and why the oligarchy has despised the Jews as well as the Christians for a very very long time
That's a fact.
As much as people may want to just be good and spiritual nice folk living and loving and being left alone, the fact is that the oligarchy needs to kill most people most of the time while keeping the survivors trapped in perpetual scarcity, hedonistic revelry at night to distract from the normalized pain of existence and war.
So if you want to actually fight that, then you need to organize structures that will function as instruments of defense and offence in battle.
That also forms the basis of the modern sovereign nation state as well in more recent history, and although anarchists and libertarians may violently disagree with me, I don't think our capacity to combat the oligarchy's feudal agenda will be increased by abolishing sovereign nation states any more than I believe it will be increased by abolishing institutional religion.
I mean, sure we can all just try to disengage from the system and create micro parallel barter economies.. but if you think that the organized military and technical power (including the control of space based satellite systems requisite for all internet and telecommunication), water, and electricity infrastructure can be resisted by simply creating micro-economies, then I really believe you’re living in a dangerous fantasy.
And I think the oligarchy is laughing at you.
In my assessment, ANY organized institution carries with it power for good or evil and it is thus incumbent on each generation to fight to represent the best culture possible as individuals and as leaders in order to keep institutions from becoming used by the oligarchy against the people.
Tremendous words here - amazing work not to be taken away. So few are aware of so much and from birth are gently coerced forever to never be what they were meant to be by our creator. It is the brilliance of Christ’s teachings they feared the most as to look within and become like Him usurps their power. It is time to look Satan directly in the eyes without fear as it is then his power dissolves and today it is about to happen: These are the words of the one and only Jim Caviezel who also played Him in the Passion of the Christ delivering beautifully Christ’s message in a speech to thousands recently as Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is indeed “WARRIOR”✅🙏💥: “ Every man dies…not every man truly lives…you! you! you! We all must fight for that authentic freedom and live my friends! By God we must live and with the Holy Spirit as your shield 🛡️ and Christ as your sword ⚔️ may you join St. Michael and all the Angels in sending Lucifer and his henchmen straight right back to Hell where they belong!! “ 💥🙏
God Bless you Matt!
Great statement, Matt! This so needs to be said in this day and age where so many just want to be spiritual living in some hippie, anarcho capitalist/communist community of small farming by hand, hoarding gold and storable foods for the Apocalypse. Institution needs to be defended. You say "globally extended" human sacrifice networks of Pagan cults.
Let me weigh in for a minute on the meaning of sacrifice: the belief that a child must be sacrificed for BAAL or Molech stems from the belief that good harvests and good things must be paid for, and there's "no free lunch." Evil must be compensated for good. As the Old Testament said: "There is no Atonement without shedding of blood." Blood must be shed in order for atonement to come.
BUT...and this is a big "BUT..." since sacrifice was the "norm of the ancient day," the Hebrews were speaking the language of the day, in order to be relatable, and because this is the culture that they came out of. BUT...I can show that their real intention, and trajectory, was to abolish sacrifice, once and for all. The Jews saying "there is no atonement without shedding of blood," I maintain, is like China and Russia talking "green" and "sustainability" in order to be politic and to avoid World War III. They don't want to upset the apple cart too much nor rock the boat too much. But their real intentions are stated by their actions: regreening the Chinese desert, building space infrastructure, rail lines, and funding for nuclear fusion.
Same with the Hebrews, I maintain. Even before Jesus shows up, Jews were already on a trajectory of eventually abolishing sacrifice. Hosea 6:6: "I desire mercy and not sacrifice.”
First, a substitution is made: animals instead of humans.
Then, sacrifice is to be done in Jerusalem, rather than locally. You can make the argument that this is akin to the gradual abolition of smoking by first banning it in bars, then at beaches, then parks, and so on. Now, as a smoker myself, I am all-too familiar with this concept of using a gradualist, "stepping stone" approach to ban something, and I hate it, when it comes to what I enjoy. But...in the case of something like shedding of blood or sacrifice, I think this could be a GOOD thing.
Sacrifice is equivalent to Slavery, I maintain. And I think the ancient Jews probably thought this too. Sacrifice, and the notion that there is "no free lunch" and "you can never have it too good," or the deeming of human development as "utopian" is so ingrained into the mindset of Pessimism. Today's version of Baal Worship, I maintain, is this pessimistic, Anti-Utopianism that asserts that suffering and payment of pain for anything positive is just the "Natural Order of Things" and therefore inescapable. I once heard an Ayn Rand-admiring friend of mine utter the phrase: "That Perpetual Motion machine known as Socialism." Whenever you hear a rationalist, Atheist skeptic use the phrase "perpetual motion machine" to describe something, you know right off the bat that they think the thing is either impossible, a lie, or wrong.
Socialism may be a perpetual motion machine, if you do not like Socialism, and that's fine if you believe that. But this is often extended to say or think something like: if all the countries from Vietnam to Senegal and everything in between got connected by rail line, got electrified, and became at peace and stable and prosperous, that is too "pie in the sky" and thus too "utopian" and "too good to be true." It is easy to say, given what we have been programmed with, to call THAT a "free lunch" or a "perpetual motion machine" or "utopia." The dominant belief is that you can never have it that good, and that suffering or payment must be given. That anything good must also be accompanied by an equal evil in order for payment to be made.
Newton's 2nd Law of Thermodynamics requires that payment must be made because of increasing entropy in a diminishing world, never taking into account an open system with unlimited and abundant energy constantly flowing in from an infinite universe outside. When jesus multiplied the fish and loaves of bread to feed the hungry, seemingly from nothing," and seeming to get "something from nothing" (there's that "perpetual motion machine" again), he was making a statement about Energy being an Open system, constantly flowing in. Thus, Newton's Increasing Entropy in a diminishing world is a restatement for modern times of Baal worship: that children must be paid in blood for harvests to come.