383
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
383 points (98.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43895 readers
1196 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I think the more correct thing to say is that Organized Religion is a scam. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don't force those views on others), but organized religion always winds up rotten at the top - and it's not surprising. Organized religion is one of the most powerful tools for controlling people, even if it wasn't (though it might have been) intended to be that way at the beginning. A king/president/dictator can threaten the lives of their subjects, but only a holy man can threaten their immortal soul (from the perspective of the devotee anyways).
Now that's a take I completely stand behind and agree with. I couldn't have put it better myself. That said, some religions were not made with the intent of controlling others. I don't think Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism were made with the intent to control people. We can argue about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as they were made for control by their founders, and what they intended for these movements after their deaths we do not know (or at least I don't, maybe someone out there does).
Again - I'm not arguing necessarily that any of them started out that way, in fact - I'm willing to bet that very few (looking at you, Mormons) actually were. Most religion (in my humble opinion) just stems from folks trying to make sense of an unfathomable universe using what tools are available to them at the time. But once you have the religion, and you have holy men/women who have the ability to excersize some form of power over their flock, you'll inevitably find corrupt people flocking to those positions, as they do in every position of power. Then over time they'll carve out more power for themselves and more authority, find ways of extracting influence and power from their positions until soon you've got "holy men" living in palaces with the authority of kings.
It's just human nature for positions of power to eventually become corrupted to some degree, and positions of religious authority offer an unparalleled lever in which to move the masses, which only serves to make it more attractive to would-be tyrants
Just FYI, that is specifically why The Baha'is don't have clergy. They do have an administrative body with local, national, and global levels of influence, but those are 9 member councils that are elected by the members of the faith, who must use the Baha'i rules of Consultation to reach unanimous decisions. Also if any of them ever appear to want the position, they are automatically ineligible to hold said position. It's worked well for about 60 years so far.
Hum. That's like saying "there's nothing wrong with being convinced that 2+2=5". There's something intrinsically mistaken about it, and I don't think it's defensible.