Is It or Isn't a Religion? You Tell me.

[BIAD]

wow !!! ... there's that freakn list ..... so sad to see how many people are trapped by this (un-Biblical)
religious system ... my entire family has the influence of this so-called "church" ... most of them don't
believe in God and are totally hostile to the actual Biblical salvation message ...

I guess I see the RCC as a magnet for the religious unsaved ... sometimes God allows these things to
happen according to his sovereign plan .... false religion will indeed have its heyday as we enter the
final 7 years of this dispensation

Well, the sun goes somewhere on a night and we can sleep easier in our caves if we know that someone
up there will be kind enough to bring it back in the morning. That is, if we say thank-you enough and say it
on our knees!

The control through ritual is many-faceted. It creates a feeling of order, of an idea that your God is close to you
and grants boons for your worship. To serve is a condescending 'trick' to make the masses conform in assistance
maintaining a malleable society. It can be debated whether this is a negative ploy, although it is still using fear no
matter how it's looked at.

Religion also means shared-accountability. Through instruction from the voices/written documentation of a particular
deity -the Elders or Priests, advise a person what to do and be rewarded by means laid out in a core-doctrine.
Ideally for the reward to be ultimate, that person needs to be dead.

Do good and your God gives you immortality and gratification, do bad and you're punished.
The person judges his/her behavior in life, Deity judges in death.

The trappings set the Priests seperate from the congregation and ergo, a type of 'earthly-deity'
The position of Pope or 'Father' holds the keys and the power to heaven, a door in human-form to a place where
the harsh realities of this world do not exist.
Such a responsibility demands gold and silver, reverence and fine clothes.

The days of wondering if the daylight will return, now resides in the structure of a religion.
In a way, our prayers use the sentients-of-a-faith to reach the ears of a God and surely... surely, these important
humans can occasionally trangress pious instruction and screw a cherub-faced choir-boy?

We've created an ideal that here on the blue planet, we fail miserably to live-up to.
But faith is the string that holds the carrot.
Amen!