'It proves that exposing small children to religious indoctrination is equivalent to child abuse!'

Thats right David G and that is why secularist are so keen to indoctrinate the kids with their something from nothing faith before they can think at all. Unfortunately by the time they are old enough to think its likely the kids would of blown their brains on drugs and alcholol.

'The late Christopher Hitchens' as opposed to the very alive Jesus Christ. Says it all.

Religious institutions, as such, are not the only
arbiters of religious experience. They don't own
the Truth, for Truth cannot be owned. Nor should
they think they hold some franchise on our
spiritual life. They are consultants and frameworks,
but they are not God Himself. We shouldn't confuse
the path with the destination.

Quite a few people turned away from religion, found
that life without a conscious awareness of God is
difficult, and now they're back because, that is,
theoretically, where to find Him. But they did not
go back as the spiritually half-interested, complacent
congregants that many of their parents were when they
were growing up. They've come back with an interest in
actually having a religious experience.

Organised religion can't remain the same. It will have to
step up to the bar, religiously, or it will wither away.
Organised religious institutions are in for a huge
transformation, for the simple reason that people have
become genuinely religious in spite of them.

runner
Christ is only alive in your head and the head of the others who have been indoctrinated. He probably never ever lived.

It is often those who have accepted the "revealed truths" and later found them wanting who then turn to drugs and other self destructive behavior. Or it can be the unfortunate children of those who are not interested in their children.

Such people had not undertaken for themselves, when younger, the hard task that Hitchens describes. If you read Hitchens you find that he deplored dishonesty and hypocrisy.

I find it interesting how the discussion of these subjects on OLO generally starts with the villification of the writer. So far there's been little to no discussion of what Geraldine actually said.

As a Protestant I found the piece interesting. I would never feel that failure in the institution of the denomination that I belonged to undermined my Christianity. Christians expect failure. The church is made for sinners. Religion exists outside the institution, not because of it. The religion may be present in the institution, but it will always be in an imperfect way.

So while a failure in the institution should be condemned, it doesn't invalidate the belief.

However Catholics are more heavily invested in the concept of The Body of Christ and The People of God so I think, as evidenced by Geraldine's piece, tend to see failures, when they occur, not just as institutional failings, but as failings of substance.

I'm not sure exactly why this should be but suspect it is because for over 1000 years the church provided the civil service of many European countries and was part of the state, so that belief has to a certain extent become subsumed into belonging, in the same way that being Australian isn't a statement of belief, but a statement of where you live and are accepted as a citizen.

Regardless of the condition of the institutional "catholic" church (which is now rotten to the core at the very highest levels) it is primarily a power-and-control-seeking business corporation competing for market-share in the whats-in-it-for-me market place of consumerist religion.

This is a classic example of the whats-in-it-for-me exoteric religiosity which is the only kind of religion that now exists in the world.
What religious insitutions tend to provide is social association and optimistic aint-life-wonderful talk, perhaps in combination with self-applied tecniques that people can use as a means for consoling themselves. Instead of cultures of comprehensive right practice, there are workshops and study groups. Even of Ignatian "spirituality" But does anyone seriously practice such "spirituality" or even live the highly disciplined life which IS necessary for such practice to have any real transformative affect.

In todays humanly created world everyone, including all of those who presume to be religious (as supposedly distinct from secular) is obsessively preoccupied with what is "out there". What they do with one another in the common world. Everyone is involved in the mere exchange of words, socializing with one another, and relating to the other aspects of the common world with which they are associated. Thus when people are involved in religion they make merely token and inevitably self-involved gestures in the direction of religion. Such is the thoroughly institutionalized exotericism of what is conventionally called religion.

The exclusive preoccupation with what is "out there" is a disposition that is now manifested everywhere on Earth - with dreadful results. Listen to the global "daily News" of terrible violence and threats. Much of it perpetrated and encouraged by religious true believers.

Look at the absolute emptiness of consumer egoity whether so called religious, or secular. It is madness.