Desipis

For all its faults the Church has faithfully told the story of Jesus for 2000 years, even if it has not always 'lived' that story. The Church exists to tell the story of Jesus and the only flaw that would be fatal to the Church would be if it failed to tell the story faithfully and appropriately. The Jesus narrative is so compelling that there will always be people willing to do the Church's work, in spite of its human weakness and failings, just for the sake of telling and hearing once more of the God-man and the injustice that was done to Him and the way that His death gave ultimate meaning to His life.
For many of us who choose to embrace the Church there remains some degree of ambivalence to her and her history but the story is always worth telling.

Religion is hierarchical codification of spirituality.

Corruption.

Enlightenment cannot be explained, dictated nor sermonised. If you need to be told, you wont understand.

A church is the last place to find enlightenment.

Fundamentalists, idealogues and true believers hold onto their illusions for dear life.

Truth is too real for them, too mundane, too scarey to acknowledge and too far beyond their received recipes of consciousness. If its easy, and nice, and all laid out for you, its unlikely to yield enlightenment.

If it requires a suspension of your capacity for logical thought and rational contemplation of the perception that yields a true appreciation of reality... it will never be enlightening.

Logic and reason are the foundations of conceptualisation. Anything short of a rigourous application of those fundamentals of conciousness will yield spiritual nothingness.

Maybe the light will come on in the room, but its still only a room. This is religion.

Letting go is the hardest thing to do. Then one can hope to become enlightened.

waterboy,

You seem to have missed my point. You don't need the church to spread the "Good Word". You don't need to tithe to tell the story of Jesus. You don't need to attend mass to be a good Christian.

I can understand the desire to form a community based around common beliefs, however a thorough examination of the church reveals it has little to do with sharing the faith. It is structured around gaining wealth and power for those in charge, and has continuously twisted the message of Jesus to suit it's needs and desires. "Spreading the word" and "charitable" missions are simply methods of gathering new members into the church to increase the wealth, power and influence of the church's elite.

The world would be a better place if Christians would practice their faith independently from any church and the old robed men trying to play god.

Desipis

Perhaps you have not entirely grasped my point. The Church is made up of those who choose to participate in that 'community'. It is not a matter of necessity but choice. What is your motive in 'advising' us to abandon the Church?
As I said the Church is a human institution subject to many of the faults of humanity. Your characterisation of it, however, as essentially motivated by greed and desire for power is not true. That is, while there may be elements of that in the Church, it is not 'characteristic' of the whole Church.
In our society unions play a very important role in ensuring justice prevails in the workplace. The fact that some of them have mixed motives and are tempted to participate in the political power game does not invalidate their essential role in our society. No more do the Church's faults invalidate its role.
There is a naivety about the idea that individuals can each live by their own story. At some level stories must be shared, ie communal. We are social animals. We need 'common stories' in order to make sense of our place in society. Why do you think the Israelis and Palestinians cant get on with each other? What was the basis of apartheid for all those years? Why can't Australias, America's, Canada's indigenous people just simply assimilate into our western culture?
Your suggestion that every individual should be an island of meaning is simply impossible, a recipe for pain, suffering and the deepest form of loneliness imaginable.
The Church might not be perfect but it is a community of purpose and meaning. It does address the most fundamental of human needs.. the need for common understanding and shared purpose.
The story that is not shared is called a delusion and those who suffer from delusions rarely manage to plumb the depths of human experience or live life to the full.

Funguy
I own to taking the Clarke-Leibniz correspondence out of the library and that is as far as I got. However, and others in this thread may correct me, I think that the debate was really between Newton/Locke and Descartes/Leibniz and is fundamental to the establishment of natural science. Descartes believed that clear and certain knowledge could be arrived at by the thinking mind. This was basically because he clung to a by then outmoded idea that God had planted innate ideas in us. Since God was the creator he must have ideas about what he was going to create and I think Descartes thought that we had access to those ideas via rationality. This means that you could be an armchair scientist and deduce the ways of the world without actually going out and observing it. Such a mode led Leibniz to construct a theory of the solar system which relied on vortices that moved the planets. You can see Newton’s view of that in the beginning of his final edition of the General Scholium of the Principia. On the other hand Clarke, taking Newton and Locke’s side argued that the only clear and certain ideas were formal, i.e. mathematical and if you want to know about objects in the world you had to actually do experiments and observe and induce a mathematical description. This knowledge was only ever probable and could be overturned by more observations. As you know Newton/Locke an Clarke won the day and Leibniz’s physics have been abandoned. Einstein’s thought experiments seem to belie this scheme so I guess we have ended up with a strange mixture

waterboy, thank you for this excellent defence of the Church's raison d'etre, and Desipis for your constructive criticism which I find mostly justified in spite of your exaggerations. I certainly agree that "you don't need to attend mass to be a good Christian", nevertheless I think there are situations when a "global" Church and mass attendance can serve a purpose which a local church/community with ad hoc celebrations can not.

For instance, during the Stalinist times in my native Slovakia no gathering of people - be it a church community or stamp collectors - could exist without being directly supervised by the party. However, they did not dare to close churches, which on Sundays were not only packed but often a small crowd extended to the square outside the church. That was the case at least in a larger city, where you could attend anonymously. You were jeopardising your job, and role in the society, if you were seen to have personal contacts with a priest. So for us then it was the global Church, the anonymous, "abstract" community of believers, than one felt belonging to, rather than an actual community where one knew and communicated with each other. It was an experience that I grew up in, with no RE at school, only long discussions with my father, that today makes it difficult for me to understand the mental state of people like Richard Dawkins on one hand, or emotional and irrational Christians on the other.

Yes, I agree, my experience is rather exceptional: the (Catholic) Church has learned how to flourish under physical persecution but as we see they still have to learn how to flourish, or at least survive, under psychological "persecution" and ridicule.