Religion is great, except for the man-made parts.

Religion has been used for politics, control, power, sex, wealth even to manipulate the masses. Of course, this alone seems like enough of a reason to abandoned religions as a whole. You could say the same about business, government, or liberal (non) religious movements as well, and we can’t abandon them all.

Being governed is a major part of civilization, and I believe the center of God’s Kingdom. Anarchy is the ” real ” evil, not organization. This doesn’t mean that groups don’t prove to be dubious all the time. We are all fallen self-centered beings and the moment we attempt to do things on our own we succeed only at the managing sin or the things of man. Unfortunately, I am good at this.

I think the reason organization works well is because it is part of God’s design. The fact it works well for evil purposes is because God lets us use it.

An example of what I mean.

A friend came to me periodically for marriage advice. He had had a pretty rough go to date. One day he came over very angry and announced that marriage sucked. I recall thinking, ” What arrogance to assume that an institution must be flawed merely because one can’t make it work. “
I called him on it saying, ” NO! You suck at marriage.”

The Same goes for those who point out that the divorce rate, and claim that marriage doesn’t work anymore. It amazes me how self-centered we can be to think that because ” WE ” can’t make it work, there must be something wrong with the system. Maybe, just perhaps it is the organizers who are flawed.. or their mission that’s flawed. Priests, Popes, preachers, missionaries and other sorts of God’s crew can and miss-used their positions and authority for self-serving purposes. Politicians are a given.

At best they have miss-understood the nature of God’s Kingdom and so began building buildings not cultivating gardens.