One. Every organized religion is a con game. A con game is run by criminals to deceive and steal. The religion con game is organized and perpetrated by a leadership group of priests. This group seeks to gather social status, power, and your money. These very specialized criminals covet social status above you. They covet money from your pocket. They covet civil power over you. They covet political power over you. They covet economic power over you. Two. These things are seized through our own gullibility and an opportunity. Watch the evening news. What new outrageous pontifical pronouncement has spilled from the mouth of Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, or Jimmy Swaggert? The Prime Minister of Israel has been cursed by God? Citizens of Pennsylvania have been cursed by God by their actions to keep “Intelligent Design Creationism” drivel out of their classrooms? The leader of still another country should be assassinated? All that is now required is random chance over time. Time for the Prime Minister to die of any cause. Time for part of Pennsylvania to be destroyed by any natural disaster. Any natural disaster will do. Time for a assassination by a revolutionary or a terrorist seeking power. Three. The next step is to claim a relationship with God that caused the affected event. A claim of power that is unexamined by the foolish. This is followed by demands for the signs of respect. Demands for “donations”. Demands for obeisance. Demands for bowing down. Demands for your willingness to “follow”. Your willingness to do as you are told. Four. These behaviors reassure the leaders of their own importance. This strokes their deficient, child-like and wildly inflated egos. How then is such religious leadership different from any other organized criminal leader in history? Extortion by threat of violence is a criminal behavior. Need still more proof? After 1500 years Limbo is to be abandoned. Limbo was supposed to be an ill defined form of life after death. Not Heaven, not Hell, but somewhere in between. Now we are being told: “Oops! Sorry. Limbo does not exist. Unbaptized babies are not excluded from Heaven after all.” Where is the apology for 1,500 years of terroristic threatening? When do they plan to return 1,500 years of fees and “gifts” extracted from fearful parents and grandparents? Five. These “priests” are an elite group. All too often as egotistical, driven individuals, they are unstable, and their greed is boundless. Only an unstable religious leader would call for the murder or death of a country’s leader. Only a hubris driven religious leader would have the gall to preach against homosexuality and then be arrested after propositioning an undercover police officer posing as a male prostitute. Six. These “leaders” compete with each other. They endlessly “schism”, or break, into more and more fractious and fractured groups. Each “leader” drags along as large a part of the “flock” as he can. This provides “the leader” with a monetary support base. Each leader needs a “flock” of sheep from which he can regularly steal the wool. He needs the wool to build a huge cathedral to hold the flock. He needs the wool to buy expensive cars. He needs the wool to build a private university. The private university will keep the flock growing. These schisms may be over large, or very small issues of “doctrine”. What they really are, are power plays among the elite. Sometimes a leader just “jumps ship”. He, or she, goes independently evangelical. This is accompanied by loudly proposing some slight variation of a theme. The theme may be based in individual regeneration, transformation, conversion, or salvation by faith. The other guys are corrupt, or deluded. Which sounds like a good reason to break away, but nothing has changed. For at the bottom line of the proposed change, supposedly a better way for you to have stronger faith. The change still puts your money in a different pocket. We all have feet of clay. These leaders have become so powerful that they have forgotten to look at their own feet.
(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, and the priesthood. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will interest everyone. This article may be freely reprinted so long as all copyright attributions, and the full content of this resource box are included. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com
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