why does noone want to join our church???
why does noone want to join our church???
why does noone want to join our church???
Modern religions .... any and all modern religions are all the same now
They don't worship a God .. or Gods .. or Saints ... or prophets ... or angels ... or Holy Spirits
They all worship money and power ... and their message is one of control and obedience, so that they can have all the money and power.
They're all basically the same.
Pretty sure that's also how religions were historically...
Yes, I really don't like this new model of religion where people are more loyal to their priest than their god.
That's not as new as you would hope.
Always great when people see problems that are so old they are literally mentioned in the old testament and think that it's a new thing that only emerged yesterday.
And even if you ignore the old testament, half of the gospels is Jesus fighting the Pharisees, which are exactly that.
That would be crazy, as if we in the US were more loyal to the current president than the constitu-- ohhhh.
Where I live, the 4yo would get molested by a priest, and that would get covered up by the bishop. Which is also a pretty good reason to leave / not join the church.
There are two types of churches out there in the US.
Tiny little congregations who meet up in an old gym or single-wide trailer and organize and connect community like humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years and have no goals beyond their faith and community.
And money-making grift operations who just want to fleece as many as possible by latching onto whatever controversial social issue can make people so inflamed and blinded with emotion that they hand over stacks of cash just to feel like they're hurting the people that conservative media tells them they should hate. These churches come in all sizes and seem to vastly outnumber the other kind, because this tactic is so, so easy to pull off.
The structure of the economy has changed fundamentally. And so the goals of these privately bankrolled institutions have changed with it.
Churches, as institutions, no longer aspire to maximize the number of middle class bodies in pews, because the middle class is no longer flush with surplus cash. Instead, they need to attract extraordinarily wealthy individual patrons to survive. To that end, church officials making a spectacle of casting out a single kid from a non-wealthy family for being "Woke" operates as a kind-of fundraising event for the patrician class.
Modern religious institutions don't exist to tame and homogenize a frontier population's moral code. They now serve to legitimize and promote high ranking officials as More Holy Than Thou. And as churches gain more roles of state government, its the public that has to ask special dispensation to join the church, not the other way around.
Just like how it was in the old days...
This catering to the rich and wealthy is exactly what caused the pilgrims to come to America (plus other things including the fact the pilgrims were religious extremists themselves). And now it is happening again.
The cycle or Religious bullshit must continue-
This catering to the rich and wealthy is exactly what caused the pilgrims to come to America
Well, that and the 30 Years War, sure.
The cycle or Religious bullshit must continue-
The problem of lying is as ancient as the advent of human speech. Even if all formalized dogmatism vanished tomorrow, you'd still have people mistaking correlation for causation and developing superstitions and taboos as a result. Jordan B. Peterson is a great example of this in practice. In another time, he'd be a Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard figure.
But, at some level, any individual's cache of information is going to be incomplete. We all rely on the grand game of telephone that is oral and written history. "The cycle of Religion" is just a facet of this cycle of generational retelling of accrued lore. How do you keep the logs accurate and the lorekeepers faithful to accumulated wisdom? Damned if I know. Double-entry book keeping seems to help, but its hardly foolproof.
Don't rainbows mean 👉 👌 ?
Not even. The rainbow was god's covenant with man (or Noah, specifically) that he would not flood the world again in future hissy tantrums. Some wingnuts have not RTFM.
Well, okay. A lot of them.
Most, even.
Thing is, the German lutheran church is basically going all-in on being progressive and inclusive (relative to other churches anyway), they even do gay marriages now. And they're still bleeding members like crazy, because Germans are becoming less and less religious.
If this Noone guy wants to join a church, let him.
Or be asked to step outside when my GF's 10 month old was fussy and "too noisy".
Had a church ask us what brought us to the church. The cafe, popularity of the pastor, social meida advert, etc. We said to worshih god,
it was not on thier list as a reason to go to church
I joined because I want you to bleed my bank account dry by demanding I "give" every time I walk in your doors.
The few times I encountered that I always checked "other" and wrote in "a car".
"To worship who? Oh, Trump! We need to add that on there."
I guess, maybe they thought in comparison to other churches?
But yeah, if there is only one church in the area, like there often is, then it's a bit silly.