What need has God of a church?
The Catholic Church's never-ending clerical abuse crisis reared its demonic head again, this time in France:
Some 216,000 children - mostly boys - have been sexually abused by clergy in the French Catholic Church since 1950, a damning new inquiry has found.
The head of the inquiry said there were at least 2,900-3,200 abusers, and accused the Church of showing a "cruel indifference towards the victims".
Of course, the scourge of clerical abuse of children isn't relegated to the Church. You see incidences of it across Christian denominations and other non-Christian traditions.
I was meditating on this yesterday. I wasn't doing it from a place of gloating as an atheist over benighted believers. (Especially considering that those who are non-religious have no exemption from cruelty.) I was doing so as a person trying to understand how faith traditions which extol protecting the weak seem to have this in common. And then I asked the question which is the title for this piece.
At heart, I left religion not because of an inability to believe in a divine, unknowable Being. After all, I credit the Universe with having an immanence. Looking up at a starlit sky in the middle of the Mojave Desert does bring forth questions of Ultimate Meaning. I left religion because religious structures, by and large, demand unquestioning obedience—not only to their theology, but to the (mostly) men who run these institutions.
What need does God have of a church? Or a synagogue? Or a mosque? Or any other large, organized institutions? Jesus himself is claimed to have disparaged such a necessity.
5 And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your inner room, shut your door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who foresaw the world's imminent ending. He wasn't founding a new religion. He believed that God's Kingdom was soon to be ushered in.
But, of course, it wasn't, at least not in the way that his followers expected. The years dragged into decades and now millennia, and his return has still not occurred. So men created structures to propagate what they saw as his message, even if they had to reinterpret it in light of the final unveiling not happening.
What need does God have of an organized religion, with property concerns? Well, none. As the prophet Isaiah said that God told him:
“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me?” saith the Lord. “I am full of the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs or of hegoats."
The rituals, the fripperies, the accoutrements of worldly power are not what please God, but instead
[S]top doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.
The clerical abuse scandal across all religions is, quite frankly, the result of men creating structures to gain and keep power through the guise of piety, while ignoring all the words in their various scriptures which teach that such concerns are not only not of God, but are evil and against God.
What need has God of a church? None, that I can see. Did Jesus envision someone like Joel Osteen insulting his message, which is the antithesis of the "prosperity gospel" sold like snake-oil by Osteen and his ilk? Religious structures need God only as a figurehead. Teachings of humility are for the lay people. Those in power need not abide by them. The hypocrites have always wormed their way up to being cardinals and high priests and imams. Those who take the teachings of the sages seriously, and not just as a way to oppress those not like them, need to take these institutions back and make them work for the believers. Or, simply refuse to participate. A general without an army is exactly the fate the high and mighty deserve.