{"id":35480,"date":"2018-04-07T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2018-04-07T05:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35480"},"modified":"2018-03-17T09:30:46","modified_gmt":"2018-03-17T13:30:46","slug":"qotd-organized-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/04\/07\/qotd-organized-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Organized religion"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Careful examination of the background, and also of the foreground of the Scriptures, has led me to the conclusion that they are authoritative, if often misunderstood. I note that Our Lord was personally guilty of founding one of these \u201corganized religions,\u201d and of appointing the deeply flawed Saint Peter as its first CEO. And that, whatever can be said against it, the organization is still around, with the same sales message never yet updated, and in as much of a mess as ever before.<\/p>\n<p>Verily, the more I read of history, the better persuaded I am that Catholic Church, TM, has been on the brink of collapse, continuously, these last two thousand years. As Hilaire Belloc put it, and I do love to quote this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>\u201cThe Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine \u2014 but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>By comparison, I suppose, the Prophet of Submission could be accounted wiser, to have taken arms against his sea of troubles. His outfit would descend from the unattended dunes upon complacent strangers, in hours when they were unaware. (The whole process arguably in anticipation of the Welsh art of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.llapgoch.org.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\">Llap-goch<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>For our \u201cChristian\u201d part, even in the colonies, it was the piratical State that arrived this way \u2014 with a disorganized gaggle of proselytizing priests, seldom in their baggage, under the impression they must save men\u2019s souls, wherever the ships sailed \u2014 unarmed, and frequently alone, in circumstances perfectly unpredictable, except for the reasonable expectation of a grisly end. They were, in the Americas as elsewhere, more likely to be pleading on behalf of the beleaguered natives against the State, than exacting tributes to the State\u2019s command.<\/p>\n<p>There is a real contrast here in marketing strategies.<\/p>\n<p>David Warren, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidwarrenonline.com\/2016\/08\/08\/organized-religion\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Organized religion&#8221;, <em>Essays in Idleness<\/em><\/a>, 2016-08-08.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Careful examination of the background, and also of the foreground of the Scriptures, has led me to the conclusion that they are authoritative, if often misunderstood. I note that Our Lord was personally guilty of founding one of these \u201corganized religions,\u201d and of appointing the deeply flawed Saint Peter as its first CEO. And that, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,11],"tags":[360,47],"class_list":["post-35480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-christianity","tag-islam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9eg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35481,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35480\/revisions\/35481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}