Thank you, my friend. I do appreciate it.
I agree with you. For the most part- not all religions are that way. Dharmic religions (such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, etcetera) are not dogmatic. Although later there were some disagreements as to what the original teachings were, and there was some development of social ritual, hierarchial organisation, and even dogmatic belief... There was always an understood guideline that said no one was necessarily required to believe anything, do anything, and a profound respect for diversity of belief (and often, even non-belief). The Buddha's original teaching stressed that there were no "beliefs"; everything he taught was founded on experience and reason. He even encouraged people to challenge his philosophy, improve on it if they could, and to not accept anything he said on blind faith, but rather to search it out for themselves and test it. Hinduism obviously requires belief of some sort, but there are so many different strands of thought, one need not necessarily act on any particular belief. It's all accepted, and respected.
The Abrahamic religions are fundamentally different. Judaism is in a class all its own, but it actually "requires" very little, but indeed asks a lot. Islam is all about control and order. The world Islam actually means "submission", and Muslim means "one who submits". It's a masterful design of organized religion though. It's self-perpetuating, and one living in a Muslim community couldn't leave if they wanted to (without either being destroyed or destroying their life as they know it), due to the way it's structured.
Christianity, many scholars now think through very careful study, is not what it originally was. It was very much based around freedom, and though it was certered on revelation, it was very much ad-hoc, with no real dogma or even organization to speak of (besides apostles, deacons, and prophets which had much more general meanings than they do today). This freedom resulted in a VERY wide variety of differing viewpoints, and the majority, taking up the reigns, considered these heresy based on their interpretation of Paul. So they became hierarchial to suppress beliefs they felt were dangerous or wrong, and probably ended up upholding the worldview the original community of Christians were meant to philosophically oppose and change.
So yes. As it is now, you're mostly correct. But in the case of Christianity, it's a very top-heavy, distorted version of what it originally was. And it was not a tool to control the people, but they saw it instead as a path to liberation. People still speak very much of freedom in Christ, but they're taking it out of context. I'd suggest a book called "The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context" by Calvin Roetzel. It's brilliant, and explains the theology of the original Christian community using only Paul's -authentic- epistles. It will open your eyes. Almost half of what's in the New Testament and attributed to Paul, modern scholarship tells us, is most likely not by him. Rather, it was written by people believing they were doing Paul's work, by imposing order on a chaotic community of diverse belief. A lot of the things that one thinks of when thinking of the "control" element of Christianity are in these writings, not the ones by Paul in his own words. Unfortunately, this was not an uncommon practice in antiquity (writing in someone else's name- it was often considered perfectly acceptable, unlike today), and history played out the way it did. With all the wretched things done in the name of religion.
I look forward to hearing what you think.
~Ethno
