Ministry Without Coercion.

The Enlightenment is not a religion in the sense that it proposes anything about existence out of the material and temporal world. It is not a religion in the sense of having a hierarchy demanding adherence to a set of rules and submission to the hierarchy administering those rules. The Enlightenment was and is the justification of the individual to think for him- or herself.

To the extent that a hierarchy of a church ministers to adherents without enforcing membership against the will of the parishioner, they are doing a service similar to that of the proponents of Enlightenment. There are congregations that engage in such altruistic service.

I don't disparage congregations that only minister to their own, but do not demean individuals who decide to search for meaning elsewhere. The purpose of a congregation should be to provide comfort and support, but not to dominate.

If  there is something beneficial about the teaching of a congregation, it should be evident without coercion.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Public Cooperation Is Not One Church of Thought.

There are fundamentalists who claim they are the only Christians and that the Constitution mandate against the establishment of a church only bars the government from controlling their churches. They insist that the government is obligated to abide by the church law of their own sect whichever one it is. Actually, the ban against an established church has precedent in the intertwining of church and state in the history of Europe during the middle ages. Every facet of life was controlled either by the church or the state, and one enforced the authority of the other. There was no room for independent thought. So when pagan knowledge was brought back from the Middle East by the Crusaders, there was a Renaissance of thinking and culture that allowed people to question everything about life. The king's religion was continued through the Protestant Revolution, but the Enlightenment that came with the Renaissance still separated peoples' religious thought from their secular though...
Read more

Gossips and Inferiority Complexes.

Gossips are people who have a great need to extol their own importance by saying nasty things about other people. They think they have a sacred responsibility to find fault with those they consider inferior to themselves. There is no reason in gossip other than the significance the gossips give to whatever they say about someone else. Gossip is a blood sport. Gossips consider themselves strong for meddling in the personal lives of others. Facts are what gossips say they are. If a non-fact is needed to sabotage the life of whomever they talk about, then they will construct that non-fact. Gossips pronounce as liars anyone who challenges the validity of the non-facts or false logic the gossips use. I think gossips are driven by severe inferiority complexes to spread the nasty stories they do.
Read more

All good things come to an end. Enjoy life while it lasts.

For thinking person, life needs meaning. How do we find that meaning. We look to things we do and to people, places and things we know. We also consider what we want to live for. It may be anything, but as we get older, there is less and less that we can do, and while places and things may remain as they were before, people die or go away. Living creatures do fear death. Maybe other animals do not have the capacity to conceptualize death the way humans can, but they still fear predators that can kill them. Other animals may not understand that merely living a long time will kill them, but humans do. So what do we do with this fear? Mostly we put it off or avoid thinking about it. People also find belief in elaborate supernatural schemes whereby they postulate something about their consciousness surviving the body dying. I am not sure why they fan their fears so much to be able to contemplate these fanciful post mortum expectations all the time. If these beliefs comfort them, then s...
Read more