Long way home

There comes a time in the life span of a religion when the purity (imagined or otherwise) that is engendered through interaction with the Deity or Deities gives way to piety. Purity being the mitigation of a persons sin or imperfections through the actions of worship, piety being the appearance of purity through a display of religiousness. Purity is about the relationship between the worshipper and their God, piety is concerned with a superstitious concept of God and it introduces a much greater awareness of how the individual is viewed in the community of their religion. Piety is the intellectual foundation of self righteousness, religious bigotry and divisive hierarchical structures. The pursuit of purity through an active relationship with the divine in fact precludes and invalidates the strategies of the pious. That religion degrades from the pursuit of purity into the presentation of piety is the central challenge facing any religious organisation. Piety supplies the corroded meta...

Religion taking a political role, few things in this world have more disastrous results. But right wing America wants a strong Christian leader, because they see their enemies as religious and fire must presumably be fought with fire. Also there's the issue of appeasing the deity who is apparently angry at the moral slide in Christian America. Looking at this equation objectively the same problems loom as loom whenever Christianity enters the arena of public policy development, everyone else cringes. The reasons for this are deeper than the simple fact that bigotry and closed mindedness have become a universal anachronism. The problem has it's origins in a far more fundamental contradiction in this most pervasive of faiths. Christianity in its original form comprised two simple objectives, first the propagation of its message of reconciliation and set of values and second the creation of a community of faith that would exist within but separate from society in general. This rem...