Pensive Mutterings

Preach It....

Human nature imbibes the soul to crave--and adhere to--fundamental beliefs which spawn our actions, inspire our cognitive processes, dictate our opinions and reactions--all in an attempt to filter out the chaos of life, and organize that chaos into meaningful experiences.

For centuries, since Christianity’s birth, the one universal Church dominated the world, a religion known today as Roman Catholicism. Martin Luther, an elite scholastic Catholic seminarian in the sixteenth century, carefully, with his intellectual acumen, dissected many of the Church’s dogmas, formulated his own dogmas, and made known to the world the massive non-biblical doctrines and ecclesiastical abuses of the times. He would be brazen enough to defy the Pope, refuse to recant, and be excommunicated from the Church. Still protesting vehemently, he would post his “Ninety-five theses” at the Wittenberg, Germany church, which would spur a new age of “Reformation,” leading to today’s Protestant religions and denominations, now numbering over 275.

For most Protestant religions, the worshipping of the Blessed Mother and the invocation of any saint’s intercession is blasphemous; Baptism must be full immersion; the celebration of the Mass with its Eucharist as the actual body of Christ, is borderline demonic; and the appearance of any superficial practices such as rosaries, Stations of the Cross, or statues adorning any place of worship is blatant idolatry.

The twentieth century’s mass media wallowed in delight with the notoriety of such “holy men of God” as Jim Bakker, caught funneling over $200,000 from his million-dollar PTL ministry to his mistress, Jessica Hahn; of Jimmy Swaggart who proclaimed that he would die from the hand of God unless he raised his needed support funds within an allotted time; of David Koresh and his Branch Davidians, (labeled a cult, since it is outside the parameters of the mainstream “solidified, approved, organized” religions); of Jim Jones (also branded a “cult leader”) who, with the same ingenuity, would force a mass suicide among his followers in Guyana; of the Episcopal Church ordaining its Very Rev. V.G. Robinson, an avowed homosexual, as New Hampshire’s new bishop; of Boston's Cardinal B. Law denying any required hierarchal knowledge of secretly transferring pedophile priests. The list is infinite.

Religions, sects, or cults cannot prosper without members. Potential members must be recruited and ingrained – and preferably, as Adolph Hitler and so many other dictators learned and mastered in propagating their own devastating ideologies – at a young age with life’s amenities: the “real” God and the “authentic” bible; the basic necessities of food, lodging, and group support, the latter of which can only be materialized from the members’ bank accounts and assets, as evidenced by such million-dollar, present-day religions as Southern Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, Episcopalians, and Catholics. Comparable to any business entity, Jesus Christ or any other deity is hastily and quietly ushered to a back seat. Money doesn't talk; it screams.

Regardless of any set-biblical absurdity, any common-sense violation of values, or any traditional, ecclesiastical authority, the eon-old maxim remains: "Preach it long and loud enough, and you will get followers."

WJK-1/08