It was a long hard fight for me to learn from painful personal experience that Christianity is, in fact, a religion like any other. And the purpose of a religion is to enforce the values of the believers who control it by claiming that these values come from the divine realm. The authority of these values surpasses whatever text or tradition the religion is supposed to be based on. And a religion is all about controlling other people’s behavior to force compliance to those values. The values are mostly concerned with sex and money, and protecting the boundaries of the social group.
I had the misfortune to get caught between the text and tradition (which I had been taught by very high authority ) and the cultural values of the people in the churches, and it ground me down into tiny pieces and spit me out.
It was a long hard fight for me to learn from painful personal experience that Christianity is, in fact, a religion like any other. And the purpose of a religion is to enforce the values of the believers who control it by claiming that these values come from the divine realm. The authority of these values surpasses whatever text or tradition the religion is supposed to be based on. And a religion is all about controlling other people’s behavior to force compliance to those values. The values are mostly concerned with sex and money, and protecting the boundaries of the social group.
I had the misfortune to get caught between the text and tradition (which I had been taught by very high authority ) and the cultural values of the people in the churches, and it ground me down into tiny pieces and spit me out.