A suggestion for Church reform

A suggestion for Church reform

B. Kastrup

In times past, the Church has performed the function of social control through its moral dogmas. Priests used their Sunday sermons to keep people straight, so to speak. Religious moralizing may have had a role to play in those times, absent the proper rule of law. Today, however, things are very different. Ever fewer people will take that kind of moralizing seriously, and many will think it pathetic. To be judged and absolved for their alleged sins is not what people today are looking for. They have a whole new attitude to life in which the very idea that they are sinners doesn't resonate. I don't feel like a sinner; do you? I do feel confused, but not guilty. I miss a more personal relationship with transcendence, but not judgment. I would like to experience a deeper meaning in my life but not to be given an outdated list of behavioral norms. Moreover, we have perfectly good, secular rationales for our laws, as well as law enforcement. We don't need the Church to keep society working at an operational level.

What we do need the Church for is meaning, contact with something transcendent. Our daily, secular lives lack in depth and true purpose. Ordinary goings-on are banal and ultimately pointless. Consumerism offers an ostensive escape route, but it doesn't work for long, for mere things do not have the numinous power of religious symbols. We've replaced the altar with cigarettes, alcohol, porn and new pairs of shoes, but it didn't work quite well for us, did it? A doorway to transcendence and meaning is what the Church could help us with, if only it would drop the moralizing and focus on liturgy, i.e. the ritualistic part of a religious life.

So here is my suggestion for the Church authorities: drop the focus on moral codes, judgment and guilt trips. Nobody is looking for that today and nobody will go to the Church on Sunday to get that. Jesus Himself did not focus on judgment, so why should those who labor on His name do so? Replacing judgment and moralizing with the attitude of tolerance and understanding characteristic of modern psychotherapists is, in my view, entirely consistent with Christianity.

A suggestion for Church reform

B. Kastrup

Christianity is an ideological organism. To say we can pluck out the meaning-generating-narrative while discarding the rest is like plucking out an organ from a body and expecting it to live and reproduce.

Having left Christianity about 7 years ago, I’m doing fine with the morals I’ve got and the tentative metaphysical narrative I’ve pieced together.

The hard part for me and my wife is figuring out how we should raise our son without the structure of the church.