But lately organised religion has been bothering me a lot. It is just so obviously a form of controlling people: you have to believe this and that and also hand over some cash and vote for such and such.
I can't get around the fact that this still goes on so blatantly in this day and age.
Literalism isn’t a big thing in Catholicism, but you can run into it and, what sounds to be more the issue here, there are definitely some (IME, a small minority, but they are quite noticeable) Catholic priests who love to use events where they are likely to get non-regular churchgoers in the congregaton as an opportunity to try to deploy a fear hammer to get people back to Church.
I'm not sure that's justifiable.
> The current has era has swung back to the conservative.
In the American particular Church more than in the Universal Church that seems correct. (Up through the papacy of Benedict XVI, I would have responded differently.)
(That being said, God's capacity for love is beyond human conception and no person can ever be beyond redemption.)
My feeling is this is an Americanism. Here in the UK I've been to church events in the past - usually stuff linked to school events (harvest, nativity etc), or weddings/funerals, and been in a few old cathedrals which have a donation box, but the stuff I see on US TV shows like the Simpsons -- collection plate passing, advertising, televangelism, etc all seems very different and far more obviously "con artistry"
There is some cult that does some low-key advertising in the UK (occasional posters on bus stops in London) over the last decade or so, the alpha church or something, which is mildly concerning, but the general course of religion, from what I can tell it's just a place some people go and have a chat and a sing-song, no different to the pub really.
The government<->church connection makes it easier to be distrustful of the church when you're distrustful of the government, which detracts from the divine nature of faith and creates a more secular nation.
Compare that to the US (The Simpsons depiction is largely accurate), where the US Government and the church are completely separate. That means your church can be right and your government can be wrong, which creates all sorts of problematic dynamics in the states.
Currently, the "my church is right, government is wrong" crowd has essentially adopted the Trump family as their new church. I don't think you guys could have that happen across the pond. That's why we're about to do a fascism.
could be generalized to any mainstream ideology, enforcement is the same with anybody going against the ideology being cast out of the group. Human nature hasn't changed, you could get rid of all organized religion and the same thing would happen. I think politics has become more heated because it has replaced religion for so many people, same anger vented using a new outlet
A lot of atheists love to say much about how religion only brings suffering and it's the source of all conflicts, much to my annoyance.
To me, my Holy Book is the only religious authority, and it's my job to understand it and think about it, however such injection of the mind into religion is downright heretical where I come from.
This leads to conflicts with those around me as my interpretations of the book is incredibly liberal, compared to the fossilized understandings of the clergy.
Sounds like idolatry to me -- sounds like you are taking a book, written, edited, and organized by human beings, and equating it with God.
You can find organized religions that don’t feature any of those that bother you (quite a lot are really mostly concerned with only the first, and there are some where even that is not all that much of a concern; I personally would suggest avoiding the ones that drop the first but retain either of the other two.)
That said, what is your religion-free spiritual practice, if you have any?