First they want your money because God puts them on TV to spread his Word. Now they want your money because they can talk God into curing your illness. Chicago Tribune is running a story on how some Christian Scientists are writing letters to the Senate offices, promoting a “proposal in the legislation requiring insurers to consider covering the church’s prayer treatments just as they do other medical expenses.”
A senior church official distributed 11,000 such letters, claiming that “there is a connection between health care and spirituality”. I totally get that and can’t agree more with that statement. What I don’t understand is what religion has to do with spirituality.
Isn’t the whole point of an organized religion (actually there’s also power and control and a whole bunch of other things, but we’ll focus on the monetary part for now) to
1. get money out of believers’ pockets,
2. then give three to five percent of that money back to the society they take from (they gotta keep the rest to themselves: how else are our God’s messengers going to afford designer hats and robes, those private jets they fly on, those palaces they in, or pay hush-up money when they rape little boys and get caught?),
so they can convince ordinary folks that
1. religion is a good thing for the society (no tax please!),
2. they take money from the rich and poor with the sole purpose of giving it back to the rich and poor,
3. the most affluent organization in the universe is doing absolutely everything they possibly can to feed the hungry in Africa,
and so ordinary folks would
1. keep giving some more money, and
2. convince those that are not reaching for their pockets yet to do so?
Naturally, you gotta give these folks some stories to believe in, and throw in some free rituals and prayers too lest people think they’re being ripped off.
Yeah, haven’t prayers always been free up until now? Either the church is getting hit hard by the recession, or it’s contemplating taking a leaf from its sister corporation Scientology’s business model.
