People are easily deceived by the stature to which religions have grown into thinking that they have achieved assured stability. An institution which has reached great size has not necessarily reached great success. It is necessary to look beneath the illusion of numbers and the skin of popularity. Spiritual degeneration and decrepitude are still what they are even if they are spread among millions of people. When we try to understand the causes of such disintegration, we are inevitably led to the conclusion that religion wrongly understood and wrongly expounded breeds distrust, exploits ignorance, and disrupts society. How do ordinary people arrive at their understanding of a religion, then? They arrive at it through the guidance of official exponents. Therefore the latter bear a larger responsibility for the downfall of their own faith than they usually realize. They have often invoked judgement of God on others; have they ever observed how history has invoked the judgement of God on them? So far as the mission of an institution consists in assuming the austere role of a prophet and making the glowing message of such a man freely available to simple toiling folk, so far as its presence in society acts as a check on human character, which would otherwise degenerate and permit evils more serious than existing ones to spring up, it possesses something which the people profoundly need; it has a most valuable service to render for which it must live, and it can face its critics as indifferently as Jesus faced his persecutors. But so far as the institution has come to mean something glaringly different or has come to constitute a professional means of livelihood for certain individuals, merely by seating them on the chair of sanctity, or has associated itself with pointless dogmas which outrage human intelligence, it has certainly become something so unchristian and useless that the continued fall of its influence need surprise none.
-- Notebooks Category 17: The Religious Urge > Chapter 4 : Problems of Organized Religion > # 73
