Marketing Sin

Is Christianity a great religion or what?  By focusing on sin and forgiveness churches have a ready-made mix that is sure to keep the masses coming back for more. 

This was recently evidenced by the Catholic Church in a study that shows the resiliency of religious faith in forgiving the Roman Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals.  While the study did find that Catholics were still not contributing to the “diocesan financial appeals” in the traditional pay-to-pray system it did uncover that Catholics were able to “disconnect their own personal faith” from the tainted priests and continue their Catholic practices.

Another term for this ability to “disconnect” when more than 10,000 young people have been victimized by sexual abuse is schizophrenia. It is this same schizophrenic mode of operation that allows all of us to continue our American Way of Life even though we know the polar bears are perishing and mass extinctions are happening on a global scale.

If Catholics can forgive their own priests, the leaders of their house of worship, for sexually abusing thousands and thousands of young people, what does this say about our own ability to forgive our schizophrenic lifestyles that are literally destroying the biological diversity of the planet?

It says we are schizophrenic petroleum addicts, sedating ourselves by surfing through our 200-channel cable TV service and not even interested in redemption from our daily eco-sins because we are almost totally disconnected from nature. As John Steinbeck pointed out, one of the biggest threats is that we are all submerged in “listless self-satisfaction.”

We might be going down for the last time.