Christian organisations (what about other religious communities, I wonder?) are mere commercial interests?

Can you tell me honestly that you look at a televangelist and not see a crass commercial venture?

You don't find it a tad arrogant to tell people they aren't in a Church for spiritual reasons, as a community of shared values, or simply because they want rites to accompany their lives, but just members of mere commercial interests, perhaps?

I'm not saying they're not members of the church for all those reasons. I'm saying that the church they are members of is run like a transnational corporation.

If they don't like that being pointed out to them, then maybe they should find a church that, you know, isn't run like McDonald's or McDonnell-Douglass.

Such churches do exist, you know.

But they don't have a turnover comparable to the GDP of a moderately sized Central Asian republic.

Btw., I find it interesting that Catholics and the Orthodox are Churches, while Protestants have sects. Care to explain where the difference comes from?

The Catholic and Orthodox churches are also sects - but some Protestant sects don't have churches, in the sense of a well-defined organization.

Many people stand up for the right of racists to spread their venom. Few people stand up for the right of communists to not be monitored by the political police

What are we to conclude from your words? That you believe everything that has a large support is wrong

That appeal to popularity is a bullshit argument.

Church members and people who value the Churches form a very large proportion of the population. Why do you think you can teach them what democracy is?

Because apparently a lot of them think that their particular parochial prejudices deserve some special protection from criticism and insults which is not extended to anybody else's parochial prejudices.

I find this inconsistent with democracy.

Suddenly you discover that there are other "social gatherings", and that they are playing a role in political powerplay. Allottment gardeners, for instance. They are well organised and usually have no problem to get their point across. Astonishing how much influence they have. Does that make you as excited as influence of Churches? I think not. So what is it?

I don't see them claiming any super-special prerogatives that are not available to other organizations or social groups.

In particular, I don't see them getting their undies in a twist about people "offending their allotment gardener feelings" or "insulting the pumpkin cultivation instruction manual."

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

The CoE is still one of the largest property owners in the UK.

The Vatican is an entire country and no one knows exactly how much it is worth. But when you count up the buildings, art treasures, land, and 'investments' it's not a small number.

Oddly, very little of that wealth is spent on the poor.

Even more bizarrely, the poor are encouraged to donate generously every Sunday.

How much is the Mormon church worth? How much are the various Islamic and Jewish religious organisations around the world worth?

How much does the IRS not claim each year in the US because religious and spiritual organisations are tax exempt?

Clearly we're not in a world where people of like mind gather in each others' houses for a communal shared experience and mammon is of only passing interest.

God regularly gives preachers in the US their own private jets, almost as if they were executives of their own corporations.

God seems remarkably generous like that - especially to mainstream religious leaders.

All of this is possible because of special pleading by religionists, and less special organisations find it hard to match the economic history of established churches.

Now - clearly the roots of religious privilege (let's call it what it is) have nothing to do with actual spirituality, which is a nebulously meaningless concept at worst and an entirely personal and subjective one at best.

Religions are privileged because they tell stories about tribal morals and identity. They dress up the stories with some theatre, which impresses the easily impressed. But at root it's political theatre designed to modify values and behaviour to whatever ends the church in question happens to have. (And as someone else pointed out, most have authoritarian values rather than progressive ones.)

Secularists don't have the same privileges because they don't do the theatre, they (mostly) don't claim to have the weight of centuries of tradition on their side, and they're not in the business of defining morals - although corporates and pols certainly go out of their way to try to influence beliefs and behaviour, which is not entirely different.

(Although usually they're a bit clumsy at it.)

That's really the only difference. Otherwise churches have an interesting history as economic entities which make a nice profit by soliciting and/or demanding donations from the faithful.

Of course your personal beliefs are different etc, etc, but I covered that earlier.