Hebrews pt2

5:7
He, in the days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and petitions with strong crying and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and having been heard for his godly fear,

Very dramatic interpretation of what Jesus went through before death.

5:12
For when by reason of the time you ought to be teachers, you again need to have someone teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God. You have come to need milk, and not solid food.

What most people get taught about religion is very much like Terry Pratchett's concept of "lies to children." In Pratchett's case, he was talking about methods of teaching children science and history. Teachers tell the young students very simplified things, and as they grow older the concepts gradually become more abstract and complicated. In theory anyway, although in many schools it doesn't work out that way at all.

For example, in most English speaking primary schools, when learning to spell children are taught that "I comes before E, except after C. " It's presented as an iron clad rule. But when kids get older, they generally learn that this is not even close to being true. I often doesn't come before C, especially in words not originally from the English language. I've got a Gaelic name, and people are constantly misspelling it because they're confused about the I/E rule.

In school, if we keep attending up through university levels, we learn that almost all those "lies to children" are so simplified as to be almost wrong. Religion does the same thing, except many people never make it past the Sunday School level of understanding. That is not to say that religion is wrong, but that sometimes the ideas we're taught are so simplified as to be borderline wrong. And now we've got millions of healthy, decently educated adults going around spouting these things they learned-whether it was from Sunday School or just absorbed from pop culture. There are church leaders who never matured past the "milk" stage of Christian reasoning. And often the smartest people are not in influential positions, because advancing in the ranks of churchdom requires charisma and people skills more than it does knowledge of God. The true religious intellectual is usually not allowed anywhere near church congregations.

And this is actually why Roman Christianity and its descendants worked so well, compared to the other branches that were smothered or didn't get to be as enormously popular. They deliberately set out to make a theology, mythology and doctrine that people could pick up quickly and easily. Something a five year old child could learn in a year, a religion that could be explained in an eight page tract. A few simple rules. It's so easy to pick up that there's this thing called, I think "The Wordless Book" which is about five pages, just five individual colored pieces of construction paper. And each page represents an aspect of Christian doctrine.

It works in the sense of attracting and keeping people, but it fails in the area of making good Christians. New converts are immediately encouraged to go out and make more converts, leaving them unprepared to deal with the deeper questions that might come up.

Gnostics (and others) like to blame the Roman church for everything, but it couldn't have happened if there was no doorway left open- it couldn't have happened that way unless the Gnostics let it happen on some level. And I see the same attitudes in many of today's intellectual Christians and Gnostics. There is little tolerance for those who are not well educated, or for those who can't keep up. They are often quick to start arguments, sometimes incapable of compromise and lack the ability to work together as a group. They don't do charitable work. There are no Gnostic sacraments (no legitimate ones that we know of anyway, the "Gnostic Mass" is not Christian) and no Gnostic family venues like Sunday Schools. Perhaps things were slightly different in the early Christian period, but something besides fear drove people toward the Orthodox and Roman churches, weakening the Gnostics.

The Gnostic says "sink or swim", while the establishment church says "here are some floaties for your arms, and look, we have a shallow end." Unfortunately, floaties and a shallow end is what the majority of people really want from organized religion.