Give Me That Old Time Religion?

I just got back from a holiday trip, taking my family to visit my brother during the Easter break. My brother is a very devout Catholic and we joined them for some Easter activities at their church. On Good Friday evening, we attended an excellent production of the "Living" Stations of the Cross. High School students took on the various roles in the passsion story and there was a wonderful music group and singing. I was raised a catholic and had seen the stations many times without much thought about the morbid focus of the whole activity. My new perspective on things made me look at this very differently and I thought I'd put down some of my thoughts here.

• After all the things that Jesus said to us, why the hell are we so dedicated to memorializing his death and torture and not his life and teaching.
• Wouldn't a far better tribute to Jesus be to try to listen to his message to love one another?
• The ritual of the church seems to keep people from sharing personal experiences and from helping each other connect to the God within us.
• Sitting in these ceremonies is a lot like watching TV. I wonder how many of the congregation are engaged in the story and how many are wondering about their dinner, or where they're supposed to be later in the evening.
• Wouldn't it be much better to just get together and talk with each other than to sit in these elaborate productions that don't really connect with most of the people there?
• If someone wanted to design a way to keep us from our inner selves and from helping each other grow in our spirituality, I doubt they could come up with a better way of doing it than the Western religions have devised.
  

I'm not sure how many more times I'll find myself in church, but I'll never look at the process the same way. I no longer even find the exercise innocent, as I see it as a distrction from what we need to be to each other. I finally agree with Marx that "Religion is the opiate of the masses." But far worse than a tool of societal stratification, I feel the church is numbing us to our own potential, to our own divinity.

I've always felt that the two greatest perils in this world were church and state. I'm afraid to say that I fear them both more the older I get.