One of the main strengths of religious institutions is their sheer pervasiveness; by inserting itself into every facet of life, religion ensures that its disciples can't stray too far from the path without being reminded of it.
That's called totalitarianism, by the way. Not many people consider it to be a good thing.
Not necessarily. It's totalitarianism if said institutions do the ensuring through force, and without the consent of the disciples. However, by choosing to belong to a religious community, people choose to have institutions and members of the community remind them of the religious values.
Yesterday I attended church service in Romania where I had visited my sister and the sermon was about the four things a (christian) community has to follow to persevere and grow.
I first considered just posting the quote from the Acts of the Apostles (reproduced below) in the Rationality Quotes Thread but I fear without explanation the inferential gap of the quote is too large.
The LessWrong Meetups, the EA community and other rationalist communities probably can learn from the experience of long established orders (I once asked for lessons from free masonry).
So I drew the following connections:
According to the the sermon and the below verse the four pillars of a christian community are:
Other analogies that I drew from the quote:
And what I just right now notice is that embedding the rules in the scripture is essentially self-reference. As the scripture is canon this structure perpetuates itself. Clearly a meme that ensures its reproduction.
Does this sound convincing and plausible or did I fell trap to some bias in (over)interpreting the sermon?
I hope this is upvoted for the lessons we might draw from this - despite the quote clearly being theistic in origin.