Religions are made up of fallible people who have the capacity to deceive and thus control through deception.
On the one hand the catholic church could genuinely be a gift from God.
On the hand the church could be the product of clever deceivers.
The same is true of all faiths.
What does one do?
I am just speaking on my struggles with faith in religion.
I think some of the answers were less than helpful here, unfortunately
.
In all seriousness, from an epistemological point of view, creating a conspiracy on the scale of the Catholic Church would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Moreover, it is a deception that is difficult to explain based on human motives. Let us assume for the sake of argument that the first Christians got together and conspired to form a “church” that professed the “resurrection” of a certain “Jesus Christ.”
There would be an awful lot to fabricate: stories about Jesus’ birth and death (even supposing he was really crucified), stories about miracles (including some rather public ones), some rather unique and controversial sayings. Jesus’ story is quite different from that of mythical heroes in ancient times. (Compare Jesus with Aeneas, Achilles, or Odysseus, or even with real-life figures such as Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, or the Old-Testament priests, kings, and prophets, and you will see that fabricating Jesus’ life story would be a considerable challenge.)
Then again, it would be difficult to explain the steadfastness of the first disciples in the face of persecution. Why would they suffer prison, torture, and death for the sake of a fable that they had invented? Even if they didn’t admit that they made it up, it would have been much more sensible to keep silent as much as possible.
So, I think that a
deliberate concoction of the Church can reasonably be discarded. However, the theory that the Church is a
delusion fares little better: the closest thing in history to a delusion of this kind is the formulation of the great pagan religions. On the other hand, those religions differ from Christianity in several respects.
First of all, the pagan religions (as well as Judaism) took hundreds, if not thousands, of years to develop, and their development was “organic:” the later forms can easily be traced as gradual developments of earlier ones. Christianity, on the other hand, emerged in more or less its present form in about a generation. (St. Ignatius of Antioch clearly attests to a threefold hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons as early as the beginning of the 2nd Century A.D., and there are hints even in St. Paul’s writings that this hierarchy is beginning to form already in 50 A.D.)
Second, Christianity has a remarkable unity of doctrine and practice (a characteristic it shares with Judaism and Islam), even today despite the sad divisions among Christians. Each city in the ancient world had its own pantheon, and there was very little attempt to unify them, at least not until Christianity became a threat to paganism. On the other hand, the monotheistic traditions have always been very emphatic in retaining the essence of their beliefs.
(The doctrinal unity of Christianity is probably more pronounced than that of Judaism and Islam, especially on certain essential points of doctrine, such as those regarding the Trinity and the Incarnation. Even if we look at some of the sadder aspects of our history—the Arian controversy, for example—it is remarkable that people would be willing to fight and even die for the sake of a doctrinal question; that was unheard of in the ancient pagan world.)
So if Christianity is a delusion, it would be remarkable for its coherence and the speed with which it came to be. I think, therefore, that the possibility of a “Christian delusion” can also be reasonably discarded.
What we are left with, reasonably speaking, is that there is at least some degree of truth at the basis of Christianity. Exactly what that is and how reliable it is, is another question, which probably cannot be completely answered outside the context of faith.
They inspired me so much…so I recommend that you look at the best models of the Catholic faith and learn from them–why they stick with the faith despite the woundedness of the Church. I recommend St. Augustine and St. John Vianney.