Faith vs Religion

Faith Is Not Religion; and Religion Is Not Faith. They are two different things. I hope to flesh out a discussion of this at some point. For now I'll just dump a few thoughts, to be tidied up later.

1 A Bit of a Rant

Religion has a very important role to play, and modern religion is flat out failing to do so. Religions tend to degenerate, starting from wise spiritual people who understand, gradually being supplanted by wannabe wise spiritual people who do a good charismatic job of aping what they heard from the generation before. Eventually, those who understand are weeded out by those charismatic wannabee leaders. Then, if someone who understands turns up, they are at the very least ostracised, if not outright taken out and executed. Jesus said "unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven". I see in this Jesus referring precisely to the problem of religious leadership evolving towards those who charismatically parrot what they heard from the generation before, getting all legalistic with the words of scripture because, in absence of understanding, legalistic interpretations of scripture is all they have. Faced with the Son of God himself, who understood, the leadership of his day did the expected thing and had him executed. Two thousand years later, we haven't learned, for the most part.