I'm with you here, Phi. I'll even take it a step farther. I don't think that this complaint only applies to so-called Christianity, but can be extended to anything that calls itself a religion.
(I feel the same way.)
As with anything I post in these forums, I am simply speaking from my own experience; I am not just trying to fling mud or stir up trouble.
(Yeah, I can get in that spot too, with others thinking I'm just being a trouble-maker or jokester: although I do like humor 
)That said, in my own experience
as a seeker, I've become quite jaded towards organized religion of any kind.
(I feel the same way. And I wonder as I look around in some of the sites, if some of the people who are leaving the more traditional religions didn't start looking for the same reasons. But somehow they get started in a "new way" and then find all sorts of "high priests, high priestess, lessons to take, hierarchcy of people telling them what is and is not the proper way to fell and think about...you name it...and I wonder if they don't notice it somehow? I mean it seems so apparent to me...)I was raised Protestant and became disillusioned with that as a teenager, because the people I knew didn't seem to live Christ-like lives. Mostly these were other teenagers who were just being normal teenagers, but I was a sensitive and idealistic kid who thought that if you were going to go to church and worship some guy who espoused a message of love and caring for other people, you should try to live that the rest of the week as well. Anyhow, my next serious encounter with organized religion was with a small, new religious movement (okay,
cult if you like
) that has its roots in Hinduism. This experience was a bit different in that I didn't feel that there was so much hypocrisy
(hypocrisy is the debbill! )--although there was some--as much as the rules and practices were so strict and stifling that to do them as sincerely as possible invariably and repeatedly led me to alienation from the world outside, or the larger experience of life. I may have made quite a bit of spiritual progress (not sure about that, actually), but whatever progress I made was made by sacrificing time and energy that could have spent in many other productive, healthy pursuits--like friendships, relationships, and my own passions and interests. More to the point, I came to the realization that by following that path I was invariably repressing my own personality and aspirations, even the natural unfolding of my life! At any rate, recently I've been doing some research into Buddhism and have been disappointed to find that many of its practitioners are just as dogmatic and caught up in textual scriptures or someone else's experiences as anything else I've seen.
(I know, there's always a leader and I guess that's necessary, but after that there's a teacher of the leader, and a high priest/ess of the leader, and another text to explain the leader, and disciples of the leader who said this about the leader or that about the leader, until soon you're all caught up in the leader instead of the message!) Which is not to say that there are not genuine, wise, caring, authentically spiritual people in any of the above-mentioned traditions, or in all other traditions for that matter. But I think that those people owe their genuine spirtuality not so much to their religion as to spontaneous spiritual experience--whatever label one may want to put on that type of thing (enlightenment, grace, realization, getting saved, etc. ad naseum
).(I had never heard it expressed as ad nauseum before, is that from a new cult practice? )
Man, I am afraid I am coming off as a crotchety, bitter anti-religious guy lately. I'm not really crotchety or bitter, but I do find myself in a place where it is hard to stomach religion and so called spiritual teachings that point to something other than the present moment.
(For me that's important and astute. In my seeking the most important thing I have found is that now, each moment, I can feel a connection to the Originator of All Things without having to follow an orthodoxy at all. I do get lonely sometimes for other persons that might share my path, but I realize that if others began to share, soon we'd have to get the path organized, make some rules, teach new joiners what we're about...and that would be...organized religion! )
