Dear friends of (any) religious persuasion (or really, anyone who has any ideas or input on this topic)...
Hypothetical situation: Let's say a particular individual ("Bob") gains or is granted the power in your overall religious organization ("church") so that he gets to shape the future of your religion more or less single-handedly. Bob gets to make decisions pertaining to actions against non-believers, what policies the church will follow, who gets appointed to other positions of power within the church, whether or not to start holy wars, etc, etc. Bob is the top-level leader of your religion; the only voice higher than Bob's is the voice of God.
Now let's say Bob is a sneaky bastard who doesn't actually believe in God. He never outright says this to anyone, but neither does he ever promote God to the followers. Bob's personal agenda is not to destroy your religion and turn you all into atheists; in his twisted mind, Bob has decided everyone in your church should just worship
him instead of God since Bob and the other priests (or whomever) are the ones who actually do all the hard work on God's behalf.
So Bob sets out to reform your religion by making changes that shift attention away from God to himself. He doesn't come out and tell people not to believe in God; he makes changes to emphasize what he and the people in the church are doing. Also, in the recent past there was a tragedy which left many people in doubt about their faith and church attendance is way down; a lot of questions have been asked as to why God did not intervene, and Bob is certainly using that to his advantage: instead of there being "no God", Bob promotes "abandonment by God". Apparently God has better things to do than prevent awful things from happening to innocent people, but look! Bob and the church are here to save the day, aren't they just so worthy of your devotion and God isn't! (And, of course, a certain percentage of people will actually go for this.)
So here's the question, since I'm not religious and really know nothing about it. If this was your religion, what specific changes would Bob have to implement to work towards his goal? (Set aside the practicality of it and whether or not you think he would actually succeed.)
Bob already plans to rewrite ("update for the modern age") the religious texts to spin them as the "Word of Bob" rather than the "Word of God" (like a "New" New Testament or something). He also has an eye to squash offshoot sects of the church by getting their leaders to "come back into the fold" and he's slowly but surely having his own picture phased in to replace that of the popular representations of God/Jesus/etc. But what else? What other specific things and activities do religious people such as yourselves do which Bob would have an interest in "reforming"?
This is research, honest. : )
Tags: heart of the empire, writing
Feeling: 
Curious
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