Penalties, Penalties, and more Penalties.

Hello, lovely honors friends. Hope your week is going well! I'm trying my best not to freak out about anything, and so far I'm doing okay. 

Anyways, I took a pause from the reading today because of the issue that I simply can and will not stand for any penalties on the people of the church. Now I'm, not saying that church shouldn't be taken as seriously as Calvin does, because the church is very important as a part of the Christian life, but PENALTIES? Especially penalties that go all the way up to PRISON? 

Uh Uh. No No. Bad Juju. 

Calvin for some reason believes that the body of the church should be penalized for not coming to church and that they should be charged with a fine for doing so. Not only that but with each sermon you don't come to you have to pay the same or even more. And the same goes for almost EVERY other offense. No wonder the church was racked up in money and the Pope was stinkin' rich!! The church is literally making everybody broke, and they aren't even including a tithe in all of those fines! Since when was the church given permission by God to charge people of their community to pay money to them and even imprison them. 

This is such an oppressive form of "church", I can't even call it a religion. You cannot force faith on people, and this the ultimate amount of forcing faith on people. The church in Calvin's eyes is acting as a place of strict law and order in the case of Calvin's ideas and is legitimately a dictatorial oligarchy over whatever community that church is in. I can understand imprisonment for certain things, like.. actual crimes..... but this is religion taken way too far, and I can't stand for that. 

The church should not be a place where the people are forced to hear about God and be treated as lowly peasants and experience fines and penalties for ridiculous reasons. The church should be a place of love and grace, and the clergy should treat the laity as fellow children of God, loving their neighbor as themselves. Ulrich was right in one of his theses (much more all of them) when he stated that "Whoever pretends to remit any sin only for the sake of money is the companion of Simon and Balaam, and the real messenger of the devil personified."

Calvin is really wrong and really uptight about how the church should go about treating its people. The church should not be required, as we are people of free will and anyone who is forced into "faith" will not only hate every second of it but will never actually accept faith. I thoroughly disagree with most of Calvin's ideas concerning these matters.

I commented on Moriah's and Kayla's posts.