Is Religion a Hospital for Sinners?

Religion when shown how many do harm in it and even because of it responds that it is not a haven for saints but a hospital for bad people or as Christians say, sinners.  Religion has no right to say such a thing.  Only the evidence has the right to speak on this subject.  It is too serious for turning into a buzzword.  It is a boast and totally inappropriate while victims of the members of the religion languish.

The Church is inclusive of sinners for it sees itself as a hospital for sinners. It is not doctrinally inclusive. The creed is intended to include those who accept it and exclude those who do not.  So the hospital is not for you if you have the sin of heresy.

Being a hospital for sinners is hardly anything to crow about if the wards are ridden with MRSA.

And it implies there is no welcome for people who see themselves as great humanitarians and who put in the hard work.

Sin is a choice or it is not sin but illness.  If people choose to be sick then the hospital they go to is not a hospital but a contraption. It is for attention seekers.
 
If the best religion is a hospital for sinners and that is what religion is for then any religion that is not a hospital is not a religion and is just bad. The hospital for sinners doctrine implies that other religions to varying degrees are havens for sinners.

Sin is not truly the problem. Morality is difficult to work out and we are weak so the real problem is ignorance and take suicide. Morally condemning it is useless for it's a healthcare issue. Suicide is such a huge matter that anything that can't spiritually do anything about it is not worth talking about.
 
A hospital is for sickness not health. In other words, it invites you in when you are sick not when you are well. In an evil world, dealing with evil has to be done first before you think about being positive and doing good. The same with the hospital. The sickness is there to be fought and then you can worry about the health. The hospital’s essential praiseworthiness is about how it destroys sickness as opposed to making people healthier. The religions essential praiseworthiness should be about how it deals with evil as opposed to getting them to do good works. Thus claiming that all are sinners and that it is a hospital is just proof that the religion is a total failure. 
 
Some religions present themselves as hospitals for sinners.  Others claim to be for the spiritually or medically insane.  Take Hinduism.   It presents itself as a hospital for the ignorant and insane who think this world and life are real and who need enlightenment so that they see not if it is true. The leaders are nurses and the people are nursing assistants. The bad care then is malpractice. The basic value of medicine and the concept of hospital is unaffected by how many are lazy or useless or misleading. Something good remains good if abused for it is abused only because it is good. Notice how this argument attacks religions such as Buddhism which are about enlightenment not moral problems. Should religion be defined as a hospital for those who do things against God? No - any entity can say the same thing. It is not up to the religion to say it but the evidence. Thus making the claim is intrinsically dishonest. A hospital is not made by proclamation but by evidence and proof.
 
If religion gives solutions to sinfulness and the human weaknesses that harm people that are not God’s solutions then the religion is abetting sin and taking advantage of sinners. It thrives on sin. In a sense sinners are vulnerable and need special attention simply because their works produce so much direct and indirect harm - for example, thieves give old people many a sleepless night without even realising it.
 
The Church teaches that it contains sinners but is without sin. That looks like something very profound obtuse or contradictory.

Implications: It may say without sin but seems to mean more than that. It has to. What use is just lacking sin or badness? You need to be actively good as well. People who do no harm may do nothing for others so what use is that? They are just selfish or lazy. If all the Church cares about is being without sin or if that is what is most important to it then it is not truly good at all.

So if nobody in the Church lifts a finger to help another it is still claiming to be good. It is like how it is good that there is something that is there to help even if it does not. So the Church is still claiming to be good if nobody lifts a finger for anybody.

To say an organisation does good even if no members do it is insane. In fact it is not the religion but the people in it that do any good which is why religion as religion should get no special regard..

A religion that produces people, even some, that do harm in the name of the faith or lead people astray, can claim to be a hospital for sinners. Regardless of how much harm the followers do the religion can claim to be a hospital for sinners and blame the failure of the "treatment" on the non-co-operation of the patients. It makes as much sense as running a cancer clinic in which nobody gets better and the patients are said to be not responding to treatment for they secretly don't want to get better.

Christianity is said to have done some good. In the light that we should always take the most charitable interpretation of a person, we must believe that the goodness of a Christian is coming from her as a person and not from her as a Christian. That way we give glory to her human nature. As she is human, we can be like her for we are human too. It is not only fair to say her goodness is hers and not from religion but also inspiring and helpful.
 
The notion of religion being a hospital insults the good people. It is nonsense for goodness is human not divine.

What if we see nothing special about religious people in a religion? The religion will say, "You may not see the benefits for God may be working mysteriously in the flock. The flock must try to avoid displaying its holiness too much". This teaching prevents religion's claims to heal vice from being put to the test. If religion is lying it has to protect its lies from exposure. It prevents anybody looking for evidence that the religion or God helps people more than anything else can. There is no point if God has mysterious ways! Religion likes to say that if things are not perfect they would be worse without its spiritual input and influence! But that is only a judgemental guess! It cannot know that. And all religions say the same thing despite having huge ethical and spiritual disagreement! Religion is like a con artist that sells you an intangible and invisible washing machine. It protects its lies from refutation. But doing that does not make it convincing so any spiritual benefits that seem to arise from it easily evaporate.
 
You would need to be very sure that the religion is true and believable and sensible before you can teach ideas that cannot be tested. It is only fair to the people and to society. You cannot take away the reality check from people lightly. Man doing this would be terrible and vile. Only a God could have the right to do it. Religion is not a hospital for rational heads so how can it heal sinful hearts?
 
Religion often says that God's grace enables and empowers our capacity to think and love and work. Thus it claims to be rational though supplemented by faith for reason cannot tell you everything and mostly only good for spotting contradictions. Nobody has the right however to claim to be rational. What they do is spell out what they think or believe or know and the case in its favour and answer the case against it. Rationality is not an adjective but a verb. Actions speak. You live out your rationality rather than proclaim it.
 
People say, "My religion is a hospital for sinners. I am in this religion for it encourages me to do better and forgives my sins." If you are like everybody else and commit the same wrongs over and over again and have a pattern created where you do harm and repent and do it again and repent ad infinitum then you are not in a very good hospital.
 
We are told we must not judge a person to be bad or doing bad if there is a chance they could be well-meaning. If we see nothing special about the lives of Catholics for example despite the Church's claim to be a hospital for sinners then should we judge Catholics or the Jesus who is supposedly transforming them into goodness itself? The Church lies that it is a hospital for it has no regime for helping sinners and does not care to check if any of its sacraments or prayers really have an effect that cannot be explained by purely natural processes. The Church does not like to encourage you to judge for then you will see exactly how useless its solutions for the problem of human malice and duplicity are.
 
A hospital that claims supernatural support but which proves no different from anything else based around mundane therapy and healing has no supernatural support at all. It is a con not a hospital. In fact it is a wonder the "hospital" which is based on lies and fabricated cures isn't making people worse. Who knows? When it is crafty it could be good at hiding that it does make people more sneaky.
 
Blaming the bad people who do evil in the name of God, religion or faith is wrong. It is stupid to say that religion is never to blame. To say of a bad religion, "The x religion is accused of sectarian violence and child abuse and pious fraud and many things. The religion or religious system is not to blame for these terrible deeds. It is the people in the religion that must be condemned, not the religion." That is really to say that religion or a particular religion is good regardless of what damage belief in it does or leads to or how ineffective it is at being a hospital for sinners. It is to say that this religion if not all religion is good no matter what it does or says. It is to say that you will not look to see if the religion itself is the problem or a problem. That makes you part of the problem!
 
Every religion at least implicitly has to claim to be supportive of or a hospital or therapy for making people live better lives. A man-made religion is not guaranteed success if it claims to be a hospital for sinners. It is just boasting that it can change people when it cannot. People have to change themselves. If religion helps make you good, the better person is the one who becomes good without it. Moreover, religion will refuse to take any blame if members become extremists. It says its job is to help people to become good not bad. That is no excuse and the religion is a disgrace for making that excuse.
 
When a religion claims to have magical or sacramental powers when it actually does not have them it can and indeed should lead to trouble. It is not helping at best and at worst it is doing harm. It needs to be kept in line and great caution exercised. Children should not be indoctrinated into it. They should not be encouraged to join or remain in it. People seem to think it is okay for their children to be "harmlessly" manipulated by religion if the religion is simply man-made and deluded about its divinely inspired provenance.
 
Any religion can make the hospital excuse. We know some religions that purport to be hospitals are more harmful than others. And a real hospital uses hard facts to show that its treatments work. It prefers to give the case against its effectiveness than the case for its effectiveness because that makes it become a transparent, honest, scientific and truly caring hospital. It is through facing up to errors that it improves. Religion does none of this.

All the hospitals for sinners get sinners to testify about what is good in them and they attribute this to the religion. Nobody cares that some drug addicts sometimes just stop taking drugs when some former addict comes along and says, "I was a drug addict until Jesus changed me and healed me." Stopping drugs after turning to Jesus does not prove that Jesus had anything to do with it. A coin is tossed and comes up heads. Thinking the coin will be heads does not mean you have caused it to become heads. The hospitals never mention the people who prayed for healing and never got it. Those who speak of the power of the hospital to heal their hearts do not mention the bad things they still do. The religion hospital uses manipulation to look effective.
 
An evil person is hardly in the same league as a sick person. Evil only resembles a sickness in some ways but it is not a sickness. We don't call it evil for nothing. Religion insults the victims of evil people by treating those monsters as patients.
 
A man-made religion cannot expect people to consider it to be a hospital for sinners. It is only as good or as bad as the ideas it has and the methods it uses. Priests like to think that they are doing the ultimate good works by providing sacraments, with their alleged power to change black hearts, to the people. The Church explicitly teaches that you need God more than bread so it is better if there is a choice to send for a priest for a dying person rather than an ambulance. Hypocrites like to feel they are good people - the ultimate hypocrite performs superstitious rituals in order to convince herself or himself that she does the greatest work of all. It is their substitute for doing real good.
 
A huge part of the "treatment" religion gives is based on the notion that it gives you answers to, "Life! What's it all about?" This is nearly always answered in a narcissistic way - "It is about God's plan to make me happy." When a believer won't change her mind when proven wrong in her doctrines clearly she has some kind of obsessive compulsion in which narcissism plays a role. Religion if it is a hospital gives a cure that is worse than or as bad as the disease. Or it gives a cure that has a price down the line. 
 
Believers often complain that they cannot love some sinners and hate the sins. They are told to work on it with the help of faith in the religion, prayers and sacraments. But if these things do not have any magical power to heal then the religion is to blame if the believers start to hate some sinners so much that they murder them. To have people depending on ineffective treatments is cruel and irresponsible.
 
Religion's pretence that it is concerned about educating sinners and healing them is easily exposed as fraud. It does its healing in the light of the doctrine that, "We are all sinners and thus nobody can criticise anybody for sinning for they do it themselves." The doctrine can be phrased as, "We are all sinners. The only difference between you and me is the sins we choose to commit." Religion cannot know if all people are sinners specifically when many people could be weak rather than sinful. So religion is being judgemental and hypocritical. Also, the "we are all sinners" doctrine anaesthetises believers. It stops them seeing or caring that their religion has no special power to make especially good people. People like to think that if they do bad then they are not the only ones.
 
Even if the religion is from God, it is irresponsible and insulting to make the "We are a hospital for sinners" claim without proving it. A religion showing its power to heal has to be an actions job not a words job. Actions speak and words do not in this case.

The goodness and badness in Christianity is just what you would expect from something that wasn't really getting any grace from God. And we must remember that though it is true that an organisation cannot be blamed for everything its members do, it can if it offers grace to help when there is no grace. The harm done by members raises the question if the organisations existence is justified. The organisation claims its existence is justified despite the harm because it is a hospital for evildoers.

If a religion claims to be God's only authorised hospital for sinners and the people are no better or wiser than heathens, or if they are worse, then there is no justification for it continuing to exist - meaning members must leave it.

There is no justification for the continued existence of Christianity.
 
FINALLY
 
Treatment is all about trial and error. If religion is a hospital for sinners and treats sin and sinfulness (the latter is the love of sin and in a sense is worse than sin for it alone paves the way for it) then the failures not the successes speak loudest. [And especially if moral evil is a bigger evil than sickness and when moral evil is behind a lot of sickness - eg how the rich don't do much for the poor.] Medicine has to care more about failures too. If you get medicine that is not very good it is only because medicine has no choice but to use it. But religion is a choice or should be and if it is not then you should get out. What if you had to pick one of the following: “Concentrate on religion as a hospital but only in regard to failed treatments” or“concentrate on it as a hospital but only in regard to successful treatment”? The first is the one to choose for it is the best test. Failed treatments are more telling than successes for it is more important that you get no worse than that you get better.