Thought for the day, #2

To invest yourself too much in human institutions is to set yourself up to become enslaved by delusions and ultimately disappointed. In order to maintain your faith, you will be compelled to see things as other than what they really are. Before long, too much of your identity becomes bound up in this institution so that you are essentially a prisoner of it. This can't really serve your spiritual life, because if this institution is large, powerful, and impersonal, as many modern institutions are, its leadership will be rather more concerned with their own power, status, and priveleges. Their petty concerns will stand in stark contrast to your ostensibly noble goals for so unconditionally supporting the institution in question. Such is the way of civilized human life. To deny that is as silly as trying to deny the Laws of Thermodynamics (which, of course, is another crazy thing our societies try to do, something known to those who study peak oil and resource issues).