Although it would be folly to ignore how theism and its stories can be used to freeze a community's allocation of power and privilege, one wonders whether critics who dwell on this have ever read Amos or Hosea. Then paying particular attention to the fact that its prophetic stories regularly indict individual hubris, cultural rigidity, and oppression, it shows that there is much more to religious fabulation than painting word pictures of "pie in the sky" to encourage the proles to accept their lot without rocking the boat.
Granted, theism often functions in a "preservation" or "repression" mode, but it frequently functions in a "reform" mode too. This can be seen across the array of human institutions.
How can this be? This has been called the "prophetic' tradition.
Most theistic communities feel that since God, by hypothesis, cannot change, truth is absolute. The same phenomenon occurs in secular communities too.
The perpetual theistic struggle between repressors and reformers is apparent not only in history, but across all contemporary cultures. In any case, then, one cannot simply dismiss theism as the opiate of the masses. However, given what humans have discovered historically about the general desirability of checks and balances in the power structure of social organizations, there is also every practical reason to keep the institutional embodiments of these theistic and secular efforts separate, so that each can act as a prophetic voice of reform for the other.
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