IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
One has only to look at the traditional Quakers to see how a group functions without clergy. On the one hand, certain power abuses don't take place.Hi everyone!
As a follow up to my previous thread I created this one because I think they are very closely connected, we each have been given eyes to see for ourselves and a mind to think with for ourselves so why do we need clergy?
Haven’t we arrived at a place in history with the internet where we can investigate truth for ourselves?
As opposed to Prophets, clergy have not been given any special powers by religious scriptures so why do people follow them and what if the world were free from clergy and we each independently investigated truth with our own minds?
What do you think the world would look like without clergy?
However, the kind of specialized knowledge that come from focused study over long periods of time doesn't exist. The average Quaker doesn't have the specialized knowledge of a scholar the way someone who has gone to seminary, or a yeshiva, or whatever your own higher institution is called, has. Questions arise, and the quality of the answers given is simply poorer. The idea that "the holy spirit will give all the wisdom a person needs" is simply preposterous. If a person doesn't know the needed facts, they aren't going to miraculously be given those facts by the holy spirit.
Remember also that the clergy are able to bring children into the covenant (whether it is baptism, circumcision, or whatever your faith does), passage into adulthood (bar mitzvah, confirmation, protestant baptism, etc.) marriage, visiting the sick and dying, and helping the mourning with a funeral for all the members of their congregations only because they don't have time competitions from another job.