But christianity and islam are still the biggest MLM schemes in the world, however they work slightly differently.
Instead of being incentivized to recruit people around you, you are incentivized to create your own recruits by having as many children as possible and it's absolutely expected that you will "recruit" them. Also they love proselytizing (religious education etc) in schools, even though they don't care about doing it to adults. They know children are softer targets, and if they don't convert them before they reach adulthood, they're way less likely to succeed.
Basically it's all about proselytizing to children instead of adults. Get them while they're young!
At the very minimum, you should take a world religion class if you want to be taken seriously???
And your post is for sure a shining example of "intellectualism".
Or just like grouping two beliefs with about half the worlds population together?
Google says there are 2.2 Billion practicing Christians and 1.8 Billion practicing Islam.
How many Billion people are you referring to when you use the word "retarded"?
They are grouped together by size and by the fact they both prey on children as their main recruitment targets
Do you think "christanity and islam" should never be together in a sentence just because they differ in some aspects that are irrelevant to this conversation?
Who were you referencing that's incredibly retarded?
It is not a part of any of your examples.
Anabaptist out of Christian sects had the right idea in my opinion.
NB I hate Google for breaking the above URL but I’m tired of fixing them...
Edit: I thought "bishop" was a specifically catholic title. It appears that some televangelists may have misappropriated not just the faith, but also the title.
Anyway, Catholicism is a lot bigger than the Roman Catholic Church. You have other very explicitly Catholic churches such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, and you also have faiths like Anglicanism, which are a weird hybrid where most (Roman) Catholics would consider them protestant, but they refer to themselves internally as a "Holy Catholic church", they have Bishops too (but no Pope, their spiritual head is for historical reasons the Queen of England) and so on.
The thing about religion is that believers try to recruit others and get their standing from that, whether its the small scale parents recruiting their children and deriving authority over their children from that, or those born again who feel compelled to save others. You can't say the same about politics or academia or country music - its not like everyone who goes to university has an interest in educating the unwashed masses; generally, the incentive for someone with a degree is to wish they were rarer! ;)
For what it's worth, my religious beliefs are shall we say pretty individual. I have no reason to protect, support or defend any other religions. I regard many of them to be pretty appalling in a variety of ways and some of them certainly do engage in aggressive proselytising, deceptive practices and such. But not all of them. In general, specific examples aside, the things I have against them have nothing to do with pyramid selling though and lazy opportunistic slurring like this does nobody any favours.
People who need faith are very similar to people who need a job or an income. They are all suffering. That is the commonality. One way faith spreads, if you are a student of history, is to claim faith is a "shortcut" fix to suffering. But if you know your faith, you know faith is hard work/just like keeping a job or earning a living honestly.
That doesn't stop people from selling a "shortcut". Because selling a shortcut is easy. Neither does it stop people from buying into it.
In a pyramid scheme, the participants are mostly busy recruiting new members, and the tangible benefits of membership are tied to the stream of recruits. Once that stream stops growing, people start dropping out and the same pyramid structure that accelerated the growth also leads to accelerated collapse.
Religions that have endured over generations have a very different balance of promises and recruitments. Instead of large immediate rewards that can't be kept up over the long term, they rely on hopes about the indefinite future (e.g. paradise) or benefits that are proportional to the size of the community, not it's growth over time (e.g. caring for their sick). Religions do rely on missionarizing to grow, but they can remain stable even without growth, and mostly propagate themselves by parents converting their children.
I think that's ignoring many immediate things people get from religion. Immediate sense of belonging, getting to listen to someone who's "got life figured out", getting some motivation, and many other reasons. Whether that's provided by a megachurch, a local friendly priest, an MLM convention with a charismatic speaker, or another way doesn't matter. I met a masonic priest who joined the group because his wife died and he needed people who would take him out for dinner once a week.
I come from a country that's virtually 100% Catholic (or at least was) and don't believe that many people really cared about the final paradise. Or at least that wasn't really the reason they turned up to the church every week.