> Likewise, serving for a reward is better than no service - but it misses the point of actually becoming a happier, more loving person.
My point of contention is the belief that tricking people into doing good as an end that justifies the means is acceptable. I don't believe people should be tricked into doing good. I don't believe they are even doing good when they don't fundamentally understand why they should be doing good. What results from this process is just a bunch of bad and evil people trying to forgive themselves of their sins. They'll invade the religion, corrupt it, and pretty soon over time organized religion will just be filled with these types of people. THAT'S the reason why it's bad to just trick people into doing good. Your religion will just start attracting these false worshippers, and you end up with religions filled with hypocrites. Religion is not objective. It is subjective, so it is very prone to be distorted and bent and shaped to satisfy the needs of both good and evil people. If you start making compromises and just get people who want to "serve for a reward," you'll end up slowly corrupting the religion and letting those evil people infiltrate, shape, and dominate it. This obviously hasn't just started happening, it's been happening over centuries. And yes, there ARE actual good Christians, but it's harder to tell them apart from the corrupted ones. The corrupted ones are the ones the liberals and the atheists hate, because they are at the forefront of intolerance, outdated traditionalism, and hypocrisy. They give the GOOD Christians a bad name. Unfortunately, this easy corruption of religion is fundamental to the way it operates. If you indiscriminately acquire new religion members, your religion is prone to infection, like an open wound. This is why religions who don't go out with a sales force, adding whoever and whenever they can, are less prone to infection and corruption.
This is why religion that lacks a sales team has more credence because honestly, a religion that sells itself is more believable as divine and correct.