[WanderingKnight]

If you are talking about the organizations that collect taxes and declare that their followers must go on crusades (which would be the Church in the Dark Age), then I agree with you.

It's not only Christianity. Think primitive. Picture an archetypal ancient tribe. Who were the ones that held power over their peers, other than the chieftains? That's right, the elders, who acted as the religious leaders. They held "knowledge" that the rest didn't have. And that "knowledge" is what they used to hold their position of inequality.

I'm not saying they were intentionally doing so in order to take advantage of others, but that's what, objectively speaking, it boiled down to.

However, I think that "religion" is a loaded word, and if you use the above definition as a blanket term, there will be problems.

Indeed, it's a loaded term, especially when people start equating irrational beliefs to religion (which is what I see a lot of people are doing in this thread, and everywhere else). Everyone has irrational beliefs--that's something we can't avoid until we somehow evolve into a more advanced species. Not everyone has a religion.

Religion is, by definition, an organized set of irrational beliefs constituted by consensus of a number of people. And as soon as this consensus is formed, as with every organized corps in the history of humanity, a division is born between "the organizers" and "the rest", who follow the formers' directives. A single person believing the sun is a god does not make it a religion, especially when it lacks legitimacy with his or her peers. But take a sizable number of people within any given society, preferably the majority, who believe that--inherently, some sort of organization within such a group of people must be born, because it's necessary to maintain such a belief consistent amongst each individual person. And as soon as such an organization is born the religion is finally constituted, and a sector of the believing population find themselves with power over their peers, because they are the ones who determine the "truth", since they're the ones responsible for keeping the religion consistent.

It's not much more complex than that. It's hard to picture it with modern religions, since they've been around for a long time and they're way too ingrained in our minds, but really, that's all it boils down to. The problem is, having an irrational belief (or set of beliefs) does not make you religious. Those beliefs must be shared, by consensus, amongst a number of people--and that's where the sticky part begins, as I mentioned before.