My polemic

My thought is that religious institutions are no different from other human institutions: government, science, Hollywood, Microsoft, the Hilton and Bush dynasties, the Soviet Union, and the Hustler Club in my old neighborhood.

That is to say, that all things start out from the ideas of one or a few people, with the most noble of intentions. Then over time, things get popular, leading to bloat, watering-down, and sabotage from within and without due to jealousy and mismanagement and just good ol' entropy.

So "institutions being insane", in my view, boils down to bureaucracy. No institution has ever killed anyone, not directly... individual human behavior is all that really counts. But bureaucratic mechanisms make it easy for people to be lazy and shitty to each other, e.g. the military chain of command.

But Mark's question was "what's the right way to interpret religious teachings" (i.e., the right way to deal with bureaucratic mechanisms). There are basically two, the broad and the narrow. We're all on-board with the broad-minded view of religion.

Remember that video of the religious woman I posted a few months ago? That's the narrow view. And it's impossible to argue for or against that, because as soon as you start to argue, you've missed the point. It's FAITH, pure as the sun.

Science is my faith- it's the path I believe is most right. It's faith, because I gladly gloss over the horrible things done historically by and in the name of science: Hiroshima, eugenics, landmines and lobotomies. Horrible things have been done in the name of god, but what's more likely to kill us? Raw religious fanaticism, or a suitcase nuke?

Religion ain't the problem... I don't think religious views are a good or bad thing either way. The real problem is that people are still animals, deep down, and do all sorts of irrational and stupid things, which can then be rationalized later by saying "You're a jew" or "You're black" or "You made me rape you" or "I'm just crazy." People's brains just ain't right, at a really fundamental level, that just changing some lines of text in a religious book isn't going to fix.

Trying to be communist, or drive a Prius, or alms to the poor also isn't going to fix the main problem, which is: human brains aren't good at large-scale social interaction. In fact, our brains are designed to be quite bad at it. Our brains are built for hate and irrational behavior. (Citations provided upon request.)

To conclude, then, I think it's inconsequential to ask "what's the right way to interpret this text?" Because your intuition will determine your intellectual answer, not the other way around.