the opiate of the masses without the masses

It's time for your irregularly scheduled, goodbye I don't love you, church related post. The church is perfect, but the people aren't. So don't worry true believer, be happy (hopelessly devote yourself to a particular form of bureaucracy?). I hear this all the time, but what does it mean?

I don't know.

OK, try again. For the person saying it, it probably means that it's unrealistic to expect people to be perfect no matter how amazing the organization is that they're associated with. Fair call.

But what is an organization without people? If the church is the platonic ideal of a religious institution and it's just the people that contaminate it, what would happen if we took the people out? It would just be an abstract idea, but maybe not even that because no one would be around to think it.

Shouldn't an organization exist to serve the people who are party to it and not the other way around anyway. What is more important the institution or the individual? Either way an institution is nothing without its people. It is its people. You gotta dance with the one you came with.