MORALS: PERSONAL DENIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL SACRIFICE | nationalsalvation.net
The Medieval Church kept the Bible away from the people. It said that if people read the Bible they would cease to be unquestioning followers of the Church.
The Church was dead right.
One major source of Church revenue was the chantry. A wealthy man could set up as church where a priest would devote his full time to saying masses for the rich man's soul, each of which cut his time in Purgatory. Poor men could only buy cheap indulgences and so had to face God on their own.
No one can be even vaguely familiar with Jesus' words in the New Testament and be less than shocked at the idea that money could buy Heaven.
Chantries existed in Egypt. A man would leave an estate to support a man who would do the spells and chants and other things that would help his soul reach the afterlife. But Amon never said that earthly wealth was a barrier to salvation. Jesus did say it, and he said it repeatedly.
The Church took St. Paul's degenerate Zoroastrianism and became a fan of personal torture. The Church made the questionable advance of using a stake instead of a cross psychologically warping people into doing to themselves what was done to Christ.
The Church punished the bodies of its component people, but it never denied anything to itself as an institution. But only we who understand Wordism that denial of the body does not just mean torturing oneself. An institution is as much a body as a person is.
In fact one of the great inventions of the West was the corporation. There is a lot more to a corporation than just that one cannot lose more than one invests in the corporation.
It would be very hard for us to explain what United States Steel is to any earlier society. US Steel is not the sum of its parts. Millions of people own a piece of US Steel. But they put in money and maybe they vote their shares, and that is it.
A corporation is its employees, it is its executives, it is Board of Directors, all in a different sense. It is hard for us to think otherwise, but it was impossible for earlier societies to think that way.
An institution is as much a part of this earth as a human being is.