Which brings us to a longstanding personal grudge of mine, organized religion.

While I’m entirely convinced that my dad, who describes himself only half-jokingly as a “recovered Catholic”, sent me to the same Catholic school he attended because he wanted me to suffer through the same masses he had to, I’ve had to spend a lot more time and energy confronting the half-baked ideas of people who think they’re headed to some sort of afterlife than my fifth grade self intended to.

In the interim since graduating high school I’ve studied numerous other faiths in various capacities, and have largely found myself landing on the same conclusion as Hyde from That 70s Show that, “Although I respect the Judeo-Christian ethic, as well as the Eastern philosophies, and of course the teachings of Muhammad, I find that organized religion has corrupted those beliefs to justify countless atrocities throughout the ages. Were I to go to church, I’d be a hypocrite.”

I do concede that even though I tend toward the belief that humans ultimately control our own destiny and consciousness is merely the happy accident of a lot of neurons and synapses all firing off on a consistent basis, I get that the idea of there being nothing more to our human experience than life here on Earth can be a little too much for some people.

I also concede the floating teapot argument — the idea that you could argue to me right now that there is a tiny floating teapot somewhere in space, orbiting the Earth right now. You may have no proof of this teapot whatsoever beyond your own uneducated speculation, yet if you claim that this teapot cannot be monitored by any satellite that currently exists and you know beyond a doubt it’s there, I can’t exactly prove you wrong.

The same logic applies to rationally arguing the existence of any god. Sure, people can speculate on whatever they want and can never be proven wrong, but that’s a questionable assignment of the burden of proof. Plus, in that case, the flying spaghetti monster is just as real as any other god.

Ultimately, I get why people want to believe in something more. Life is scary, it’s brutal, it’s really bleak if we can’t rationalize everything somehow — religion is a natural human response to the overwhelming existential uncertainty inherent in our very existence and psychological composition.

The thing is, I also empathize with these people. While they may never realize it and might be offended at the very suggestion, the people buying into organized religion are just like little fifth-grade me, buying into a promise of something that’s way too good to be true.

They needed to hear my dad’s advice on bullshit detection before somebody indoctrinated them to believe that they needed to repent for their sins, study scripture, and echo the dead dogma of so-called holy men in robes who claim license to the voice of their creator.

The real crux of the problem is that promising an afterlife is a lot different than promising to boost someone’s skill level in Runescape. I was forced to confront the reality of the lie I’d believed in head-on, but Catholic people won’t exactly get to lodge a complaint at the Vatican if they die and there turns out to be no heaven, Mormons won’t get to complain about wearing that special underwear for nothing, and ISIS suicide bombers will never get the chance to turn their weapons on their commanders for lying to them about the virgins they’ll encounter in paradise.

The point is, these institutions prey on people. They demand their time, devotion, and money. Yet their promises are predicated on faulty teapot logic that is simply perpetuated indefinitely, believed to be true by people who take other people at their word merely because they don’t have any reason not to.

In reality of course there are plenty of reasons to believe that organized religious institutions are nothing special and serve no higher purpose. More than anything, they’re designed by people to serve the will of people, with the very human purposes of consolidating wealth, power, and spreading an ideology so that more people continue to buy into it.

The crucial distinction is that while they espouse some sort of moral code, in practice these institutions are self-serving above all else, at the cost of contradicting whatever dead dogma they preach to their adherents.

For example, let’s take a particular heavyweight, the Catholic Church. In 2012 the Economist estimated that they have a national operation budget of around $170 billion in the U.S. alone.

That’s a lot of tax-exempt money, and you might be wondering where most of it goes. Here’s a rough breakdown: $98.6 billion to health care, $48.8 billion to education, $11 billion to parishes, $4.7 billion to charities, and $8.5 billion to other subsidiary organizations.

Now you might be wondering, so what? Who cares if the Catholic Church runs a bunch of schools and hospitals and spends the rest on churches and other miscellaneous expenses, that sounds like exactly what they would and should do with their money, it hardly means they’re corrupt and self-serving.

That may seem true on the surface, but it’s worth noting that Catholic owned hospitals have been found to repeatedly violate the law by refusing to provide emergency medical care for women suffering miscarriages — in one egregious case even ‘discharging’ a woman to the parking lot so that she could be taken to a different hospital to receive care, where she needed seven pints of blood and emergency surgery.

Additionally, some of that subsidiary money has gone toward political spending — for example 60% of all anti-marriage equality campaigns in the four states where legalizing same-sex marriage was on the ballot in 2012 came from the Church.

But then again, aren’t these really only problems for people who aren’t Catholic?

After all nobody is forcing people having miscarriages to go to Catholic hospitals, they can just go somewhere else (although 1 in 6 hospital beds in the U.S. are at Catholic hospitals). At least it makes sense that the Church would campaign against same-sex marriage, it’s a crucial part of their moral ideology that marriage (and sex, of course) is a sacrament to be shared between only one man and one woman.

I learned that the hard way when I, a sophomore in high school at the time of the 2012 election, engaged in a little bit of the gay-marriage debate with my religion teacher. After we went in circles a couple of times, she grew frustrated and exclaimed “So do you think a man should be allowed to marry a sheep?”

Even fifteen-year-old me knew not to say anything to that one, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a class go collectively silent so quickly. But that’s the Catholic ideology, who cares if there were LGBT kids in that room who felt dehumanized by the comment — that’s just what they believe, right? My grandpa once said, “opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one.”

This is where it gets sort of awkward. Remember that “self interest of corrupt institution trumps espoused moral code” idea? That’s the only context in which one can really reconcile the moral superiority the Catholic Church’s attempts to claim on family issues with the fact that they spent millions opposing legislation intended to provide accountability for victims of sex abuse.

“During this same time period, bishops’ conferences spent millions on lobbyists in states where the church is actively opposing similar legislative proposals. Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey spent more than $5.2m, $1.5m and $435,000 respectively on top lobbyists in the state capitols. Opposition efforts ultimately thwarted statute of limitations reform efforts in those states.” — The Guardian

The same Catholic Church that spent millions opposing same-sex marriage also spent millions to defend Priests who sexually abused children.

The legislation that Church money lobbied against would have extended statutes of limitations for child sex abuse cases or temporary civil windows for victims whose opportunity for a criminal case has passed — one of which was even authored by a state legislator who was abused by a Priest as a child.

Their rationale is pretty simple if you think about the Church as a self-serving institution run by men to serve the wills of men — they figured a few million was a worthy investment against both the financial and public relations fallout of having to settle for exorbitant sums in countless new sex abuse cases, and they won. Hopefully their savings go towards a good cause.

Granted, the next point to be made is that the Church is an ancient institution and ancient institutions change slowly. Not only that, but they’re in the process of changing — they knew they had a problem, that’s why they elected the Bernie Sanders of Popes.

Don’t get me wrong, Pope Francis seems like a genuinely selfless human being who believes every word he preaches and lives an exceptional life. He’s washed the feet of Muslim refugees, at least spoken out against the discrimination of LGBT people, and ditched the bulletproof Popemobile because “at my age I don’t have much to lose”.

The only problem is that while Francis sure did come into office ready for a revolution from within, he ran head-first into a brick wall of bureaucracy.

Just over a month ago, the last remaining sex abuse victim the commission established by the Pope to tackle the problem of abuse of minors quit and claimed that the Vatican was “stonewalling” the commission.

Marie Collins, who was abused by a Priest at age 13, said she believes Francis is “sincere” but that “resistance by some members of the Vatican Curia has been shameful.”

The only other sex abuse victim on the panel was kicked off last year for complaining about the slow pace of change and refusal to intervene in individual cases.

So really, I should have answered my teacher’s question about whether a man should be allowed to marry a sheep with another question –

Does your god say that only a man and woman engaged in the sacrament of marriage can have sex, or does he also make room for priests to molest kids as well?

Because the Church makes room for it in their budget.