I think Dostoevsky is saying that we must never confuse faith with religion. We must never confuse the institutions that have arisen, these man-made institutions—and I mean that quite literally, because they’re all run by men—who have created languages to help people understand faith, with faith itself. I, as a person of faith, read the same story and did not see it as a repudiation of faith the way a lot of atheists do. I saw it as a challenge to always remember that those who claim to speak for Jesus are precisely the kind of people that Jesus fought against. What I love about the Grand Inquisitor parable—and a parable is truly what it is—is this notion that if Jesus showed up, all of a sudden, today, he would not only bear very little resemblance to who the Church says he is, his primary focus would be on challenging the very religious institutions who claim to speak for him.

I first read this book when I was a Christian: a firm, devout follower of Jesus. Someone whose impression of Jesus was wholly a result of what the church told me he was. When I read The Brothers Karamazov, and particularly this section, my eyes were opened to the notion that the Church’s conception of Jesus is inextricable from the Church’s political, religious, and economic interests—that their Jesus may not be who Jesus actually was. This rocked my world, even back then. I could sense that I was never going to be the same.

This realization instilled in me, first and foremost, a deep sense of anti-institutionalism. I have always been distrustful of institutions—particularly religious institutions, but also political institutions. Essentially, anyone who presents themselves as a gatekeeper to truth, or a gatekeeper to salvation, I am distrustful of by definition—regardless of anything that they are saying or doing. In a sense, that’s the impression I have of the historical Jesus as well—I see him as a man who challenged political authorities for no other reason except that they had set themselves up as authorities, over and above anything good or bad that they were doing. Just the notion that they were in this position of power was enough for them to be challenged, to be questioned.

This is one reason why I am not interested in any church, mosque, synagogue—any kind of organization. Because I have no interest in subsuming my beliefs and practices into what a group of men somewhere have decided I’m supposed to believe. The great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart once said “if you focus too narrowly on a single path to God, all you will ever find is the path.” I take that to heart.

I also feel that the mistakes of institutions have no bearing on the value of the faith. To me, the most unsophisticated attack on religious faith is to say that religion has been responsible for great evil in the world. Well, of course it has. It’s a man-made thing, and human beings are prone to evil acts. But to blame religion for bad things done in the name of religion is akin to blaming nationalism for fascism. Any ideology is prone to be used for good and bad, and rather than focusing on judging the actions of those performing these deeds in the name of the ideology—we, in a knee-jerk way, focus on the ideology itself.