Why has religion become an exploitative business in the name of God?

Because of some unscrupulous people who have exploited the religious sentiments of the general public.

Religion is like a medicine meant to cure us spiritually. Just as the field of medicine can become a breeding ground for quacks or false doctors who are unqualified and who can’t cure patients, the field of religion can become the breeding ground for godmen who are not spiritually qualified and who can’t help people spiritually.

In fact, religion can be much more easily exploited because most people don’t even know what the purpose of religion is. They often treat as a holy person anyone who wears a sacred-seeming dress, utters some ancient-seeming hymns or does some wise-sounding wordplay.

Seeing this naiveté and gullibility of the people, many unscrupulous people enter into the field of religion and become self-styled godmen. And if these godmen happen to have some charisma and some sleight of hand to perform ‘miracles’, then they become anointed as incarnations of God. They invent some rituals for their own worship and fleece their doting worshipers of hard-earned money.

These godmen are not interested in loving God or in helping others to love God. They love only their own bellies and bank accounts and egos. Such people have perverted much of what goes on in the name of religion into an exploitative business in the name of God.

Nonetheless, there are still those who practice religion for the sake of loving God. By proper education, we can learn to identify those sincere religionists and with their association develop love for God.