Giving up hope on organized religion?

In general, people are wary about organized religion. They approach institutionalized religion with skepticism and doubt. In my personal experience, most of them have negative emotions towards God because of organized religion. When probed deeper, these people cite religious wars, internal conflicts, politics, bigotry, commercialism etc as reasons to reject organized religion. These are indeed valid reasons but the question that comes to my mind is we have these issues in pretty much all fields from sports, entertainment, politics, educational institutions to professional careers. Perhaps the scale and intensity  might not be the same but pretty much every field controlled by man is filled with politics, wars, conflicts, and bigotry.

In sports, we can find mass rigging, illegal doping, corruption, and other scandalous affairs that question the basic ethics of sportsmanship. Yet sports is the biggest crowd pleaser crossing all modern day barriers. We can encounter similar issues in educational settings where one has to deal with student favoritism, partial research or funding based curriculum etc. The very idea of learning has to be open and unbiased but today we have so much political agenda within educational institutions that the idea of unbiased education has to be questioned. I have had many experiences over the years where teachers or professors show favoritism to few students and change the entire academic interests of others. Yet I do not find people not going to school or against educational institutions because of its imperfections. In the political arena, there have been many wars in the past between countries for natural resources or political ideologies where millions of people have been killed, but how many of us give up on organized Government? A significant portion of our tax dollars go to Defense and because of these dollars, countries are able to wage wars with each other and kill millions. I do not find people quitting to pay tax to the Government because the Defense is going to war?

Therefore, there is bigotry, war, fighting, crime, corruption, politics pretty much in every sphere of organized and man made service delivery system be it social service, or military service or religious service etc. Why single out religion? While I agree 99.9% of 21st century religion has become corrupt, still I believe there is a 0.1% chance to still find the essence of the truth - a truth that can change our lives for now and for ever. As long as that very small window of opportunity exists, it is the duty of every intelligent human being to seek the truth beyond mundane causes. Finding fault with an imperfect religious society is scarcely a reason to search for the truth. Who ever finds such faults with the imperfections of mainstream religion are cheating themselves and who ever are following mainstream religion without due process and deliberation are cheating others.

If people can accept other forms of fallible man made institutions, then one should also deliberate on God with the help of religious institutions even though fallible.

Hare Krishna.