What stood out to me in my latest reading of Miracle in the Early Christian World was something that Howard Clark Kee says on page 140:
"However
gracious and beneficent Isis may have been, formal entrance into the
ranks of her cult devotees was on a cash-in-advance basis only. There
were no social or economic restrictions on participation in the cult, as
is evident in the remark made in passing that the crowd in the
procession on the occasion of Lucius's transformation consisted of
'throngs of those initiated into the divine mysteries, men and women of
every rank' (11.10). At the conclusion of the Ploiaphesia and the summoning of the conclave of the pastophoroi,
prayers were delivered from a liturgical book 'for the prosperity of
our great emperor, the senate, the knights and the whole Roman people'
(11.17)----scarcely what might be termed a subversive agenda. The book
ends with the testimony that the man who had to sell his clothes in
order to pay his initiation fee to the cult of Osiris began to enjoy
life in two ways: 'I was illumined with the nocturnal ecstasies of the
supreme god,' and he began to prosper as a result of his substantial
income as an advocate (11.28). It is not at all surprising that details
of Lucius's experience----including the brush with death and the
passage through the elements (11.23)----should reappear in a modern
middle-class movement such as Freemasonry."
What I like about the
religions within the Bible and based upon the Bible is that they
democratize access to the divine: one does not have to pay money to
experience God, for God regards even a poor person who needs God's
help. At the same time, there is a notion in the Hebrew Bible that
people can make vows as a way to get God to help them, and that they
repay those vows (often an animal) when God answers their prayers or
delivers them. Does that concept imply that people need to pay God to
receive God's help? Or is the purpose of that concept simply to give
people a way to say "thank you"?