What do you mean by pure religion?
To me, 'pure religion' is a revering or worshipping of a higher power. Some people have called it an attempt at a connection between us humans and God. That idea sits pretty well with me. Now, I understand that when a large group of people unite in this attempt to connect with something greater, we get sets of procedures, protocols, hierarchies, etc coming into it. This is the nature of humans - to try to control everything in an attempt to defend the ego. (At it's purest, religion seeks to humble the ego.)
And then we get egos saying that 'my attempts to connect with God are better than yours' ( my religion is better than yours), so we get all sorts of fighting, etc. And later on we get non-believers pretending to be believers and hijacking religions for political gain or monetary gain or power. And we get others who are confused about the whole thing and believe that their religion needs to assert itself as the dominant one (or that all the other religions are pretences or even evil.)
So the essence of the original religion gets blurred, distorted, twisted, complicated. That is why religion gets a bad name. But it's all to do with grubby human ego - the very thing that the original religion seeks to address in the first place.
That's my take on religion.
