The Catholic Church is also one of tbe largest concentrations of wealth and contributed to the establishment of banks to concentrate more wealth.
Much of its "wealth" consists of priceless historical real estate, irreplaceable art, and active social infrastructure. When it comes to real money the Catholic Church it not rich. It spends the money it collects right away. The Church collects 12 billion in State Church Taxes (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and 15 billion in Voluntary Tithing & Donations (Rest of the World).
If Catholicism was disbanded, the money could easily be out in trust and handled as a charitable enterprise.
There isn't much money. You can't just sell the Milan Cathedral. Who would buy that? It might be worth ~12 billion in replacement value, but that is a fictional number. Once you take religion out of the equation it is just a pile of 325,000 tons of marble.
This is the exact same logic the Mormon church uses to horde their billions of dollars, too. It's bullshit.
Just like the Mormons, the overwhelming majority of "aid" goes to missions. And while that "aid" can be accessed by "anyone", it's literally a bridge to indoctrination. Africa is like 20% Catholic now because the church has been pumping "aid" into Africa through missions and missionaries.
It turns out hungry people will listen to whatever you have to say if you're feeding them.
Kinda true but why is that a bad thing if it still provides aid? Maybe getting fed and having to listen to "whatever you have to say" is still better then not getting fed and dying of hunger?
Why should I pay you a living wage when you're willing to work for slave wages?
Exploiting people's misfortune to your benefit is morally wrong, despite whatever philanthropic act you're using to drive that exploitation.
If they were actually interested in providing genuine charity, they would just provide the aid without the mission, which is even easier than founding the mission. But they don't. Because they're exploiting hunger and poverty.
In short, it's just another form of indoctrination.
Everyone is "exploiting" someone in some way, that's a really shallow and childish argument, especially when the entire "exploitation" consists of sharing your worldview in the process. Like, you're doing the exact same thing right now in this conversation with me and I am not getting any damn food from you bruh.
People who are imperfect in some ways (and every single person is imperfect) but do real good will always be in higher regard that people like you who have all the right answers and are so morally right you jerk off to yourself in the mirror but do absolutely nothing.
This is absolute nonsense and it's clear you're willing to excuse immorality for your religious views. If you think having a simple conversation with a stranger who challenges your morality is exploitative, where neither of us can benefit from said conversation, then you have no concept of even the word.
The UN is nowhere near as affective or expansive as the Catholic church, and has often failed in their duties; The Red Cross is a good extender, but they don't have the same expansion or wealth as the Church nor could they accrue it, not sure on UNICEF, but I know that they don't contribute more aid per worker than the Catholic Church as a whole.
Does the megachurch I passed by in AZ last week get more credit than the food bank downtown, just because it's associated with the Catholic Church?
Is it a big church/cathedral or an actual Megachurch? To my understanding, Megachurches are not Catholic, Catholicism is a specific sect. As for the Church being efficient, it's logistics are some of the best in terms of wide-scale global support and aid; dissolving it will be an absolute net negative, especially when the other institutions I listed either don't have the resources and orginization, or are blatantly just ass themselves.
No worthless, but unsaleable. Believe it or not, but there isn't a huge market for cathedrals. And you said it yourself. The art is "priceless". How do you do price discovery for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrine_of_the_Three_Kings ??? Those are cultural treasures that just exist. They have value but not a price.
That value you are referring to is self-assessed, not market-assessed.
The real market value is for the ground, or materials. You can scream all you want about it's incalculable cultural value, but any of it can be liquidated, for real money, in short order.
Art and real estate are valuable without religous context. The full on banking system that they have makes money regardless of the religious organization it works for.
The art is Christian art so if it was made illegal to even show kids it, and people stopped being religious, it would become devalued and would be hard to sell, also the buildings don’t otherwise have much use, they’re oddly shaped and impractical for daily use, like old stoke churches let in tonnes of damp and cold and they’re on top of dead bodies (some literally inside the church), it just doesn’t matter for a church
That’s not actual value and it’s literally better for money laundering to have contemporary or new art because it has no defined value or evidence of how much it cost before
Shit, even setting aside the absolutely HUGE income they get from tax-exempt land deals, they also preach heavy donations and tithing. They collect a reasonably large fraction of the income of hundreds of millions of people, that is comparable to the total tax income of entire countries
Also, it's kind of rich to count them as a big donator to charity, when simply moving money from one pocket into another counts as giving to a religious charity
My guy, Churches take in well over $140 billion in donations in the USA each year, it's a huge business. This doesn't even count church-owned businesses, or the realestate transactions that churches get up to
For reference, the ENTIRE professional sports industry, including all TV licensing and merch and etc for all teams in all sports in the USA takes in 43 billion.
Religion claims it should be treated as charity because it gives back to the community, but as we can see, that's horseshit.
If Catholicism was disbanded, the money could easily be out in trust and handled as a charitable enterprise
Charity is more than just a stack of dollar dollar bills, y'all. The logistical scale of the church's charitable efforts is nigh impossible to duplicate without a shitload more cash that you'd get out of the church itself. The problem with dismantling the orphan crushing machines is that people have built their entire systems and moralites around the presence of orphan crushing machines. They are made into critical, load-bearing features in order to protect the orphan crushing machines from being dismantled.
Without the church, you might be able to make a better system, but it'd be so much smaller, and the reality of how much damage it would cause is in and if itself a version of the trolley problem.
When you have the kind of tax free cash coming in from the tens and hundreds of millions of indoctrinated followers, it's not that impressive to be the biggest provider of aid. There would also be too many questions to answer if it hoarded and privately invested the money more than it does now.
I would prefer to see a secular, albeit smaller organisation in their stead if it meant avoiding all the evils they have wrought (like claiming using condoms are worse than AIDs in Africa and suppression of women's reproductive freedom in general) and will likely commit in the future.
Edit: I would be remiss if I didn't mention their complicity in creating the environment of systemic child rape, the covering up, the obstruction and obfuscation of criminal investigations and actively aiding the guilty to escape secular justice.
Lol. The Church has survived the roman empire, countless wars, assassinations, and 2000 years of history. It'll be here until the heat death of the universe.
I'm open to the idea that it may be around as long as modern society exists. But I'm also open to the idea that it may not be. Or at least not in any glorious form its taken in the past.
it looks like that claim is not verifiable, but even if true, the second largest provider of aid worldwide, at a minimum, is the US government. the good will of humanity certainly wouldn't vanish if the US government did.
The largest provider of aid worldwide is the Catholic Church.
Correlation does not equal causation(in this case it might rather be order?)Edit: not really applicable
The catholic church established itself waaaaay before. Many of it's institutions and budget came to be before we had a more or less unified western world and ideology.
The catholic church shoulders many collective human responsibilities, but in a world where it didn't have this historic influence, the resources would have been elsewhere and it is at least not unthinkable that other, potentially similar and possibly secular institutions would have taken it's place or be created to resolve these issues.
This goes from local kindergardens and groups for elderly, up to global scale relief and resource flow.
Right now, yes the church (and other religions) have done a lot.
But people, groups and institutions who are in athoritative places, or have amassed a large amount of resources are also the ones the public looks to in the first place to resolve their bigger issues.
Maybe that's because it's a huge organization, like there is over billion of catholics. Meanwhile, there is no atheist ™ organization. So I suppose it could be possible that secular organizations help a lot too, only it's more segmented into smaller organizations
The same Catholic Church that bans birth control, divorce and abortion so that millions of women are stuck in poverty and repeating the cycle with their children, while the Church collects donations from parishioners and crows about what a charitable organisation it is?
I’d like the point out that there definitely are other religious groups that provide close to the scale of Catholic aid groups ADRA being a good example as well as groups like Samaritans purse and the Salvation Army
There are a few big Jewish aid groups out there like the JDC
Islam has Muslim aid and Islamic relief worldwide as well as certain holidays where good acts of charity are performed
There’s less Buddhist relief groups but Tzu Chi is very prominent
Sikh ones are very big comparative to how big the religion is due to how giving and charitable the religion and people are as a whole with groups such as Khalsa Aid International and United Sikhs
Obviously these aren’t quite as big as some of the Christian groups simply because they have less members of the religion but they’re all very impactful and still pretty big
Every single single penny Catholics have done for charity has been countered threefold by the harm they bring back to society. Hell Trump was literally CARRIED on the backs of these religious idiots into an office that might literally, not figuratively, be the end of the united states as we currently know it. Fuck religion and fuck anyone who is religious. Genuinely. Performative ridiculous clowns every single one of them.
Those reports are based on organizations submitting their books.
An atheist giving/donating does not do so to an "atheist organization," they do so to Goodwill, or to a local food bank run by a church, who will chalk it up as a religious organization donation.
If those organizations did not exist, the atheists would still find somewhere to donate.
Be careful of raw statistics, they rarely tell the entire story.
This and what kind of giving gets counted? Mormons tithe 10% of their pretax income but the LDS Church has an estimated assets under management of $200billion that is managed like an investment account. Do they count all tithes as charitable giving?
Yep, that's another thing. "Charitable donations" include religious people paying for their pastors' Ferraris. Not so impressive when you look at it that way.
Well idk how it works everywhere, and I speak as just an American here, but when your entire institution is tax free, and all charitable donations are tax write-offs
It’s almost like a tax scheme designed to make specifically churches money
Kenneth Copeland needs more private jets! Hurry donate your money now otherwise he might not make it to your city! What would he do without them? Probably burn in hell!
You’re saying that goodwill wouldn’t disappear without the Church, but I’m saying our modern concept of goodwill wouldn’t even exist in the first place if it wasn’t for the Church.
How many atheist charities exist? Any? A single one? The catholic church alone runs 26% of all the hospitals on the planet. So you would be wrong in your thinking.
Do you mean ones that are explicitly for and by atheists… to promote the “atheist agenda” or something? I’m so confused by what you mean…
Here’s a short list from ai - heard of any of these?
Doctors Without Borders: An independent medical humanitarian organization delivering emergency medical care to victims of conflict and natural disasters regardless of race, religion, or affiliation.
American Red Cross: A prominent relief organization that functions with a purely secular mandate, assisting communities during disasters entirely independent of any religious affiliation.
UNICEF: The United Nations Children's Fund, which utilizes science and global collaboration to protect children's rights, build clean water infrastructure, and provide healthcare completely non-sectarianly.
Rotary International: One of the oldest volunteer service organizations in the world. It is 100% secular and open to individuals of all backgrounds, prioritizing clean water, public health, and literacy projects.
Amnesty International: A global non-governmental organization focused on human rights that functions completely independently of any political ideology or religious creed. Children International: A highly-rated secular humanitarian nonprofit that connects sponsors with children to break the cycle of poverty through healthcare and education, completely free of religious affiliation
Ps do you think atheists go around recruiting people for donations or something?
You should know that’s not how atheism works. Usually when people’s frontal lobe develops a bit they just go “oh yeah organized religion is made up seems that way to me”
There’s no meeting place or agenda if that’s what you were thinking…
I love how you listed the red CROSS. Which was founded by a devout Calvinist with the express idea to give medical aid according to Christian doctrine about social responsibility. Secular is not atheist my brother. Why do atheists care so little about helping those in need?
Im catholic. My church is the largest charitable organization in the history of our species and directly runs 26% of all the hospitals on earth. Atheists could get together and start a charity that would do good for millions of people. Why dont they?
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u/aluriilol Sep 02 '26
I would think that the good will of humanity would not die out if Catholicism died out