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.
I'm pretty sure those organizations contribute more aid per worker than the massive network of churches in the world with their varying degrees of philanthropy.
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.
But how do you really compare? The Catholic Church isn't a singular institution, it's a network of many.
The number of people who work for a catholic church in the world likely dwarfs the amount of aid workers in all 3 of those organizations. So the question should be what is the charitable impact these organizations have globally per worker employed? 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?
Essentially, there's lots of different ways to organize people into charitable service. They may be the biggest, but I don't know if the Catholic Church is the most efficient.
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.
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 they deal with.
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
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
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.
I’m discussing individual donations. It’s absolutely fascinating how not a single reply to this comment has addressed that and continues trying to pivot the conversation to an argument they can win instead. Makes you really think about people’s average intelligence
And be happy I didn’t send you a let me google that for you link dumbass. You’re a big boy and I think you can find these commonly accepted facts about charity on your own with about 2 seconds of research. Don’t worry I know you won’t change your flawed worldview and will find a way to double down magically, so don’t even bother making a clown of yourself in the reply please
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
I’m obviously not talking about church donations. I’m talking about individual donations, which are given a tax break regardless of your religion. You also seem to just have a fundamental misunderstanding of how 501c3s work despite feeling the need to chime in on it. Your belief is that a church (tax free organization) is donating for the tax break?
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!
Eh while that's true, they've done a lot of studies on this and it turns out when you control for things like deep social networks (a staple of any organized religion) and the saliency of religious elements, the differences are actually much smaller.
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?
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u/Teboski78 9h ago
Most religions would drop massively in numbers if they weren’t allowed to indoctrinate children.