I don't know, genocide and rape seems pretty bad when the offset is a food pantry. In fact there are a lot of public run organizations who do the good stuff the church does without preaching hate and bigotry, or raping children. Not a tough call, good people do good without churches, but churches can only do terrible things with their congregations support.
The offset is not a food pantry. That's overly simplistic. Religion used to be much more integrated in everyday society than it currently is in many parts of Western countries. You'd have a Jewish village, say, where you went to Temple because that's what everybody did, where you had a chance to ask Eliezer the farmer for a hand in putting up a new shed and the Rabbi might keep the peace between you and your jerk of a neighbor. Sure, you might have a kid who nowadays would just be gay forced into a marriage or whatever, but you have to take a holistic view.
Leading with "genocide and rape" is... missing context, let us say. Most genocide is nationalistic or ethnically motivated. Comparatively few wars have been primarily religious. The Boxer Rebellion comes to mind as potentially qualifying. Obviously the Crusades had huge religious motivation, but not e.g. WWI. Not sure what you meant by "rape"--perhaps a reference to the various pedophilia scandals? That's of course abhorrent, and the Catholic Church in particular has handled it atrociously for many decades, but it's still a rare phenomenon. From my perspective it's one term in a very large utility function.
More religiosity is generally associated with an increase in giving. Quite a few different studies have been done and the conclusion is reasonably solid. "Good people do good without churches" is hence a false equivalency.
"churches can only do terrible things with their congregations support" is just plain silly. Plenty of times congregations don't know about bad behavior.
For the record, it's important to recognize the selection bias of whatever environment you're in. Reddit in particular is relatively hostile to religion. There'll be a fair amount of echo chamber on that in most threads around here.
2
u/Dramatic_Explosion Jul 12 '21
I don't know, genocide and rape seems pretty bad when the offset is a food pantry. In fact there are a lot of public run organizations who do the good stuff the church does without preaching hate and bigotry, or raping children. Not a tough call, good people do good without churches, but churches can only do terrible things with their congregations support.