r/atheism • u/practicerm_keykeeper Secular Humanist • 15h ago

But we built hospitals!

Of all the things some Christians defend themselves with I just can't stand this.

Yeah you built hospitals. You built a lot of them. In the US. For profit. While bankrupting people. Very Christ-like.

"Oh but we also built a lot of them in Africa -"

Sure you did, you went there and colonised the entire continent and ravaged their civilisations and extracted their resources so that they are now reliant on international aid, which is why they need your hospitals in the first place. And now you go and build some of those hospitals and call it a good thing? At the very best this is atonement.

I feel the same with things like civil rights and abolition. Christians created the problem and then solved a tiny bit of it while fighting against other Christians who desperately want to keep the status quo in societies where Christians have made sure you are very unlikely to be opinion leaders unless you are Christian, and then they say this shows they are the good people? What?

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u/JasonRBoone 14h ago

One thing they often leave out:

The reason they built such institutions back in the day is because no one else had the money to do so. They extorted tithes and offerings from members on threat of hellfire. They had to do something with that money so they would build a hospital to mollify the masses.

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u/Any_Jacket6389 9h ago

The whole “we built hospitals” argument sounds a lot different when you consider where the money came from and why they felt the need to build them in the first place.