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Religion In US 'Worth More Than Google and Apple Combined' (theguardian.com)
A new study says religion in the United States is worth $1.2 trillion per year. Not only is that equivalent to the 15th largest national economy in the world, but it's more than the combined revenues of the top 10 technology companies in the U.S., including Apple, Amazon and Google. The study, "The Socioeconomic Contributions of Religion To American Society: An Empirical Analysis," was conducted by Brian J. Grim from Georgetown University and Melissa E. Grim from Newseum Institute. The Guardian reports: The Socioeconomic Contributions of Religion to American Society: An Empirical Analysis calculated the $1.2 trillion figure by estimating the value of religious institutions, including healthcare facilities, schools, daycare and charities; media; businesses with faith backgrounds; the kosher and halal food markets; social and philanthropic programs; and staff and overheads for congregations. Co-author Brian Grim said it was a conservative estimate. More than 344,000 congregations across the U.S. collectively employ hundreds of thousands of staff and buy billions of dollars worth of goods and services. More than 150 million Americans, almost half the population, are members of faith congregations, according to the report. Although numbers are declining, the sums spent by religious organizations on social programs have tripled in the past 15 years, to $9 billion. The report points to analysis by the Pew Research Center which shows that two-thirds of highly religious adults had donated money, time or goods to the poor in the previous week, compared with 41% of adults who said they were not highly religious. The analysis didn't account for the value of financial or physical assets held by religious groups, or for "the negative impacts that occur in some religious communities, including [...] such things as the abuse of children by some clergy, cases of fraud, and the possibility of being recruitment sites for violent extremism."
Interesting thought; I'm genuinely curious: Who contributes more to doling out welfare: private funded charities (including religions) or the government?
At the time, medical opium was a "good" thing. It allowed the populace to deal with inequality, financial hardship due to lack of labor rights, and uncertainty due to lack of social security more easily. When the same shit crops up again, no wonder the same mechanisms get traction.
"religions are recipes for life"
The worst people I have ever met in my life are religious. I'd give examples, mainly from my childhood, but given the sheer excrement you wrote it would fall on deaf ears. That said I have decided about 20 years ago to completely cut off all religious nutjobs from my life, and I have never been happier.
"religions are recipes for life"
The worst people I have ever met in my life are religious.
That's not a contradiction, you know? Some recipes are, well, quite bad.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think a lot of that, for the religious orgs, goes into building massive churches. LDS is insanely wealthy and spares practically no expense in making huge, ornate temples. When they're about to re-dedicate one, us "impure" commonfolk can go inside, and I did that one time and saw some life-size oxen made out of what appeared to be gold surrounding a big ornate pool presumably used for baptisms, and then some expensive looking theaters (practically a multiplex) used for displaying religious propaganda to the public, and practically all of the floors and walls adorned with either granite or marble in pretty much the entire temple, with each room (and there are many rooms) being about two stories in height with really big chandeliers. I guess another way of describing it would be something four times as big, expensive, and decorated as the whitehouse. And in spite of the massive size of this thing, very few people even go inside, and they have about 170 of them throughout the entire US.
And for some reason they see fit to ask that their members pay all of the expenses for their own missionary work, even though people of that age typically don't make much at all and it takes them years to save up for that. (My dad was required to save up for it by his parents for about 5 years, and then when he turned 17 he moved away from home and spent it on college and pretty much just ignored the church for the rest of his life.)
LGW, we don't agree on much, but we agree on this. Some of the best people I've known in life have been believers, and by "best", I mean, really walked the best meaning of their faith. I'm talking about Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews. The whole lot. People whose first response to others was, "What can I do to help?" Now, I've also known some really wonderful non-believers, but it almost seems as if they are more susceptible to the worst impulses of humanity: Objectivism, neoliberalism, and the faux-Libertarianism that is infecting current discourse. If you should encounter a really horrible person online, say on a forum or Twitter or something, chances are very good that they're atheists. Not because atheism made them that way, but because being horrible almost requires non-belief. While there are horrible people of faith (Family Research Council and Westboro Baptist Jackoffs, for example), they tend to stick out because they tend to make a spectacle of themselves.
Now, people of faith have their own pitfalls to watch for. One is the "blessings on me but not thee" kind of tribalism which ends up in an evangelical Trump supporter, who has to twist their faith into knots to justify their actions in the world and the "American Civil Religion" which is the "God & Country" horseshit. You will not find any instance in the Bible of Christ displaying nationalism, in fact, just the opposite. For Him, the pilgrims & refugees went to the head of the line.
As you say, there are bad recipes and good recipes, but belief seems to have the properties of a good ingredient. [Note: while I'm not a particularly religious person, I've encountered a lot of Daoism in my work and martial arts study, and I guess it's a spiritual system in which I find congruence, especially the more esoteric aspects of what's sometimes referred to as Chinese alchemy. Oh yeah, that reminds me, I've also met several really first-rate human beings who have belief systems way outside of the mainstream. It's almost as if the part that makes you better is the process, more than the specifics of any faith tradition.]
You are welcome on my lawn.
Internet-style atheism has this unfortunate habit of going on to argue that any religion which presents myths as myths isn't really religion. If you reject the literal resurrection of the Biblical Jesus, you are not a Christian in any religious sense, no more than your religion is Judaism if you reject the notion of ancient Semites literally encountering a deity (and/or Ancient Aliens). One cannot maintain disbelief and faith simultaneously. They are literal antonyms.
What really gets erudites upset is this business of presenting myths as facts. Religious adherents don't think of their sacred teachings as myths, despite the fact that they are all of ancient origin, they all include unsubstantiated supernatural events, and they all make untestable statements about reality focusing on the existence of supernatural beings, their relationship to us, and what we can expect from them when we die. They are all myths by any meaningful definition of the term, and religious teachers adamantly insist that they are absolute facts.
What's much worse, they also regularly abuse children by forcing these memes down their throats. Otherwise these claims would stand a lesser chance of survival if only developed adults were confronted with them.
Ezekiel 23:20
The concept that 'religion' and 'religious organizations' pay no tax is a fallacy. The pastor and employees still must pay income taxes, that is not exempt. Most people that go out and purchase stuff for a church pay sales tax unless they are carrying the tax exempt form...and it's a pain in the rear to do it for online purchases. The biggest savings is property tax, and many churches would never survive if they had to pay property tax