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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."
But Apple and Google pay more tax than religion in US....
I sorta missed how this is related to technology?
Can someone point it out for me?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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.
Funny how people are quick to point out "the negative impacts that occur in some religious communities" without saying much about the positive. Some religious communities (it can be hard to separate the religion from the community) are clearly doing something right.
I can't find good current stats on household income by religion, but this 2009 survey breaks it down pretty well.
Hindus come out on top, as they have for some time now: evidence that the more gods you believe in, the more successful you are in life. Or maybe it's something to do with the number of pirates - the data is slim. In any case, religions are recipes for life, and some of them seem to still be pretty good recipes, much as /. would hate to consider such a thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Everyone else cash only.
"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.
Given religion's tax exempt status, the real question is whether they pay more in taxes than Google and Apple combined too...
I'm not American, so take this for what you will, but I would say that the absolute worst people I have met in my life are religious, and the absolute best people I have met in my life are religious.
Best I can make out is that religion is the great amplifier. If you're a good person, it makes you the best of the best, and if you're a bad person, it makes you the worst of the worst.
Some people couldn't follow a recipe to boil water to save their life...
It isn't so much the moral codes (which tend to be similar among great religions and also humanism) that make slashdotters hate on religion, nor even the traditions. Getting together to sing songs, asking parents for permission to marry..etc...whatever.
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.
The claim to have such special knowledge of the universe is plainly arrogant. Scientists must back up their claims with evidence, whereas religious teachers back up their claims with more claims in more ancient texts. This insistence that they are right, with not a shred of solid evidence to back it up, is an insult to humanity's progress in the enterprise of determining facts from falsehoods.
The debate over whether religion causes more good than harm is entirely separate, but commonly gets convoluted with this basic point. Religious teachers claim an unwarranted exemption from the need to demonstrate their claims, and the scientific/philosophically educated among us find that repugnant.
Of course religions are a great way to make money. You're basically selling a promise you never have to fulfill. Show me one other industry where you can sell something, never deliver and the whole shit is considered legal and even morally ok.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
there are a number of non-religious people who hangout on Slashdot who do not understand a basic right called "freedom of association", and who have been propagandized into not knowing the difference between a tax exemption and a subsidy.
On the first point:
Churches are voluntary associations. The church is a collection of people who all pay their taxes on their income and property like anybody else, but who then gather together and chip-in some of their post-tax money for use by the group. Even the people who get tax breaks on their income for contributing to a Church, [which is the minority of church-goers since most people do not fully itemize their taxes] are still contributing post-tax dollars [they've just been taxed a little less on those dollars]. There are plenty of groups that gather together and chip-in money, like gaming groups, stamp collecting groups, cancer support groups, free speech groups, etc. It's unfair for government to tax such groups, and taxing them would inhibit the basic human right to freely associate with other like-minded people.
Apple and Google [cited by another poster] are for-profit corporations who are under no obligation to do anything charitable at all and are in it for the money. There's nothing wrong with that, but it makes them fundamentally different from a church or a charity hospital, or a comic book collectors' club. The purpose of a business is to sell stuff and/or services and make the founders filthy rich.
On the second point:
Post like this are always meant to say "they should be TAXED to pay for stuff I WANT!" and are usually accompanied by some moron ranting that the churches are being subsidised. Nothing could be further from the truth:
A Subsidy is when government takes money from person or entity A and gives it to person or entity B, to serve a purpose of the government's choosing [perhaps to punish A, or to help B, or both, or for reasons unrelated to A or B but to achieve some other desired outcome].
A tax exemption or tax cut is when government takes less of your money. That's it. Government might have planned to take 40% of your income,leaving you with 60% but it decides to only take 30% and leave you with 70%. You are not getting anybody else's money. You are not being punished. You are not being forced to suppport a policy you disagree with, and nobody is being forced to support you.Government is just stealing a little less from you.
Don't be an idiot. You don't need a recipe to boil water, but you do need a good freezer.
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.
Churches also do the most Charity, real Charity too in the local areas, not only with money but with time you can't easily measure. If you want to meet a bunch of people that really care about the neighborhood, and SHOW it, go hook up with a local congregation. Just like everything there are some bad actors.
Hindus come out on top, as they have for some time now: evidence that the more gods you believe in, the more successful you are in life.
A majority of Hindus in US will the upper caste (start from Brahmins) upper class who had the advantages of traveling to US for study (or work) and settled down. They are generically called "caste Hindus", they would be materially wealthy whether in US or India.
The right wing Hindu movement (not all of them are bat-shit evil, though quite ignorant) has a lot of support from US, so when the Indian PM Modi shows up at Madison Square Garden, he gets a full house. http://time.com/3442490/india-narendra-modi-madison-square-garden/
In India, they assert their power forcing down vegetarianism (this is a complex issue, which can be argued on moral, ethical and functional terms, here is a primer http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/on-diet-in-india-and-western-arguments-against/article7440854.ece, the usual fear of minorities, which includes Christians, lower caste Hindu's themselves, and other standard issue conservative and regressive ideals.
In USA, they will be seen as archaic with the next generation and the current Millenials, who had the fortune to study in secular American schools which promote some version of tolerance and humanism, which is closer to the core tenets of Hinduism in its truest essence...Tat Tvam Asi.
Tat Tvam Asi
A lot of 'broken window fallacies' in this analysis. It's like calculating the impact of a scam and saying it makes the economy run. And also why do you give 'added' value to the halal and kosher food market ? If there was no religion, they would be normal butcher / supermarkets, with the same value, minus the extra tax taken by the religions, so nothing added here.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Some of the best people I've known in life have been believers
Likewise - and from a similar range of backgrounds. However, to the extent that their beliefs contain things I find abhorrent, I see their 'native' generosity as being constrained by religion, not the result of it. Certainly many of those I know who started as believers and came to reject the beliefs they were raised on did so from the dissonance between principles and expression, internal inconsistencies or an internal growth that left the original belief system behind.
More, some of the most dangerous and damaging people I have met have been fervent believers. Some have used their belief system to justify behaviour that is essentially self-serving. Others, from genuine belief that what they were doing was 'right', have caused more harm than the first group.
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
There are certainly a lot of nasty, self-important people who are atheists. Just as there are plenty who are Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu ... I suspect a degree of confirmation bias in your assertion.
but because being horrible almost requires non-belief
As T.S. Eliot observed “Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.” Belief can be, and often is, used to justify action that would otherwise be clearly horrible.
they tend to stick out because they tend to make a spectacle of themselves
As do your online atheists, above. How can you tell an atheist who doesn't loudly announce it at every opportunity?
but belief seems to have the properties of a good ingredient.
Unquestioning belief can be blind. Unchallenged belief is limiting. Unexamined belief can be stagnating. In as much as it's easier to co-operate with people with whom you share a common belief, belief builds communities - but it's a short-cut to really understanding and acceptance of an individual. As you say, all too often it becomes tribalism by another name. Just because some people can be amazing and also believe says little about the worth of belief.
It's almost as if the part that makes you better is the process, more than the specifics of any faith tradition.
With this I am in total agreement.
... is this "news for nerds"? Pun intended, but still. This pisses me off more than any other story I've seen posted here since the new regime took over.
Slashdot editors, I know you have to pay the bills. I know the temptation is there to post clickbait headlines. I know the Taboola ads are easy money for a lot of sites and if it helps keep the servers running, fine, I can ignore them. But this is enough already. This is pandering. This is such a blatant effort to prop up your ad impressions that it's laughable. What really pisses me off that a site that's supposed to be a forum for tech news — which is why I came here, and why (despite my better judgment) I've stuck around all these years — can't even make an effort to pander while staying on the technology theme of a gorram technology site. This is the worst yet.
Posting this story to /. is guaranteed to get the flamers and trolls in a tizzy — and I'm sure I'll get modded down to the very depths of frozen Dis for calling a spade a spade, along with the "Stuff that Matters" apologists who'll jump in to point out the second half of what was always this site's slogan. And I'm generally fine with non-tech news when it's actually breaking news, like the "10 dead at Oregon community college" headline that the algorithm seems to think is "relevant" to half the stories on the site. But this is not news on tech. This is not really even news. It's a big, juicy bone for the trolls to fight over, just in time for the weekend. And it's fucking sad. If I wanted to see people get in pissing contests about religion, I'd go hang out on Reddit or, I dunno, the Catholic Answers forums. But that's not why I come to Slashdot, and if this keeps up, I'm going to have less and less reason to come back.
1. They count Halal and Kosher foods as religious benefits. But if the followers of those religions were not followers, they would eat just as much meat - it would just come from non-religious suppliers.
2. They count 'business with faith backgrounds' - which is broad enough to include pretty much every business that has a religious owner. Well done, chick-fil-a and Hobby Lobby get to count as economic gains from religion.
3. Schools and daycare facilities? So if the religion were erased, all those children would just no longer go to school? Any economic activity by these as religious organisations is exactly balanced by activity lost to non-religious organisations, because demand is inelastic.
I've no doubt that religion in the US is worth a vast amount of money, but this does feel like someone is trying to inflate the numbers.
Oh, and the authors? Brian Grim and Melissa Grim? Brian actually gives his email as 'Brian@religiousfreedomandbusiness.org' where Melissa is a research fellow. An organisation which describes their purpose this: "The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation educates the global business community about how religious freedom is good for business, and engages the business community in joining forces with government and non-government organizations in promoting respect for freedom of religion or belief."
Melissa also lists her education as the "Newseum Institute." Which is a political pressure group, not an academic organisation.
And Brian Grim is president of the "Religious Freedom and Business Foundation" -
Yeah, sounds totally unbiased and trustworthy.
So, what I see here are two researchers employed by organisations with the stated goal of making religion look good for business who then write a report in which they very broadly define religion in order to make it look good for business.
This study should be taken with a giant heap of salt.
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.
Tax-deductions for donations to ~10% of the GDP? That just means the rest of us have to pay more taxes. Absurd.
if they paid tax
It's good to see Jehova's Witnesses are the second poorest. A little bit of karmic retribution.
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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
It isn't even that people pretend have special knowledge , but that they use it to impose their will and opinion on other. "I don't like abortion, none shall have one" , "I don't like gay marriage , no gay shall get a marriage license" etc...etc... Frankly everybody can have a wrong view on the universe for all I care, and think the moon is made of cheese and the milk jug answer their prayer , but once they try to change laws or impose their religious opinion on others, that is when they step too far.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
He was also the founder of the Spanish Inquisition.
I didn't expect that.
I get that there's some value to see the scale of the economics, but isn't bundling all religion into one category and comparing it to individual tech businesses like comparing all companies remotely involved with food to GM? Religion is a pretty massive category containing a crapload of competition.
As far as good works and all the "is it good or bad" talk, it's ultimately pointless. Like porn, religion ain't going anywhere. The world would be a far, far better place without it, but given human nature it would be replaced with someone equally idiotic, deceitful and hypocritical.
Do I hate religious practitioners? Naw, not as a group, some are really decent people that feel the need to join a club in order to frame their life. I don't care about that unless they can't keep it out of interactions with others.
People like to attribute human behaviors, both good and bad, to religion when it is convenient. I'm not religious, but I don't understand the religiphobes (or would that be theophobes?). It is too simpleminded a thing to blame what people do on their religion alone when we see that same bad behaviors by non-religious. People do use religion as an excuse, but that's not the only excuse out there for bad behavior.
From a scientific perspective, I think the emergence or religion in societies is quite a fascinating topic. Virtually all societies have independently birthed religions. That doesn't happen by chance, or by virtue of a scheme. That happens because there is a real social benefit. Of course, that does not mean there are no negatives.
On a lighter note, religion has provide us with some really awesome music, and a great excuse for extra holidays.
"A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell, mouths mercy, and invented hell, mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused soul to worship him!" --Mark Twain
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Oh, and I would add that religion could be considered the mother of science, as a common element of religions is an attempt to explain the world around us. It served as a means to bring people together to try and understand and interpret the world.
If you're getting your ideas about religion from TV preachers, then I don't blame you for feeling the way you do. But TV preachers aren't actually religious, they are just using religion to make money. They are no different from politicians who claim to care about you, in order to get elected.
> Churches also do the most Charity.
Any data for this claim?
Compared to what?
I assume other local charities like soup kitchens have a greater local impact.
And how would church charitable activities compare to welfare provided by the government
A very small percentage of money given to a church actually goes to charity. Most goes to the institution of the church.
The church itself is not a charity. It is a non-profit, like GoodWill.
You dont get any soup until you listen to their sermon about how you're going to be tortured for eternity.
Thats not charity. Thats carrot & stick.
From a scientific perspective, I think the emergence or religion in societies is quite a fascinating topic. Virtually all societies have independently birthed religions. That doesn't happen by chance, or by virtue of a scheme. That happens because there is a real social benefit.
No, no it does not. It only means that it is a successful and viable strategy. It doesn't have to benefit humanity to be widespread. After all, advertising exists.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm religious or anything, but this is not only combining all religions, but all religiously affiliated things in the US. So that means all those hospitals that start with "St." That means a number of universities that seem pretty secular, but actually are actually owned by the Catholic Church. This doesn't just mean the money people put in the basket at Church.
So understand what this number is before you panic about it.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I think that is a bit of a reach. While I catch your meaning, religions is used to provide instant, irrefutable answers to important questions. It is like the placebo of information. We, as humans, have a thirst to know basically all the information we can find, so we ask questions, like "Where did all this land come from?" Ask a priest, he will say God did it and it took 7 days. Whelp, that is that. Now I can FEEL like I know the answer, without any of the extremely hard work required to figure out the actual truth. Science, on the other hand, if done properly will more often lead to more questions. The engine of science is driven on the fuel of curiosity. The engine of religion is driven on authoritative answers to uncertainty. Very different things.
> Scientists must back up their claims with evidence,
Except for Dark Matter, Dark Energy, String Theory, ... yup, plenty of evidence. NOT.
Marking you troll was terrible /. moderation. You seem sincere here. You're also quite wrong.
Dark matter and dark energy are observed "facts" that can't be explained by accepted theories. We know a little about each form those observations.
Dark matter has been found three different ways: in galactic rotation rates, in gravitational lensing where there's no visible matter, and in the balance of mass to electron count in the early universe, as observed via the CMBR. The observed ratio of familiar matter to unknown matter (called "dark" both becuase we don't know what it is, and because it doesn't interact with photons) is the same for both, and you don't need to invent anything else to explain the gravitational lensing, so it's accepted there is a common cause for these 3 unexplained effects. We also know, from these observations that it's slow-moving matter (not like neutrinos) that doesn't interact with light or EM in general, and that is was capable of forming in the first few hundred thousand years. All of this is observed fact.
Dark energy is just the name given to the observed fact that galaxies are not just moving away from each other, but accelerating over time. That's about all we know, but the math says that whatever it is, it's both the dominant energy in the universe, and astoundingly weak (the universe is mostly empty space, so there's no contradiction there).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It would appear that atheists are another subject you know nothing of, along with gender dysphoria and politics and feminism.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes