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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."
Following recent EC rulings, Apple is considering registering as a religion for tax purposes. They may succeed, as people have been calling them a religion for years.
Google, on the other hand, having achieved both omniscience and omnipresence, is more a God than a religion.
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.
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.)
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.
How about religious group Hobby Lobby, who wants to allow their employees to have health insurance, with the string attached that the health insurance not cover birth control pills?
How about religious group Salvation Army, who wants to allow their employees to have spousal benefits, with the string attached that those employees not be gay?
How about religious schools such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, who employ people with the string attached that they not get divorced (but only if they're women)?
These few examples are but a drop in the bucket. True, they're not "religions", they're only organizations run by religious people. But they all claim to be exempt from the law because of religion. Also, you can find as many and more examples of religions doing the same. Religions attach strings to their money because they feel it is their moral duty (in the most generous interpretation). Do not pretend that they're just helping people; they're helping the deserving people, and they get to decide which ones are deserving. Also, do not read this as a defense of government as the highest good; there are plenty of problems there, as well.
If by that second point you meant an inverse relationship, then yes. Amazon's description:
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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
"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
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.'"