RE: Christianity in Africa stats: <10 MN in 1900, 700 MN today.
July 23, 2023 at 2:44 am
(This post was last modified: July 23, 2023 at 2:46 am by Fake Messiah.)
(July 23, 2023 at 2:37 am)Nishant Xavier Wrote: Right, so Marxist Militant Atheism is doing nothing to help the world's Poor. Christian Churches and Christian States do much for the cause of the Poor around the world.
Yeah, like kidnapping children from poor families and selling them to rich ones.
Again, if you weren't so concerned in enabling pedophiles you would see that criticizing Church has nothing to do with Marxism, but that the Church is doing a lousy job. Like when it comes to hospitals - they are just taking money from the government and then doing horrible job running those hospitals because they put their Catholic bigotry in them. Here is an example
Quote:Where Catholic Beliefs and Public Needs Collide
Rape victims are being turned away, and divorced employees are losing their jobs. Catholic hospitals, kindergartens and nursing homes -- which are primarily tax-funded -- are causing problems for Germany's social welfare state. But some politicians are fighting back.
Their original mission has expanded into a corporation encompassing 16 nursing homes and 10 hospitals. The only problem is that care is precisely what has been lacking there recently. Wanting nothing to do with a possible early termination of a pregnancy, doctors working for the Cellitines turned away a woman who was seeking help shortly before Christmas, despite the strong suspicion that she had been raped.
The case reveals how far the Roman Catholic Church has distanced itself from German society, especially -- but not only -- in the area of sexuality.
Catholic facilities are increasingly sealing themselves off, often behaving as if they were part of a state within a state; a cosmos subject to its own rules, which are monitored by the pope and his bishops; and a world in which federal, state and local governments have little say.
Every year, Catholic dioceses receive billions in funds from obligatory taxes paid by church members. But when it comes to scandals, such as when sexual abuse is systematically covered up and remains uninvestigated for years, citizens have little influence and are left to experience how the church energetically defends its special rights.
The process of alienation is well advanced, and it would be a mistake to treat it as merely a problem for Germany's few remaining churchgoers. In fact, it potentially affects millions of Germans. The church is involved in many areas of society, including kindergartens, schools, hospitals and nursing homes. It is the second-largest employer in the country, after the government. It dictates the kind of life its doctors, educators, teachers and cleaning women are allowed to lead. It determines how children are raised. And it also decides -- on its own authority -- how patients are to be treated or, in some cases, turned away.
"The scandalous incidents in Cologne sharply contradict the Christian social mission," says Sylvia Löhrmann, deputy governor of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Green Party politician is a member of the Central Committee of German Catholics, a forum in which she wants to see the incident addressed. "Not helping a woman who has been raped is a violation of human decency. In doing so, the church harms itself more than anything," says Löhrmann, who is also the state's education minister.
Catholic organizations run some 420 hospitals throughout Germany. In their employment contracts, their roughly 165,000 employees are generally required to comply with the guidelines of bishops and the heads of religious orders. In fact, in some areas, the Catholic Church exerts a strong influence on the social welfare state. The church even has a monopoly in some rural areas, where it controls many facilities, from kindergartens to hospitals to nursing homes.
Paradoxically, although the number of churchgoers has been shrinking for decades, the influence of bishops has been rising. In 1950, excluding ministers and members of religious orders, both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany had 130,000 civilian employees, a number that has jumped to over a million today. What's more, Germany has gradually entrusted the churches with large parts of its social welfare system.
The consequences are often enormous for church employees. For instance, an employee who gets a divorce can quickly lose his or her job. And you don't have to be gay to be fired; sometimes all it takes is to express sympathetic views toward homosexuality. Couples who try artificial insemination also have no place in the church's employment.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/ger...79198.html
Or take when thousands of Spanish children were stolen from hospitals by nuns and sold to wealthy Catholic families.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/magaz...abies.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"