Is the catholic church a force for good?

[Tonus]

I thought the best contender would be laying down your earthly life for your fellow humans with no earthly reward. (ie. no insurance policy payout to your surviving relatives.) Self-sacrifice purely for love, done in the faith that there is an afterlife.

That to me would take the sort of faith that an atheist couldnt match and would be hard for an athiest to explain in secular or evolutionary terms. Why deprive your own selfish DNA the opportunity to continue propagating while simultaneously saving the life of someone else whose DNA is technically going to compete with your future offspring.

I'm not sure I understand. You're saying that it's tougher for an atheist to make that sacrifice, because he doesn't have a hereafter to look forward to? I guess there is merit to the idea. It would make the atheist's self-sacrifice an actual sacrifice, though, wouldn't it? Dying in the flesh with the knowledge that you're going to heaven, where you'll spend eternity with all of the good people who ever existed, sounds like a pretty big upgrade. Where's the sacrifice?

Then again, that is also the Christian example, isn't it? Jesus took a fleshly body for a time period that for him was barely the blink of an eye, then sacrificed it and returned to heaven. He gave up something that he never needed. Where was the sacrifice? That's like deciding that for Lent, you're going to stop setting your hand on fire.