Quote:Germany: Catholic Church sees record drop in membership
More than half a million people officially left the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany in 2019, new figures show. Just over half the population now belongs to one of the two main denominations.
Germany's top Catholic body said Friday that a record 272,771 people left the country's Catholic Church in 2019, and that the number of baptisms and weddings taking place in churches also dropped sharply.
The number compares with some 216,000 people canceling their membership in 2018, and beats the previous record of around 218,000 in 2014 by a large margin.
The chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, Georg Bätzing, said the statistics could not be made to look good in any way and that the drop in baptism and wedding ceremonies showed the "erosion of a personal attachment to the church" particularly clearly.
Churches in Germany also suffer financially when they lose members, as a church tax is deducted from people's incomes if they are registered as being either Catholic or Protestant.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-catholic-c...a-53959392
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"