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Comment by ristlane | Hacker News Reader

I can’t speak to other religions, but Jesus did not speak against the state, or against statehood as such.

Meanwhile the Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in the world, despite all of its problems due to consisting of deeply flawed humans.

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Jesus didn’t speak against the state, but saw it as something different that didn’t interest him. He spoke more against religious authorities, and against the strict enforcement of harsh religious laws. I say this because lots of people seem to be claiming the opposite and pushing for more christian influence in governance

True but he was martyred by the state. This is the core of Christian faith. God was put to death by an unjust government. It was Christ’s threat to state power that earned the execution. And tax collectors, even the disciple Matthew, were widely considered sinners during his day. The orientation people have to government power is much different before and after Christ. Political liberalism, individual freedom and many other things we take for granted are the direct result Christianity. But yes, “render unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s”

The Roman Governor famously found nothing wrong with Jesus, that is to say nothing threatening to Rome, and washed his hands symbolically to say Jesus is dying because of the demand of the crowd and the religious authorities. He was dangerous to religious order, not secular order.

> True but he was martyred by the state. This is the core of Christian faith. God was put to death by an unjust government. It was Christ’s threat to state power that earned the execution.

Actually, the Gospels make clear that Pilate found Jesus not guilty, and it was only the threat of a riot by the priests if he didn't crucify Jesus that he crucified him. It's still ultimately the religious authorities who order his death, and in this case, the state is at best acting as a tool of the religious authorities rather than in its own secular authority.

It kinda depends on how you define "charitable" though.

Historically, churches treat money spent on themselves as "charity." There was an interesting discussion in Christianity Today a long while back about how, on the surface, it looks like Red state residents are more charitable than folks in Blue states -- but the difference was tithing to churches, which overwhelmingly consume those funds on operating their Sunday morning social club & related programming.

If you factored out that aspect, the comparison flipped dramatically.

The paradox seems to be between the charity of religious people and the cruelty of religious societies. I don't have a good explanation.

The paradox being resolved that religious people aren't highly charitable in general, but people in a social club are pressured into paying dues, and mentally ill people are easily duped into giving up their money.

Catholic Church is also the largest organization in the world which openly protects pedophiles.

I bet it is also a hedge fund

Well, they have the official "Institute for the Works of Religion"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Works_of_R...

A proper bank, with historic ties to the Mafia.

It was a disaster for the church and for humanity.

Ireland used to be the most Catholic nation in the world; not anymore. Their faith was obliterated by the sex abuse scandal.

Germany has many sex abuse scandal of the church and they still try to hide them. Pope Benedict himself helped to hide them.

There is probably not a single country where the catholic church is not the best place for child sex abusers.

Well maybe Islam, as it is having Mohammed, who raped a nine year old girl, as their "Son of God".

Every religion in the West is losing adherents as quickly as 80 year olds are dying. Pederasty has nothing to do with it.

I think it's probably got something to do with it. Plenty of non-Catholic denominations and other faiths have had similar abuse scandals, and in the public consciousness the crimes of Catholic priests get filed under "why religion is bad" as much as "why Catholicism is bad".

Well, it's certainly not helping with the recruiting of younger people into that particular religion... Today's 80 year olds in the church probably joined 60-75 years ago.

Disaster for the victims, but taking down the unelected undemocratic Church is a silver lining.

That's not really the cause. It is more like grease to ease the egress when someone already looking for the exit for other reasons needs an easy excuse. Ireland's Catholicism was already weakened by various ideological currents and social engineering that swept across the country, many facilitated by powerful, shall we say, American corporate interest and investment. Living the Catholic faith is demanding and utterly unappealing to those who've been made slaves to their deranged passions. Not so coincidentally, those who are slaves to their passions are easier to control. I leave the inference to be made here as an exercise for the reader.

The British colonization of Ireland was brutal, but it was corporeal. The spiritual colonization today, materially prosperous and comfortable, destroys the soul.

Synagogues are giving the Catholics a run for their money. Ask yourself why the shorim are allowed to completely cover up all the abuse inside the orthodox community?

What? Comparing the size and scale of the Catholic church, and the centralized system of protecting known sex abusers, to a small fraction of a tiny religious group is absurd.

The jewish | christian schism is out of hand when the disagreement is over which has the more significant subgroup of sex pests and enablers.

There are over 5.9 million Orthodox in the USA alone. That's not some fringe religious group.

Yes, but it also is besides the point. People gladly attack the Catholic Church and they do so with a kind of seething hatred or blind ignorance that allows them to assign to the Church a unique status in this regard. But the fact is that child abuse[0] is or was present in all institutions that deal with children, both religious and secular. In fact, the rate of abusive priests in the Church (estimated to be about 4%) is average or below the rates elsewhere, especially public schools where it is something like 10% among staff, last I checked.

And I wonder if the parent above knows how protective these Jewish communities are of their own. They do not like to involve the state in their affairs.

So none of this is unique or even extraordinarily present in the Catholic Church.

[0] And by "child abuse", certainly in the Church, it is best described as a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. That is, 80% of abuse victims were post-pubescent teenage males.

Do you have a source for this number?

*edit: looks like you're an order of magnitude off, the number is closer to 500k [0]

0 - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/08/26/a-portrait-o...

The Catholic Church is also responsible for more violence, "holy" wars, death and harm then Hitler, Mao Zedong, Stalin and whoever else you want to add to the list combined.

No it's not

The Inquisition alone killed an insane amount of people.

At that is just a small part of the history of the catholic church.

Please provide evidence for your claim.

Edit: OP originally claimed that the inquisition killed 50 million people and then edited their response instead of providing evidence. That's better than nothing, but I think still illustrates that OP might have extreme biases when discussing the Catholic church.

Do you also need some evidence that the earth is in fact not flat or the center of the universe as your beloved church claim for so long and also killed people for saying otherwise?

Just google "inquisition" or the million other atrocious acts for the church. I don't wast my time doing the work for people who defend the most criminal organization in the world

As a general rule of thumb, "popular common knowledge" of the Medieval and Early Modern periods tends to be the complete opposite of the truth often enough that anyone who cites to popular knowledge for this period is very suspect in their use of sources.

It really doesn't help when you start your citation to this by comparing it to flat earth--no educated person in the Middle Ages would believe it to be flat; even the standard textbooks of the day (e.g., Ptolemy, Aristotle) would give you several proofs of its spherical nature. It's even mentioned on Wikipedia's List of Common Misconceptions, which is a clear sign you should purge it from your list of comebacks.

High estimates for the number of deaths due to the Inquisition is somewhere in the thousands. Communism in its various forms is in the tens of millions.

Here's a source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/was-obama-r...

The article is written by someone on the left, whose point is served by magnifying the crimes of the Catholics (and minimizing those of the Muslims). Therefore, it's likely to have a generously large estimate of the death toll due to the Catholic Church. And it says:

The Crusaders themselves suffered; historians estimate that only one in 20 survived to even reach the Holy Land. It is estimated that 1.7 million people died in total.

Historians estimate that 150,000 people were put on trial by the Inquisition, with 3,000 executed.

I'm afraid that is a lot less than the usually estimated 6 million from Hitler alone, and far less than the tens of millions from Stalin and Mao.

Or the extreme amount of death at the hands of the Mongols.

The Crusades were also in response to the caliphate conquest which conquered Roman and Persian lands in the middle east and north africa

I searched and found this pristine answer. It’s around 100k Still it was for many people a horrible time and institutions that did that once should be abolished. That’s nothing anyone can come back from in a humanitarian society.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/39443/what-was-t...

Edit: It’s not the goal of life to argue with bad institutions until they become slightly less bad . If an institution has a history of abuse of power or trying to get power trough violence it should be abolishe

The inquisition is hardly the only thing the Catholic Church was involved in.

edit: I think a poster upthread ninja-edited, making the parent look off.

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