Cite?
Charity? Quite a large number.
Don’t forget the tax write-off.
More seriously, I am skeptical that someone would fund a hospital because of religion, as opposed to the more general “it’s a good thing to do.”
Many people are charitable. Religious people may give religion credit, but I think they would do it anyway, like the rest of us heathens.
Not charity-Religion. If religion can’t be blamed when people do bad things, then it shouldn’t get the credit when people do good things.
Organized Religion ran most Charities for centuries. Still do in some areas.
I have never heard of a good that was done because of “religion” that is not done at least as much and often more for secular reasons. Charity, for example, is often greater in secular societies. Religions often regard the needy as having offended the local deity in some way and are to blame for their own affliction, whether it be illness or poverty.
And then there are people like Mother Teresa, who encouraged suffering in her “hospitals” because she thought it made people more devout.
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- Steven Weinberg
What percentage of funds raised was for the benefit and/or promotion of their respective sects?
Actually, much of the Black Death’s toll was due to respiratory spread (pneumonic plague, not related to filthy living conditions, but facilitated by lots of people living in close proximity).
Also, even more frequent bathing would’ve had a limited impact on rat and flea populations (whose activities were essential to the outbreak of bubonic plague).
Ever watch anime? Hospitals often have crosses on the wall, because in the Japanese mindset they’re something the Christians brought in. Many religions don’t put particular emphasis in taking care of people beyond those closest to you; Christianity does. The oldest Old Folks’ Home in my home town was founded by a childless rich couple as a general hospital, hospice and orphanage (people could leave their children there without renouncing paternal rights too). Funding hospitals, hospices and orphanages is something specifically linked to specific religions.
Doctors are pretty common through Japanese history, but they would treat you at your home.
The Japanese almost certainly had better medical care through most of the Christian era than Europe, despite not having hospitals, because they had better standards of cleanliness, weren’t bleeding people and practicing other invasive nonsense, and weren’t packing sick people and newborns in with each other in hospitals.
The Japanese also didn’t give a damn about LGBTQ people, because Shinto morality is short and simple, “Think about the consequences before you act.”
The desire to do good and the belief that you are doing good is if little value if your benevolent religion is telling you to murder folks.
It’s hard to quantify how many people have been saved.
How many people have been saved by public hospitals? They’re pretty much an invention of Christianity, and weren’t at all common in the ancient world. If a rich person got sick, he sent for a doctor, and was treated at home.
During the massive pandemics that ravaged the Roman Empire in the last days of paganism, thousands fled Rome and other cities of the empire to avoid contagion, including the great doctor Galen. The early Christians stayed behind to tend to their sick neighbors and create what were essentially field hospitals to treat the injured. This happened through multiple waves of the pandemics, and some Christians who stayed behind possibly got immunity if they didn’t die and so seemed to be blessed by their God. What was recorded was that many Roman citizens marveled that the Christians they had seen martyred and abused by the pagan political system under Diocletan and other Emperors nevertheless extended charity toward those who had despised them, and this seems to have accounted for a large wave of conversions. As did the higher level of rights women enjoyed in a Christian relationship - the husband could not order a wife to get an abortion against her will, as he could under Roman law with no recourse from the woman.
Hospitals as a public charity and as teaching institutions were started and manned by the Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages, and remain a large component of the public health care system.
How many lives have been saved by the end of practices like infanticide, abortion (in some cultures), ritual sacrifice, and killing the deformed, lame, and disabled (as a Roman father was not simply allowed, but required to do under the Law of the Tablets?
How many lives were saved by the end of slavery (by and large - it still survives in some countries). There is no doubt that while some slave-owners used the Old Testament to justify slave ownership, the largest number of abolitionists in England and America were motivated by their religious faiths. The Christian condemnation of slave trading by Jesus’ disciples (Paul and John in particular) and Christ’s admonition that he came to free men from all forms of oppression were used by the abolition movement to help sway public opinion.
How many lives were saved by the civil rights movement? The greatest leader in that movement, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. achieved the greatest conversion of white Americans to his cause by specifically calling them out on their Christian beliefs. His most powerful and effective speeches implicitly used biblical references (easily recognized as such by any Christian) to sway both black and white listeners. The preachers of the black churches of America were the infrastructure that kept the civil rights movement alive.
How many peoples lives were saved by the hope that they derived from their Christian beliefs? Metastudies on religious belief find a high correlation between religious belief and practice and lower rates of depression, suicide, substance abuse, domestic violence, and a host of other social ills.
St. Jude’s was founded by entertainer Danny Thomas purely because of religious beliefs. Thomas, a devout Catholic, founded the hospital to fulfill a promise he made to St. Jude.
When I started the thread I was thinking more in terms of the effects religion had on civilization. I know a lot of religious wars have been fought but undoubtedly many wars would have been fought anyway.
When you are counting “loss of life” (as in one, two, three), exactly what are the criteria for an event being counted as a loss of life, as opposed to an event that you do not count as a loss of life? and how do you quantify “cause”, as determining whether religion is a countable contributing factor?
Take the Holocaust, for example. None of those people would have been killed if they had not been Jews. So, did religion cause that?
It’s likely that most of the animosity towards the Jews, in Germany, was an influence of Lutheranism. And, of course, the general animosity towards the Jews in Europe (and the US, at the time) was due to Christian belief.
How Christian or what branch of Christianity Hitler might have been, be whatever it may, he certainly grew up in a culture influenced by Christianity and Lutheran hate for the Jews.
That said, there were plenty of 18th to 20th century genocides that were economic, philosophic, or simply xenophobic, across the world. Religion affects the eddies of human history, but ultimately it is the people that are the murderers. Even fairly militaristic religions were probably, generally, mellowed out by the practicalities of their situation at a sufficient rate that the believers probably weren’t all that much more kill-happy than most other groups in their time.
Sage Rat:
More likely, it was simply an aspect of the prior Catholicism that Martin Luther didn’t abandon.
I’m not sure if you are stating that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was based on religion, or not, but if you are, then I believe you are mistaken.
The Nazi persecution was ethnic based, not religious. The way that the Nuremburg-style Anti-Jewish laws were written and enforced, for example, you could have been baptized into one of the Christian faiths as a baby, and attend Catholic church your whole life, but officially, you would still be considered as a Jew (and a noncitizen) if one your parents or grandparents were Jewish. In other words, it was based on genealogy, not religion.
Hitler’s personal belief system seemed to be a weird blend of Christian and pagan stuff, reinforced with some 19th century pseudo-scientific crap (like imperfectly understood genetics, or phrenology).
True. Edith Stein was a Jew, who became an atheist, and later converted to Catholicism, and became a nun and a philosopher. Her conversion did not matter to the Nazis, who murdered her in the Holocaust. She was later canonized as a Saint.
Hitler’s belief system was very idiosyncratic and hard to categorize. He certainly was an apostate from traditional Christianity, and he denied the teachings of the Catholic Church in which he was baptized and nominally educated.
It would certainly have been a lot harder for Hitler to find the bloodlines he wanted to exterminate without the documentation of religious affiliation though. Even if there might be some differences in the genetic makeup of Jews and “ethnic Germans” he would have had no way of knowing this. Skull measurements and whatever are not terribly reliable evidence of ancestry!