https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10508619.2020.1729570

what a coincidence as peter thiel is coming to europe tour to give talks on the ANTI-CHRIST.

while evangelical ignoring someone like THIEL who is obsessed with the anti-christ.

africa(not south africa) and asia have lack of BASIC access healthcare so theres that. USA have at least that, if you get sick/injured you get sent to the ER, its just the extreme cost. africa and asia doesnt have those.

I think it's a hyperbole and it works.

Religion is one of human basic mental needs, unfortunately. Oh, prove me wrong. (with actual studies and not anecdotes)

Found the Argentine, everybody!

A stopped clock is right twice a day!

No can do. Gotta bomb brown people to protect pedophiles.

The old "Do as we say, not as we do" gambit.

Aren't the least religious countries on Earth generally the happiest ones?

Many Christians: "Oh my god! This Jesus was a commie socialist woke antifa!"

Interesting thought. If tithing to the catholic church paid for my healthcare, I'd consider signing up.

Religion is just ceremony and doctrine surrounding belief.

A bit like having cake and a party, because you believe the earth completing a lap of the sun dated from the day of your birth is worth celebrating.
Or having someone arrested and taken to court and sent to prison for stealing from you, because you and many others in society believe in concepts like personal property, and justice, and morality. You know, all those things you believe in that definitely exist, even though you've never seen a photo of morality, or seen a scientific study proving that justice exists. But they must do because old books say so, and so do your peers, and anyway our whole society would fall apart if people stopped believing in them.

Humans, simply put, are weird. We're a species composed of mental disorders unique to us and nothing else in nature. To single out religion as being especially weird and worthy of contempt is... well... a bit weird and worthy of contempt, IMO

I was actually surprised to find out LDS (mormons) are several times wealthier than the Catholic Church on paper.

Their total revenue is around $30 billion a year. They could, in theory, pay for an entire states medical costs like Utah that spends about $18 billion a year.

Spefically pointed to your comment though, the Catholic Church is already the biggest private healthcare provider in the world. It operates roughly twenty percent of healthcare facilities in the world.

I fully support socialized medicine for all. One question though, the church owns and operates numerous medical universities and hospitals. Are they really cool with universal healthcare?

Those are great points. What payment model do the Catholic hospitals usually use? Free to everyone? Or are they operating the hospitals but only under whatever insurance or government coverage exists? I’m sure it varies around the world but I’m curious about the US especially. I think I was born in a Catholic founded hospital. But it seems like they are just the care provider and not so much the funding provider. The world “healthcare” has two meanings in this way.

The least religious countries are those without a strong central organized religion. The people there are still mostly religious, just on an individual level - I live in one of those, I can see it all around.

Catholic hospitals are private in the US, unless specifically otherwise designated. You can pull up the public finance records to see how revenue is spent, to the best of my knowledge.

MAGA: He is neither a true American nor a true christian.

How many Catholic hospitals are there?

How much wealth does the Vatican have stashed away?

he can LITERALLY do more than just "urge".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Catholic_hospitals_in_the_United_States

EDIT: there are 110 pages on that Wikipedia list of Catholic hospitals in the USA, but I don't know if every one of them is still catholic or not.

Edit 2: no one actually knows how much money the Vatican has .... the Vatican bank is subject only to Vatican law

Yes, they do not pay all the costs. Often times they will write off debts or provide care for free. This is not always the case though. Typically they are funded like a for profit hospital with the major difference being there are no shareholders to take the profit.

I have heard estimates that they subsidize $60 billion a year in healthcare costs across the US.

I was trying to get a clearer picture of how many countries the Catholic Church could fund annually but estimating their money is very complicated. They are not centralized like the Mormon church and all their churches operate independently.

With estimates as high as $2 trillion of total revenue, in theory, they could pay for several European countries. But not something like the whole US that spends $5.3 trillion on healthcare.

I think this also touches on just general criticism of the Catholic church. Are they really good stewards of their money, is corruption a problem, etc. I have read a lot of conflicting information on these topics.

Yeah, that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and sunk.

CAPITALISM!...yay?

In Rome like half of the hospitals were ran by the church before they got privatized with neoliberalism

Life satisfaction of the mentally unstable is a curious measure to go by. Everybody knows being totally fine in an unhealthy world is a sign of mental disorder itself...

Yea go ahead and get back to me when a birthday party involves killing someone and celebrating it.

So celebrating murder is the benchmark for insanity? Public executions used to draw big crowds, nothing to do with religion. Armies still give ceremonial medals for particularly inventive or brave killing, again, nothing to do with religion. Luigi Mangelone is celebrated by many for murder... admittedly the murder of a corporate 'hands off' serial killer, but still - its celebrating murder.

Again, I say, people are strange enough already - religion is barely even the icing on the cake.

But donald trump isn't for some...

Buddhism isn't a religion as there is no deity to worship. Isn't it more a philosophy?

“You should be nice to people”
How does this need proof?

Doesn't need a god either, or thousands of mutually incompatible made-up backstories.

Religion is just ceremony and doctrine surrounding belief.

A bit like having cake and a party, because you believe the earth completing a lap of the sun dated from the day of your birth is worth celebrating.

Cakes, parties, planets, the Sun, rotation, years, are all real. Your gods aren't.

Religion is one of human basic mental needs, unfortunately. Oh, prove me wrong. (with actual studies and not anecdotes)

How about you prove yourself right before demanding that others need to?

Fun fact, only yesterday I've heard in the radio about a new study about youth anxiety and their conclusion was that a sense of togetherness is what reduces anxiety and while religious communities provide that, they are not the sole provider of that sense and other communities may as well. Also "people need community" is not the same as "people need religion", so your ridiculous claim better be not backed up by anything that confuses these two.

I live in one of those, I can see it all around.

Prove it (with actual studies and not anecdotes)

USA will ask how the shareholders will cope.

My "prove it" comment was a direct reaction on LurkingLuddite's "prove it" comment - see it to find the /s in mine.
I don't have studies but I have friends with education in psychology and this seems to be today's understanding of human psyche. People need something transcendental to believe in - that's why religion is so widespread. It's not a disorder, it's the natural state. I'm not a big fan of religion, so I see it as an evolutionary trap - surely adaptive in many ways, though, unfortunately.

It's not my field of study. All I can give you is my experience. Feel free to find some yourself though, if you're interested enough.

Down with the red sox! Down with the cubs! Down with the pope!!

/s

What is he supposed to do? Finance a coup?

To be fair, church-owned hospitals are pretty much closest thing to universal healthcare USA currently has. Government chipping in with their own universal healthcare would relieve a lot of cost, paperwork and trouble from the church.

Yeah, its a sliding scale. I suppose tax status is a simple line to differentiate between a philosophy & religion.

Sort of. A lot of us (countries) have some kind of public healthcare, but it's not really universal.

From experience in Australia: dental isn't included, physio is limited, out of pocket costs can be large for non-hospital visits because it's not a public system just a private subsidy model (mostly), wait times for "elective" surgery can be way, way longer on the public system because private health is permitted to exist and the public system is underfunded/understaffed.

What's worse is that private health cover is allowed to just cover the difference between public and private, meaning even if you go private, the public is still paying. Like, you wanna be private, fuck off and go be private then... (Talking to the private healthcare advocates, not the people. I have some level of private healthcare cover, even though I think it's a fucking stupid system)

List goes on.

It's WAY better than the US, but I refuse to call it universal.

red sox are boston. white sox are chicago

Sorry, not American. Just what percolated in my mind about the pope being a fan of something

nah no worries. it was just me doing my own overly invested in this shit goof. wasn't like… trying to demand compliance to our ways of being

Trump will invade Vatican City.

This is not the kind of Popeing he paid for.

That only exists in the USA for what I know and would be a terrible way to decide theological or philosophical questions lol!

Yea people are crazy, so why would you defend something that makes them even less attached to reality??

I'm aware of their history. They tried & failed in Australia but mixed results in NZ

You hate to see pedophile-on-pedophile violence like this.

How many child size skeletons are in those Vatican vaults?