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Churches close their doors as fewer Americans attend
(abcnews.go.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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That's something more churches should do. They always preach about "helping the poor" but most don't give a fuck.
If every church took in two homeless people, there would be no homeless in America...
They're more than happy to take in everyone's dollars, though. Can't get enough of those.
Reverend Larry:
I DO want your money, because god wants your money.
One of the best things my family church did to reach out to the community was running a low-cost daycare center in our tiny rural town. It helped local families, bolstered the church's finances, and brought new families into the church.
Unfortunately, it was an Assembly of God church with toxic teachings that I'm still working through decades later. So ... straights and roundabouts, I guess.
People often make the argument that churches do a lot of community service and charity work. Why, then, do you need to include the fairy tale nonsense of mystical deities? We can totally have organized groups of volunteers that do nice things for people, WITHOUT the mythological element involved.
I've since left the church and I don't disagree with you. It shouldn't be necessary to involve religion in providing needed services to a community.
But I also haven't seen a lot of non-religious organizations offering practical services directly to the people who need them the most.
Don't get me wrong: there are a lot of great nonprofit organizations that do amazing work. But they aren't necessarily offering subsidized daycare or affordable housing on a scale that meets the needs of the communities where they operate. And very few of them are reaching out to people in rural areas. Churches still have something of a monopoly in those places.
I think this is largely due to the fact that faith communities have more cohesion than secular groups. All of the small secular groups I've been involved with have fallen apart after a year or two because the bonds that hold them together are simply not as strong as those in churches.
The whole bit about giving 10% of your income to the church as a duty to God is a fantastic racket. It means that the true believers think that God is keeping a ledger, and therefore they are more likely to support their church financially. So people in churches are literally more invested in their religious community, which gives their church the resources to provide services as social outreach.
And that's not even getting into the power structures within the church and the role of a pastor as leader (that was missing from all of the secular groups I had experience with). Or the organizing power of a group of dedicated little old church ladies.
There are a lot of elements that churches are better at harnessing. And I haven't encountered a good solution for creating a secular organization with the same kind of strength.
Strictly speaking, you don’t. Several denominations tried to throw out the mysticism in the 60s to significant backlash of the congregations. Mainstream denominational seminaries are actually pretty open minded from what i hear.
The triune mysticism can be looked at as an act by many denominations, it can’t be dropped because not enough of us skeptics engage with the religious systems locally to justify changing theology. If official positions becoke “well the trinity isn’t actually…” they risk loosing significant numbers of members. Changing that requires skeptical people to earnestly engage with churches and their congregations.
Those poor children. Churches and religion should be no where near education.
Almost like taxing them would have been better for society all along.