Does the Catholic Church do more harm than good?
Appearance
| This Wikiversity page is inactive and is of historical interest. You may discuss this page on the talk page, copy all or part of this page to another page for further editing or start a new discussion about this page at the Wikiversity:Colloquium. |
After a community review discussing Wikidebates and its inclusion within Wikiversity, the project has been discontinued due to a lack of moderation and policy implementation. Please open a new Wikiversity:Community Review to re-open the project. No new arguments or debates will be included. Any new additions will be reverted. |
Does the Catholic Church do more harm than good?
A more general question is Does religion do more harm than good?. It will perhaps be most interesting to focus on features specific to Catholic Church. Properly dealing with the question requires some aggregation of pros and cons, but to help itemization, arguments are allowed to state a single item of harm or a single item of good and leave it to the reader to do the aggregation.
The Catholic Church does more harm than good
[edit | edit source]Pro
[edit | edit source]
Pro It does the general harm of religion: see Does religion do more harm than good?
Pro Its opposition to condoms and other forms of contraception prevent limiting of spread of AIDS and prevent limitation of population growth that threatens ecosystems. Population growth in industrial countries creates load on resources (e.g. fossil fuels) for intensive agriculture and population growth in less industrial countries create load on resources (e.g. deforestation) for extensive agriculture.
Pro Its involvement with 20th-century far-right dictatorships is problematic.
Pro The church executed people for heresy, that is, for teachings at odds with the official Catholic doctrine. An example is the execution of Giordano Bruno. See W:List of people burned as heretics.
Con
[edit | edit source]
Con It does the general good of religion: see Does religion do more harm than good?
Con The Catholic Church is one of the largest charitable organizations on the planet, running hospitals, orphanages, etc.[1]
References
[edit | edit source]- ↑ Catholic Church: World’s biggest charitable organization, usa.inquirer.net
See also
[edit | edit source]External links
[edit | edit source]Wikipedia:
- Wikipedia:Criticism of the Catholic Church
- Wikipedia:Catholic Church and HIV/AIDS
- Wikipedia:Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
- Wikipedia:Catholic Church and homosexuality
- Wikipedia:Anti-Catholicism
- Wikipedia:Category:Catholicism-related controversies
- Wikipedia:Catholic charities
Non-Wikipedia:
- The Catholic Church is a Force For Good in the World, intelligencesquared.com
- Is the Catholic Church a Force for Good?, wordonfire.org
- Is the Catholic Church bad? Why or why not?, quora.com
- Catholic Church a force for evil - Dawkins, irishtimes.com