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I have no idea what you’re basing this comment on.
The sins of the catholic church are many and global and as large and unforgivable as their wealth and reach and history:
From the very beginning they were antithetical to plurality - soon as they got power first order of business was the destruction of classical Hellenistic learning centres.
Then crusades, inquisitions, colonialism and forced conversions, complicit in slavery, the witch trials, and interference with politics all over the world.
Opposition to human rights, anti-science (dark ages anyone), support for dictatorships, residential school systems targeting indigenous children, and the ongoing sexual abuse crisis with institutional cover-ups.
And their worst crime of the modern era: their response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
Strict opposition to condom use (in fact actively lobbied against condom distribution and sex education) even as HIV/AIDS spread globally - particularly devastating in heavily Catholic regions like sub-Saharan Africa, the Philippines, and Latin America where the Church wielded significant influence over public health policy (as they still do). Millions of infections and deaths directly attributed to this crime against humanity.
But yes, “force for good”.
I'm basing it on an understand of history and nuance.
The roman catholic church is at least sixteen centuries old. I dare you to name any human organization of which endured for over a millennium and did not partake in something odious to modern sensibilities.
I could probably go point-for-point with a rebuttal to each bad things you noted, but the only one that really merits rebuttal is "dark ages". The term is out-of-vouge in modern scholarship largely because it was essentially an anti-theistic smear from the start; the roman catholic church's obsessive need to keep books and insist that the world was made by a rational intelligence laid the fundamental foundation for the renaissance, and the era between the fall of Rome and the enlightenment was far more advanced than the term you used implies.
Like I said, whether the roman catholic church is a net-good in 2025 is entirely based on how you weight the value of both the good and bad things they do. You're free to assign them an arbitrarily high negative value because you have religious differences with them if you like, but pretending that they've never done anything good and aren't doing anything good today is a position of willful ignorance.
Come to think of it, I doubt you can find a single organization that was even a century old which doesn't have at least one black mark against them.
So you could go point for point for rebuttal but don’t and instead write 5 paragraphs of arm waving and whataboutism - “what about other old institutions” - I don’t care, we’re talking about the church.
The comment I replied to, you said “considerable force for good for centuries” now you want to limit it to 2025?
Go ahead and rebut how millions of lives were lost by actively sabotaging condom use and every other crime I mentioned.
I said they’re an overall negative, anti-human institution with a long well documented history of points to back it up.
I didn’t say “nothing good” has come out, beautiful flowers come out of excrement too.
You held on to the “dark ages” - but skipped over the destruction of knowledge that led to them and you wrote what you consider a rebuttal. So let’s talk about that:
They didn’t systematically keep fuck all.
Some scribes kept some books, the ones they could hide from the church. Most of the old writings of classical authors have been lost.
Between 500-1000AD the Church systematically destroyed classical libraries and learning centers. The burning of the Library of Alexandria and closure of philosophical schools eliminated centuries of knowledge in science, mathematics, and philosophy.
The Church controlled virtually all education, restricting literacy to clergy and limiting curriculum to religious doctrine.
Church prohibited dissection and medical research, leading to the loss of advanced Roman medical knowledge. Illness attributed to sin rather than natural causes, impeding medical advancement for centuries.
The Church burned books, destroyed manuscripts, and executed or exiled intellectuals who challenged religious orthodoxy.
It’s an obscene rewriting of history to thank the executioner for the rivers of blood that fed what came after.
Are you an atheist, a neo-pagan, or just a protesting with an anti-papal bias?
I ignored most of your anti-catholic bullshit because that's what it is -- anti-catholic bullshit. You asked where I got my assertion from, and I answered. If you want to get into more detail, sure, let's do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_HIV/AIDS
Condoms are very effective at stopping the spread of HIV, but they do fuckall to keep anyone infected with HIV from developing AIDS and dying. If the catholics are providing 25% of the world healthcare for people with AIDS, that means that there are "millions" of people alive today because of the roman church. And if celebrities like Princess Diana or Magic Johnson get credit for humanizing victims of the AIDS epidemic, so does the catholic church.
I don't want to defend their wrongheaded opposition to prophylactics due to their family planning usage, but how much blame they get for the spread of HIV and how much credit they get for research and healthcare is, like I said. complex as fuck.
To paraphrase wikipedia, "citation fucking needed." Here's some random links I found, starting with two biased statements.
https://churchandstate.org.uk/2023/01/christian-vandalism-of-the-classical-world/ https://www.christian-thinktank.com/qburnbx.html
The first is a pop-formatted article by a rather obviously biased author, who doesn't seem to have any actual citations for his claims. The second is a more scholarly formatted article from someone with a more pro-christian bias, but numerous citations are included. Here's a less biased take, whose short form is "no":
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/20453/did-christians-burn-the-great-library-of-alexandria
I'm going to infer that you're alluding to the story of Galileo Galilei here. In short, Galileo was condemned by the church not because he was an "intellectual who challenged religious orthodoxy", but because he didn't even try and hide his anti-catholic bias. There's a world of difference between telling the king he's wrong and telling the king that he should abdicate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei
To paraphrase what I said before, if you want to assert as a matter of faith that Christianity in general or the roman church in particular are bad and evil, then there's no way I could convince you otherwise. If your perspective is more religiously agnostic, however, I encourage you to do a bit more research before you repeat the biased accusations of others as if they were objective fact.