The Pope to Kill 75,000 People

By the by; religion kills people.  And that’s not just the obvious millions who have died as a result of religious wars.  People spend a lot of money on their religions, building places of worship, buying irrational literature and trinkets for rituals and paying to visit supposed holy places and people.  Take cathedrals as one for instance.  One cathedral built at Coventry in the UK in 1962 cost £22 million, by 2009 values.   The value of a life saved by easing poverty was put at around £195 in chapter 4 [William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden (New York:  The Penguin Press, 2006), p.252.].  That means that the money spent on that one cathedral could have been used to save the lives of around 113,000 people.  Not really very Christian.  Multiply that up by all religious buildings in the world and the lives which are going to be lost due to religion will be many times more, in the millions.  A similar calculation can be done with the costs of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the UK in 2010, estimated to total £15 million (at 2010 values and excluding police and security costs).  That equates to 75,000 people who are going to die because religion got the money, not the people in poverty.  Is the Pope following Christ’s teaching that we should take care of the poor? 

Mental health, as always, resides in reality.  And the reality is that the people supporting such religious buildings and Papal visits are deluded, and are selfishly guarding their entrance to heaven.  That is where the benefit is (though it isn’t real):  the cost is for the poor and needy of the world.