[iscrewyou]

There are religious organizations that own hospitals. I was flabbergasted when I found out about this recently. My first thought was how they’ve got a perfect system to avoid all taxes.

Edit: it seems like the typical derailment is happening when it comes to religion. The topic is about taxes. I mentioned taxes. Not if religious organizations should own hospitals.

[throw0101c]

> There are religious organizations that own hospitals. I was flabbergasted when I found out about this recently.

Why would you be surprised at this? In (e.g.) Christianity, caring for the poor and sick has been one of the central tenants since its inception, so why wouldn't formal institutions be organized doing so?

Before the welfare state—which is a fairly recent invention—the largest organization would have been the Church (and its various religious orders: Dominicans, Franciscans, etc), which would have worked towards its three-fold mission of worshipping God, evangelizing, and serving the poor:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9m-pNsFPV0

It can reasonably be argued that the very idea of taking care of the poor, etc, only came into Western civilization because of Christianity. As someone who presumably lives with-in Western civilization and adheres to its (general) values, you take the idea for granted, without perhaps examining where it/they came from:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Holland_book)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...

[tialaramex]

> It can reasonably be argued that the very idea of taking care of the poor, etc, only came into Western civilization because of Christianity.

You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity, or warfare or various other things humans have sometimes done and sometimes not done...

The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others. Plutarch is like "Philanthropy is a good idea".

[throw0101c]

> You can try that argument but it's not very convincing. I think you could do equally well arguing that slavery is the fault of Christianity […]

You can also argue for a Flat Earth, but all your arguments given would be bad: given that slavery existed before Christianity arrived on the scene, and early Christians (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa) argued against it, that would contain a bunch of bad arguments as well. The history of Western thought as outlined in (e.g.) Siedentop's Inventing the Individual shows how Christianity moved the needle from slaves to serfs to individual freedom:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18740986-inventing-the-i...

This can further be expounded on in Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession illustrating how everyone—pauper to Pope—was afforded a fair shake at justice (due process in law) going back to (at least) the Middle Ages:

* https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo562094...

See also Whitman's The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial for an interesting run-down on that topic:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2187985.The_Origins_of_R...

> The ancient Greeks (so, significantly before Christianity and also influential for "Western civilization") have a whole bunch of goddesses representing the idea of specific kinds of being nice to others.

And how many orphanages did the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans have? (Versus leaving children outside to die from exposure.) Or hospitals:

> The declaration of Christianity as an accepted religion in the Roman Empire drove an expansion of the provision of care. Following First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE construction of a hospital in every cathedral town was begun. Among the earliest were those built by the physician Saint Sampson in Constantinople and by Basil of Caesarea in modern-day Turkey towards the end of the 4th century. By the beginning of the 5th century, the hospital had already become ubiquitous throughout the Christian east in the Byzantine world,[3] this being a dramatic shift from the pre-Christian era of the Roman Empire where no civilian hospitals existed.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hospitals#Roman_Emp...

The current-day 'Western values' are Christian values. The most recent instance of non-Christian values being practiced in the West would probably be Nazism, and before that Nietzsche's observation that you either accept a supernatural entity and have (e.g.) Christian values, or you have nihilism and morals are arbitrary (in After Virtue, MacIntyre outlines why any one system (by Kierkegaard, Marx, Kant, Hume, etc) is just as arbitrary as any other (agreeing with Nietzsche in the binary choice that is available)).

[tialaramex]

> The current-day 'Western values' are Christian values. The most recent instance of non-Christian values being practiced in the West would probably be Nazism

I'm sure this feels right to you, but to get there you have to decide that the actual "Western values", which have little to do with Christianity, are instead somehow Christian, while the contrary practices of some Christians aren't.

The Nazis were mostly Christians, it could hardly have been otherwise given how Christian Germany was at the time. Yes, some Nazis wanted to destroy Christianity (and all of them wanted a Church subservient to their politics, but that was true everywhere, it's why the Church of England even exists) but on the whole they're a product of Christianity, even if that's uncomfortable for you.

[iscrewyou]

Great points. But you missed the mark. The discussion is about taxes not if religions should own hospitals. The same poor people you mention have to pay taxes while the religious organizations get special cuts. If we are blind to how profitable and mutually beneficial relationships hospitals and insurance companies have, there is nothing else to discuss.

[throw0101c]

> The discussion is about taxes not if religions should own hospitals.

This sub-thread is, as I was commenting on:

> There are religious organizations that own hospitals. I was flabbergasted when I found out about this recently.

[nullindividual]

What's worse is they enforce their religious worldview at these hospitals, denying legal medical treatments based off of the largest human hoax and political control mechanism ever invented by man.

[rjzzleep]

In Germany some of the best hospitals are Christian (catholic I believe, but may be wrong). The US is a really weird place.

[wccrawford]

There's a bunch of local hospitals that are all run by a religion, but so far as I know, it doesn't dictate what they will and won't do for patients. So while I'm sure there are some religious hospitals that deny treatment, it's not all of them.

The US is a really, really big place. Our states are the size of many countries. I'm not surprised that there's incredibly diverse sets of circumstances here.

[dumbo-octopus]

Plenty of good Christian hospitals here too. I suspect the parent is referring specifically to abortions, there are other procedures that a Christian would be potentially unwilling to perform (sex change operations, for instance), but they tend to require an experienced surgeon specifically trained in that operation, which wouldn't be hired by the hospital due to not aligning with their mission (would you want the government to force you to hire a .NET developer when you're purely an embedded systems shop?).

As for abortions in particular, if you are of the opinion that procedure would be murder, it would certainly be out of place for the government to force you to do it. How many folks who promote the government forcing doctors to do what they consider to be killing children would be okay with the government forcing them to kill another human in their day job?

[nradov]

The same is true in the US. Some of the best hospitals (and complete integrated health systems) are run by Christian churches. This is largely for historical reasons: decades ago, churches stepped in to deliver healthcare as part of their mission because governments and secular organizations weren't doing enough. Some of them do refuse to perform certain services, particularly certain women's reproductive services, on moral grounds. This can make it difficult for women in some areas to access care.

[leipert]

Ha. But it is weird as well in Germany, because the churches are not bound to the normal Labour law and can for example discriminate against gay folks without recourse. Which is even more ridiculous given that most of the funds for the catholic/protestant schools and hospitals are payed by the tax payer/health insurances.

[spaer]

Hospitals were invented by religious organizations. It’s not strictly going to be driven by tax avoidance