Free The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture by Darrel Ray

largely dedicated to religious instruction. Facilities and debt retirement are mostly related to religious work as are administration and denominational fees. My church had a Boy Scout troop that met in the building, but only Protestant Christian boys were allowed. Maybe the boys learned some functional skills, but as a member of that particular troop, I saw a lot of “God and country” type of instruction, including prayer and blatant Protestant propaganda.
    Considering the tough time I had getting the board to let a few neighborhood kids use the gym, we can see that non-religious use of the facilities were uncommon. From these examples we can conclude that virtually all costs associated with facilities, utilities, maintenance and insurance were religious in nature. No one was using the facilities to teach children reading or to help elderly people find a cool place to go in the summer heat when they had no air conditioning.
    That leaves programs and missions. Most of the programs involved teaching children religious ideas: Christmas and Easter programs, summer Bible school programs, church camps, adult and children’s choir, etc., all were primarily viral focused. Were people better able to deal with real life, finances, disease, childcare or a host of other daily problems as a result? While my church claimed to teach these things, most of what passed for religious instruction in childcare, finances, disease control or prevention was heavily steeped in non-functional religious ideas and downright superstition. Things like prayer vigils for cancer victims, abstinence classes for teens, Christian financial management, among a host of other activities, all focused on the virus. These activities healed no one from cancer. I saw no evidence of unwanted pregnancy prevention. Churchmembers would have been better off taking a secular financial management class, where they would not have been pressured to give 10% to the church.
    “Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.”
    -Robert Ingersoll
     
    How about missions? Most mission money goes to those who are preaching a religion’s specific message. My parents became missionaries after they retired, so I was able to get an inside picture of what other missionaries were doing with the money given them. By far the greatest amount of money went to paying missionary preachers and building churches. I saw very little of that money going to teach children to read, how to manage a small farm more effectively or how to build local infrastructure and conserve resources. Instead, thousands of Bibles and religious tracts were purchased and distributed, religious services were conducted, hundreds of people were baptized, hundreds of children memorized scripture verses, but at the end of the day, there was little done to bring people out of their poverty or provide them with the skills needed to live in a fast-moving modern world.
    I heard returning missionaries give talks on the good they were doing. They did not talk about teaching people to run their own business or raising more educated children. They did not tell of higher-quality produce from farms and gardens or less disease and death. Instead, they proclaimed the glory of god in new churches built, numbers of people baptized, numbers of Bibles distributed, as well as men and women who graduated from the missionary Bible college.
    Of the money given to a religious organization, something less (probably far less) than 5% provides something of functional value. Most money is directed to ensuring propagation of the religion. How does that compare to a non-religious charitable organization? The Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance recommends that charitable organizations spend 65% of their budgets on program activities and