Houses of Worship. Excerpt Chapter 8

And the grand totals are…

Number of houses of worship… 339,239 Number of members…163,730,703

Now I know where the expression "Holy Moley" came from.

Keep in mind these figures are nine years old and far from complete. I’m sure there is tens of thousand of smaller churches not mentioned in this list. Trust me, I live in the Tampa Bay, Florida area and there is a church on damn near every street.

The above totals are grossly underestimated but numerical accuracy is not the issue here. I only wish to illustrate the extent and social impact of our religious material world.

Speaking of the world, can you imagine what these figures would look like on a global list?

While I was typing our own USA list I was astounded more than once. 60 million Roman Catholics? Wow!

As a matter of fact I do have some global figures in the same database, might as well. First lets do a few calculations from our USA list. I’ll attempt to be ridicuously conservative.

Let’s say each of the above churches was situated on an average of just 10 acres of land. (I understand the Catholic Church owns more land than any other entity on earth). A meager ten acres each will make a satisfactory illustration. You draw your own conclusions.

10 x 339,239 = 3,392,390. That’s millions of acres being occupied by churches. The entire state of Connecticut sits on only 3,135,360 acres. Why are we not taxing these people?

If all of these churches paid say a total of 25,000 dollars each for all State and Federal taxes lumped together, (some would be paying tens of millions) the yearly total would be 8,480,975,000 dollars, or in ten years it would amount to almost 85 billion. One can do a lot with 85 billion dollars. Like feed our countries starving children for instance.