Religion is the Greatest Grift
What other confidence game convinces marks to put their complete and utter faith into an unseen being based on unproven and unprovable promises of life ever after upon the believer’s death? Meanwhile, grifters like the Catholic Church, fundie-vangies, Jews and Baptists use their ill gotten gains to enrich themselves, buy political influence and escape criminal justice accountability.
A case in point is the Catholic Church in New Orleans, Louisiana (https://tinyurl.com/Church-sex-abuse) where senior church officials are being investigated for their roles in covering up for suspected pedophile priests including those who engaged in sex trafficking by “gifting” abuse victims to other pedophiles. The whole sordid scenario extends all the way up the Catholic hierarchy to the pope who has yet to order all accusations to be forwarded to local law enforcement for investigation. Much of this was exposed when NOLA Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker (https://tinyurl.com/Pedo-Priest) was finally arrested after years of delay and obfuscation by the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
Fundie-vangie (fundamentalist-evangelical) churches are also in on the action as exposed in an article about Gateway Church in Texas (https://tinyurl.com/fundie-vangies.) One pastor went so far as to tell an employee who reported sexual harassment,
“…one of the church’s pastors, who allegedly told her ‘God gave her cancer to teach her a lesson.'”
The employee reports,
That pastor was terminated later in 2021 with two years salary severance pay, and, according to the lawsuit, the plaintiff was told it was her fault, and offered six months severance payment if she would resign that day. A few months later, the plaintiff was fired during a Zoom call.
Now, this case would be routinely swept under the rug and forgotten if 
the founder of Gateway Church, Robert Morris, hadn’t been forced to resign due to a “sexually immoral” interaction with a “young woman” (who was 12 years old.) As of this post, Gateway Church is bleeding members (https://tinyurl.com/Church-imploding) so Robert Morris’ son James Morris plans to start his own megachurch because the money is too good to give up just because Dad wasn’t smart enough to bluster his way out of the accusations like any smart man of god!
Jews don’t get a pass either although rabbis seem to have a predilection for young boys more so than girls. A quick DuckDuckGo search (much more secure than Google) turns up lots of hits including a book by Dr. Elana Sztokman, ““ that contains more than 80 stories of sexual abuse in the Jewish community.
The “whataboutizers” will jump in with stories about the Taliban or Indians or some other group but they’re missing the point. There’s not much Americans can do about other countries and societies. We need to look at loosening the grip of religion and religious hypocrites on American society. That starts by recognizing and acknowledging the dangers of religion in the US.