• IDew@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    I don’t at all understand churches advertising… Maybe because of my European ass? To my knowledge churches are not about profit? I get that you want to announce your service times and such, but put that in a small column in a newspaper for the ones interested or something lol

    • Mugly12@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I imagine it’s a form of evangelism. Like, if they can convince someone to attend church from the ad then that is the same as saving their soul and gets them points in God’s book (or so they tell people when in reality money is the goal).

            • marcos@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              AFAIK, they did invent the modern flat-Earthism. Europe designed a straw-men to use as racist propaganda to say the people on their colonies are stupid, but it was a group at the US that said “yes, that’s us, and we are proud of it!”

              Antivax was invented everywhere, again and again, so,maybe they get a half point for it too.

              • Serinus@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                In the modern era, the pseudoscientific belief in a flat Earth originated with the English writer Samuel Rowbotham with the 1849 pamphlet Zetetic Astronomy. Lady Elizabeth Blount established the Universal Zetetic Society in 1893, which published journals. In 1956, Samuel Shenton set up the International Flat Earth Research Society, better known as the “Flat Earth Society” from Dover, England, as a direct descendant of the Universal Zetetic Society.

          • anachronist@midwest.social
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            5 months ago

            USA gotta export its worse ideas abroad, after all. For-profit churches, flat earth, antivaxx

            More like someone in Europe realizing that they could import something from America and it’d catch on like an invasive plant species with no local ecological resistance.

    • QuantumSparkles@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      They want to convince you to come to their church so you can donate to their church which is totally not profit it is for the lord trust me it’s not sweet delicious tax-exempt profit mmmm

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 months ago

      American megachurches are for-profit multimedia empires, doomsday cults, illegal political influence organizations, human trafficking rings, and shields for those who commit sex crimes, in an expensive, tailored trenchcoat.

    • The_v@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      That’s an ad for Mormons. The Mormons are a corporation disguised as a church that has gained extreme wealth. They own a huge real estate empire, universities, and farms plus over a hundred billion in one investment fund.

      Thy have been caught numerous times breaking all sorts of financial laws but because of their status as a church it’s hidden.

      For the Mormons it’s all about profit and hoarding wealth.

    • half coffee@lemy.lol
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      5 months ago

      The church in the ad is particularly harmful. I had to fight to get out of it, and only after they took 10% of my income for years and trafficked me. They want money, power, and control, not increased numbers at their services.

      • Chuymatt@beehaw.org
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        5 months ago

        White and delightsum.

        Also, gotta increase their 35billion in holdings to make the elders more obscenely rich.

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        and trafficked me

        There’s a serious “wait, what?!?” here. The church sells slaves?

        • half coffee@lemy.lol
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          5 months ago

          I was threatened by local leaders and family if I didn’t go on a 2 year mission in another country, then when I got there, they:

          • took my passport immediately and locked it in a building I couldn’t access
          • required 12 to 16 hours of work a day, with discipline if productivity dropped
          • refused to provide adequate food or medical care
          • restricted my communication with my family
          • assigned me a companion to surveil me 24/7 and report disobedience to leadership (and assigned me to surveil someone else)
          • disciplined me when I was physically and sexually assaulted by other missionaries

          I didn’t want to call it trafficking for a long time. I figured maybe God just had a weird way of doing things. But my spouse works at a recovery center for survivors of violence (including trafficking) and helped me realize that’s what it was.

          A pretty big misconception is that trafficking has to look like selling slaves, and I agree that’s an egregious thing, but it can be a lot more broad than that.

          There are a lot of resources at https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en if you’re curious. My mission experience checked just about every box for labor trafficking, and I’ve heard very similar stories from a lot of other people who have been missionaries.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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            5 months ago

            Were you mormon? Or is this more widespread than I thought?

            If you are talking about the mormon church, and if what I’ve heard is correct, you missed an added point that makes it look all the worse. That you had to pay for the right to let them do that to you. Normally in a labour trafficking situation you’d at least be expecting some sort of compensation, even if it’s grossly inadequate and ends up largely back in the hands of the traffickers as they charge for accommodation and transport. But from what I’ve heard, mormons do the labour entirely for free, and pay a large amount for the “honour”.

            • half coffee@lemy.lol
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              5 months ago

              I was mormon. Thankfully my parents paid to traffic me, so I could afford to go to college and cut them off relatively soon after I got home.

        • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          They might be talking about a mission? Personally wouldn’t call that trafficking, but it can be pretty brutal depending on the mission

          • joyhunter@lemmy.zip
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            5 months ago

            It is trafficking. Growing up in that church, I still agree with a lot of the stated philosophical beliefs, the actual behavior of most of the community is incredibly disappointing and leans cult-like. The mission isn’t inherently trafficking, the religion isn’t inherently a cult, but it’s not beating the allegations and more within need to call out the members that commit these illegal organized atrocities and make it into a cult.