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Comment by iliketosleep | Hacker News Reader

Many of these people are essentially selling hope. No shortage of paying customers there.

explains why the church business has never gone bankrupt. no matter how big or small it is. They always expanding.

I mean, a lot of individual churches have closed or shutdown in recent years, especially so in some part of the US and Europe.

Churches (in America) are like lotteries and other fantasy businesses. When they get boring, churches go out of business and they get replaced by other churches that promise a chance at a better prize. There are parts of USA where many old church buildings are for sale and can be had for a song.

> Church of England weekly attendance falls below 1m for first time.

> Sunday attendance also drops to 760,000 as decline continues in face of growing secularism, diversity and ageing congregation

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/church-of-engl...

> Religious affiliation, church attendance, and belief in God have all fallen in the US. None of these declines is happening fast, but the signs are now unmistakable. To take religious belief as an example, only 45 percent of young adults aged 18-30 have no doubt about God’s existence, compared with 68 percent of people aged 65 and over.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/09/05/religion-is-in-d...

>Church of England weekly attendance falls below 1m for first time

Well, the Church of England was as close you could get to atheism while still being in a religion.

Those self-help/get rich quick people serve the same role as the churches, but without the spirituality and community (or any self-humbling).

Generally agreed, but there often is some semblance of community in those get-rich-quick schemes, MLMs in particular. You have people coming to the scheme's local branch meetings like they'd be attending church service, and they're all full of enthusiasm that's feeding off each other - creating a ridiculous cult-like happy death spiral.

Source: 3 people I know are, or were in the past, involved in various MLMs and invited me - including to one of their "internal" meetings, which I attended out of curiosity, and where I observed the most striking cult behaviour I ever experienced.

Churches go bankrupt all the time?

There are three vacant churches for sale on my morning bike route alone

Plenty of churches are growing. Plenty are closing doors.

Now replace "church" with "business".

This is how things work.

I think we're only seeing your comment as a dig at religion for dig's sake.

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