Am 26.07.2014 00:45, schrieb Jim Henderson:
> On Fri, 25 Jul 2014 21:53:54 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>
>> (A country that builds more churches than hospitals.)
>
> Arguably, that's the case in the US as well.
>
> And the UK.

Germany, too. (*)

Does this make sense? Let's see:

In 2011, Baden-Wuerttemberg had a population of about 10.5 million, and 
285 hospitals with a total of 56910 beds and an average utilization of 
76.8%; thus, it can be concluded that on average about 1 in 240 people 
were in hospital at any given day. We can also conclude that an average 
hospital had 200 beds.

If we presume that a pious person would attend church services regularly 
at least on major holidays, such as Easter Sunday or Christmas, then it 
would take just 0.4% of the population to be pious in order to require 
about as many church seats as hospital beds.


(*) Actually, reading Stephen's posting more carefully: Maybe no. 
Germany /has/ more churches than hospitals, but whether more /new/ 
churches are being built than hospitals is difficult to tell. 
Statistical data from Baden-Wuerttemberg indicates that the number of 
hospitals is actually declining (as people remain hospitalized for ever 
shorter times), but I'll wager that the same goes for churches. Just 
noticed a New Apostolic Church building having been torn down a few 
weeks ago near where I live.

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