You have to ask who wants the residents to feel beholden to the government. Institute a program where people get foreclosed-on houses free and the right wing will lambaste it. A lot of this is the fault of the US electorate, who seem to prefer extremely expensive solutions like swelling prison populations to anything that might be thought of as being soft on crime.

We do know of companies that don't pay a living wage because government assistance programs are helping their employees. If it wasn't for food stamps, lots of people simply couldn't afford to work for Wal-Mart.

We've had the War on Poverty for roughly fifty years now, and poverty went down considerably at the beginning. Given a more or less constant effort, why would you expect poverty rates to continue to decline? It takes money to keep people out of poverty, and the economic situation has not always been in favor of finding decent jobs. The most promising new development over the last fifty years is probably the ACA, flawed as it is. Lots of people simply couldn't earn their way out of poverty because of lack of medical care. When I was working with the welfare system (as a programmer), medical assistance was the number one reason people couldn't get themselves off welfare.

As far as charity goes, while it's a good thing, it isn't a panacea. You care about the mentally disabled. Lots of people don't. Charity favors people that the people giving charity favor, and that's not necessarily a good thing. Charitable giving depends on what people are giving now, which isn't necessarily what the need is now. There's good reasons why a safety net needs government support.

Government programs have been increasingly oriented towards pushing people into working, which is generally a good thing. The average stay on welfare programs, whenever I've checked, has been about three years or less, meaning that its primary function has been to get people through a bad spell. For everybody who's managed to stay on for over twenty years, there's got to be ten who spent a year on welfare, that used the system as it should be used and got no publicity for it.

One of the Freakonomics books had a section on drug dealing. At one time, the lowest level, peddling stuff on the street, gave you less than one year of life expectancy (meaning that somebody would probably kill you within a year) and didn't pay minimum wage. Everybody wanted the glamor job of drug kingpin, and worked for extremely dangerous peanuts to try to realize that hope. Since then, the death rate went way down.

First, let's discuss monopoly pricing. Given a competitive market, the optimum pricing will usually be not much higher than the expenses of production, because raising it will lose a lot of business. In a monopoly, the pricing is higher, but it's still limited. Raising prices will reduce the amount of business according to the demand curve, which is never completely inelastic. A monopoly, effectively, is an organization that can do monopoly pricing, not just one without competition. Microsoft Windows was and arguably is a monopoly, since there were no other generally acceptable desktop operating systems, so Microsoft could pretty much get what price it wanted.

A natural monopoly is a business where no competitor can effectively break the monopoly pricing. In the case of water companies, the cost of running piping to every building will normally be higher than the amount the competitor could earn by undercutting the monopoly, so we couldn't normally expect a competitor to emerge if there is a monopolist. (This is different from two competitors in a natural monopoly who each hope to be the monopolist.) Your example of different companies for different areas of a city is irrelevant, since the choice of water provider is completely tied to the location of the building. It's no different from having one water company for a city, and another for the next city over.

There's three reasons for such a natural monopoly that I can easily think of. One is that the infrastructure is very expensive, so the cost of duplication would be higher than the potential profit. One is that it uses an exclusive resource, such as limited space on utility poles or part of the EM spectrum. One is network effects, so the value of owning X rather than Y depends on the number of people using X and Y. Microsoft Windows is necessary for most people's computers because it reliably runs Windows-compatible software, and developers generally bring things out on Microsoft Windows because that's where the customer is. To compete effectively, an OS would have to reliably run Windows software, and there's lots of reasons that isn't going to happen any time soon. Consider what happened with early nettops, low-end laptops that ran some sort of Linux variant and were intended to run web software. They didn't sell because they couldn't run Windows-compatible software. It wasn't until Apple transformed the smartphone and tablet markets that there was a big market for OSes that weren't Windows.

There are also situations where there doesn't have to be a monopoly, but where one would be much more efficient. I've lived in a city with city-coordinated garbage service and one with hire-your-own, and the former worked a lot better. Trucks had to travel shorter distances for the same business, neighborhoods had uniform garbage days rather than having garbage trucks running around and messing up traffic at any time, and people didn't try to evade paying a garbage company by stuffing garbage into other people's bins or just dumping it somewhere inconspicuous.

So, we've seen ways to get natural monopolies, specifically through barriers of entry and network effects, without involving politics. The political reaction, in some of these cases, has been to grant a de jure as well as de facto monopoly on the condition that the monopoly is regulated. (This can happen in various ways. My water and sewer service are supplied by city government departments, my gas and electricity and phone service by regulated private companies, and my garbage collection by private companies that bid for city contracts. All work well at reasonable prices) The other political involvement is in allocating scarce resources. Somebody has to decide who can use what chunk of EM spectrum, and on what terms. Somebody has to provide easements on public and private property, or it would be completely impractical for anybody to build out infrastructure (some property owners would refuse to cooperate at any reasonable place).

The "God of the Gaps" is an argument that, since there are things we can't figure out, there must be a God that did it. I think of it as an argument for people who don't think God could do something outside the limits of their imagination. This isn't what the Catholics do. They believe there is a God that created all things, and hence the laws of nature were God's doing, and evolution was God's way of creating species. They don't use evolution as an argument that God exists.

The "God of the Gaps" argument is more a fundamentalist Protestant argument, where they pick away at evolution until they think they've found a fatal flaw with it, and then say that proves God did it. Even saying that evolution is compatible with Christianity (which the Catholics have said for a long time) removes the God of the Gaps argument.

In your last paragraph, you fail to provide support for Catholic doctrine being at odds with scientific theory. You provide examples of the Catholic church saying some things are immoral, which is not a conflict with science. The use of embryonic stem cells could be immoral even if it's scientifically useful (consider some of the Nazi experiments on Jews in WWII for a parallel). Contraception could have lots of demonstrated benefits and still be immoral. The church can tell people to do things one way because that's the moral way, while knowing it isn't going to work in almost all cases. You and I don't agree with those moral stances, but they aren't anti-scientific.

Removing all the cases where the Church says something is possible but immoral, you have one stupid statement by a Pope in 2009. I don't think that comprises evidence that the church is anti-science.

Modern Protestant denominations are mostly offshoots of Catholicism. The Orthodox branch of Christianity isn't really.

The Catholic Church teaches that evolution happened. The Pope just said it did. Therefore, any Catholics who believe otherwise are already considered wrong by the mainstream church. What more do you ask? Should there be a modern-day Inquisition in which Catholics who are Young-Earth Creationists are forced to recant?

As far as telling people to believe goes, I can attest to at least one Catholic school offering at least one course in theology in the lower grades, which my friend who took it described as arguing (and much preferable to the Biblical History, aka "whobegat", class). This suggests that they were trying to encourage people to think about their faith.

I've noticed an idea among some Christians that it's okay if you lose your belief for now, because you're having some sort of spiritual or spiritual-related problem, and that presumably when that's resolved you'll regain it. I don't know how common this is with Catholics.

Really, there's a whole lot of Christians who are very reasonable about most things.

"Magic" has some connotations that many people don't like. Let's just consider the possibility that God has worked a very small number of miracles that go against natural law. That wouldn't affect scientific progress or scientific discoveries, since the miracles can be disregarded as misperceptions or lies. The laws of nature would have to be understood as the laws of nature when God isn't directly mucking with things, but since true miracles are extremely rare that would not be a problem.

When we find that so many things can be explained scientifically, and that lots of things that apparently cannot be explained scientifically are mistakes or hoaxes or such, it's tempting to think that everything can be explained scientifically, and this is indeed a good assumption to make. That doesn't mean it's always true.

Huh? Past the "cogito, ergo sum", there's nothing you're going to figure out from first principles that applies to the real world. (That's not even from first principles, since there's no logical reason anything has to exist. It's an observation that's really hard to get out of.) Anything Descartes came up with in the second Meditation and later was going to be based on his prior beliefs, and I suspect he had a strong desire to come up with some sort of reason to believe the world is real (IIRC, in the Sixth Meditation).

I'm also curious how, using the principle of the Meditations, he was supposed to come to the conclusion that there was no God.

It's not necessarily compartmentalized thinking, but the natural limits to science. If you can find a way to do objective measurements, you can make a science out of it. Bill James applied scientific methods to baseball and baseball stats (which are objective measurements, although there was a certain amount of subjectivity in making some of them).

If we had some objective means of determining the morality of something, we could have a scientific theory of ethics and morals. We don't. Therefore, to say anything meaningful about morals, we have to come up with something outside the process of science.

If your churchmates don't really care about the science, that's not really bad. Having a false opinion of something because you never looked into it and never needed to is pretty much harmless. We've all got tons of such opinions. People on slashdot usually have more or less considered opinions on science, but that's because they get interested in it. If somebody's busy trying to make sure poor people have enough to eat, I don't really care about their scientific opinions.

The problems is if they get vocal and insistent about their false opinions, and you said nothing about that. It also appears that any of them who do get interested in science have opportunities to do so.

Ask a physicist of appropriate speciality about time as it relates to the Big Bang. Last Stephen Hawking book I read claimed that time didn't exist "before" the Big Bang.

Ask the same physicist about causality. It sure isn't what it used to be.

From some stuff I read, it sounds like European scientists several centuries ago thought they could learn about the world both from the world itself and from the Bible. That really didn't last very long.

I can be totally sure about something, and then find I was mistaken. I don't see why a scientists can't be totally sure about some things.