Christian family fined after arguing taxes 'against God's will' (bbc.co.uk)

there are a lot of crazy people out there...

This is directly addressed in the Bible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar

It is entirely possible to live without paying taxes for religious reasons.

The trick is to intentionally earn less than the threshold to pay taxes, which is known as “tax resistance”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance

Notable examples include Dorothy Day (recently canonized), Aamon Hennacy, and (mostly symbolically), Henry Thoreau.

In a Christian context, a life of willful simplicity spent in service to the dispossessed is explicitly encouraged as virtuous in many many places.

Perhaps the judge wasn't aware of Matthew 22 when he said:

> "In my view, the Bible effectively said that civil matters and the law of God operate in two different spheres."

From Matthew 22:

> 17 Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” 18 But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? 19 Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. 20 And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” 21 They said, “Caesar's.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's

To me that's a pretty black and white. Taxes may be a scourge, but to avoid paying them has nothing to do with god. (Yes, I find it highly hypocritical that modern religions get tax exemption status).

Please don't post religious flamebait to HN. There's no intellectual curiosity in that, so it's off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The US IRS has a nice document about frivolous tax arguments. It sets out why they think these are wrong in US law.

https://www.irs.gov/privacy-disclosure/the-truth-about-frivo...