Makes sense to me, and should be done in the US as well. Providing a tax exemption is in a way the opposite of a separation of church and state. The state is giving them special treatment.
As long as clubs give free entry, sounds reasonable to me that club dancing would be considered a social, community-like activity to bring people closer to each other (literally too) and make them feel joyful.
Because people exploit the rules massively (the Church of Scientology is one example of many).
More importantly: these religious buildings still call the police when there is a break in and call the fire service when there is a fire. They expect all of the benefits from paying taxes without actually doing so.
These sound like property taxes, but that aside, your example could register itself as a non profit organization.
The important distinction between non-profits and churches in the US is that churches do not have to demonstrate that they aren’t a just a profit generating company (see Scientology, many evangelical churches) - they don’t have to provide any documentation at all.
I’m fine with churches being untaxed non-profits, as long as they actually demonstrate that.
Formalized clubs do get some tax benefits. Most people are only familiar with 501(c)(3)s but there are many kinds of 501(c)s; specific tax benefits and allowed behavior to maintain them vary.
Are there any countries where the religious groups are NOT exempt from taxes? I'd be curious if this has been done and those religious groups still managed to remain "open to public" while surviving on private donations.
It is more complex than that. The Church of England started out as the English branch of the Roman Catholic Church. In that form, it was scarcely a private body – it was the state religion, intimately entwined with the state, with the power to levy taxes, and it ran its own court system with jurisdiction over issues which today would be viewed as essentially secular in character (validity of marriages; inheritance of personal property; crimes committed by clergy), and the state would recognise and enforce that court system's decisions. The property of such a state religion is hardly "private property", it is arguably "public property".
For centuries, the King and Pope had intermittently fought over control of it (a situation not unique to England, but repeated across mediaeval Europe). Henry VIII did not see himself as carrying out a state takeover of the Church, but simply as settling that traditional conflict between Pope and King decisively in his own favour.
To put this in perspective, in Switzerland your employer takes your church donations out of your salary. Your taxes directly fund the church. _That's_ the opposite of separation of church and state.
In the USA, tax deductions to churches is giving the same treatment as a charity.
Both are wrong. Churches should prove they act as non-profits just like any other organisation. Because especially in the US a lot do not exactly oppose profits.
Charity organisations usually get tax exemptions too. Maybe make that the only tax exemption, and have religious organisations prove that they are charities.
Under English common law, religious organisations are charities by definition. A charitable trust is a trust which serves a "charitable purpose", and the "advancement of religion" has long been recognised as a charitable purpose, going back to at least 1601 [1]. (Originally all charities were trusts, and so charity law formed part of trust law; later, people began using other legal structures for charities, and the rules which defined a charity in trust law were extended to apply in those other cases too.)
Most jurisdictions which inherited English common law, have maintained the classification of "advancement of religion" as a charitable end. To give just one example, look at how the IRS defines "charity" in the US [2]
It doesn’t matter because in order to get nonprofit status they’d need to fill some forms explaining how it is managed, financial statements, maybe perform external audit if they are large enough etc. If they are not willing to do that work, they won’t be eligible for nonprofit tax exemption.
That's because it's a legally meaningless phrase. Being a church, however, is legally different and gets benefits like not having to register before claiming charitable status.
I don't think religious institutions have to pay property taxes.
Ok, I looked it up: “states subsidize religions to the tune of about $26.2 billion per year by not requiring religious institutions to pay property taxes for property worth about $600 billion. This subsidy is of particular interest because property taxes pay for services such as firefighting and police, which religious institutions use the same as corporations and private citizens.”
> But non-profits have to pay property tax, right?
No, non-profits do not have to pay property tax.
So by that measure states also subsidize non-profits. And your math does not take into account the amount of services religions provide residents.
If you went by the internet religions do nothing except take money, but if you visit the real world, religions are the backbone of social services in the US.
Don't you find it funny that an org such as the church is a non-profit? I mean, sure, it has not stakeholders, but woah boy their members get decent salaries. I guess I should incorporate a non-profit.
Sure, there are pastors of evangelical megachurches flying around in private jets.
On the other hand, other religious groups often have quite poorly paid clergy. I remembering hearing about an Eastern Orthodox parish, where after paying for the building, utilities, etc, the parish didn't have any money left to pay the priest. So he is working a full-time secular job, his wife works part-time (as well as looking after the kids), and the priest does all his religious duties after work and on weekends. (The plan was to convert enough people to Eastern Orthodoxy that the parish could fund the priest's salary and he could quit his secular job; hasn't happened yet, who knows if it ever will.)
One of my former work colleagues was a Protestant minister. His church was too poor to pay him anything. He worked for Oracle during the week, and ran church services for free on the weekend.
A lot of religious denominations are struggling with ageing congregations and declining membership. Even if there is sometimes still a lot of money at headquarters, when you get to the periphery of shrinking local congregations things are often very frugal.
The article makes clear that churches in Montreal are still getting their tax exemption if they stick to purely religious activities (prayer, worship, etc). They are only being taxed when they use their property for not explicitly religious activities like charitable uses, community groups, etc.
Do those people applauding this really want to applaud a policy that gives tax exemptions to specifically religious activities but denies them to activities that are less explicitly religious in character? It seems the opposite policy to what they actually want.
Opinions on the cheering side are likely diverse; but a good argument for it is wanting a consistent tax code where people are treated consistently without reference to what they are thinking. I am not at all sympathetic to the idea that we allow good works to go tax-free only when religious people do them. That isn't fair. No exemptions for churches is fair, although they should have gotten more notice if this article is representing the situation comprehensively.
People doing charitable work probably shouldn't be paying taxes. People doing community work probably shouldn't be paying taxes. I'm even nervous about taxes on business since things like supermarkets are primarily involved with is getting food to people cheaply - discouraging that seems foolish. The basis of that taxation status shouldn't be linked to religious affiliation.
Well, I know that here in Australia we mostly have what you want – there are few special tax exemptions for religious groups. Most of the religious exemptions from taxation in Australia are simply applications of the general tax exemptions for charities and non-profits, combined with the fact that religions are legally categorised as both.
The main specific exemption I know of relates to fringe-benefits tax (FBT). Not all charities and non-profits get FBT exemptions or concessions, only some. Religious institutions fall into one of those categories that do get FBT relief, but so do other non-profits like hospitals, aged care facilities, health-related charities, charities targeting poverty/homelessness/etc. But a charity which promotes the advancement of arts and culture, for example, would not get any FBT relief, although it would be eligible for other tax exemptions due to charities and non-profits.
Also, there is at least one area in Australian tax law where religious groups are disadvantaged: deductible gift recipient (DGR) status. Donations to religious groups are not tax-deductible when used to fund their core religious functions, only when used to fund their programs to help the poor, etc. By contrast, there are various other categories of charities and non-profits for which all donations are deductible (e.g. Scouts; Girl Guides; public libraries, museums and art galleries; some environmental groups; etc).
The tax exemption clearly seems to indicate it is only for religious services. Which means that other charities, including ones without a religious message, are disadvantaged.
While the treatment may still be preferential (it still has some unique tax exemptions), it at least sounds closer to fair. The specifics of the tax law of Montreal are probably unknown to most people here.
In Japan post temples are clearly for profit operations (charging people outrageous amounts of money for about anything) and they are also not taxed by the government. Which is why you have a plethora of sects.
The headline is a bit misleading, purely church things are still exempt, side projects a church may be doing are not. A mega church raking in millions: tax free. A small town church running community projects on the side: taxed for every bit of good it does.
Churches get a bad rap these days, for many reasons. I want to take a minute to defend them. Right away, I want to say that I am not defending religion-driven bigotry, nor megachurches, nor abuse.
I don't know about Canada, but in the U.S. churches are still where communities meet, where people connect with the spiritual world, and also the ones doing most of the "heavy lifting" on any kind of charity activity.
They are also generally nice and reasonably centrist-progressive, meaning treating everyone respectfully, nor expecting you to sit through a sermon like the old days. (I heard of one place where this may have been the case, but never saw it myself.)
Food Not Bombs might have a weekly freegan cookout, but most of the e.g. feeding people, distributing donated clothes, counseling without having to do paperwork first, food banks, and so on, are done by churches, or church-like organizations, or by people who met at church. There are some exceptions, like in Western Mass and a few places in the Catskills.
Source: Traveled around the U.S. with no base income. I don't go out of my way to take advantage of these things, but I'll go if a friend is going.
That's presumably because the US is so Christian. In other countries there are plenty of non-Christian charities. In general people aren't good because religion tells them to be.
No one has made a claim that religion is the only motivation for good. In USA not just churches but also hindu temples and buddhist temples get tax exemptions (like any other non profits).
As a Hindu and as a victim of Church sanctioned violence in Portuguese colonies I am no fan of Church, and yet I do not think it makes any sense to tax a charitable organization just because it is religious in nature.
In the USA, this is quickly becoming an obsolete understanding of religion. Regular church attendance is down from 70% to just over 50% in the last 20 years, according to Gallup.
People are leaving the churches. The real question is what will replace them. If people need community, build community centers. There are other solutions that do not rely on continuing to provide tax exemptions to organizations that more and more people are fleeing.
People are fleeing, in fact. An important thing to remember is that in these polls, when they say things like "No religion in particular" they don't actually mean that these people are Atheists. They mean they don't ascribe to a specific dogma, like Catholic, or Baptist. These people often may still think of themselves as "christian" but, for one reason or another, have rejected organized religion.
From 70% to 50% is such a large change in 20 years. For this to be caused by a change in _parenting only_ would mean that probably every child born 38 years ago until today never attended a church. (this data counts adults, so they would only start counting when they turned 18). That seems very unlikely.
You should see some Soviet community centers before thinking they can replace anything.
USA is highly uneven. In some states like Florida you can see churches on every other corner, and they are very active and developing, serving not only as community centers, but also as halls, child day care, hospitals, schools, galleries etc. No freaking "community center" can replace that.
I was born in the exUSSR and there, if you want to find the most apocalyptic, neglected, boring and useless building which lives by renting out itself to some strange businesses (if at all), you can ask for the local community center.
Have you considered that you might just be jaded? Why should a 1980 USSR concrete building be your idea of the best that a "community center" can be, in the USA in 2020?
Doesn't your complaint have more to do with the USSR than it has to do with community centers?
Yeah this veered off into personal opinion real fast, I'm like we have thousands of Community hubs in Australia and they're great and only getting better.
>You should see some Soviet community centers before thinking they can replace anything
The concept was good and they did work. In many towns, it's usually the only place where you could run cultural evens,some more important community gatherings and so on. What did happen once the Soviet occupation ended, was the lack of funding of these places. The town I grew up in, 15k population and the culture center large enough to be suitable for a pretty large city,so the maintenance costs are substantial. That's where people go for theatre,concerts,and so on.
As for the churces, they do a lot of charitable work, however my own experience with churchgoers in many countries is that it's too often ' It's our way or no way at all'.
Churches in USA are not nearly the same as in most other countries. They are funded bottom up and also have to survive by serving their community well.
If you need to ask for some community center funded from some abstract government, you don't have the local community, at the first place.
The.. local municipality funded by the same local community as your churches?
> Churches in USA are not nearly the same as in most other countries. They are funded bottom up and also have to survive by serving their community well.
Where do you think other churches get their funding? Where do you think municipalities get their funding?
Municipality is too top down for these purposes either and should not tell people how to entertain or take care of themselves. I don't want it to spend even a penny on that, ok? Enough to help emergency services and such - no one will want to opt out of that.
I can't imagine your model working for any town/city except the very smallest ones or those inhabited by rich people only: to have an independent building,where the community could do whatever they think is right for them requires capital and some sort of management. So if it's a small village in the middle of nowhere, building something is probably realistic,but what about a few thousand people town? You'd need a piece of land, substantial amount to build it or even to rent it. And how a larger community would finance it? Joe may want to contribute but Mary won't and so on. Once you have the place,who runs it. Self elected local activist or elected person? How would they decide that events they plan to do fit well within the community, especially if it's more diverse? Whether it's national or local, the main problems around its use would remain the same.
Indeed, I have seen community centers in the US that do all that (perhaps with the exception of Hospitals).
I don't recommend going to your church when you need to go to a hospital. Go to a hospital. Doctors spend 12 years in school for a reason. The best outcome is that someone may do some first aid and call you an ambulance. The worst is you may die because you wasted time.
I have seen and used both American churches and Soviet community centers.
There is no unconditional goodness on this planet, but the way some people think they can reinvent better commu-nism "this time" is a 100% evil.
Nowhere was communism ever mentioned, only the potential for a "community center" which is a rather generic term that can exist independent of communism.
Many contemporaries of early Russian communism have described that the whole thing have started with mass apostasy.
Which of course could, in turn, be the result of people being disappointed by G-d, which, in turn can be the result of massive and proliferating slavery/the-world-owes-me mindset with pure inability to risk and do business.
The latter is mostly the same today. The G-d loves everyone but gives to patient and industrious.
If you compare to official textbooks from "both sides", yes, it sounds made up. It takes some time to find the history in witnesses' words.
And.. things are largely unchanged until today in that region, easy to check.
In the city I grew up in in Canada, the nearby community centre was a relatively nice building on a big piece of land surrounded by a park and playgrounds. Not every one, but many had large halls and gymnasiums, some were collocated with schools, some with art galleries, etc. In the winter many distributed sand and salt, and they just generally acted as hub for anything the community required and anything the government needed to provide to the community. They also served a purpose as a shelter and support site in the event of a natural disaster.
As a child of a relatively poor family, I spent a fair bit of time there because the local government sent us a catalogue a couple times a year detailing all the programs they were running which due to our income level were more or less free (being a whopping $30 or something otherwise).
Based off this and your other comments, it seems a more visceral reaction to the phrasing “community centre” than that you have any real argument against them.
(I feel like the glib single-character response stands on its own, but more verbosely: yeah, the trend isn't good, but a) there's no reason to assume it's linear, "fair-weather believers" is a thing, and b) I'm not a TIOBE follower, but let's say java use was 70% 20 years ago, and down to just over 50% today. Is "obsolete" the word you'd use?)
> this is quickly becoming an obsolete understanding of religion
Yes, I stand by my words. If you read them again, you'll see you are arguing with something I didn't say.
If 29% of religious people have left the church (50/70=71% still attend church)... then that is a major shift. It would be foolish to continue with previous assumptions about the role of churches going forward without taking into account how religious people are changing their behaviors.
Just wanted to point out this might not be true of other religions in the US. Yes they make up a smaller number, but I know for a fact that Muslims are religiously more participatory than they were 20 years ago in America. It could be sheer rising numbers, but I and many of my peers have also become more involved in our religious centers than we used to be.
So what if, in order to accommodate the changing role of the church in America, you prevent the other minority religions and minority communities from ever having their centers grow in the same way churches were able to?
> If people need community, build community centers.
Granted I've always been the last person to know where the party is and still don't know where to buy weed in a state where it's legal if it hit me in the face, but what I do know is that if I ever wanted to meet people the last two places I would go to is the local community center and church like it's 1971. In my experience, joining a hospice social club would be an equally bright experience.
> If people need community, build community centers. There are other solutions that do not rely on continuing to provide tax exemptions to organizations
Community centres are an order of magnitude more expensive than providing tax breaks to churches.
Well, then just leave them untaxed, and let "the problem" take care of itself. My parents go to a typical < 100 member Protestant church, which is filled with nothing but gray hair, and they are the young ones. When the boomers are gone, I figure at least half of the churches in America will simply stop existing. I don't know what happens with all of that property.
(The problem is that the only way to keep the lights on in these churches is to appeal to people in their 60's and 70's, but programs geared for that age bracket will turn away people in their 20's and 30's, and deprive the church of new people, new perspective, and new funding. These kinds of churches are slowly starving to death, victims of simple attrition.)
It's going to go against the grain at hackernews, but taxing churches in the US is a terrible idea. If you wanted to further the divide between the "liberal city"/"conservative rural" American cultures, this would be a great way to do it.
If you grew up in a rural area of the flyover states you would know that churches form the backbone of these rural communities. For example, the church in my hometown organizes youth gaming nights (yes, D&D style), widow support groups, and hosts food drives along with so many more things. They're so poor that every year they have a board meeting and the board divides up the operating expenses that are unpaid and they pay them out of pocket. The board members are 'well-to-do' community members with job titles like firemen and teacher. If they were not tax-exempt, they would have to shutter.
This is not to condone or justify the negative impacts that some churches have on this country, and religion often serves as a cloak for a lot of bad cultural habits like racism. I understand why people want to combat abuses of the non-profit status of the church, but taxing them is not the way to accomplish this.
I don't know about the US tax system, but at least in my experience here in Australia, not every expense incurred by a business or partially-taxed non-profit is necessarily deductible. For example, I formed a company with some friends for the purpose of work on a single contract, and the expenses we incurred in incorporating the company were only deductible at a rate of 20% per year over 5 years, so we ended up having to pay tax without being able to deduct most of that particular set of expenses during the 1 year we were in operation.
Thats for items which depreciate in value over a multi year period right? I know that you were only in business one year but the tax system isn't really designed around 1 job incorporated companies.
In any case, my broader point is that tax law for businesses and other taxable organisations is not as simple as "we didn't make a profit and therefore pay no tax this year", and therefore as someone who isn't a qualified tax accountant, I can't really say with much accuracy what impact particular changes to tax law are going to have on the overall financial position of an organisation like a church.
One of the companies I used to work for - the joke was they are a land acquiring company under the guise of technology. They did tech too and made a lot of money, but they made decent sum from land too.
It's not exactly high effort either. If a business can afford to build a megachurch and run TV campaigns to fill it, it shouldn't have a problem finding the time/money to file a fucking tax return.
I'll happily to make an exception for any church that is truly run as a genuine non-profit charity, and most income really is spent on good work in the community - not on investments and buying really nice things for the pastors.
But that's going to exclude most of these businesses. Unless that changes they won't get any sympathy here.
I remember watching the collection round at a church once. Pensioners who literally had breadline incomes were all putting significant amounts of cash onto a plate - for the Catholic Church, which is literally one of the richest and longest established businesses on the planet.
I will never, ever forgive that organisation for leeching off its poor devotees quite so shamelessly. Likewise for any other church with significant wealth.
>>Don't you only tax profits? If a church isn't making any, then there'd be nothing to tax?
Land and buildings for one could be taxed. Churches bought or were given land ages ago, before there was a Manhattan or Boston, as we today know it. Go ahead and pay property tax on land worth $250 Million when you barely make income to keep the lights on.
A solution to this is to give back the land to the local city and have it handled as cultural heritage, with an authorization to practice religious activities at specific times, but it’s governed by local administration overall.
That’s how some cathedrals are managed in europe for instance.
What has survived millennia “as it is”? The United States? It was founded scarcely three centuries ago. The Christian church? Ever hear of the reformation, of Calvin, of Protestantism? I.e. one of the main reasons the United States exists?
It absolutely has not survived millennia. What you call your Christian church today would be unrecognisable to the faithful of a century ago, never mind two, or five, or ten, or twenty. Or are you acknowledging that Christianity is the cult of Mithras, and that it’s still a death cult?
In the UK our local church is physically about 850 years old, But there was a church on the site back in 1086 and presumably before, as it was mentioned in the domesday book. It’s Anglican now, before then it was catholic, maybe it used to be a pagan worship site, maybe in future it will be for the cult of Cummings.
It has severe financial issues at the moment - maintaining the courtyard alone costs £1k a month. I’m waiting for more detailed finances on that.
Maintaining finances for any organisation is a basic bread and butter protection against corruption. I don’t see what harm there is in taxing religious organisations the same way as any other charity.
Here in USA. Oldest churches are from the 4th century elsewhere.
For the record: I don't think that priests should be able to buy $50M jets or keep 40% of total land of x country tax free, but they should not be forced to sell buildings because property tax is too high.
I assume they meant "here in USA" with regard to the comment about 300 years, but are pointing out that outside the US there exist churches as old as 4th century.
Yes. My comment was about "here in the USA" because the grandparent comment talked about churches existing "before Boston".
Churches are routinely handed over to the state or to commercial entities in order to preserve them because church membership is in rapid decline and its very expensive to take care of the church building especially if it has "survived millennia".
What a perfect way for the state to exercise control over religious organizations! You’d quickly end up with every such state sponsored “church” as disruptive to state interests as the Church of England, the Lutheran State Churches of Scandinavia or the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.
China aside given that it's an authoritarian state I much prefer the control the state has over the church here in Germany, because it eliminates virtually all religious sectarianism and has led to the church having adopted teaching and a curriculum that is largely in line with the basic constitutional law and secular values rather than existing outside of it. Same in the UK or Scandinavia.
One of the reasons Islamic extremism is so hard to combat is because Islam exists largely outside of the control of the state, as backyard mosques can basically preach anything regardless how extremist it is, often deliberately recruiting people out of organizations that try to integrate with the state and society at large. I assume this is similar to radical Evangelicalism in the US.
Parallel societies are bad, they're a breeding ground for extremism.
The First Amendment strongly prevents something like this in the US. There is no way the state can control a religious organization here and that’s a good thing. Americans secularism >> European “secularism”.
Islamic extremism in your country is not due to lack of state control of their mosques. It’s how you have treated generations of Islamic immigrants (Turks on work visas, no citizenships, open borders with lots of “refugees”, etc). Of course they will make parallel societies. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
I don’t live in, or generally care about the deep south where the Southern Baptist and Evangelical churches apparently share control of the state, so in a sense yes.
I thought you were talking about the USA as a whole, my mistake.
Most Turks in Germany are citizens (requirements are if anything laxer than in the US), and there's practically no religious extremism among Turks, so that's just a wrong claim.
And actually extremism among Turks is absent for the very reason I outlined above. In Turkey there's a long tradition of either religious integration in the state in the Ottoman era which had a strong scholastic tradition, or laicism under Atatürk, so there was very little room for sectarianism.
And yes, a lot of extremism is present among refugees, but that just proves the point, where do refugees originate from? Countries with failing state authority.
> China aside given that it's an authoritarian state I much prefer the control the state has over the church here in Germany, because it eliminates virtually all religious sectarianism and has led to the church having adopted teaching and a curriculum that is largely in line with the basic constitutional law and secular values rather than existing outside of it.
The picture you paint of government control over religion sounds very authoritarian to me. As far as “parallel societies are bad”, what happened to “diversity is our strength”?
Diversity is a good thing, that's not changed. But diversity doesn't mean 'anything goes'. There's boundaries in a civil society for a reason.
Religious practice is fine but withholding a secular education from children or ditching modern medicine, or attacking the rights of women or exercising corporal punishment isn't.
I don't see how having the ability to put a stop to it is authoritarian, at least not any more than religious extremism itself is. The alternative to government exercising control over religion is having religion exercise control over government. The problem doesn't go away.
> Religious practice is fine but withholding a secular education from children or ditching modern medicine, or attacking the rights of women or exercising corporal punishment isn't.
Fair enough. That’s not what I thought you meant by “keeping religious orgs in line with state secular views” or whatever. Even still, you don’t need state control over religion to achieve those ends, and indeed in the US where the state is constitutionally prohibited from interfering with religion, these things aren’t problems (at least not to any reasonable interpretations).
> Religious practice is fine but withholding a secular education from children or ditching modern medicine, or attacking the rights of women or exercising corporal punishment isn't.
So a religion is fine as long as it is watered down to the point it does not teach what is right.
I could not have hoped for a more perfect illustration of my point. We are in perfect agreement on the outcomes, we just disagree on whether the state being in charge of determining public morality is good or not. You, a product of a state indoctrination system, agree with its values. The same thing happens in other countries where the state has different values.
Thankfully the First Amendment prevents America from doing that here. I prefer American secularism over the weird European theocratic states that you describe.
then they need to close down and move. if i buy a house for 20k and when I retire the property values are sky-high and the property taxes, which pay for things like roads and schools are too much for me to afford, i have to move.
the people giving money to churches to attend that church, should pick up the cost of going to that church. which includes property taxes. if they are not willing to pay for that, it's their problem. excusing churches from these taxes puts the burden for the church not on its members, but on everyone.
let me ask you - that mcdonalds down the street. are it's property taxes paid by you? do you think if they declared themselves the church of fat asses, their property tax should be paid by you, as a county resident? because it would be, like it is for churches. when a portion of land isn't getting tax collected, the cost for the county doesn't go away - they get it from the people paying the taxes.
> the people giving money to churches to attend that church, should pick up the cost of going to that church. which includes property taxes. if they are not willing to pay for that, it's their problem. excusing churches from these taxes puts the burden for the church not on its members, but on everyone.
Your whole premise here is that property taxes should be considered part of the cost of attending church (your first and second sentences from the quoted section above), but that’s exactly what is up for debate. You need to support that premise if you want to say something more persuasive than “I think churches should pay taxes because I think churches should pay taxes”.
umm, no I don't. everyone pays taxes by default. it is you who needs to say something more persuasive than churches should not pay taxes because they are churches.
No, you (not I) made a claim: churches should pay taxes. I didn’t make any claim, at least not here. I only pointed out that you didn’t support your point. Secondly, I don’t see why the “separation of church and state” position needs further defense. It’s an established precedent and status quo for hundreds of years. To that end, your “everyone pays taxes by default” claim is obviously wrong because churches don’t pay taxes by default. Moreover, proponents of separation of church and state don’t need you to find their arguments compelling; their will is law—your position is the challenger and it needs persuasive support if you would like the status quo changed.
ah yes. the tax exception for a church means churches don't pay taxes by default. i like that circular logic. just like women not being able to vote for hundreds of years - they shouldn't vote now.
your claim was that I needed to prove my point that churches should not pay taxes. i said the claim is invalid, because taxes are paid by default, by everyone, unless an exception is granted. so what needs to be proven is why the exception should be granted to churches.
this has nothing to do with separation of church and state. you have profit, or own property - you pay taxes on it. being religious is not a valid argument to pass on city expenses to everyone else on the block.
my position is not a "challenger." rules and laws are not written in stone as the word of god you pretend the bible is. they need to be reexamined frequently, and someone granted a tax exemption needs to prove again why that exception is still valid.
> ah yes. the tax exception for a church means churches don't pay taxes by default. i like that circular logic. just like women not being able to vote for hundreds of years - they shouldn't vote now.
That's not the argument I'm making. I'm arguing that the onus is on you to persuade, not that the status quo is inherently superior by virtue of being the status quo. I was very clear about this.
> your claim was that I needed to prove my point that churches should not pay taxes. i said the claim is invalid, because taxes are paid by default, by everyone, unless an exception is granted.
The exception has been granted and is well-entrenched in precedent. You can disagree all you want and demand that someone needs to make an argument that persuades you; nevertheless, the law protects churches and you don't agree with it, so you must be mistaken about the burden of persuasion.
> my position is not a "challenger." rules and laws are not written in stone as the word of god you pretend the bible is. they need to be reexamined frequently, and someone granted a tax exemption needs to prove again why that exception is still valid.
The law prohibits taxation of churches, and your position is that we should change the law, ergo it's (by definition) the challenger (the status quo being the incumbent). No one here is claiming laws are written in stone; our disagreement appears to be whether or not changing the laws requires a persuasive argument, and here you are mistaken. Specifically you're mistaken that churches are legally obligated to reprove the validity of their tax exemption--you may wish that churches were so obligated, but they aren't, and if you insist there is such a legal obligation, it's incumbent upon you to furnish evidence to support your claim.
Anyway, this conversation has diverged from an interesting subject to litigating burden of persuasion which is well established and obvious. I'm not interested in debating the obvious unless there's some evidence that can call into question its obviousness. If we can't agree on obvious matters, I don't think this conversation is likely to enlighten, so I bid you adieu.
> the onus is on you to persuade
and I am saying this is false. but it is expected you believe this. the status quo was people believing in a god. now we don't. it is not on us to prove there is not one. it is still on you to prove there is one. just like it is on you to prove an exemption should still be given, or you don't get one anymore.
yes, that is my opinion. this is what we do in comments on a subject matter. state our opinions on it. there is no need to prove to the irs churches should not be taxed. they take tax rules all the time and reexamine them, and drop ones that are no longer appropriate, which is soon coming for churches. as can literally be seen in this article being discussed.
yes, churches not being taxes is a flaw in the tax system, not churches. churches and everyone else can be and do whatever they want to. welcome to the discussion.
Or you could just build a huge multi-apartment building instead having a church on the first floor (maybe several floors) and actually resolve some of the housing issues in the area at the same time.
I have been on a budget committee for a Methodist church. There is no profit, no money left over the next year, the largest expense is the pastor who is an employee (50k per yr in this case).
Mega-churches might have money left over but by law they are supposed to spend their money as their nonprofit charter says or they could get audited by the State and fined or have their charter terminated.
Russian Orthodox priests in Romania and Bulgaria are absolutely terrible. They prey on a gullible and very poor population while living in opulence and flaunting their wealth. In Bucharest, Romania, they are currently building a church to the tune of 100 million euros.
70% or more of that came from public funding, essentially tax payer money rerouted to build this monstrosity, something the country really can not afford.
And all of that for a pissing match about who has the tallest church.
Meh.. I find it difficult to care too much on a site whose population regularly fawn over a billionaire who stands to make billions more, largely due to booking sale of taxpayer-funded carbon credits to his company's most recent quarterly earnings as profit.
People around the world have different value systems and tolerances. For me it's impossible to consider state-funded excesses of the church without drawing comparisons to the likes of Musk. As for their relative social benefit, that's another topic entirely..
> they are currently building a church to the tune of 100 million euros.
> 70% or more of that came from public funding, essentially tax payer money rerouted to build this monstrosity, something the country really can not afford.
In Tesla's case, $428m of public money contributed almost one third of all profits made by the company in a single /quarter/, at a time when the dollar's future as a reserve currency is being called into question due to panic spending to support a system on the brink of collapse.
The trick will likely qualify it for inclusion in the S&P 500, making it further eligible for more of that sweet public money over winter, as the current administration discusses that index's performance as an explicit target on an almost weekly basis.
No, my complaint is about churches and their lack of transparency with regards to how they process their income and the fact that they don't pay taxes. The should never receive taxpayer funds.
The recent elections confirmed the conservative direction of the country, fueled along others by the catholic church.
The good thing is that religion is not compulsory anymore. There used to be a time where not bring part of the church meant beung a real outcast.
This included the communist rulers who were quick to chistianise their children because otherwise they wild have hell in the family.
That was acually not bad as the church balanced the state.
Now they are omnipotent, and this is also the reason more people can be outside of church - because church is not unanimously seen as a savior anymore. Quite the opposite in the ranks of 30-50 yo people.
I lived there for a few years in total, I'm well aware of all this and it is a sad thing to see this raise its ugly head again. The church was instrumental in getting rid of the communists but they are a huge problem by themselves as well.
How is that any different than America where preachers tell their poorest congregants that they should give 10% of their income before they pay their bills? If they come up short on their bills are short, “God will provide”?
Some are even willing to use credit cards to pay their tithes if they come up short.
Maybe you could earmark the collected taxes for creating secular alternatives? Or maybe create a system where people don't have to rely on churches and rich people for charity.
Aside from being plain condescending or outright rude, you've shut down discussion about any approach that may be different. A better response would have been to ask them to suggest something, or show a case (another country, say) where this was already done.
Yeah, let's just give up on making the world a better place. We might never reach Utopia, but we can for damn sure get closer especially if we free ourselves from dogmatic thinking. Do you really want to settle for better than nothing?
Communism is what you are looking for... where all people are putting in all of their effort to the common goodwill with government guiding the effort.
Ah yes, clearly the only two options here are all-in capitalism or communism. Definitely no room in between those two points for anything more nuanced.
That system that failed everywhere and people found the excuse that it was not applied right, but the idea is sound. I lost my younger years living in such a regime, thanks but no thanks.
“I don’t like the design of your pacemaker; mind if I take it out and use the parts to build you one I approve of” is not a sales pitch that works often.
I’m pretty fiercely atheist, but the churches around me are where the local homeless get food and a reprieve from the cold. If you closed that today and diverted the money to a secular replacement, there would be a pile of bodies by the time it was operating.
No there wouldn’t. Not if it’s government driven (as it should be)
> Those in favor of lower taxes have argued that individuals are more capable than the government of allocating money to important causes, including people in need of assistance. But the study found that was not true. Donations do not match government assistance, and without tax money, social services are not funded as robustly.
We already have secular alternatives, state welfare in many countries. A worse value for money system would be hard to imagine, populated with clock watching, work-to-rule types who actively use bureaucracy to avoid work.
St Vincent de Paul is the one I'm most familiar with. Time and again you hear accounts from people who were refused welfare for one reason or another and turned in despair to the SVP. They're not an alternative but they are invaluable to the people who fall through the cracks in society. They rely on donations from churchgoers and all are unpaid volunteers.
If it becomes a government service, it will instantly become a political target for budget cuts and regulations that will exclude people from getting help.
As an example, I have someone in my extended family that works for one of the state governments for employment services, and from the stories they've told me about how the department has been slashed and burned and forced to work with a skeleton staff, I'm not surprised at all that when the pandemic hit that everyone was having a hell of a time signing up for unemployment or getting the money they're supposed to be getting, and desperately need right now, or even just reaching a live person to talk to.
And of course that just makes the department look badly run, in people's eyes, which makes the average citizen even more likely to allow more money to be cut from them, because they just assume it's well funded already and "they suck at their jobs, what are we even paying their salaries with our tax dollars for? They should be fired!"
Whereas churches have a bit of a shield from that, at least, especially from the GOP in the US, who aggressively and consistently fight against social programs and non-defense government services otherwise, but their voter-base tends to be very religious, so they have an incentive not to hurt churches in any way.
> Or maybe create a system where people don't have to rely on churches and rich people for charity.
Being handed everything by a welfare state is de facto charity for the recipient. The biggest difference is that charity is morally superior because it's voluntary.
Besides, the US has a very large welfare state. I get a big kick out of people pretending the US doesn't have an epic scale, highly dysfunctional, poorly operated, welfare state, that doesn't spend trillions of dollars per year. I just can't figure out what they're spending $8.1 trillion on every year. Must be roads and military. Where'd all that magic trillions of dollars in stimulus spending come from? That laissez-faire Capitalist US system surely. Those free market $1,200 checks raining from the sky.
Without exception every welfare state - including the US, which has one of the most progressive tax systems - heavily relies on rich people to pay an extremely outsized share of taxes.
How many trillions are churches spending, in dollars and hours, to provide basic services? And that with a dose of magical thinking, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and appeals to authority.
IME even the most progressive churches can do a lot of 'soft' damage to already hurting people. Secular services certainly have their own faults, but at least they don't have so many invisible strings attached.
Please also keep in mind that secular services compete for resources and mindshare against religious institutions. It becomes a self reinforcing argument on the right that we need to keep the latter because the former is so bad.
Churches provide much more than just money. Solace, peace, love, community etc... I'd say this is more important than money.
I used to be a Christian. There are a lot of bad sides of Christianity and that is why I left. But it does help many people and after studying Buddhism I understand how the right approach to Christianity can bring a lot of peace to believers:
Unconditional love. Many people grew up made to feel they had to earn their parents' love.
Letting go of control. You can't control everything in life. Whatever is going to happen is up to God now.
Forgiveness. When people ask for God's forgiveness, it helps them to forgive themselves.
I feel these things should exist without God. That is, they can be helpful to non-believers too. But I am having a hard time creating secular versions of these.
I think the root of the problem lies in the fact that God here is an abstract entity with whom the believer communicates but no such abstract entity exists for non-believers (duh!).
May be some form of general artificial intelligence can fulfil this role in the future?
Real people can fulfil this role too but they are probably not abstract enough. edit: And hence not "powerful" enough (to forgive, to protect etc.).
Just spit-balling here. Also not trying to offend anyone here.
The purpose of being a Christian is to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. In if you wonder how far the love of your neighbour stretches, the goalpost has ben set at the very end: Love your enemies.[See: Mark 12:30-31 and Matthew 5:44] And this follows and is natural because God is LOVE [1 John 4:7-21].
I have a hard time believing AI will fulfil this role. For would it be optimized for gains here and now, or actions of sacrifice now that will be payed back fully in an everlasting life and that is built on faith? :-)
And I must admit that love is hard and I mess up a lot!
But i try to do the same as is written here:
"Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."[Philippians 3.13-14]
If that was the case, I would be the last in line! ;-)
But God's whole purpose was to save sinners like me and you through Jesus Christ:
"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us". [1 John 1, 8-10 NKJV]
Not only that, but the idea that we should have some sense of mercy, grace, forgiveness, etc that even permeates secular society. It’s an important value, and we’re seeing it break down as mobs of allegedly grown adults harass strangers for decades-old off-color remarks made as children, or for remarks made by family or acquaintances, or etc. I think Hitchens said that he didn’t like Christianity, but it may have been a bulwark against worse things. I think he was speaking about extreme Islam, but I think there are other pseudo-religious toxic philosophies (and thus toxic behaviors) that Christian ethics defend against as well.
The point of his quote is that he realized they weren’t uniformly bad. I’d go further and suggest that it’s not even possible to have a successful secular society without a religious cultural substrate, at least not for very long. I don’t mean this as a slight against atheists or agnostics; only that religion is eminently functional to the extent that we don’t find significant societies that exist without a significant religious substrate in any place or time. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s certainly an interesting question in my mind.
I really hope you are wrong. Science is relatively new, it's just a matter of time until we figure out how to solve it all without faith, god and dogmatic religion. One thing's for sure, the most developed countries in the world are running away from religion.
Science isn't incompatible with faith, but moreover, I think you're making a mistake by assuming that perfect rationalism is optimal. Many atheists believe religion serves an evolutionary function by motivating people to irrationally put the good of the group over the good of the individual, and the mechanism in question is the belief in a deity or karma system that punishes injustice and rewards justice. Note that this doesn't mean that a perfectly rational individual would never work for the good of the group, but he would only do so to the extent that the good of the group benefited him (as is often the case); however, he wouldn't put the good of the group above his own good--he wouldn't die for the group, for example (and of course there are many less extreme examples, especially under the rubric of "tragedy of the commons"--cheating, stealing, etc when the odds are good that one can go unpunished). Of course, many non-believers have died for things they believe in, but in doing so they were acting irrationally. So perfect rationality is actually less optimal than certain kinds of dogma, but not all of those "positive dogmas" are religious.
One interesting question is whether those "positive dogmas" have "staying power"--will they be around as the moral potency of religion fades from a culture (especially by decades and centuries)? Maybe an indicator would be a comparison of aggregate generosity between religious and a-religious people?
Churches provide love? As long as you are one of “them”. Go into your typical small southern church if you and your spouse are different races - many church goers still believe that “miscegenation” is a sin - including Bob Jones University.
I wonder how many churches would be as “loving” if “Adam and Steve” walked in?
You can’t create secular alternatives to religious organizations, it’s like creating an alternative to a bar with no alcohol. You get something vastly more different than that would suggest. Churches and other religious organizations are based on a belief in something higher or transcendent that is lacking in secular organizations. All attempts to provide them have been miserable failures. Sunday Assembly was the last major attempt in the US, failed, humanist associations have a long history of being for comically tiny minorities compared to even extremely marginal religious communities. Communities require people to show up, regularly, whether they feel like it or not, with family.
There was a wonderful article I read ages ago and can no longer find on the history of communes in the US over the 20th century. Not one secular commune managed to perpetuate itself across generations without turning into something vastly less communal. Most religious communes failed too but the Amish and Hutterites are practically ethnic groups based on religion and there are lots of smaller groups.
I think the fact that you consider taxes to be such a nightmare scenario shows that your moral system is broken. Society cannot exist without cooperation, and refusal to participate in society (at everyone’s expense) is an immoral position imo. We can certainly argue about the specifics of what that participation should look like (ie taxes and conscription and whatnot) but when your position is that the government should never ever be allowed to force you to do things, then we’re on completely different planets, and I think your moral code is flat out broken.
Oh, worry not, I firmly believe that sometimes the government absolutely should take your money under threat of violence, but we should always remember that's exactly what taxes are.
Every time we propose the government spend money on something we must remember where that money comes from and seriously consider if it's justified.
Well, that's good, and in that case, I agree with you. However, I guess I'm also just much more pragmatic than you, because from a purely utilitarian perspective, the government running various "charity" programs is much more efficient than private charities running them. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/republicans-give-more-to-char... The general attitude here in Europe also is a much more favorable outlook on taxes as well, and while it is true that people give less, overall, society is better, and people know and don't mind that their taxes are going to help those less fortunate. It's just that generally speaking, government run programs (when not being constantly tried to shut down) are able to provide an overall better service.
That's not to say we can't have differing opinions on where precisely to draw that line, I think debate on that is good and healthy, and it's important to strike a good balance between too much and too little social welfare. But it's also better to have a more efficient and effective solution than to have one that "feels" better.
I really wish people didn't do this. I agree with your post, but it's preemptively combative to make the first thing you say, "you're going to disagree with me." It makes you sound like you're trying to present yourself as an underdog in the face of a monolithic enemy.
Should a non profit foodbank not get the same treatment as a church?
Churches can be opposed to abortion or same sex marriage. At the same time care for the needy. However also sometimes be biased at only serving the needy that they think need to be served.
I think that’s the main issue here. If churches are non-profits, treat them like other non-profits.
earthscienceman says>"It's going to go against the grain at hackernews, but taxing churches in the US is a terrible idea.<
I fail to see why.
All financial dealings of churches go unaudited. They should be subject to annual open public audit, at the least. I think they should be taxed as any other corporate entity. They frequently compete with normal corporations and should be given no preference. As it is they pay neither federal nor local taxes in most jurisdictions, if not all.
BTW I'm very conservative. My inclination would be to do what the British and the French did centuries ago - confiscate all the properties of the churches.
Afaik churches in the US doesn't even have to report anything, so there's no way to know where the money is from and what they are being used for. That's a pretty big difference
Even a church ought to be accounting where is moneys are going from and to... I have no qualms with the government being able to inspect those records too.
To me, reporting makes sense. For an organisation as big as a church, employing a few accountants seems like value for money simply because then fraud will be deterred.
While they aren't required to report, many register voluntarily for fundraising and discounts. AmazonSmile, Kroger Community Rewards, and similar programs often outsource basic eligibility to GuideStar. GuideStar will not add you without proof of exempt determination by the IRS.
>They are. There is no difference tax-wise for a non-profit and church.
While both churches and non-profits don't pay tax, they are treated differently. Secular non-profits have to account for the money coming in and out of the organization, while churches don't have to account for the donations or expenses.
AFAIK, the difference would pretty much be that they actually have (pretty loose) limits on what they can spend money on, and on endorsing electoral candidates - and they'd have to publish information about their finances.
If you argued that religion was not an intrinsic social benefit then you might start saying that some of what they do is not non-profit work. That could get interesting.
> AFAIK, the difference would pretty much be that they actually have (pretty loose) limits on what they can spend money on, and on endorsing electoral candidates - and they'd have to publish information about their finances.
I'm not from the US, so I 100% expect those things from churches already. These sound like completely reasonable demands I would have on any public institution.
Theoretically churches are already legally forbidden to endorse candidates but in practice this is effectively bypassed with the fiction that priests/pastors/etc can say they are sharing their personal opinion, not an official church position.
I think it's because publicly funding this stuff is inefficient, and religion/spirituality seems to be the most effective motivator for sustained charitable work.
They also spend a lot of money and effort on promoting their own religion and interests. They could easily create subcharities that are seperate entities designed to do the charitable work while being taxed on their non charitable areas.
Well, actually, Europe is the main exception to the rest of the world. America is in-line with most of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, India, and South America in that religion still plays a major role in everyday life. In fact, religions are growing, not shrinking, worldwide.
Perhaps I should have been more clear, America is the exception of the wealthy countries that can afford extensive education. What might have previously been commonly called first-world.
The thing is, the concept of religion as a distinct, separate part of culture is basically a Western concept itself - and one that many scholars don't find to be very solid. Take Japan for example: Shintoism and Buddhism are very woven into the culture of modern Japan. Rituals, shrines, and other associated practices are quite prevalent and most of the population interacts with them on a regular basis. Yet your link lists Japan as being the second-least religious country, after China, which also has a number of beliefs that essentially qualify as 'religious' in nature.
In the Western world, the concept of humanist, egalitarian democracy is more-or-less an extension of certain Christian ethical beliefs that preceded it, so again, this definition of 'not-religious' is itself pretty problematic.
One problem I see is that church is also leading the cause to marginalize gay people from society by force of government.
There's a reason why during the Bush presidential candidacy a big news item was the push for a Constitutional amendment to exclude gay marriage. The Mormon church spent a great amount of money advertising in California with regards to how dangerous gay people are to kids.
People talk about "intolerance" of "cancelling", but cancelling is about the exercise of free relations by withdrawing. And then there's the force of law.
> church is also leading the cause to marginalize gay people
This might be the case of some church organizations (specifically those that make it a point to be politically active), but claiming that all churches do this, or even a majority of them, is just not accurate - guilt by association.
I grew up in Catholic schools, and almost every priest that taught us was incredibly kind and open to gays.
These priests are some of the nicest people you'd ever meet.
Yet their foundational texts at minimum call homosexuality unclean. Then the are the laws prescribing murder for homosexuals. This is just one problematic topic among many.
Church culture evolves but not always in the progressive direction. Propping up these ancient institutions just because they are old--and sometimes do good--comes at a high cost to marginalized groups.
But this is not a valid argument for removing their tax exempt status since their tax exempt status is not based on agreeing or aligning with the government's views on homosexuality.
This article in particular seems to be about better use of church space to not let empty rooms stays unused, albeit in a somewhat aggressive way.
But more generally, I think an angle to the whole question would be to apply either or both:
- treat religious organizations as any other non-profit, with no specific religious exemption. If they can’t continue doing the same in that legal framing they need to adapt.
- give all non-profit orgs a path to have the same advantages as religious organizations, so they can help the community in the same ways.
So is conference halls. So is Zoom for that matter.
Churches are also places where parents force their children to go against their wishes, where creepy priests make unwanted advances etc.
> also the ones doing most of the "heavy lifting" on any kind of charity activity
Any kind? Really? What about NGOs? Volunteering nurses? FLOSS communities? People 3D printing masks in maker spaces?
Here in the U.K., the National Health Service put out a call for volunteers to help and tens of thousands of people signed up, regardless of any church.
You don't need these for significant charitable activity to occur.
I am not saying that churches don't do good, just that they're not needed for charitable activity to occur and we need to determine whether the good that occurs because of churches outweighs the bad, (which btw often doesn't even come to light due to victims fearing retaliation).
It's evident by your opening that you have a bone to pick with religion, so I'll keep this short. 3D printing masks for an emergency and other one offs don't come close to the amount of non stop, year long, permanent activity in charity and community of churches and mosques.
> 3D printing masks for an emergency and other one offs don't come close to the amount of non stop, year long, permanent activity in charity and community of churches and mosques.
The problem is that in the U.S., the state has given up on helping the poor, especially when compared to EU countries, and it is then up to private institutions to fill in some semblance of what should have already been there as nonnegotiable basis of a developed society.
I am not from the U.S., (but with a lot of fiends from there), and I can tell you that a lot of what churches do in the U.S. is so basic that it should not be their role to provide. It is often used as a metric of "success" for churches and private charity in general, but in reality all it shows is a failure of the wider society where things like medicare for all are still not a thing, even during a pandemic.
When there's a possibility of thousands of dollars that need to be paid for an ambulance ride, that is a systemic failure of the system no church can fix.
I am not religious myself, but I want to make it clear that I am not arguing churches do no good. They absolutely do. I just feel that the awful shit they do is often overlooked as soon as something positive can be said about them.
There are multiple sides to every story, even characters you wouldn't think much about based on the overall picture did good, (one particularly repulsive character of history did a lot for animal rights for example).
I also feel like other forms of charity are often diminished in their impact because they're less visible than church charity.
Let's take FLOSS for example; I come from a relatively poor upbringing, without access to good education or the internet for the longest time. I have cerebral palsy and that means any kind of physical work is pretty much a no go for me. What I did have was a couple of friends who gave me Mandrake Linux on 3 CDs back in the day with GCC preinstalled and a book on C.
Now I am able to support myself as a programmer and donate to FLOSS on a regular basis.
Because FLOSS gave me hope, I also found the motivation to exercise really hard and to preserve some amount of mobility for myself, even into adulthood.
Without it, I'd most likely end up dependent on people I wanted nothing to do with and without any kind of dignity, demotivated and miserable. I cannot overstate the impact the free software community has on me and I feel like it did more for me than any church ever could.
Yes, some of the stuff you said churches do that is a failure of the state has been called perseverance porn. Feel-good stories of people coming together to help pay for an out of control ambulance ride and so on.
communities? no. churches are where a group of people from the community meet, that exclude others on the basis of religion. if a bagel shop did that, people would be up in arms. if they want to give away free food, why would getting taxed on profits stop that?
With no to little reporting requirements American churches are the ultimate fraud machine for the use of an exclusive and nepotistic section of society.
Spin it out as a series of regular companies/charities, both for and non profit.
For any church worth keeping the only difference it will make is the paperwork the accountant does, for the vast majority it will shut down piles of legal loopholes and expose corruption.
Wonder why european churches are a dying breed? There isn't any personal profit to be made there, and the good people saw fit to have their governments establish semi-functional systems of care based around moral ideals.
Every major religious book preaches against women rights and other bad stuff. The churches(or any other religious organization's) goal is to make the society conform to the religion as much is permitted at that point in time.
> nor expecting you to sit through a sermon like the old days
Its because America has come a long way to instill the freedom in the minds of people and the church knows if they force too much people will not turn up. So they relax it for now but once people become enough religious, they will move the needle a little further until there are no independence left. Don't fall for the charity stuff.
The church is in only interested in keeping its own institution alive. If you ask the majority of Christians - who overwhelmingly went for a candidate who does not display Christian values - it’s because he furthered their agenda.
The church has hidden and continues to hide child molestation by their leaders.
They are pushing to reopen during Covid putting their congregations in danger - who are statistically older.
Churches are also one of the most segregated parts of society.
They consistently oppose universal healthcare.
One survey showed that 22% of Christians still believe that interracial marriage is a sin.
I understand they are meeting places for the community but the fact they they worship imaginary beings and that makes them special is what gets people riled up. I understand worshiping and not worshiping is a critical element in tolerant human society, even in the 21st century that is supposedly made of science and enlightenment. What people really get angry with is when they get mixed up in politics and monetary activities promoting political agendas and want to maintain their tax exempt status even though they claim to be nonpartisan groups.
What's bizarre to me is that they are tax free for worship (in my mind fair enough). But get taxed for hosting community services, e.g., foodbank. Definitely think usage in charitable functions warrants tax exemption as much as service
I don't think it's that bizarre. I find it quite subversive when a church group does 'community events' when there are other organisations which those church members could join to achieve the same result, without flying the banner of $ideology.
That article says the practice was actually very rare, even though it features very prominently in literature from the period. Maybe not the best example.
Your definition of "most" is rather suspect here. Obviously the "business-like" religions get lots of press, but in the real world they are a tiny minority.
For the way the article is worded, it sounds like a lot of noise is being made about some select reinterpretations of a law by bureaucrats. I would be shocked if the situation hadn’t changed.
All orgs that have the ability to enrich their employees should pay their fair share. I'm looking at you churches, charities and california golf courses... The fact that mega churches got PPE forgiveness loans would make my blood boil if I was a small business who didn't make the cut.
I suffered conversion therapy and could never get on hormone blockers young; because of the nonsense faith results in from people with authority over administering a medical treatment. As an adult I'm now trying every year to afford surgeries I cannot afford while my peers save for homes. Also parents disowned me and I have ptsd from the physical & mental abuse.
Nice to see religion coming to an end before my shorter life from it. Of course it will out last me but I'm hopeful; as the younger generation is aware of the countless injustice while malevolent people attempt to disguise religion as what the "community" needs.
The facade known as religion should rot to nothingness with all the people that forced it upon others.
edit: Yah religious patrons don't like it when victims of religion speak out. Similar you all don't ever remedy the victims of what you support exist in this cruel world because of people like you.
How so? Do you need more detail from me or do you think people denying others of medical treatment because of their religion isn't deserving blame on religion. Do you have any idea why conversion therapy existed at all? I find your statement about being an atheist irrelevant a well. I'm agnostic and I find atheists to be just as irrational compared to religious people. You cannot prove their is a god and similar to proving there isn't a god. I do prefer how doctors that are atheist don't deny medical treatments for patients because of their religious beliefs.
Some commenters are pointing out that all nonprofits are tax-exempt in the United States. This is true, but religious organizations enjoy an extra benefit. Secular non-profits have to apply for 501(c)3 status and then file an annual return. Churches and the like are presumed to be 501(c)3 organizations and have no filing or disclosure requirements, and the IRS is loath to investigate them.
Where i live, secular non-profits has tax excemptions (almost similar to churches) without need to apply for them. While disguised business enterprise may happen, that is something that has to be proven by state. This seems to me reasonable.
So perhaps US should loose the rules for secular non-profits to be on the same level as churches?
I acknowledge this is anecdotal but in the Bay Area CA I drive by many churches (of different faiths) occupying large areas of land on prime hilltop real estate. I’m astonished by this.
Given the extreme wealth in the bay area, I am astonished you find it astonishing. Billionaires and multi millionaires would have funded these churches. Most churches and other religious organisations run on a tight budget and deter important costs like building maintenance because of lack of funds.
I have seen crumbling Catholic churches, and I have seen the Vatican Meusum. Two extremes of wealth.
Churches are almost a 2000 year old thing. Back in the day, rich person wanting to have the papers in order for the life after, would donate his fortune along with 45,000 acres to the church. Now there exists a major city and an acre goes for $50 million or whatever.
And so on...if we could turn the clock back and buy land on Manhattan or Las Vegas we'd be rich (on paper at least too)
I am astonished by your astonishment: churches were one of the first buildings to create a nucleus of a new city, so you can say they created the value of that estate out of an empty hilltop in the middle of nowhere.
I don't mind charities being exempt from paying municipal taxes on church land, but I do object to things like Sanitarium making Weetbix and Peanut butter, selling it in the supermarket, and not paying any company tax on profits.
"Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"
Did you purposefully leave out the full sentence? I would argue it is/was a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, would like to hear why you think HN should be exempt from political discussion anyways? We see thought-provoking discussions here each day. This is one of the positive aspects of HN that I value that it allows you to be politically and socially aware of ideas to get you out of your role as an "engineer" or "hacker".
Censorship isn't the same as having community rules for positive discussion and sticking to them. The latter implies consent -- if you don't agree with the rules, participate and voice your speech somewhere else.
You can be a free speech absolutist and still think it's a bad idea to shout fire in a theater. Being against censorship doesn't mean you welcome anyone into your home to shout whatever the heck they want.
Also, perhaps you should review them again:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
Churches are one of the biggest business entities in any part of the world. Most churches are structured like a proper business entity (Eg. they have equivalent of directors, CEOs and managers) and have revenue targets and KPIs set.
Most churches are also located in some of the prime real estate of top tier cities and I always wondered how they were able to afford paying $1500+/Sq.M in a prime, central area.
About the charity work - I know for a fact the charity work the churches do cost less than 10% of the income they make, I got this number from a former church member who was a top level guy in his church. Given that churches are anyway structured like a business entity internally and manage money like a proper business, why shouldn't they be taxed as one?
It makes no sense to not tax them no matter how you try to justify it. If they did get an exemption, so should Mc Donald's for giving away a free Cola bottle with every $20 meal you get.
Actually yes. Why government should have prime real estate? Why government officials should not pay taxes? Because it's government?
Honestly, this is just a job. This is just a building that serve some purpose. This is kinda business which provides you something in exchange of mandatory subscription ️
So churches should be taxed because they use effective organisational structures and are well run? That’s a new one. You could say the same of well run charities.
There are an enormous number of (small) churches that don't function as business entities in the way you describe. Taxing churches would adversely select against these, encouraging all churches to behave more like businesses. It's unlikely to me that that's the outcome that anyone wants.
If you think Christianity is broadly good and correct, the trend towards business-like megachurches and celebrity pastors is deeply corrosive to the faith.
If you think Christianity is broadly bad and corrupt, the trend towards business-like megachurches and celebrity pastors entrenches and effectively promulgates many of the religious ideas that you abhor.
I'm not OP. And yes, at first sight that seems to be the main argument. But...
If we're fair to what it is being said, the point seems to be this: churches are like corporations: their goal is to grow in size and revenue.
That is demonstrated by the anecdata of a friend, someone high enough in a particular church, that confirms they only spent 10% of their income on charity.
So the gist seems to be this: if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like duck, it must be taxed like a duck.
Not a bad argument per se. However, it lacks supporting data, preaching for those who already feel that religious institutions are a scam anyway. So, because of that, it's not very persuasive.
> I know for a fact the charity work the churches do cost less than 10% of the income they make
If you really know this for a FACT, then I'm sure you can share your source for this information.
Churches are currently treated almost exactly like any other non-profit by the IRS. Taxing them specifically, but NOT other non-profits means we would be specifically discriminating against a religious organization.
...and religious persecution is a new level of left-wing intolerance that I, sadly, would not be surprised to see.
Most churches are located on expensive real estate? And most are run like big businesses? And you know for a fact that charity work is less than 10% of income?
These are bold statements that need sources other than some guy you know.
Everyone commenting about how great churches are? You’re absolutely delusional. The gross majority of these organizations are bigoted and racist. I grew up in the southern United States and experienced all manner of churches. I don’t care how great your church is. Give me 20 minutes with your congregation and I’ll find the racists and bigots. These assholes promote terrible mental and physical health. They don’t believe women have a right to make family planning decisions and they protect rapists. They push political agendas under the guise of religious belief. Half of them don’t have education past high school.
Religion is a vestigial structure and a hideyhole for the worst parts of humanity.
This is not an exaggeration. I have lived this. I have watched others live through this. The USA will ultimately be destroyed by completely ignorant Christians who are able to fake some semblance of rational thought.
Stop defending these institutions as “for the public good”. Tax them out or existence and let secular / non religious organizations take their place. It is absolutely absurd to pretend Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or whoever are special because of the particular brand of imaginary edicts they subscribe to. None of us are special. We are all just stupid meatbags on a rock.
I commend all the lives saved in the name of God but let’s not pretend or equivocate. Christianity in the USA is a net drain on society and it has no place in a rational conversation. Anyone who thinks, believes, or sells otherwise? You’re a lunatic.
Well I was raised by a famous “pastor” who traveled around and “preached” to both receptive and dismissive congregations across the US. I experienced more churches than most people.
I’m telling you this whole Christianity thing is a scam.
And you'll replace Christianity with what? Another religion? Atheism? Other religions have the same problems and Atheism is its own religion - requires faith to believe.
Humans are religious beings... you won't get rid of it by only focusing on the negative aspects of your own experiences.
> Atheism is its own religion - requires faith to believe.
Atheism is two (or more) different things. It is both the active belief in the non-existence of any God, and also the passive lack of any belief in any God.
It’s not like I have to have active faith in the non-existence of Quetzalcoatl to have no interest in worshiping that deity.
And I’m saying this as someone who went from Catholicism via Wicca to something in the general area of Apatheism or Ignosticism.
> Atheism is, in the broadest sense, an absence of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2][3][4] Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist.[5][6]
Agnosticism is that the existence or non-existence is unknowable, which is related but not quite the same, hence me specifying “Apatheism or Ignosticism” rather than Ietsism or Agnostic atheism.
Look, you were raised by fraudster, to begin with, and have seen only fraud. The whole Western modern humanism (which we like so much) is based on Christianity.
Yes, historically, Christianity's theological contribution was the idea of a god that cares equally for everyone. But western humanism goes beyond that (building upon) in that human life is valuable in itself, regardless of the social, economical and, the big innovation, religious/ideological stand of that particular individual.
All of that is supported by philosophical arguments, giving western humanism a much older foundation than Christianity.
So, succinctly, I would put like this: was Christianity a necessary condition for the development of western humanism? Yes. Was it sufficient? No. Bigger and better ideas were needed to make it what it is today.
Not OP but a fellow atheist. Let me provide my opinion.
You'll find racists and bigots in any group, but religions explicitly promote the supremacy and truth value of one over the other, and is a source of racism and bigotry. Unlike say, a board game club.
Why is it when you criticize religion then all religious apologists come along? It's even bi-partisan. Criticize Christianity and right wingers come with whataboutism and criticise Islam and left wingers are angry.
If I criticize Nazi white supremacy philosophy of formenting hatred, do you come with a similar excuse of how human tribal nature will find a different means for formenting conflict, or how the British empire was also racist.
Is my point of criticizing religion in any way related to your snark about the Trump administration?
If you're right (and I believe you are) that the whole world is fucked up, filled with all sort of crazy and misguided people, why not treat churches like any other worldly institution, taxing them?
That explains it. Your only experience with Christianity is with the oddest strains of it. I see that stuff pretty often with American "atheists". What they refer to as church feels like a fever dream, or something entirely alien.
>Anyone who thinks, believes, or sells otherwise? You’re a lunatic.
I disagree. You disagree with me, so you're insane.
Let's be more generous with the opposing position. If, as been argued, we're religious by nature (which the worldwide spread of different, often contradictory, beliefs amply demonstrates), religion is not a mental cancer, and belief in X is not a mental crisis.
Like our innate tribalist tendency of viewing the whole world as an unending conflict between us and them, we, modern humans, must try to find solutions that take those characteristics in consideration, not pretend they do not exist.
It's no one fault to have a religious tendency. There's no bad faith in being a believer.
I don't live in America and Catholic priests are leading the mini movement against lgbt and feminism. And by opposition to feminism I mean stuff like claiming that male should be head of household and keep her in line via yelling and hitting table with fist.
Even in case of domestic violence they focus on getting couple together and about how woman should be nice.
Eh, I'm mostly torn these days. On one hand, as I also grew up (and for now currently reside in) the southeast, I've seen relgion bring out and be used to justify the absolute worst in people.
On the other hand, I've seen it anchor people and bring g out some of the best. I've seen and met people, who by all means have the right to be depressed, bitter, angry, etc. but maintain an attitude of forgiveness and happiness I can barely begin to comprehend.
I suppose on an individual level it can be very good, but I remain wary on religion as an institution.
The issue with this is always the same: which taxes ddo you want them to pay? Since most churches don't make a profit in the strict accounting sense, their won't be much Corp tax. And (AFAIK) they already pay payroll taxes (the main place church money. You could maybe tighten that up and make sure everyone is declaring benefits (use of the private jet) properly. But the USA just made that whole mess much more generous for CEOs so presumably a mega pastor would benefit from the same allowances. So what's the plan here, sales tax?
- Fundamentalism and literalism is a fairly modern phenomenon which is mostly a Protestant reaction to the Enlightenment and the lionization of scientific, empirical knowledge over other forms of knowledge. Early Christian leaders didn't believe in literalism. In the Middle Ages, there was a fourfold method of interpreting scripture. And so on.
Church father Origen (184-253 CE), due to his familiarity with reading and interpreting Hellenistic literature, taught that some parts of the Bible ought to be interpreted non-literally. Concerning the Genesis account of creation, he wrote: "who is so silly as to believe that God ... planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life ... [and] anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?"
- There have been near-infinite forms of Christianity (and every other religion) since their founding. To say that "Christianity is XYZ" is simply wrong. It has embodied entirely different values at different times and the Christianity of 2020 would be nearly incomprehensible to the Christian of 1600 or 1000 or 500. This is true even today.
- Many of what are considered "humanistic" or "secular" values are more-or-less directly traceable to the influence of Christianity. Universal value of human beings, that is, that everyone has fundamental dignity, rights, the ability to vote (democracy), and similar human rights concepts that have Western origins are almost direct extensions of Christian thought. In many ways, modern secular Western democratic society is post-Christian one, in the sense that it's a direct extension, not a radical departure.
- The concept of secularity has been redefined and come under attack in the past few decades. See writers like Charles Taylor, who have argued that secularity hasn't resulted in less religious beliefs, but merely their multiplication and changing of form. This falls in line with other social trends.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadMore importantly: these religious buildings still call the police when there is a break in and call the fire service when there is a fire. They expect all of the benefits from paying taxes without actually doing so.
The important distinction between non-profits and churches in the US is that churches do not have to demonstrate that they aren’t a just a profit generating company (see Scientology, many evangelical churches) - they don’t have to provide any documentation at all.
I’m fine with churches being untaxed non-profits, as long as they actually demonstrate that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization
That isn't true. Non-profits are not taxed either.
For centuries, the King and Pope had intermittently fought over control of it (a situation not unique to England, but repeated across mediaeval Europe). Henry VIII did not see himself as carrying out a state takeover of the Church, but simply as settling that traditional conflict between Pope and King decisively in his own favour.
In the USA, tax deductions to churches is giving the same treatment as a charity.
Most jurisdictions which inherited English common law, have maintained the classification of "advancement of religion" as a charitable end. To give just one example, look at how the IRS defines "charity" in the US [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_trusts_in_English_l...
[2] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-purpose...
No it's not. All non-profits are untaxed. If you are going to charge churches, then charge all non-profits.
Personally I think that's a bad policy.
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/are-there-advantages-to-being-...
"There are no direct legal benefits associated with being identified as an FBO."
I don't think religious institutions have to pay property taxes.
Ok, I looked it up: “states subsidize religions to the tune of about $26.2 billion per year by not requiring religious institutions to pay property taxes for property worth about $600 billion. This subsidy is of particular interest because property taxes pay for services such as firefighting and police, which religious institutions use the same as corporations and private citizens.”
No, non-profits do not have to pay property tax.
So by that measure states also subsidize non-profits. And your math does not take into account the amount of services religions provide residents.
If you went by the internet religions do nothing except take money, but if you visit the real world, religions are the backbone of social services in the US.
That really depends on the denomination.
Sure, there are pastors of evangelical megachurches flying around in private jets.
On the other hand, other religious groups often have quite poorly paid clergy. I remembering hearing about an Eastern Orthodox parish, where after paying for the building, utilities, etc, the parish didn't have any money left to pay the priest. So he is working a full-time secular job, his wife works part-time (as well as looking after the kids), and the priest does all his religious duties after work and on weekends. (The plan was to convert enough people to Eastern Orthodoxy that the parish could fund the priest's salary and he could quit his secular job; hasn't happened yet, who knows if it ever will.)
One of my former work colleagues was a Protestant minister. His church was too poor to pay him anything. He worked for Oracle during the week, and ran church services for free on the weekend.
A lot of religious denominations are struggling with ageing congregations and declining membership. Even if there is sometimes still a lot of money at headquarters, when you get to the periphery of shrinking local congregations things are often very frugal.
Do those people applauding this really want to applaud a policy that gives tax exemptions to specifically religious activities but denies them to activities that are less explicitly religious in character? It seems the opposite policy to what they actually want.
People doing charitable work probably shouldn't be paying taxes. People doing community work probably shouldn't be paying taxes. I'm even nervous about taxes on business since things like supermarkets are primarily involved with is getting food to people cheaply - discouraging that seems foolish. The basis of that taxation status shouldn't be linked to religious affiliation.
The main specific exemption I know of relates to fringe-benefits tax (FBT). Not all charities and non-profits get FBT exemptions or concessions, only some. Religious institutions fall into one of those categories that do get FBT relief, but so do other non-profits like hospitals, aged care facilities, health-related charities, charities targeting poverty/homelessness/etc. But a charity which promotes the advancement of arts and culture, for example, would not get any FBT relief, although it would be eligible for other tax exemptions due to charities and non-profits.
Also, there is at least one area in Australian tax law where religious groups are disadvantaged: deductible gift recipient (DGR) status. Donations to religious groups are not tax-deductible when used to fund their core religious functions, only when used to fund their programs to help the poor, etc. By contrast, there are various other categories of charities and non-profits for which all donations are deductible (e.g. Scouts; Girl Guides; public libraries, museums and art galleries; some environmental groups; etc).
While the treatment may still be preferential (it still has some unique tax exemptions), it at least sounds closer to fair. The specifics of the tax law of Montreal are probably unknown to most people here.
I don't know about Canada, but in the U.S. churches are still where communities meet, where people connect with the spiritual world, and also the ones doing most of the "heavy lifting" on any kind of charity activity.
They are also generally nice and reasonably centrist-progressive, meaning treating everyone respectfully, nor expecting you to sit through a sermon like the old days. (I heard of one place where this may have been the case, but never saw it myself.)
Food Not Bombs might have a weekly freegan cookout, but most of the e.g. feeding people, distributing donated clothes, counseling without having to do paperwork first, food banks, and so on, are done by churches, or church-like organizations, or by people who met at church. There are some exceptions, like in Western Mass and a few places in the Catskills.
Source: Traveled around the U.S. with no base income. I don't go out of my way to take advantage of these things, but I'll go if a friend is going.
As a Hindu and as a victim of Church sanctioned violence in Portuguese colonies I am no fan of Church, and yet I do not think it makes any sense to tax a charitable organization just because it is religious in nature.
In the USA, this is quickly becoming an obsolete understanding of religion. Regular church attendance is down from 70% to just over 50% in the last 20 years, according to Gallup.
People are leaving the churches. The real question is what will replace them. If people need community, build community centers. There are other solutions that do not rely on continuing to provide tax exemptions to organizations that more and more people are fleeing.
From 70% to 50% is such a large change in 20 years. For this to be caused by a change in _parenting only_ would mean that probably every child born 38 years ago until today never attended a church. (this data counts adults, so they would only start counting when they turned 18). That seems very unlikely.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/248837/church-membership-down-s...
USA is highly uneven. In some states like Florida you can see churches on every other corner, and they are very active and developing, serving not only as community centers, but also as halls, child day care, hospitals, schools, galleries etc. No freaking "community center" can replace that.
Could you elaborate?
Doesn't your complaint have more to do with the USSR than it has to do with community centers?
For example: https://southperth.wa.gov.au/our-future/projects-and-places/...
I didn't even realise there was a connection to Russia until he brought it up.
The concept was good and they did work. In many towns, it's usually the only place where you could run cultural evens,some more important community gatherings and so on. What did happen once the Soviet occupation ended, was the lack of funding of these places. The town I grew up in, 15k population and the culture center large enough to be suitable for a pretty large city,so the maintenance costs are substantial. That's where people go for theatre,concerts,and so on.
As for the churces, they do a lot of charitable work, however my own experience with churchgoers in many countries is that it's too often ' It's our way or no way at all'.
The.. local municipality funded by the same local community as your churches?
> Churches in USA are not nearly the same as in most other countries. They are funded bottom up and also have to survive by serving their community well.
Where do you think other churches get their funding? Where do you think municipalities get their funding?
I don't recommend going to your church when you need to go to a hospital. Go to a hospital. Doctors spend 12 years in school for a reason. The best outcome is that someone may do some first aid and call you an ambulance. The worst is you may die because you wasted time.
The latter is mostly the same today. The G-d loves everyone but gives to patient and industrious.
As a child of a relatively poor family, I spent a fair bit of time there because the local government sent us a catalogue a couple times a year detailing all the programs they were running which due to our income level were more or less free (being a whopping $30 or something otherwise).
Based off this and your other comments, it seems a more visceral reaction to the phrasing “community centre” than that you have any real argument against them.
>just over 50%
k
(I feel like the glib single-character response stands on its own, but more verbosely: yeah, the trend isn't good, but a) there's no reason to assume it's linear, "fair-weather believers" is a thing, and b) I'm not a TIOBE follower, but let's say java use was 70% 20 years ago, and down to just over 50% today. Is "obsolete" the word you'd use?)
Yes, I stand by my words. If you read them again, you'll see you are arguing with something I didn't say.
If 29% of religious people have left the church (50/70=71% still attend church)... then that is a major shift. It would be foolish to continue with previous assumptions about the role of churches going forward without taking into account how religious people are changing their behaviors.
So what if, in order to accommodate the changing role of the church in America, you prevent the other minority religions and minority communities from ever having their centers grow in the same way churches were able to?
Granted I've always been the last person to know where the party is and still don't know where to buy weed in a state where it's legal if it hit me in the face, but what I do know is that if I ever wanted to meet people the last two places I would go to is the local community center and church like it's 1971. In my experience, joining a hospice social club would be an equally bright experience.
Community centres are an order of magnitude more expensive than providing tax breaks to churches.
The people are paying one way or another, the question is whether public society will fill the gap or leave it to commercial businesses.
That is one part. However, it is naive to assume people would pay the same for community services.
The other is most of the church work is at heavily discounted rates.
My hourly rate is $160/hr in my day job and I do about 10/hrs a week for my church at $20/hr.
Does your typical government worker ever do such heavily discounted work?
(The problem is that the only way to keep the lights on in these churches is to appeal to people in their 60's and 70's, but programs geared for that age bracket will turn away people in their 20's and 30's, and deprive the church of new people, new perspective, and new funding. These kinds of churches are slowly starving to death, victims of simple attrition.)
It's going to go against the grain at hackernews, but taxing churches in the US is a terrible idea. If you wanted to further the divide between the "liberal city"/"conservative rural" American cultures, this would be a great way to do it.
If you grew up in a rural area of the flyover states you would know that churches form the backbone of these rural communities. For example, the church in my hometown organizes youth gaming nights (yes, D&D style), widow support groups, and hosts food drives along with so many more things. They're so poor that every year they have a board meeting and the board divides up the operating expenses that are unpaid and they pay them out of pocket. The board members are 'well-to-do' community members with job titles like firemen and teacher. If they were not tax-exempt, they would have to shutter.
This is not to condone or justify the negative impacts that some churches have on this country, and religion often serves as a cloak for a lot of bad cultural habits like racism. I understand why people want to combat abuses of the non-profit status of the church, but taxing them is not the way to accomplish this.
In any case, my broader point is that tax law for businesses and other taxable organisations is not as simple as "we didn't make a profit and therefore pay no tax this year", and therefore as someone who isn't a qualified tax accountant, I can't really say with much accuracy what impact particular changes to tax law are going to have on the overall financial position of an organisation like a church.
Same may be going on for churches too.
I'll happily to make an exception for any church that is truly run as a genuine non-profit charity, and most income really is spent on good work in the community - not on investments and buying really nice things for the pastors.
But that's going to exclude most of these businesses. Unless that changes they won't get any sympathy here.
I remember watching the collection round at a church once. Pensioners who literally had breadline incomes were all putting significant amounts of cash onto a plate - for the Catholic Church, which is literally one of the richest and longest established businesses on the planet.
I will never, ever forgive that organisation for leeching off its poor devotees quite so shamelessly. Likewise for any other church with significant wealth.
I would find that especially galling.
Land and buildings for one could be taxed. Churches bought or were given land ages ago, before there was a Manhattan or Boston, as we today know it. Go ahead and pay property tax on land worth $250 Million when you barely make income to keep the lights on.
That’s how some cathedrals are managed in europe for instance.
It absolutely has not survived millennia. What you call your Christian church today would be unrecognisable to the faithful of a century ago, never mind two, or five, or ten, or twenty. Or are you acknowledging that Christianity is the cult of Mithras, and that it’s still a death cult?
It has severe financial issues at the moment - maintaining the courtyard alone costs £1k a month. I’m waiting for more detailed finances on that.
Maintaining finances for any organisation is a basic bread and butter protection against corruption. I don’t see what harm there is in taxing religious organisations the same way as any other charity.
By "millennia" you mean "at most 300 years, maybe"?
For the record: I don't think that priests should be able to buy $50M jets or keep 40% of total land of x country tax free, but they should not be forced to sell buildings because property tax is too high.
Churches are routinely handed over to the state or to commercial entities in order to preserve them because church membership is in rapid decline and its very expensive to take care of the church building especially if it has "survived millennia".
The upkeep of a Cathedral is hella expensive, St.Paul's in London claims its building's upkeep cost is > £5.2M ('more than £10 per minute').
A building ownership tax seems sensible, but I'd be amazed if any Capitalist government considered it.
I'm not sure I understand your meaning. Are you referring to something different from property tax?
Then if we’re talking about the UK, it feels weird to argue about religious buildings ownership in a kingdom, where the Queen has a religious role.
One of the reasons Islamic extremism is so hard to combat is because Islam exists largely outside of the control of the state, as backyard mosques can basically preach anything regardless how extremist it is, often deliberately recruiting people out of organizations that try to integrate with the state and society at large. I assume this is similar to radical Evangelicalism in the US.
Parallel societies are bad, they're a breeding ground for extremism.
Islamic extremism in your country is not due to lack of state control of their mosques. It’s how you have treated generations of Islamic immigrants (Turks on work visas, no citizenships, open borders with lots of “refugees”, etc). Of course they will make parallel societies. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
You conveniently forget that the church has no qualms about controlling the state in the US
Have you been blind to politics in the past few years? From forcing intelligent design into schools to full assault against planned parenthood etc.
I thought you were talking about the USA as a whole, my mistake.
And actually extremism among Turks is absent for the very reason I outlined above. In Turkey there's a long tradition of either religious integration in the state in the Ottoman era which had a strong scholastic tradition, or laicism under Atatürk, so there was very little room for sectarianism.
And yes, a lot of extremism is present among refugees, but that just proves the point, where do refugees originate from? Countries with failing state authority.
The picture you paint of government control over religion sounds very authoritarian to me. As far as “parallel societies are bad”, what happened to “diversity is our strength”?
Religious practice is fine but withholding a secular education from children or ditching modern medicine, or attacking the rights of women or exercising corporal punishment isn't.
I don't see how having the ability to put a stop to it is authoritarian, at least not any more than religious extremism itself is. The alternative to government exercising control over religion is having religion exercise control over government. The problem doesn't go away.
Fair enough. That’s not what I thought you meant by “keeping religious orgs in line with state secular views” or whatever. Even still, you don’t need state control over religion to achieve those ends, and indeed in the US where the state is constitutionally prohibited from interfering with religion, these things aren’t problems (at least not to any reasonable interpretations).
So a religion is fine as long as it is watered down to the point it does not teach what is right.
the people giving money to churches to attend that church, should pick up the cost of going to that church. which includes property taxes. if they are not willing to pay for that, it's their problem. excusing churches from these taxes puts the burden for the church not on its members, but on everyone.
let me ask you - that mcdonalds down the street. are it's property taxes paid by you? do you think if they declared themselves the church of fat asses, their property tax should be paid by you, as a county resident? because it would be, like it is for churches. when a portion of land isn't getting tax collected, the cost for the county doesn't go away - they get it from the people paying the taxes.
Your whole premise here is that property taxes should be considered part of the cost of attending church (your first and second sentences from the quoted section above), but that’s exactly what is up for debate. You need to support that premise if you want to say something more persuasive than “I think churches should pay taxes because I think churches should pay taxes”.
your claim was that I needed to prove my point that churches should not pay taxes. i said the claim is invalid, because taxes are paid by default, by everyone, unless an exception is granted. so what needs to be proven is why the exception should be granted to churches.
this has nothing to do with separation of church and state. you have profit, or own property - you pay taxes on it. being religious is not a valid argument to pass on city expenses to everyone else on the block.
my position is not a "challenger." rules and laws are not written in stone as the word of god you pretend the bible is. they need to be reexamined frequently, and someone granted a tax exemption needs to prove again why that exception is still valid.
That's not the argument I'm making. I'm arguing that the onus is on you to persuade, not that the status quo is inherently superior by virtue of being the status quo. I was very clear about this.
> your claim was that I needed to prove my point that churches should not pay taxes. i said the claim is invalid, because taxes are paid by default, by everyone, unless an exception is granted.
The exception has been granted and is well-entrenched in precedent. You can disagree all you want and demand that someone needs to make an argument that persuades you; nevertheless, the law protects churches and you don't agree with it, so you must be mistaken about the burden of persuasion.
> my position is not a "challenger." rules and laws are not written in stone as the word of god you pretend the bible is. they need to be reexamined frequently, and someone granted a tax exemption needs to prove again why that exception is still valid.
The law prohibits taxation of churches, and your position is that we should change the law, ergo it's (by definition) the challenger (the status quo being the incumbent). No one here is claiming laws are written in stone; our disagreement appears to be whether or not changing the laws requires a persuasive argument, and here you are mistaken. Specifically you're mistaken that churches are legally obligated to reprove the validity of their tax exemption--you may wish that churches were so obligated, but they aren't, and if you insist there is such a legal obligation, it's incumbent upon you to furnish evidence to support your claim.
Anyway, this conversation has diverged from an interesting subject to litigating burden of persuasion which is well established and obvious. I'm not interested in debating the obvious unless there's some evidence that can call into question its obviousness. If we can't agree on obvious matters, I don't think this conversation is likely to enlighten, so I bid you adieu.
yes, that is my opinion. this is what we do in comments on a subject matter. state our opinions on it. there is no need to prove to the irs churches should not be taxed. they take tax rules all the time and reexamine them, and drop ones that are no longer appropriate, which is soon coming for churches. as can literally be seen in this article being discussed.
Mega-churches might have money left over but by law they are supposed to spend their money as their nonprofit charter says or they could get audited by the State and fined or have their charter terminated.
https://images.cdn.circlesix.co/image/1/1366/0/uploads/posts...
Let's just say that not every church is the same as your Methodist church.
https://balkaninsight.com/2018/11/23/heavy-price-tag-oversha...
70% or more of that came from public funding, essentially tax payer money rerouted to build this monstrosity, something the country really can not afford.
And all of that for a pissing match about who has the tallest church.
People around the world have different value systems and tolerances. For me it's impossible to consider state-funded excesses of the church without drawing comparisons to the likes of Musk. As for their relative social benefit, that's another topic entirely..
> they are currently building a church to the tune of 100 million euros.
> 70% or more of that came from public funding, essentially tax payer money rerouted to build this monstrosity, something the country really can not afford.
In Tesla's case, $428m of public money contributed almost one third of all profits made by the company in a single /quarter/, at a time when the dollar's future as a reserve currency is being called into question due to panic spending to support a system on the brink of collapse.
The trick will likely qualify it for inclusion in the S&P 500, making it further eligible for more of that sweet public money over winter, as the current administration discusses that index's performance as an explicit target on an almost weekly basis.
The recent elections confirmed the conservative direction of the country, fueled along others by the catholic church.
The good thing is that religion is not compulsory anymore. There used to be a time where not bring part of the church meant beung a real outcast.
This included the communist rulers who were quick to chistianise their children because otherwise they wild have hell in the family.
That was acually not bad as the church balanced the state.
Now they are omnipotent, and this is also the reason more people can be outside of church - because church is not unanimously seen as a savior anymore. Quite the opposite in the ranks of 30-50 yo people.
Some are even willing to use credit cards to pay their tithes if they come up short.
Grow up, there is no utopia and whatever works already is better than nothing.
> Those in favor of lower taxes have argued that individuals are more capable than the government of allocating money to important causes, including people in need of assistance. But the study found that was not true. Donations do not match government assistance, and without tax money, social services are not funded as robustly.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/republicans-give-more-to-char...
Incredible value for money - 90% of the services provided by our local church are staffed by unpaid volunteers who go above and beyond.
As an example, I have someone in my extended family that works for one of the state governments for employment services, and from the stories they've told me about how the department has been slashed and burned and forced to work with a skeleton staff, I'm not surprised at all that when the pandemic hit that everyone was having a hell of a time signing up for unemployment or getting the money they're supposed to be getting, and desperately need right now, or even just reaching a live person to talk to.
And of course that just makes the department look badly run, in people's eyes, which makes the average citizen even more likely to allow more money to be cut from them, because they just assume it's well funded already and "they suck at their jobs, what are we even paying their salaries with our tax dollars for? They should be fired!"
Whereas churches have a bit of a shield from that, at least, especially from the GOP in the US, who aggressively and consistently fight against social programs and non-defense government services otherwise, but their voter-base tends to be very religious, so they have an incentive not to hurt churches in any way.
Being handed everything by a welfare state is de facto charity for the recipient. The biggest difference is that charity is morally superior because it's voluntary.
Besides, the US has a very large welfare state. I get a big kick out of people pretending the US doesn't have an epic scale, highly dysfunctional, poorly operated, welfare state, that doesn't spend trillions of dollars per year. I just can't figure out what they're spending $8.1 trillion on every year. Must be roads and military. Where'd all that magic trillions of dollars in stimulus spending come from? That laissez-faire Capitalist US system surely. Those free market $1,200 checks raining from the sky.
Without exception every welfare state - including the US, which has one of the most progressive tax systems - heavily relies on rich people to pay an extremely outsized share of taxes.
IME even the most progressive churches can do a lot of 'soft' damage to already hurting people. Secular services certainly have their own faults, but at least they don't have so many invisible strings attached.
Please also keep in mind that secular services compete for resources and mindshare against religious institutions. It becomes a self reinforcing argument on the right that we need to keep the latter because the former is so bad.
I used to be a Christian. There are a lot of bad sides of Christianity and that is why I left. But it does help many people and after studying Buddhism I understand how the right approach to Christianity can bring a lot of peace to believers:
Unconditional love. Many people grew up made to feel they had to earn their parents' love.
Letting go of control. You can't control everything in life. Whatever is going to happen is up to God now.
Forgiveness. When people ask for God's forgiveness, it helps them to forgive themselves.
Gratitude.
I think the root of the problem lies in the fact that God here is an abstract entity with whom the believer communicates but no such abstract entity exists for non-believers (duh!).
May be some form of general artificial intelligence can fulfil this role in the future?
Real people can fulfil this role too but they are probably not abstract enough. edit: And hence not "powerful" enough (to forgive, to protect etc.).
Just spit-balling here. Also not trying to offend anyone here.
I have a hard time believing AI will fulfil this role. For would it be optimized for gains here and now, or actions of sacrifice now that will be payed back fully in an everlasting life and that is built on faith? :-)
And I must admit that love is hard and I mess up a lot! But i try to do the same as is written here:
"Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."[Philippians 3.13-14]
What if your neighbor was a child with two dads?
What if they looked like they were “illegals”.
The majority of Christians support politicians who whether you agree with their politics or not definitely don’t “display Christian values”.
Do you really wonder why so many people see the entire Christian establishment as hypocrites?
You can quote scripture or we can look at reality.
EVERYONE is a sinner. That sin is then forgiven.
But God's whole purpose was to save sinners like me and you through Jesus Christ: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us". [1 John 1, 8-10 NKJV]
One interesting question is whether those "positive dogmas" have "staying power"--will they be around as the moral potency of religion fades from a culture (especially by decades and centuries)? Maybe an indicator would be a comparison of aggregate generosity between religious and a-religious people?
I wonder how many churches would be as “loving” if “Adam and Steve” walked in?
https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/deja-vu-all-over...
There was a wonderful article I read ages ago and can no longer find on the history of communes in the US over the 20th century. Not one secular commune managed to perpetuate itself across generations without turning into something vastly less communal. Most religious communes failed too but the Amish and Hutterites are practically ethnic groups based on religion and there are lots of smaller groups.
In many muslim countries in the world there are plenty of places like this because alcohol just isn't a thing.
Every time we propose the government spend money on something we must remember where that money comes from and seriously consider if it's justified.
That's not to say we can't have differing opinions on where precisely to draw that line, I think debate on that is good and healthy, and it's important to strike a good balance between too much and too little social welfare. But it's also better to have a more efficient and effective solution than to have one that "feels" better.
I really wish people didn't do this. I agree with your post, but it's preemptively combative to make the first thing you say, "you're going to disagree with me." It makes you sound like you're trying to present yourself as an underdog in the face of a monolithic enemy.
Churches can be opposed to abortion or same sex marriage. At the same time care for the needy. However also sometimes be biased at only serving the needy that they think need to be served.
I think that’s the main issue here. If churches are non-profits, treat them like other non-profits.
I fail to see why.
All financial dealings of churches go unaudited. They should be subject to annual open public audit, at the least. I think they should be taxed as any other corporate entity. They frequently compete with normal corporations and should be given no preference. As it is they pay neither federal nor local taxes in most jurisdictions, if not all.
BTW I'm very conservative. My inclination would be to do what the British and the French did centuries ago - confiscate all the properties of the churches.
They are. There is no difference tax-wise for a non-profit and church.
To me, reporting makes sense. For an organisation as big as a church, employing a few accountants seems like value for money simply because then fraud will be deterred.
While both churches and non-profits don't pay tax, they are treated differently. Secular non-profits have to account for the money coming in and out of the organization, while churches don't have to account for the donations or expenses.
If you argued that religion was not an intrinsic social benefit then you might start saying that some of what they do is not non-profit work. That could get interesting.
I'm not from the US, so I 100% expect those things from churches already. These sound like completely reasonable demands I would have on any public institution.
https://ffrf.org/outreach/item/14005-churches-and-political-...
My local church, that drives 10,000s of nearby resident crazy by ringing it's bells, had 3 people attending last time I stuck my head in.
3.
People only use it for weddings, christenings and Christmas.
They're not been a part of the community for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_and_religion#/media/Fil...
See how the US is an outlier?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Japan
In the Western world, the concept of humanist, egalitarian democracy is more-or-less an extension of certain Christian ethical beliefs that preceded it, so again, this definition of 'not-religious' is itself pretty problematic.
There's a reason why during the Bush presidential candidacy a big news item was the push for a Constitutional amendment to exclude gay marriage. The Mormon church spent a great amount of money advertising in California with regards to how dangerous gay people are to kids.
People talk about "intolerance" of "cancelling", but cancelling is about the exercise of free relations by withdrawing. And then there's the force of law.
This might be the case of some church organizations (specifically those that make it a point to be politically active), but claiming that all churches do this, or even a majority of them, is just not accurate - guilt by association.
I grew up in Catholic schools, and almost every priest that taught us was incredibly kind and open to gays.
These priests are some of the nicest people you'd ever meet.
Church culture evolves but not always in the progressive direction. Propping up these ancient institutions just because they are old--and sometimes do good--comes at a high cost to marginalized groups.
But more generally, I think an angle to the whole question would be to apply either or both:
- treat religious organizations as any other non-profit, with no specific religious exemption. If they can’t continue doing the same in that legal framing they need to adapt.
- give all non-profit orgs a path to have the same advantages as religious organizations, so they can help the community in the same ways.
So is conference halls. So is Zoom for that matter.
Churches are also places where parents force their children to go against their wishes, where creepy priests make unwanted advances etc.
> also the ones doing most of the "heavy lifting" on any kind of charity activity
Any kind? Really? What about NGOs? Volunteering nurses? FLOSS communities? People 3D printing masks in maker spaces?
Here in the U.K., the National Health Service put out a call for volunteers to help and tens of thousands of people signed up, regardless of any church.
You don't need these for significant charitable activity to occur.
I am not saying that churches don't do good, just that they're not needed for charitable activity to occur and we need to determine whether the good that occurs because of churches outweighs the bad, (which btw often doesn't even come to light due to victims fearing retaliation).
The problem is that in the U.S., the state has given up on helping the poor, especially when compared to EU countries, and it is then up to private institutions to fill in some semblance of what should have already been there as nonnegotiable basis of a developed society.
I am not from the U.S., (but with a lot of fiends from there), and I can tell you that a lot of what churches do in the U.S. is so basic that it should not be their role to provide. It is often used as a metric of "success" for churches and private charity in general, but in reality all it shows is a failure of the wider society where things like medicare for all are still not a thing, even during a pandemic.
When there's a possibility of thousands of dollars that need to be paid for an ambulance ride, that is a systemic failure of the system no church can fix.
I am not religious myself, but I want to make it clear that I am not arguing churches do no good. They absolutely do. I just feel that the awful shit they do is often overlooked as soon as something positive can be said about them.
There are multiple sides to every story, even characters you wouldn't think much about based on the overall picture did good, (one particularly repulsive character of history did a lot for animal rights for example).
I also feel like other forms of charity are often diminished in their impact because they're less visible than church charity.
Let's take FLOSS for example; I come from a relatively poor upbringing, without access to good education or the internet for the longest time. I have cerebral palsy and that means any kind of physical work is pretty much a no go for me. What I did have was a couple of friends who gave me Mandrake Linux on 3 CDs back in the day with GCC preinstalled and a book on C.
Now I am able to support myself as a programmer and donate to FLOSS on a regular basis. Because FLOSS gave me hope, I also found the motivation to exercise really hard and to preserve some amount of mobility for myself, even into adulthood.
Without it, I'd most likely end up dependent on people I wanted nothing to do with and without any kind of dignity, demotivated and miserable. I cannot overstate the impact the free software community has on me and I feel like it did more for me than any church ever could.
Just to point out, being an active developer/maintainer/etc of widely used FLOSS programs often seems to involve that. ;)
i'm also not sure what this has to do with taxes.
With no to little reporting requirements American churches are the ultimate fraud machine for the use of an exclusive and nepotistic section of society.
Spin it out as a series of regular companies/charities, both for and non profit.
For any church worth keeping the only difference it will make is the paperwork the accountant does, for the vast majority it will shut down piles of legal loopholes and expose corruption.
Wonder why european churches are a dying breed? There isn't any personal profit to be made there, and the good people saw fit to have their governments establish semi-functional systems of care based around moral ideals.
> nor expecting you to sit through a sermon like the old days
Its because America has come a long way to instill the freedom in the minds of people and the church knows if they force too much people will not turn up. So they relax it for now but once people become enough religious, they will move the needle a little further until there are no independence left. Don't fall for the charity stuff.
https://galileounchained.com/2012/05/14/are-churches-more-li...
The church is in only interested in keeping its own institution alive. If you ask the majority of Christians - who overwhelmingly went for a candidate who does not display Christian values - it’s because he furthered their agenda.
The church has hidden and continues to hide child molestation by their leaders.
They are pushing to reopen during Covid putting their congregations in danger - who are statistically older.
Churches are also one of the most segregated parts of society.
They consistently oppose universal healthcare.
One survey showed that 22% of Christians still believe that interracial marriage is a sin.
Great production, acoustics, cameramen, and often to peddle and push the organizers products [2] (books, DVD's, etc)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjpWTsh07k0 [2] https://store.harvest.org/
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souperism for a more blatant historical take.
or is it finally going to tax
Judism
ISLAM
and all region based venues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TncdhLGjFTE
I suffered conversion therapy and could never get on hormone blockers young; because of the nonsense faith results in from people with authority over administering a medical treatment. As an adult I'm now trying every year to afford surgeries I cannot afford while my peers save for homes. Also parents disowned me and I have ptsd from the physical & mental abuse.
Nice to see religion coming to an end before my shorter life from it. Of course it will out last me but I'm hopeful; as the younger generation is aware of the countless injustice while malevolent people attempt to disguise religion as what the "community" needs.
The facade known as religion should rot to nothingness with all the people that forced it upon others.
edit: Yah religious patrons don't like it when victims of religion speak out. Similar you all don't ever remedy the victims of what you support exist in this cruel world because of people like you.
So perhaps US should loose the rules for secular non-profits to be on the same level as churches?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/mormon-church-...
I have seen crumbling Catholic churches, and I have seen the Vatican Meusum. Two extremes of wealth.
And so on...if we could turn the clock back and buy land on Manhattan or Las Vegas we'd be rich (on paper at least too)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitarium_Health_and_Wellbein...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"
Did you purposefully leave out the full sentence? I would argue it is/was a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, would like to hear why you think HN should be exempt from political discussion anyways? We see thought-provoking discussions here each day. This is one of the positive aspects of HN that I value that it allows you to be politically and socially aware of ideas to get you out of your role as an "engineer" or "hacker".
Fair point about being a new phenomenon.
Let's post about rent control while we're at it and really set off some flamewars.
"Censors have never been on the right side of history. If you support censorship, consider that you may be advocating evil."
If this was a sarcastic bio, then forgive me for misunderstanding.
You can be a free speech absolutist and still think it's a bad idea to shout fire in a theater. Being against censorship doesn't mean you welcome anyone into your home to shout whatever the heck they want.
Also, perhaps you should review them again:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
Most churches are also located in some of the prime real estate of top tier cities and I always wondered how they were able to afford paying $1500+/Sq.M in a prime, central area.
About the charity work - I know for a fact the charity work the churches do cost less than 10% of the income they make, I got this number from a former church member who was a top level guy in his church. Given that churches are anyway structured like a business entity internally and manage money like a proper business, why shouldn't they be taxed as one?
It makes no sense to not tax them no matter how you try to justify it. If they did get an exemption, so should Mc Donald's for giving away a free Cola bottle with every $20 meal you get.
If you think Christianity is broadly good and correct, the trend towards business-like megachurches and celebrity pastors is deeply corrosive to the faith.
If you think Christianity is broadly bad and corrupt, the trend towards business-like megachurches and celebrity pastors entrenches and effectively promulgates many of the religious ideas that you abhor.
If we're fair to what it is being said, the point seems to be this: churches are like corporations: their goal is to grow in size and revenue.
That is demonstrated by the anecdata of a friend, someone high enough in a particular church, that confirms they only spent 10% of their income on charity.
So the gist seems to be this: if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like duck, it must be taxed like a duck.
Not a bad argument per se. However, it lacks supporting data, preaching for those who already feel that religious institutions are a scam anyway. So, because of that, it's not very persuasive.
If you really know this for a FACT, then I'm sure you can share your source for this information.
Churches are currently treated almost exactly like any other non-profit by the IRS. Taxing them specifically, but NOT other non-profits means we would be specifically discriminating against a religious organization.
...and religious persecution is a new level of left-wing intolerance that I, sadly, would not be surprised to see.
These are bold statements that need sources other than some guy you know.
Religion is a vestigial structure and a hideyhole for the worst parts of humanity.
This is not an exaggeration. I have lived this. I have watched others live through this. The USA will ultimately be destroyed by completely ignorant Christians who are able to fake some semblance of rational thought.
Stop defending these institutions as “for the public good”. Tax them out or existence and let secular / non religious organizations take their place. It is absolutely absurd to pretend Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or whoever are special because of the particular brand of imaginary edicts they subscribe to. None of us are special. We are all just stupid meatbags on a rock.
I commend all the lives saved in the name of God but let’s not pretend or equivocate. Christianity in the USA is a net drain on society and it has no place in a rational conversation. Anyone who thinks, believes, or sells otherwise? You’re a lunatic.
How many churches are you an expert on, exactly?
I’m telling you this whole Christianity thing is a scam.
sudo apt-get remove religion
It’s a mental cancer.
Humans are religious beings... you won't get rid of it by only focusing on the negative aspects of your own experiences.
Atheism is two (or more) different things. It is both the active belief in the non-existence of any God, and also the passive lack of any belief in any God.
It’s not like I have to have active faith in the non-existence of Quetzalcoatl to have no interest in worshiping that deity.
And I’m saying this as someone who went from Catholicism via Wicca to something in the general area of Apatheism or Ignosticism.
The second one would be agnosticism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atheism&oldid=969...
Religion is a disease like cancer and aids. You dont replace it with another disease. Atheism is the cure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
All of that is supported by philosophical arguments, giving western humanism a much older foundation than Christianity.
So, succinctly, I would put like this: was Christianity a necessary condition for the development of western humanism? Yes. Was it sufficient? No. Bigger and better ideas were needed to make it what it is today.
Some of the series is already in book form, which goes into more depth than the podcast.
[^1] https://historyofphilosophy.net/
Only if you believe in him! The "caring" is not unconditional.
Its not just Christianity, Hinduism and Islam are also bad.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can do better than that: I can do that with any group, not just a church congregation!
You'll find racists and bigots in any group, but religions explicitly promote the supremacy and truth value of one over the other, and is a source of racism and bigotry. Unlike say, a board game club.
If I criticize Nazi white supremacy philosophy of formenting hatred, do you come with a similar excuse of how human tribal nature will find a different means for formenting conflict, or how the British empire was also racist.
Is my point of criticizing religion in any way related to your snark about the Trump administration?
If you're right (and I believe you are) that the whole world is fucked up, filled with all sort of crazy and misguided people, why not treat churches like any other worldly institution, taxing them?
That explains it. Your only experience with Christianity is with the oddest strains of it. I see that stuff pretty often with American "atheists". What they refer to as church feels like a fever dream, or something entirely alien.
>Anyone who thinks, believes, or sells otherwise? You’re a lunatic.
I disagree. You disagree with me, so you're insane.
It’s still mental cancer. Believing in an imaginary sky god in 2020 is a mental health crisis. It’s absolutely absurd.
The scientologists who think that life was seeded by aliens have more to stand on than Christians do.
You can’t even have a rational debate with a religious person because they will just fall back on “faith”
Like our innate tribalist tendency of viewing the whole world as an unending conflict between us and them, we, modern humans, must try to find solutions that take those characteristics in consideration, not pretend they do not exist.
It's no one fault to have a religious tendency. There's no bad faith in being a believer.
Even in case of domestic violence they focus on getting couple together and about how woman should be nice.
The article is about Montreal which, last I checked, isn't in the USA.
Church attendance in the US is dropping dramatically, catching up with democracies elsewhere in the world.
Generally the more educated and free a population, the less church (or mosque or whatever) going there is.
This is true in general but some reason it is not the case with islam.
On the other hand, I've seen it anchor people and bring g out some of the best. I've seen and met people, who by all means have the right to be depressed, bitter, angry, etc. but maintain an attitude of forgiveness and happiness I can barely begin to comprehend.
I suppose on an individual level it can be very good, but I remain wary on religion as an institution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Fundamentalism and literalism is a fairly modern phenomenon which is mostly a Protestant reaction to the Enlightenment and the lionization of scientific, empirical knowledge over other forms of knowledge. Early Christian leaders didn't believe in literalism. In the Middle Ages, there was a fourfold method of interpreting scripture. And so on.
Church father Origen (184-253 CE), due to his familiarity with reading and interpreting Hellenistic literature, taught that some parts of the Bible ought to be interpreted non-literally. Concerning the Genesis account of creation, he wrote: "who is so silly as to believe that God ... planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life ... [and] anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism
- There have been near-infinite forms of Christianity (and every other religion) since their founding. To say that "Christianity is XYZ" is simply wrong. It has embodied entirely different values at different times and the Christianity of 2020 would be nearly incomprehensible to the Christian of 1600 or 1000 or 500. This is true even today.
- Many of what are considered "humanistic" or "secular" values are more-or-less directly traceable to the influence of Christianity. Universal value of human beings, that is, that everyone has fundamental dignity, rights, the ability to vote (democracy), and similar human rights concepts that have Western origins are almost direct extensions of Christian thought. In many ways, modern secular Western democratic society is post-Christian one, in the sense that it's a direct extension, not a radical departure.
- The concept of secularity has been redefined and come under attack in the past few decades. See writers like Charles Taylor, who have argued that secularity hasn't resulted in less religious beliefs, but merely their multiplication and changing of form. This falls in line with other social trends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age
TLDR: It's complicated.