That doesn’t really have anything to do with the OP. Taking away a special privilege =/= abolishing freedom.
Christianity has always shown the ability to thrive in the face of violent persecution. It did so in the Roman Empire 1,900 years ago and continues to do so in places like China and Vietnam today. Hence it seems reasonable to conclude that Christianity could make it through some tax discrimination.
Removing tax advantages is not tax discrimination it’s treating religion the same as non-religion.
Some here seem to think that an abolishment of the freedom of religion would be an attack on Christianity, but wasn’t it put in place to stop certain Christian sects from running the country to the detriment of other religions? As an atheist, I would be very afraid if this freedom was somehow taken away for fear of what would take it’s place.
Yeah, but it thrives a whole lot better when they’re doing the violent persecution.
To be fair, everyone does.
Non-religious non-profit organizations are tax-exempt. If churches, synagogues and such were not tax-exempt, that would constitute treating them as inferior to non-religious organizations. In other words, it would be discrimination.
And this is the answer. Any sort of limitations on the practicing of religion, other than such limitations that protect others from harm and thus aren’t prohibited for religious or anti-religious reasons, is tantamount to the policing thought and belief (or, for the so inclined, non-belief) and is anathema to almost every priniciple upon which this country was founded. Even if religion were demonstratably wrong and harmful, attempting to remove its practice through legislation is the wrong way to go about it.
And to the tax-exempt suggestions, while I, as a theist myself, believe that tax-exempt status of recognized religions is wrong, I don’t think removing it would have the effect that many people might thing. In a lot of cases, church buildings, and members of the clergy and other church workers, engage in a lot of other activities aside from just organizing Sunday services. The buildings are used as schools during the week, or as community centers, and they engage in plenty of charitible work. I imagine quite a few churches could probably still qualify for tax-exempt status even without invoking religion. And even if it did kill some larger churches, plenty of people would still hold bible studies and gatherings and such in their homes or their local community centers and it really wouldn’t be meaningfully different.
Not all non-religious non-profits are tax exempt. No one is suggesting that religious organizations could not beer tax exempt on the same grounds as secular organizations, however much you might want to be able to cry persecution.
All we are suggesting is that religion per se not be a grounds for tax exempt status. When the church it’s doing something that would be tax exempt without religious involvement then it should be tax exempt. Easy. And non discriminatory, unlike the present system where I am compelled to pay the costs of your religious beliefs.
Er, no. It would constitute equality – they’d be tax-exempt if they held that status for some secular reason, and would not be tax-exempt if they didn’t.
I don’t know about abolishing it outright. I would, however. require kids to be shown the fact that religion is a lie. I would also remove the tax deduction for donations to a religon. Take away the money and religion will wither on the vine.
Something like that would take many generation to put into effect. If that is your goal, then the easiest way is to make people fear religion and all that it stands for.
The general population will eventually make the change on their own and all you have to do is plant that seed and let it grow.
Just look at what the U.S. does. Terrorist will come and get you in your sleep. owwww ahhhhh. Fear is mind control.
According to a good source:
For federal tax purposes, an organization is exempt from taxation if it is organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, public safety, literary, educational, prevention of cruelty to children or animals, and/or to develop national or international sports. Social security tax is also currently optional although 80 percent of the organizations elect to participate.
All non-profit organizations that aren’t de facto branches of political or profit-seeking businesses are tax exempt. If you want to make a unique and arbitrary exception for religious organizations, then you want discrimination against religious organizations, by definition.
It sure looks to me like that’s what a lot of posters in this thread want. Read #8. Perhaps you can find some way to interpret it as meaning that emac wants to tax some religious organizations and not others, but I sure can’t.
Post 8 should have been written better but what can you do…
I read it as the sensible way of reading it if not looking for persecution where none exists, i.e. remove the prong of tax exemption law that says religion. The local church’s soup kitchen? Tax exempt, though not if listening to religious indoctrination is required to get soup. The Church’s school? Tax exempt except again for the part that involves religious indoctrination.
And good to see you admit you were wrong on all non profits being tax exempt. They aren’t, as you notice.
The purpose of tax exemption its to encourage participation and contribution to activities we ferrel have a social benefit. By making religion without anything else a grounds foot tax exemption, the government is making a statement that it views religion as a public good. Removing that isn’t any form of persecution, its leveling the playing field.
Even if you removed the word “religious” from the list of tax-exempt missions, wouldn’t those still fall under the category of “education”?
No more than political campaigning does, and that doesn’t get the educational exemption. I’d have no problem with tax exempt status for a class on comparative religion, for example. But not for pressing a religion.
Enforced secularism because secularism isn’t a religion. Abolish all special preference with regards to religion, like the aforementioned tax breaks. Because I’d do it differently than most other people, by forced secularism, no worries about little theocracies popping up. My version of no Freedom of Religion means Everyone is Secular, rather than just Government stays out of Religious Affairs
All amendments, laws, regulations, ordinances, and rules will be made without religious input and without regards to how it affects religion. For example, things like anti-gay laws or anti-abortion laws will be automatically stricken from the books since I believe there’s no reason those laws exist except as a religious preference. If any law has a even vague smell of “because religion says so”, then its invalid.
First of all, and most obviously, I would not use that power to abolish religion.
Second, any effort to put an end to religion in any country would need to rely on killing those who practiced the religion. The persecution would need to be more thorough than anti Christian persecution was in the Roman Empire, or the Soviet Union.
During the late sixteenth century and early seventh century Christianity was spreading in Japan, but it was suppressed by killing nearly all of the Japanese who refused to abandon their Christian faith.
See? Religious genocide works! 
You mean like all the people who used to be Christian and Jewish and then converted to Islam in the Middle East and surrounding areas?
But that was just enforced replacement of one religion with another, **Uzi **, and even so there remained Christian and Jewish communities in those lands to our own lifetimes. (In the case of Japanese Christianity, it was enforced suppression of conversion away from the established religion.) The OP, in its own words, asks about eliminating freedom of religion with the apparent goal of eliminating religious practice itself. THAT has never been succesfully accomplished.
At best, in some places religiosity has lost influence in public life and faded away from being an expected value in the average person, but even there it does not seem to have been as direct consequence of policies to make belief become onerous, but as a sociocultural evolution by which once it no longer had official standing it moved into the merely private realm. YogSosoth’s proposal, a stricter, broader application of laïcisme, may in the long term eliminate the influence but will do nothing to stop people from being believers in the private sphere.