Cite for someone claiming that atheists have no opinions about religion?
My “agenda” isn’t religious in nature. It is entirely civic. It is not intended to affect or alter anyone’s religious beliefs or practices, although that will certainly be an unintended consequence. My stance on this issue does not arise from my atheism, but from my understanding of the proper relationship between church in state, which would be no different even if I were an adherent to a religion, or to religious belief in general.
We aren’t a monolithic group. There aren’t monolithic groups on either side of this debate, and I don’t see where anyone, except for yourself and Der Trihs, have claimed otherwise. Thankfully, neither of you are exactly representative of your respective sides of the debate.
Then you have a definition of religion that is so broad as to be meaningless.
Such as?
That’s a blatant misrepresentation. There are a lot of things the government uses my tax money to pay for that I neither need noe want, and I don’t insist that those programs be cancelled.
What is this agenda? What are the “semantic tricks” we are using to hide our agenda?
Der Trihs is not representative of all atheists, and his stated goals and beliefs do not in any way match my own, at the very least, or that of the vast majority of atheists I know in real life. I do not believe that relgious belief is any sort of a mental disorder, nor do I think its an abomination, or remotlely comparable to slavery. I have never denied that churches provide social benefits, I’ve only argued that they be taxed in the same manner as other charitable institutions.
Well, I guess I’m trying to get them to conform to my views to the extent that I want them to be subject to the same tax laws as non-religious institutions. I have no interest in having them conform to my views as regards the importance of religious belief or the exsistence of God.
Are you not familiar with the term, “straw man”? Here’s a link to bring you up to speed. Suffice to say, if you need to resort to straw men to demonstrate your argument, your argument is flawed by definition.
Opinion on what? “There is no God” is a pretty straightforward idea. unlike most religious doctrines, there’s not a whole lot of wiggle room in there. Outside of the topic of God, two atheists are no more likely to share opinions than any other two people selected at random, regardless of their religious backgrounds.
I’m sorry, but I’m not going to alter my personal philosophy to suit your preconceptions of what I should think or how I should act. I’ve been nothing but honest in my opinions and purposes in this thread. On what grounds do you feel justified in accusing me of dishonesty?
Look, it’s very obvious that many churches in the US are heavily involved in politics: think Dobson, think Falwell, think Wildmon, think the Catholic bishops who said they would refuse Kerry communion for his pro-choice stance. These churches have political power in large part because they have money, and one of the reasons they have money is, they’re tax exempt. They claim they are not lobbying organizations, but that’s EXACTLY what some of them are.
It would be far simpler to end their tax exampt status and let them act like any other lobbying organization.
treis In all fairness, your argument about removing tax-exempt status giving them a greater ability to influence politics is a good one. It’s the only argument for removing tax-exempt I can think of.
However, I still believe that tax-exemption for churches is a load bearing pillar for the structure of the US, and would bring a lot of other things toppling down if there weren’t a lot of restructuring of the entire system in order to accomodate that.
I still maintain that you are not paying for churches. Churches do contribute to the overall economy, and do generate revenue that does support the institutions you say they don’t pay for. Their congregations pay taxes, their charitable money goes to pay for things that are taxed. They pay sales tax.
I’m against the property tax overall, and I think that it’s an integral part of this issue, because I don’t want to see houses of worship in urban areas become a luxury for the rich alone.
Der Trihs If there are no standard arguments then how come every argument I’ve ever heard you use, I’ve also heard someone else use in the past? You are the stereotype for the proselytizing atheist IMO.
As for other atheists, sure they differ in their opinions, but Christians differ in their opinions just as often, and no one is arguing that Christianity is not a religion. The only thing that Christians have in common is that they have accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts. Hell, some of them haven’t even bothered with that part, yet people have no problem lumping them together as part of a religion, or even lumping ALL religious people in with them.
The diaspora of “the religious” is certainly far more broad and diverse than atheism.
The only thing that seems to make Atheism not a religion is that atheists say that it’s not.
BrainGlutton I agree with you completely, and if people were saying “religious people have a different set of semantic terms for describing the universe than I do, one I don’t find satisfactory.”, I’d be able to relate. It’s when they say “Religion is a mental illness, all religious people are dangerous, we need to end religion like we ended slavery.”, that I take issue with. As I have said MULTIPLE times, it’s a semantic gripe, however, that semantic gripe is used as a justification for hate and agenda pushing, and what I am trying to point out is that the hateful agenda pushing behavior is not limited to just “religious people” but atheists as well. I’m trying to shake the foundation of their Tower of Babble.
The thing that they don’t seem to realize is that if tax-exemption were to be removed, churches wouldn’t be able to afford to have a soup kitchen anymore in poor areas. They don’t realize that if they ever found themselves on the street, that those Christian/Krishna soup kitchens would feed them even as atheists. They aren’t even taking into account the overall scheme that churches fit into in society. That’s why I see the atheist agenda as being unified as a religion. They can sit there with their solidarity against tax-exempt churches. They can show solidarity in any number of “Organized religion is the biggest threat to humanity” threads, but I’m not allowed to call them on that solidarity? That’s bullshit.
The atheists on this board engage in as much groupthink as christians and muslims do. They claim rationality, yet so many of their arguments are inductive. Take the “Tri-Omni” debate for an example of an atheist dogma that is based entirely off of induction, and not at all off of deduction, though it sounds official enough to confuse most religious people who don’t know how to debate against it. Then they run off into their little atheocrat circle jerks and go “Huh, huh, did you see how stupid that fundie was, huh huh huh.”
It’s mob mentality, just because atheism ideally doesn’t adhere to that mob mentality, doesn’t mean that many self-identified atheists don’t.
Of course churches are political organizations. That’s one of the problems I have with this country is the fiction that they are not. A zen buddhist on a rock by a babbling brooky meditating is not political. Anyone congregating with multiple people out of similar ideals, is engaging in political activity. It is naive to think they are not.
As I said, I’d support removing tax-exempt status if there were no property tax at all. The property tax as it is, is unfair to poor land-owners. Imagine how much it must suck to be a black family that saves up for their $ 90,000 home in 1985 only to find out they can’t afford to keep it 15 years later because a bunch of artists moved into the warehouse buildings down the way, making it enticing to the yuppies, and driving that property value from 90,000 to 300,000 in a couple of years. That fucking sucks. I don’t want to see that happen to poor churches.
If there were no property tax, I’d be all for a uniform taxing structure for non-profit organizations.
The way I’d replace it? I’d make an income tax that only taxes your income above 15,000 a year, and remove deductions, let the CEOs pay tax on their 25,000,000 a year salaries. I don’t care if they already shoulder most of the tax burden, they also hold most of the money. They SHOULD shoulder most of the tax burden as a way of saying “Thank you society, for making me stinking fucking rich.”
I received this e-mail from a guy who isn’t a member of the boards but would love to discuss this issue with you if you want to e-mail him. You can e-mail me to get his address.
Besides of course paying for something that the government has no business of being in?
Do you have any evidence that this is true?
Even if all those things you say are true they still don’t pay property tax that everyone else has to. Since they don’t I am subsidizing them and I don’t like that.
Then you do something to support them. Perhaps if religions chose to spend their money wisely instead of on expensive altars, golden goblets, massive shrines and huge cathedrals they wouldn’t be in danger of going bankrupt. Every church I have been in has been nicer than the local school, community center or hospital.
Actually the only reason I see why Atheism is classified a religion is becuase religious people try to set up an equivilence when there is none.
That, and the fact that we don’t believe in anything that requires faith. “There is no God” is a single statement, not a belief system.
“They” ? I’m the only one saying that.
Instead, you’re proving how foolish your own beliefs are. After all, no atheist here has claimed to be God.
Of course, that way they can preach at me. They wouldn’t care if I dropped dead five minutes later, as long as I converted first.
mswas - the only person here who talks like that is me. Where is this horde of atheists who agree with me ?
This is pure fantasy. As has been pointed out, there are at least three atheists in this one thread alone who diagree.
I don’t think religion is monolithic; I just think all religions have fundamental similarities due to being religions, just like governments share certain characteristics due to being governments.
But the point is that churches are made up of people who do pay taxes. What if I, a tax payer, asked the police to investigate a church robbery? The point is that you can’t draw a clearly defined line between the church and its people.
Besides this whole point is moot anyway. We have already established that taxation is not merely about paying for government services. Firemen would not refuse to put out a fire at the house of an unemployed non-tax paying person’s house. The issue is not whether or not churches use government services, the point is whether they actually have something they can contribute. Since they are by definition non-profit (since if you are not you are not getting tax-exemption) then I say no.
So if Jerry Falwell is non-profit, I guess you can name his share-holders?
Besides, if only those churches that do “charitable” work get tax exemption, how are you going to go about defining what is “charitable” in a way that is non-religiously descriminate, how much “charitable” work should a church do, and how are you going to check up on that? While it makes good rhetoric your position raises more questions than it answers
I’m not saying that the government should give money to groups that can’t afford to build their own worship space. What I am saying is that the government should not take money from the group (ie: tax them) as this provides an extra unfair level of cost to worshipping in the way they would like.
Taking money via taxation != giving money
You said that we need to tax churches to protect them from government interferece. I was just pointing out that only a handful of churches seem to have problems with the government revoking or threatening to revoke tax-exemption status. Since this is such a small problem in general it would be like treating a mosquito bite on your foot by amputating the leg. Far more problems would be caused by taxing churches than by keeping the current system.
And given the small number of churches that have their tax exempt status questioned, the even small number that are actually taxed, and the fact that virtually no chuch leaders themselves are complaining about this, it would seem that in practice violating this is actually pretty hard. Since therefore there is no real problem with the law, why shoud we change it?
In general it is a bad policy to set laws based on what people MIGHT do. Until there is an actual problem, or in the very least a situation is becoming problematic there is nothing to be gained in changing the law, and lots of things that can be lost. Unless you can demonstrate that there is actually a problem with the taxation situation as it is, then I remain unconvinced that there is any need for change.
It wouldn’t be a “church” tax, it would merely be a tax on property ownership, like the ones discussed earlier in the thread. It would apply to others as well. However in general churches are much more sensitive to land taxes. Many churches have large portfolios of valuable real-estate, because they aquired the land during the development of the city when it wasn’t worth very much. So for example in Sydney here in Australia the Anglican church owns millions of dollars of property throughout Sydney, including some very valuable inner city real-estate. The reason for this is that since they were involved in Sydney since it was first settled, a lot of their land was given to them by the government, because at that time it was essentially worthless. Over the years the city has been built up around these bits of land, to the point now where they are extremely valuable.
This means that if you wanted to get rid of a church that had lots of valuable property setting a general land tax indexed to the value of the property could help you do that. And you could make it a general tax because most private land-owners that have valuable lands generally also have a lot of money. This is not always the case, but it is more so the case than with churches because of they have held on to a lot of their properties far longer than the average private owner.
The problem is that governments have access to all the demographic information about churches. How then do you assure that they don’t use this information to craft a law that is seemingly fair, yet ultimately targetted at a particular church. Many laws are slanted in their effect. So for instance a law increasing single mother welfare payments benefits those mothers, yet does little for anyone else. Since the government can find out whatever it wants about church groups, how do you stop them using that information in a bad way. All you would have to do is find something that naturally makes the church different, then tax that.
BTW I am not saying that there will be no ‘collateral damage’ as it were with these types of laws. There may be other people that are adversely affected. Yet since one of the premises of this whole argument is that we need to give the state the ability to tax churches to stop them persecuting them, then if the state is evil enough to openly persecute a church, I don’t see why they can’t use these sort of passive-aggressive tactics.
As best I can tell the only way to ensure that this selective taxation doesn’t happen is not give the state the ability to tax churches.
Are you kidding me? Commonality of opinion is all it takes for something to be defined as a religion, in your lexicon? Jesus Christ, that’s the worst definition for the term I’ve ever heard! What isn’t a religion, by your standards? I sure as hell can’t think of anything. If I can get five guys together who agree that Rosario Dawson has a nice ass, according to you I’ve just founded the First Church of I’d Tap That.
Well, that, and that “atheism” does not fit any rational defintion of the term “religion” that I’ve ever seen.
One person in this thread has said that. One person. And he is no more representative of the average atheist than you are of the average theist, for which everyone in both camps should be eternally grateful.
Atheists, as a rule, do not hate religion. Some atheists do. Most do not. Please stop making sweeping pronouncements about what atheists think. It is every bit as annoying to us, as “religion is a mental illness” is to you. Please stop insulting every atheist in this thread because you’re angry at one individual poster who happens to be an atheist.
You keep saying this, but you have yet to demonstrate it. There are secular soup kitchens out there that are not affiliated with any religion. How do they function? Why would religiously-funded soup kitchens be unable to do the same thing?
What makes you think we don’t realize any of this?
Except, of course, that we’re not even remotely unified in opinion, even in this thread. A few posters whom I know to be atheists have even posted in support of keeping the tax exemption. Those who oppose it, are doing so for a variety of reasons, from outright hatred of religious thought to genuine concern for the health of religious institutions in this country.
You’re not allowed to call us on our solidarity when that solidarity doesn’t fucking exsist.
Well, I suppose you’re allowed, but people are just going to point and laugh when you do.
That’s certainly true, in as much as none of the three groups you just named engage in group think to any greater degree than any other group.
I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about here. Are you just making shit up again?
And if there were no unwanted pregnancies, I’d be okay with outlawing abortion.
:rolleyes:
BTW, I believe the administration frowns on posting comments from people who are no longer members of this board. If Munch wants to post here, he’s got to pay his fifteen bucks, same as everyone else. Apparently, though, you seem to have a re-occuring problem with understanding this basic concept.
As has been pointed out to you, you’re not paying for anything.
Plenty of examples have been given to you, I cite this entire thread and every counter argument already made as my evidence. If you want to be obtuse that’s your issue.
Wrong again. You are not subsidizing them.
Do you not understand the simple concept of “poor”? We aren’t worried about the rich churches with the fancy goblets. Try to stay on the same page at least.
Or maybe it’s because atheists set their “non-religion” in opposition to “religions”. If it’s not a religion, how can it be in opposition to other religions? Don’t create the dichotomy and people won’t pigeonhole you into it. You have an ethos, one that you want to enforce on people, it’s that simple. You can either admit that or remain in denial about it. That’s up to you. Regardless, you are pushing an agenda on religious grounds.
Consider it a cite supporting my argument. If you don’t like my cite, argue with it. If you don’t like me citing Munch as a source that’s fine, but you have to deal. If the administration has a problem with me using Munch as a cite, they can lose my 15 bucks too. Think you can understand that basic concept?
You know what. I am bowing out of this. It seems like for some reason this topic is gonna get me into trouble. So before it gets me into trouble, I’m gonna step out.
Suffice it to say, tax-exempt is gonna stay, that’s the way it is. I’m happy for that, America works in my favor this time.
And has been pointed out again and again and again that churches are recieving government services that they are not paying for. The congregations income tax does not pay for the local government services. The sales tax that the churches pay does not pay for these services. These services are directly funded by property taxes which the churches are not paying.
You can’t simply repeat something many times and then cite that as evidence. I have seen nothing that even attempts to prove that removing tax exempt status from churches will cause the whole system to come tumbling down.
I am not paying for the fire service that protects them? I am not paying for the road that leads up to the church? I am not paying for the sewage treatment for the church?
You have yet to define any concept of poor. I would be shocked if a church anywhere couldn’t afford to rent a gym at the local school on sunday’s. They might have to use folding chairs and plastic cups instead of pews and golden goblets but I simply don’t care about that.
Becuase in this case the absence of something is in opposition to that something. Its the same way that a vacuum is fundamentally different but still opposite to matter.
I wish to force atheism on no one. All I wish is that the government keeps its nose out of religion and religion keeps its nose out of government. I couldn’t care less if tommorow everyone became religious so long as they don’t attempt to force me to support or follow their religion.
Walk into a movie theater. Everyone in that theater pays taxes. Does this mean the theater gets a tax break, because its patrons have all already paid taxes? Of course not.
Anyway, yes, you can draw a pretty clear line between the church, as a physical structure, and its parish. Are the parishoner’s names on the deed to the church? No? Then they aren’t the ones who owe taxes on that property. My name isn’t on there either, so I’m not the one who owes those taxes, either. And yet, in effect, I’m the one paying them. How is that fair?
Yes, taxation is all about paying for government services. That’s the only reason we have taxes in the first place. Not paying taxes isn’t reason enough to deny those services, because we’re not a bunch of barbarians here. But that’s no excuse for not paying. If you’re taking advantage of government services, you should pay for them, even if you can get away with not doing so.
My dad runs his own machine shop. He has no shareholders. Is he running a non-profit? (Well, technically, I guess he is, but only because the economy is in the crapper.) Falwell has enormous personal wealth, and owns multiple opulent mansions. For which he pays no tax, because they are “church” holdings. This isn’t religion, it’s a scam, and there are a lot of “churches” like his, manipulating the tax exemption for religions to enrich themselves.
We use the same metrics we use to determine if any given non-religous organization is a charitable organization. It doesn’t require any new laws at all, merely an application of exsisting laws to religious organizations.
Why is it unfair? What makes it unfair to make a church pay these taxes, but not unfair to make any other property owner pay them?
Yes, actually, it does. The government exsist to provide services the private sector cannot provide. To pay for these services, it levies taxes. The taxes are returned to the population in the form of these aforemention services. If one person does not pay taxes, but still receives these services, everyone who does pay taxes is subsidizing those services for that person.
I think you have me confused with treis. I haven’t made that argument in this thread.
Hey, don’t get pissy at me. I don’t make the rules. I don’t enforce them, either. But you’ve got two mod warnings because of this topic already, I thought maybe you’d want to avoid a third. If you don’t care about violating the rules of this board, it’s not skin off my nose.
(Sorry for the misattribution there, treis. Don’t know how that happened.)
We should change it becuase its wrong to force people to support religion and its wrong for government to be involved in religion. This argument was in response to the contention that allowing the government to tax someone gives them more power than they currently have.
What is wrong with the argument that the government should not be supporting religion?
But the government could not selectively target religion. If it made property taxes high then everyone in the city would be pissed off. The fact that a tax structure might impact one religion over an other should not be a concern of government. In fact, this argument can be turned around to show that the government is supporting these wealthy churches more than other poorer churches. The churches with lots of land gain greatly from tax exempt status but a church meeting in the basement of the local school doesn’t.
I suppose this may be a problem but it would be pretty hard to selectively tax just church members. A tax targeted at a church will probably effect a lot of other people and they won’t be too happy about it. Even if this were possibly its still much harder to do than to modify the exemption requirements to exclude a particular religion. Plus its much easier to selectively enforce these requirements than to selectively enforce taxes.
No, the argument is that the government supporting churches is wrong and an inappropiate function of government. In response to the objection that giving the government the power to tax religions would give them more power over religions I made the argument that the tax exempt status is in fact a more effective tool.
treis One last little thing, because of all the arguments yours has been the most compelling.
Basically, I think it’s a class issue more than a religion issue. I think property tax would remove the poors ability to have a church. I don’t think it’s fair to relegate them to a school gym, all back of the bus like. I think that our system is inequitable pretty much through and through, and that this wouldn’t make it more equitable, but less equitable. You’d only see poor churches closing their doors. I don’t think society will collapse, I just think that removing tax-exempt status unilaterally will cause a lot of problems. The property tax is the only thing keeping me from agreeing with you. If there were a way around the property tax I’d agree with you, but as I see it, the issue isn’t tax-exemption it’s an inequitable tax code through and through. It’s a much larger issue than just one little piece of the tax code. That’s what I mean by it being a pillar. Certainly it would look more equitable on paper, and your taxes might lower by a few dollars per year because of it, but it would toss poor congregations on the street. That’s all, that’s what I mean by the pillar argument. You don’t have to agree, I’m not trying to continue the debate, but I wanted to explain that to you a little better. I was going to message you privately but found out I couldn’t. I believe that society is a big structure with an interconnecting latticework, and that if you start shifting stuff around, you have to shift other things around. I think this is a far deeper issue than just eliminating one little part of the tax code. In the end, it’s not even an atheists vs churches debate, that’s less relevant than the social impact that this would have on poor communities. The benefits are less than the detriments.
So to put it succinctly, I wouldn’t support changing that part of the tax code unless we were changing the ENTIRE tax code.
Yes you have said this many times but have yet to offer anything in the way of proof.
Oh spare me the sob story. If your religion requires a fancy building and fancy material things then thats your own damn problem. There is nothing discriminatory about not providing a church with the pretty building they want.
You vastly underrate the amount of tax that could be generated from churches. If Reagan had removed the tax exempt status of churches and spent that money of the Federal debt we wouldn’t have one today.
treis, no matter how many times you assert it, governments not taxing religious groups is NOT subsidising/supporting them. Simply re-stating it over and over does not make it true. The problems with this assertion are:
We live in a society where taxation is NOT based on consumption, but on ability to contribute. There are many non-religious people and groups that do not pay tax for various reasons, and there is no assertion that the government is either supporting or subsidising them.
Government services are provided not on a user-pays basis, but on a good of society basis. Police, fire-fighters, ect do what they do not because someone has payed taxes and therefore deserves their help, they do it because it is the right thing to do.
So for instance I have never had a fire at my house, and have nerver called the fire brigade. By your logic I should be up for some sort of refund since I am paying for something that I have not used. Similarly a person has lots of fires at their place their taxation rate should go up, since they are using more government services. This is simply not the case. Arguing that the government is “subsidising” religion by providing common services to religious groups without taxation is non-sensical, since there is no real link between services rendered and taxation levels of anyone.
The main thing that taxation is seen to buy people, if anything, is a voice in the common government. That was the cry of the American war of independance, “No taxation without representation”. Since by virtue of their non-profit status churches are prohibited from participating in politics. If you insist on churches paying taxes then they should by all rights have full access to the political system, since there should be no taxation of any group without corresponding representation. While you appear to want the church out of politics, taxing churches actually gives them the right to interfere in the political process.
It is commonly accepted that in most situations that if you neither help or hinder somone, you are neutral towards them. This is effectivly what the government is doing by not taxing churches. Giving them money would be helping them, taking money through taxation would be hindering them. Doing nothing is not helping, it is remaining neutral.
Secondly the whole premise of your argument that taxing religious groups is the best way to maintain a separation of church and state is deeply flawed. Apart from the whole point 3 above that taxing churches actually gives them the right to involve themselves in political processes, there is also the issue of the government profiting from peoples religious beliefs. Once the state starts to tax religious groups they then start to gain a revenue stream from that.
This then raises all sorts of issues, as it actually then becomes in the states financial best interest for people to be religious. Since the government gets money off religious activity, they actually benefit from encouraging it. And since all religions may not be equal in the amount of tax they incur, there would then be a further financial incentive for the government to put people into higher-taxable religions.
You may be worried about faith-based initiatives or whatever now. Imagine what may happen when the government may stand to gain financially from peoples beliefs.
As for the whole part about using taxation to persecute a particular relgion, I already explained how the property portfolio of churches often differs from that of the general population. Anyway it doesn’t have to wipe out one church to be wrong, all it has to do is disadvantage one over another.
But maybe you need a simpler example. How about a tax based on building height in residential areas? Since many Catholic churches and Islamic mosques tend to be higher than protestant churches, especially low church protestants, then this would unfairly descriminate against those groups. You could even make it so that you have to be higher than two stories for the tax to have any effect. Since most houses are <= 2 stories, then only people with large homes and churches would have to pay, so there may not be much public outrage. And the law doesn’t really mention religion, so you can’t claim that it is inherently descrimniatory, even though it was conceived that way.
The only limit to this sort of stuff is your imagination.