Should Churches Remain Tax-Exempt?

[Heywood]

I don't want to destroy religion as such, that would be impossible. People can and should believe whatever they like. It's the privilege and power that Religion has that I despise. Also the harm that it does, which is plenty. Also, indoctrination should be considered child abuse in my opinion.

Religion doesn't even need it's own building or business to exist, you can just meet up and do whatever. Why expect special treatment? It is indeed a business, people turn up and pay for services. It's not a charity, and it's not prepared to file under proper procedure for tax exemption. Religion is simply belief in nonsense, but people still make a living out of that business and it should not be given special status.

Say I start my own religion, I don't get given a building. I would be expected to buy and maintain one, including paying taxes on earnings, if that's what at I wanted to do. Everyone who spends money at a business has already had their money taxed once.

If I invent a nonsense element to another form of business, should that then get tax exemption?

Religion is not special, that is my point. It's not magical, and certainly not obviously good. It's just believing made up stuff. The government giving tax breaks to help keep delusions going seems a bit...

And if you really believe in religion, God relying on tax breaks is pretty weak.

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If all the harmful elements of religion were addressed, I would have no problem with it. But right now, they are in abundance.

Life is full of trade off and you can't make a Utopian world where everything is right and just. If you give people the freedom of speech. Some people will abuse it to incite hate and anger toward others. If you give people the right to privacy, some people will use that right to conceal nefarious activities such as molesting children or cooking up meth. If you give people freedom of religion, some people will use it for personal gain. Nirvana is not for this world and no amount of laws or taxation will make it such.

If we the people give our government the power to tax churches we are giving our government the power to obstruct their establishment. The power to tax churches is the power to make them so prohibitively expensive that people will not be able to readily come together, pool their resources, and exercise religion. The power to tax churches is the power to destroy them and I frankly do not want our government to have that much power. I would rather see a few rich televangelist than the government have this ability to destroy churches.

Suppose you trust this congress and Barack Obama to "fairly" implement taxation of churches. Well it isn't always going to be this congress or Barack Obama in charge. If you want to keep the government from having the power to obstruct the free exercise of religion, it necessitates making/keeping churches tax exempt. If you want freedom of religion, you have to accept that churches need to be tax exempt.