posted
Churches are given a broad exemption much easier to keep up than nonprofit status in exchange for not engaging in certain sorts of activities, at least in the US. I'd presume a church which wished to engage in such activities but still be appropriately tax exempt could set itself up as a traditional nonprofit.
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quote: Only if you don't count spiritual and religious guidance as charity, which seems a specious distinction to make.
You've got to consider perspective here. It's pretty obvious that from KoM and my perspective, viewing religious guidance as charity is explicitly specious.
I'd compare it to a faith healer filing for reimbursement from medicare. (I recognize that comparison is likely seen as insulting. I apologize, but it's the way I see it)
But I don't think that comparison should prevent churches from being tax exempt. Clearly people do get value from being part of a religious community. And to me, the community aspect is something that religions do extremely well. The charity isn't in the religious guidance, but in the community building.
The best religions are those that build community beyond their own denomination, and the worst are those that isolate themselves from the rest of the world, and demonize other religions. Or to come full circle to the topic, to demonize certain political viewpoints.
But of course, we all demonize certain political viewpoints. And in many cases, we agree that they deserve to be demonized... (this is where my post turns to endless rambling comments)
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quote:So do you propse revoking museums tax-deductible status, then?
No, but I am saying that museums aren't doing charity work. That doesn't mean that they aren't valuable, but they aren't doing charity work.
Assuming that, if as Boris says, the reason for their tax exempt status is their charity work, then they're not doing a whole lot of that and therefore should not receive the tax exempt status.
If the reason they're tax exempt is another one, it will have to be evaluated separately.
Museums are not doing charity. That means that they shouldn't be tax exempt for the reason of their charity work. Whether they should be tax exempt for another reason is open to debate.
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posted
By the way, I found the original article I quoted on Newsweek, but I can't afford the buy the article, or else I would. Maybe in a couple of days.
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posted
I believe you that you read it in Newsweek, I just don't believe Newsweek. I would like to see where they got that number.
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posted
Perhaps if I could look again, I could tell you. One thing about Newsweek, though, if they're credibly proven wrong, they will admit it. There are lots of people and organizations for whom that isn't the case.
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posted
I used to get Newsweek, and they were pretty good on most things, but their articles on religion and abortion were consistently biased and wrong.
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posted
But they won't be proven wrong on this, because they almost certainly cited a study, and their cite was very probably accurate. It's the study that needs to be judged.
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posted
*digs through readings of recent class on religion and public policy*
In an article by Thomas Jeavons ("The Vitality and Independence of Religious Organizations"), he cites the following numbers for congregations (meaning those religious organizations which purpose is to provide experiential, primarily religious services, such as church services and the like):
75% of expenses for religious program activities within the congregation, 25% in donations/direct expenditure to others.
He also reports clergy report dividing their time in almost exactly the same way, 73% to "'ministry and religious education'" and 27% to other services.
Non-clergy employees and volunteers, however, spend somewhat over half their time on ministry/religious things and 45% on other services (though this latter does include other services to members, such as day care, that would fall under the 75% of funds).
The estimates he reports are that 43 to 60% of all charitable giving in the US goes to congregations.
Note that donations to, say, relief services would not be counted in that number: relief services are considered religious service organizations, not congregations, and are generally considered separately in analysis.
Congregations provide most of their charitable help to the community not through monetary aid, but through volunteer hours.
Religious service organizations, almost by definition, spend most of their money on service, not ministry/religious activities. Now, sometimes an organization is not easily classifiable, but luckily for analysts, the pressure on organizations appears to be to specialize, so most long established and successful organizations tend to be pretty easy to classify (and tend to behave as suggested by their classification).
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posted
Its not clear who he's citing, here's the "suggested reading" list following the article.
Ammerman, Nancy. Congregation and Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
Cnaan, Ram. The Newer Deal: Social Work and Religion in Partnership. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Dudley, Carl S., and David Roozen. Faith Communities Today. Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Seminary, 2001.
Hodgkinson, Virginia, and Murray Weitzman, eds. From Belief to Commitment: The Community Service Activities and Finances of Religious Congregations in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 1993.
Jeavons, Thomas H. “Identifying Characteristics of Religious Organizations: An Exploratory Proposal.” In Sacred Companies. Jay Demerath, Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950’s. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998.
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Only if you don't count spiritual and religious guidance as charity, which seems a specious distinction to make. Most churches I've come across will let anyone in during most services, with some particular exceptions.
Glenn already said it quite well, but I'd like to put it a bit more strongly. Claiming church services as charity is a bit like claiming to be doing charity because you let people into your political rally. And I'll be polite and not even mention what particular politician I have in mind, here.
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posted
As a bookkeeper for a congregation, I'd have to say I don't agree with most of those generalizations, fugu. Though it is a Jewish congregation in Utah, so probably not a rubric for generalizations.
Oh, and on the Newsweek thing, I'm happy to admit when I'm wrong, but that doesn't usually make it all better that I was wrong.
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posted
Those're averages over huge varieties of congregations, they're definitely not any sort of authoritative numbers on specific congregations. I would expect individual congregations to be all over the map.
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posted
A 75/25 split doesn't surprise me. Facilties, support for clergy, support for church institutions, utilities, etc. are quite pricy. And, as fugu mentioned, most churches keep the service organizations separate.
However, churches serve as clearinghouses for making needs known, central collection points for donations, an, again as fugu pointed out, manpower. While the service organizations are separate, most rely heavily on individual congregations in many ways.
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quote:I do not get why what KoM said was impolite.
"And I'll be polite and not even mention what particular politician I have in mind, here."
Translation: I'll just imply the incredibly insulting thing I was going to say instead of outright say it, and I'll claim credit for the politeness of doing so.
Since he knows it wouldn't be polite if he named the person he's thinking of, it's very safe to assume it's someone he would consider impolite to name. Even without making the very obvious leap to whom he's thinking of, it's impolite. And making the leap isn't a big stretch.
posted
O.K. Well, that's insulting towards a politician, not towards a religious viewpoint, which, given the consequent posts, is what I was thinking about.
I think there are actually obvious parallels between political parties and religious organizations. They are strongly intertwined in most countries, but as to the question KoM raised, aren't political rallies tax free? Further, are political parties taxed? Isn't the key point here not 'charity' but 'for-profit'?
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posted
OK, I'll be more explicit: I think he was comparing religious services to Nazi rallies. That's insulting to the religious viewpoint. Even if he didn't mean Hitler as the politician, it's still providing strong intimations that religious services are conducted so that those leading them can achieve power. Again, insulting to the religious viewpoint, not the politician.
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posted
Um, no, Storm, I'm definitely insulting a religion here. Apart from that, you may have a point on the for-profit thing. I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in Norway, political parties are subsidised according to the number of registered members they have. (To start a political party, you need to gather some number of signatures, I think 3000. Could be higher, it's been a while since my civics classes.) Churches, or rather 'religious communities', get the same deal, except that they don't need signatures to start one, you just need to convince someone in the Department of Churches and Education, or whatever they're calling it this year, that you are a serious community and not in it for the money. The Aesirtru got registered the other year, and the humanist organisations get money too. As you can probably guess, I Do Not Approve. I'm sure comrade Bondevik will be sending me a letter one of these days, inviting me to come in and clean things up.
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posted
Actually, thinking about it I've decided that it isn't too hard for a church to avoid a taxable profit. I've always been a little uncomfortable with the millions of invested capital the LDS church carries. Though I have no idea whether it exceeds a 6 month operating reserve that any non-profit should have. I think even credit unions can cary those without being taxed on them.
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quote: OK, I'll be more explicit: I think he was comparing religious services to Nazi rallies. That's insulting to the religious viewpoint. Even if he didn't mean Hitler as the politician, it's still providing strong intimations that religious services are conducted so that those leading them can achieve power. Again, insulting to the religious viewpoint, not the politician.
I didn't consider the whole Hitler thing. In light of his subsequent post, I guess he was definitely trying to be insulting. Ah, well.
As to it being insulting that "religious services are conducted so that those leading them can achieve power", I definitely don't think that's an insulting idea as long as whoever says it makes it clear htat he's not edit: strictly talking about power in some dictatorial sense. I mean, most religions are all about changing people's minds and getting them to follow that religion's dictates, and if that's not trying to get power, then I don't know what is. However, it's the same kind of quest for power that every person who gets up to speak in the public arena seeks, so it's nothing meaningful, really.
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posted
I was actually thinking more of filling people's minds with poisonous nonsense, though the grabbing-power angle is a relevant one too.
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posted
If filling people's minds with poisonous nonsense is a bad thing, we'd better shut down the Internet.
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It would be much more effective to shut down churches. The Internet gives you the choice, and there's a lot of good info on it as well.
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posted
And here I thought KoM was referring to president George H. W. Bush.
No need to shut down churches, KoM. There is always the choice to attend. Just remove their tax-exempt status. I do not need to be or appreciate being told that the next step after homosexual marriages is the legalization of drugs, and that is a bad thing. As far as I am concerned, that is worse than supporting Bush, who can only stay for four more years. Immoral policies are indefinitely long. And my immoral policies are your self-evident natural laws, and vice versa, so why not make you pay for speaking publically?
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"When was the last time you were dragged into a church, kicking and screaming, against your will?"
A generally uncommon experience, I would think:
But one that I think registers on the collective memory... maybe not so much "dragged into church kicking and screaming" but (e.g. boiled in oil, crucified, driven from the flock, what-have-you) persecuted in one form or another.
On an immediate personal level and also an "identity=cog-in-the-machine" level, and that adds another level of complexity.
The real mind-**** in western civies comes when that self-identification and community-orientation splats itself upon the grimster capitalist machinery.
*now I'm talking like a poet, so I should shut-up*
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"But one that I think registers on the collective memory... maybe not so much "dragged into church kicking and screaming" but (e.g. boiled in oil, crucified, driven from the flock, what-have-you) persecuted in one form or another."
If you want to argue that, it can go all ways, and really, that's a pointless argument.
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posted
The shadow: that part of myself that I deny, suppress, or hide, often by projecting it onto others.
Blaming a group in my experience usually means they remind me of myself and I don't want to notice it. Pretty effective, too. The Crusades and the Inquisition have been over for hundreds of years, and have been massively overshadowed by the secular horrors of the last century, but if Christians are your target, they're worth using again and again. If you don't like Germans, keep saying "Never again!" while ignoring genocides that happen again and again elsewhere in the world. I'm sure we could find a way to blame Easter Islanders or goldfish enthusiasts, if we need to -- after all, passions sure do get raised on the Windows v. Unix debate. But there's usually someone closer to home to represent evil to us, so we need not look inside.
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quote:"When was the last time you were dragged into a church, kicking and screaming, against your will?"
I was about seventeen and a half the last time it happened, but I certainly don't want it to happen again.
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quote:Crusades and the Inquisition have been over for hundreds of years, and have been massively overshadowed by the secular horrors of the last century,
Which ones are you counting as secular horrors?
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posted
How's about Soviet purges, Dean? How's about Chinese mass-starvation and various atrocities? How's about the Holocaust? If you choose to say that the Holocaust against the Jews was for religious reasons (a reasonable but incorrect-I think-viewpoint), then what about it against the handicapped and disfigured?
I expect someone will be along shortly to tell us that those were religious things, too, even though the people doing them said they were not.
quote:I don't know what the situation is in the US...
Wow! Never would've gotten that idea from your posts, KoM.
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posted
I don't know about Chinese mass starvation, but there is some indication that the Soviet Purges were partly because Stalin was made violent by religious upbringing when he was abused by his father and molested by priests.
And as for the Jewish genocide, it was pretty freakin' clearly religious. Despite the death of handicapped people, Jews and homosexuals were killed on a Biblical basis, and this was far more comprehensive than the killing of the handicapped. If you don't believe me, why don't you try reading Constantine's Sword by James Carroll? He is still a Catholic in good standing, but he argues that the Bible made the Shoah more or less inevitable and Catholics need to accept that this has been their legacy in order to make the necessary changes before it's too late.
Not to mention, of course, the mass held for Hitler to speed him out of Purgatory.
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posted
Um, Turin, just rereading your post, when did Hitler ever say that killing all the Jews was not a religious thing? As I recall, he said the opposite.... As I recall, his books were about how destroying the Jews was what God wanted and was Germany's holy legacy. And what about the belt buckles that said, "God with us"? And how people (like the current Pope), were let out of the Hitler Youth in order to join the priesthood?
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posted
I think the genocide against Jews could've happened for social, economic, political, and racial reaons just as easily, given a demagogue like Hitler & Co. and the times being what they were.
The Mass held for Hitler has nothing to do with Hitler himself or his motivations.
Are you suggesting that it was their religion that made Stalin's father violent and his priests sexually abusive? Because, after all, atheistic people don't beat and molest their children or the children of others, right?
Nonsense. The muder-sprees with the biggest body-counts in the twentieth century were committed by people who claimed themselves as atheists.
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posted
Hey, dean, you are usurping my position as Official Invoker of Godwin's Law here. Not that I disagree with you. You might want to mention the slightly-more-than-passive role that the Catholic Church took in the Holocaust, not that the secular governments of the day were much better. Incidentally, handicapped are one thing, but how about homosexuals? How secular was that?
And Rakeesh, I gave information on the part of the world that I know something about. How about you do the same?
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posted
Well, how often do atheists kill their children? How often do you hear an atheist say, "I killed my kids so they would be with Jesus? I know they're happier now, and we'll be together in the next life?" I never have heard one say anything like that, but I can think of maybe ten or twelve religious American parents who've killed their kids, and probably eight or so of them said that their kids are better off dead with Jesus or whatnot.
How many atheistic organizations are currently paying out billions of dollars for covering up molestation by someone trained and employed by their organization?
Isn't it the Bible that says "Spare the rod and spoil the child"? while much-mocked liberal political correctness mavens say things like, "Hitting kids only teaches them that violence is unacceptable"?
Hmmm....
Actually, the Catholic church has blood on their hands from more than the Jewish Genocide.... Did you know that some Catholic members of the clergy helped burn members of their congregations alive in Rwanda?
The Catholic Church did not say a mass for the victims of Germany's genocide. They said a mass for Hitler.
They accepted (and condoned) the persecution of Jews for hundreds of years before Hitler came on the scene, and made clear to Hitler that they weren't going to condemn him for killing Jews either.
Hitler was always a Catholic in good standing while the Catholic church threatens to excommunicate people for voting a pro-choice agenda. Don't you think that if they really felt that what Hitler did was wrong, they'd have said so at some point?
Perhaps King of Men will enlighten us as to more specifics I may have forgotten or never known.
quote:"Hitting kids only teaches them that violence is unacceptable"?
I think you flipped a modifier there...
Godwin's Law states that, in any Internet discussion, somebody will eventually mention Hitler. There exists an unwritten addendum to the law, to the effect that the first to do so loses the discussion. It arose because Hitler would show up in the most trivial of contexts. However, it is also a very good way of shutting people up when they make perfectly justified comparisons to Hitler. I quite accept that the proper reply to "OMG you are teh Hitlar" is "Godwin's Law, ignore the cretin." Pointing out genuine resemblances or sympathy, backed up with sources, between some organisation and the NSDAP is, I feel, a different matter entirely.
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posted
Actually, Godwin's law states that eventually any internet discussion will degrade to the point that somebody compares their opponent to Hitler or the Nazis. The idea is that the discussion is over at that point not because of Godwin's Law, but because when you start doing that, all real discussion is pretty much gone and all you have left is name-calling.
posted
OK, I like that formulation better than the one I quoted. I have noted that some people will cry Godwin when the Catholic Church is compared to the NSDAP, rather than the person I'm actually arguing with. That's what I object to.
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Quoted from another article on the same case, which is no longer accessible:
quote:“Schlosser's husband, John, told an official with Texas' Family and Protective Services that his wife had referenced a Bible scripture the night before the killing and told him she wanted to ‘give her children to God,’ according to an FPS affidavit that led a judge to award the agency temporary custody of the couple's two older children....”
quote:Files said Laney believed that God had told her the world was going to end and "she had to get her house in order," which included killing her children.
"The dilemma she faced is a terrible one for a mother," Files said. "Does she follow what she believes to be God's will, or does she turn her back on God?"
Files said he would present witnesses who would corroborate Laney's love of her children as well as her belief "that the word of God was infallible."
quote:Her attorney says "Bridget thought that what she was doing was right. She thought she was baptizing her children. As a loving mother she thought it was incumbent on her to get the devil out of her children." He's hoping to convince a jury that Bridget was so mentally ill, she simply didn't know right from wrong.
I can find more if you need me to, but I think that the rest of my assertions are common-knowledge.
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posted
I had forgotten that Godwyn's Law was called Godwyn's Law.
I'm not saying that anyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi or like a Nazi. Just that churches don't have clean hands even in these modern times, and I'm not sure that they're so beneficial to our society that we ought to give them tax breaks.
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