Pay to Pray (Pass the basket to the public, Father)

[Synnical]

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2005-08-24/news/cityofwarts.html


Pay to Pray
There's no longer any valid reason that religion deserves a free ride on the aching backs of the teeming, taxpaying, nonbelieving masses.
By Chris Thompson

Published: Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Thank God for child-molesting priests, I always say. On August 5, the Oakland diocese of the Catholic church announced it will pay $56.3 million to victims of sexual abuse, and sell $25.3 million in property to finance the deal. All that land will go back onto the tax rolls -- and it's about damn time. Ever since the founding of the republic, religious groups have ducked paying their fair share of property taxes, forcing the rest of us to carry those pious pikers. All you taxpayers sick of shelling out dough for cops and firefighters while bishops and ministers laugh all the way to the bank finally get a little payback.

Let's say all the land about to be sold were located in Oakland, which just barely avoided firing librarians and park rangers to settle a $32 million budget shortfall. That would score the city an extra $330,000 in annual property taxes, enough to hire a fleet of librarians. Or take Acts Full Gospel, the largest church in the East Bay, whose Oakland headquarters is assessed at $4,579,330. Two years ago, Bishop Bob Jackson led a mob down to City Hall and demanded the city do something about the homicide epidemic. If his church had paid the same taxes we all pay, Oakland would have about $59,000 in extra cash every year -- roughly a police officer's salary. Instead, Acts Full Gospel pays just $1,270 in parcel taxes and special assessments.

<snip>

Let's all say it together: This is nuts. Cities throughout the East Bay could solve their budget problems overnight if they could force priests and rabbis and ministers to play by the same rules we all do. It's more than a matter of money -- forcing atheists and agnostics to pay extra taxes while Jesus freaks mooch off the public dime is morally offensive.

Conservatives love to fuss about how taxpayers must subsidize "offensive" art through the National Endowment of the Arts, whose annual budget is roughly $121 million. But in 1997, the assets of the Mormon Church were worth at least $30 billion, much of it consisting of land exempt from taxation. In other words, you are paying extra taxes to subsidize a church which affirms that God lives in a polygamous marriage on a planet near the star Kolob, that black people are cursed by God, and whose leaders were caught posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims. When you think about it, that's no less bizarre than Christianity, which nonbelievers are forced to subsidize to the tune of billions of dollars every year.

More at link - it's a good read.

[progressoid]

1. What the???

"There is a constitutionally significant difference between giving on the one hand and not taking on the other," Walker says. "You are more lifting a burden than you are extending a benefit. If you extend a palpable benefit in the form of a subsidy, that would be deemed to establish a religion. But not taking away, lifting a burden, is more of an accommodation of the free exercise of religion.

Boy, that's some thin rationalization.

[beam me up scottie]

2. I've always thought that by automatically

exempting religions from paying taxes, the government is actually violating the separation of church and state.

I get awfully sick and tired of hearing the catholic dioceses in particular crying poverty while they sit on millions of dollars of property.

[NMMNG]

3. Religious institutions need to be taxed like the businesses they are

They recruit adherents
They solicit funds
They use their influence to sway public opinion and politics
They have properties that can sometimes be valued in the millions

They do not deserve tax-exempt status.

[onager]

4. This bears repeating...

The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery.

Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

And so does this...

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

(Source of both: Robert Heinlein)

[NMMNG]

5. All too true, and all too scary

Excellent quotes--thank you for sharing!