171–180 of 335 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, let's just give up on making the world a better place. We might never reach Utopia, but we can for damn sure get closer especially if we free ourselves from dogmatic thinking. Do you really want to settle for better than nothing?
[flagged]
Everyone commenting about how great churches are? You’re absolutely delusional. The gross majority of these organizations are bigoted and racist. I grew up in the southern United States and experienced all manner of churches. I don’t care how great your church is. Give me 20 minutes with your congregation and I’ll find the racists and bigots. These assholes promote terrible mental and physical health. They don’t beli…
Church attendance in the US is dropping dramatically, catching up with democracies elsewhere in the world.
Generally the more educated and free a population, the less church (or mosque or whatever) going there is.
Some commenters are pointing out that all nonprofits are tax-exempt in the United States. This is true, but religious organizations enjoy an extra benefit. Secular non-profits have to apply for 501(c)3 status and then file an annual return. Churches and the like are presumed to be 501(c)3 organizations and have no filing or disclosure requirements, and the IRS is loath to investigate them.
IMO this post should not be on HN. Per the guidelines [1] "stories about politics" are off-topic. I would consider this political for obvious reasons. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen and used both American churches and Soviet community centers. There is no unconditional goodness on this planet, but the way some people think they can reinvent better commu-nism "this time" is a 100% evil.
Nowhere was communism ever mentioned, only the potential for a "community center" which is a rather generic term that can exist independent of communism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Atheism is its own religion - requires faith to believe. Atheism is two (or more) different things. It is both the active belief in the non-existence of any God, and also the passive lack of any belief in any God. It’s not like I have to have active faith in the non-existence of Quetzalcoatl to have no interest in worshiping that deity. And I’m saying this as someone who went from Catholicism via Wicca to something…
> It is both the active belief in the non-existence of any God, and also the passive lack of any belief in any God. The second one would be agnosticism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atheism&oldid=969...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such an important point. It's going to go against the grain at hackernews, but taxing churches in the US is a terrible idea. If you wanted to further the divide between the "liberal city"/"conservative rural" American cultures, this would be a great way to do it. If you grew up in a rural area of the flyover states you would know that churches form the backbone of these rural communities. For example, the chu…
Maybe you could earmark the collected taxes for creating secular alternatives? Or maybe create a system where people don't have to rely on churches and rich people for charity.
There was a wonderful article I read ages ago and can no longer find on the history of communes in the US over the 20th century. Not one secular commune managed to perpetuate itself across generations without turning into something vastly less communal. Most religious communes failed too but the Amish and Hutterites are practically ethnic groups based on religion and there are lots of smaller groups.
Churches get a bad rap these days, for many reasons. I want to take a minute to defend them. Right away, I want to say that I am not defending religion-driven bigotry, nor megachurches, nor abuse. I don't know about Canada, but in the U.S. churches are still where communities meet, where people connect with the spiritual world, and also the ones doing most of the "heavy lifting" on any kind of charity activity. They…
So is conference halls. So is Zoom for that matter.
Churches are also places where parents force their children to go against their wishes, where creepy priests make unwanted advances etc.
> also the ones doing most of the "heavy lifting" on any kind of charity activity
Any kind? Really? What about NGOs? Volunteering nurses? FLOSS communities? People 3D printing masks in maker spaces?
Here in the U.K., the National Health Service put out a call for volunteers to help and tens of thousands of people signed up, regardless of any church.
You don't need these for significant charitable activity to occur.
I am not saying that churches don't do good, just that they're not needed for charitable activity to occur and we need to determine whether the good that occurs because of churches outweighs the bad, (which btw often doesn't even come to light due to victims fearing retaliation).
Churches are one of the biggest business entities in any part of the world. Most churches are structured like a proper business entity (Eg. they have equivalent of directors, CEOs and managers) and have revenue targets and KPIs set. Most churches are also located in some of the prime real estate of top tier cities and I always wondered how they were able to afford paying $1500+/Sq.M in a prime, central area. About th…
So churches should be taxed because they use effective organisational structures and are well run? That’s a new one. You could say the same of well run charities.
If we're fair to what it is being said, the point seems to be this: churches are like corporations: their goal is to grow in size and revenue.
That is demonstrated by the anecdata of a friend, someone high enough in a particular church, that confirms they only spent 10% of their income on charity.
So the gist seems to be this: if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like duck, it must be taxed like a duck.
Not a bad argument per se. However, it lacks supporting data, preaching for those who already feel that religious institutions are a scam anyway. So, because of that, it's not very persuasive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> where people connect with the spiritual world In the USA, this is quickly becoming an obsolete understanding of religion. Regular church attendance is down from 70% to just over 50% in the last 20 years, according to Gallup. People are leaving the churches. The real question is what will replace them. If people need community, build community centers. There are other solutions that do not rely on continuing to prov…
You should see some Soviet community centers before thinking they can replace anything. USA is highly uneven. In some states like Florida you can see churches on every other corner, and they are very active and developing, serving not only as community centers, but also as halls, child day care, hospitals, schools, galleries etc. No freaking "community center" can replace that.
As a child of a relatively poor family, I spent a fair bit of time there because the local government sent us a catalogue a couple times a year detailing all the programs they were running which due to our income level were more or less free (being a whopping $30 or something otherwise).
Based off this and your other comments, it seems a more visceral reaction to the phrasing “community centre” than that you have any real argument against them.