Hacker News Reader

Comment by black6 | Hacker News Reader

It's a business, like any other--it just sells something that cannot be redeemed until after death. Let's pull back tax benefits for religious institutions and treat them the same as the rest.

View on HN

It's not just like any other though, it already recieves huge tax relief. Not to mention the esitmated worth in 2018 at least was 30 Billion $

> The Internal Revenue Service automatically considers churches exempt. The reasoning behind making churches tax-exempt and unburdened by IRS procedures stems from a First Amendment-based concern to prevent government involvement with religion.

So it's okay not to pay taxes, but it can petition to recieve some. Doesn't add up.

This is some contorted logic. "We will not privilege religion, so we will give a privileged tax exempt status to religion".

Ha, nice, the Satanic Temple is also tax exempt [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Temple

I've been thinking a lot about the Satanic Temple recently. The supreme court has been ferociously eroding the separation of church and state lately. I wonder how they, and the public, would respond to public funding for a Satanic charter school that openly discriminated against heterosexual teachers and forced heterosexual students to undergo gay conversion therapy...

Edit: to be clear, I don't think that it would be a good to do. But for all the fearmongering about the "gay agenda" to make your kids gay, there's a well-documented "straight agenda" that results in a high rate of suicide (and very few enduring conversions) of its victims. If we are equal in the eyes of the law, zero or both must be valid.

I’m not against a gay only school. It doesn’t sound too dissimilar to male or female only schools, which only seek to employ teachers of the same gender.

By that logic non-profits also should not have qualified to receive relief funds since the 501c3s don't pay taxes either but do serve a social good.

US churches have some exceptions related to religion freedom, but otherwise they are conventional non-profit corporations.

They aren't given tax relief. They aren't paying the thief like the rest of us.

how would society work if the vast majority of working people dont contribute to maintence?

Evidently it works just fine since the bottom 60% of the population runs a surplus against the government since at least 2012[1].

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/60-percent-households-now-receive-...

maintenance is one thing. We have an empire, welfare state, huge entitlements and red ink of pension obligations as far as the eye can see. As soon as people fail, they look to the government to bail them out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com