Should Tax Dollars Go To Religious Causes?

Too many people making sense is confusing you, eh? How sad for you...

 

Uh, duh, Planned Parenthood is not a religion...

 

"respecting an establishment of religion"

"an" is an adjective, what follows is a noun not a verb. You respect things.

Definition of establishment

1: something established: such as
a: a settled arrangement especially : a code of laws
b: ESTABLISHED CHURCH
c: a permanent civil or military organization
d: a place of business or residence with its furnishings and staff
e: a public or private institution

The government cannot give respect to a religion or a religious group or a church.

 

Religious "causes" as in something a religion is doing?

Depends of what is the cause. If it is to advance their religious faith, no. If it is to end world hunger, why not?

 

Those are some definitions, but you forget the Constitution was written over 200 years ago. Common words and meanings change, you'd need to provide a dictionary from the late 1770's to truly claim you are providing evidence of anything. Section 8 gives you a far better indication as to the intent of what establish meant to the Founders. Perhaps you were utterly ignorant of that, or perhaps you were being disingenuous...

 

Yeah. I cry myself to sleep every night.

 

In a previous post I questioned why the Founders wrote "respecting" instead of "regarding" , and did not get a reply … perhaps because we can only speculate in what the Founders had in mind.

 

what is your point? They received tax dollars? Or people contributed to their quasi churches?

 

My point was that though you had personally never seen politics in your churches, it does exist.

 

The subject of the thread is whether churches should receive tax dollars. Not whether pastors, ministers or priests bring up politics in their sermons.

I would suspect those that do are not Ordained. Or became a minister online.

 

501c3 tax exemption for religious organizations isnt going anywhere. I'd love to see it abolished, but the establishment gains far too valuable influence over church doctrine with it. If the religious right weren't being bombarded with sermons telling them the Bible says 'pay your taxes, obey the govt and peacefully wait for the rapture,' and instead became active participants in protecting Free Will and Human advancement, our political field would look very different today. The political establishment can't effectively replace God with Gov't. But it can, apparently, convince folks that God wants them to be passive and ignore the degredation of human civilization; the institution of neofeudalism.

Eliminating 501c3 would eliminate the profit from evangelizing and ministry, and thereby remove much of the incentive for charlatons and fraudsters to get rich pretending to be holy men. Instead true believers would take the reigns and likely build an effective movement. The political establishment will resist this. Far easier to just fund the grifters that call themselves ministers with tax exemptions and let them keep getting rich off of -and consequently passifying- their sleepy flocks.

 

If we're talking about giving, say, 18% of the normal pupil enrollment funding in tax dollars to Catholic schools, I don't see why not since Catholic schools are already providing children with the normal secular education a public school would. I think by setting the percentage lower, you are ensuring none of that money is really ending up going to religious teaching. (Say for example that at a typical Catholic school 50% of the education is religious, and 50% is normal secular stuff)

 

Should Tax Dollars Go To Religious Causes? No.

Even though I'm a Christian, I cannot endorse the government of the United States giving tax money to any church or religion -- even if they do "good" things. Not the easiest decision, because many churches do a lot of good, all the time. Still, when money that has been collected by the government in TAXES is involved, my answer has to be, no.