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A solution to this is to give back the land to the local city and have it handled as cultural heritage, with an authorization to practice religious activities a
by hrktb 6y ago
A solution to this is to give back the land to the local city and have it handled as cultural heritage, with an authorization to practice religious activities at specific times, but it’s governed by local administration overall.
That’s how some cathedrals are managed in europe for instance.
- onetimemanytime 6y agoA better solution is to keep it as it is. It has survived millennia. It's their land and states can renege their promises.
- madaxe_again 6y agoWhat has survived millennia “as it is”? The United States? It was founded scarcely three centuries ago. The Christian church? Ever hear of the reformation, of Calvin, of Protestantism? I.e. one of the main reasons the United States exists? It absolutely has not survived millennia. What you call your Christian church today would be unrecognisable to the faithful of a century ago, never mind two, or five, or ten, or twenty. Or are you acknowledging that Christianity is the cult of Mithras, and that it’s still a death cult?
- iso947 6y agoIn the UK our local church is physically about 850 years old, But there was a church on the site back in 1086 and presumably before, as it was mentioned in the domesday book. It’s Anglican now, before then it was catholic, maybe it used to be a pagan worship site, maybe in future it will be for the cult of Cummings. It has severe financial issues at the moment - maintaining the courtyard alone costs £1k a month. I’m waiting for more detailed finances on that. Maintaining finances for any organisation is a basic bread and butter protection against corruption. I don’t see what harm there is in taxing religious organisations the same way as any other charity.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dmitriid 6y ago> It has survived millennia. By "millennia" you mean "at most 300 years, maybe"?
- onetimemanytime 6y agoHere in USA. Oldest churches are from the 4th century elsewhere. For the record: I don't think that priests should be able to buy $50M jets or keep 40% of total land of x country tax free, but they should not be forced to sell buildings because property tax is too high.
- ykevinator 6y agoWhy? Taxes may be too high, but why do they deserve an exemption? We all gotta pay for the snow plow.
- ikt 6y agoedit: got it wrong as per below comment
- nkrisc 6y agoI assume they meant "here in USA" with regard to the comment about 300 years, but are pointing out that outside the US there exist churches as old as 4th century.
- dmitriid 6y agoYes. My comment was about "here in the USA" because the grandparent comment talked about churches existing "before Boston". Churches are routinely handed over to the state or to commercial entities in order to preserve them because church membership is in rapid decline and its very expensive to take care of the church building especially if it has "survived millennia".
- gscott 6y agoAmerican Indians know that state and federal govt is honest to a fault!
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoCool, and all the people have to do this with any property held corporately? Or only groups of people who identify as Christians? The upkeep of a Cathedral is hella expensive, St.Paul's in London claims its building's upkeep cost is > £5.2M ('more than £10 per minute'). A building ownership tax seems sensible, but I'd be amazed if any Capitalist government considered it.
- nulbyte 6y ago> A building ownership tax seems sensible, but I'd be amazed if any Capitalist government considered it. I'm not sure I understand your meaning. Are you referring to something different from property tax?
- barry-cotter 6y agoWhat a perfect way for the state to exercise control over religious organizations! You’d quickly end up with every such state sponsored “church” as disruptive to state interests as the Church of England, the Lutheran State Churches of Scandinavia or the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.
- hrktb 6y agoReligious orgs can still do what they want, they just don’t get to use historical buildings willy-nilly. Then if we’re talking about the UK, it feels weird to argue about religious buildings ownership in a kingdom, where the Queen has a religious role.
- Barrin92 6y agoChina aside given that it's an authoritarian state I much prefer the control the state has over the church here in Germany, because it eliminates virtually all religious sectarianism and has led to the church having adopted teaching and a curriculum that is largely in line with the basic constitutional law and secular values rather than existing outside of it. Same in the UK or Scandinavia. One of the reasons Islamic extremism is so hard to combat is because Islam exists largely outside of the control of the state, as backyard mosques can basically preach anything regardless how extremist it is, often deliberately recruiting people out of organizations that try to integrate with the state and society at large. I assume this is similar to radical Evangelicalism in the US. Parallel societies are bad, they're a breeding ground for extremism.
- barry-cotter 6y agoI could not have hoped for a more perfect illustration of my point. We are in perfect agreement on the outcomes, we just disagree on whether the state being in charge of determining public morality is good or not. You, a product of a state indoctrination system, agree with its values. The same thing happens in other countries where the state has different values.
- vowelless 6y agoThe First Amendment strongly prevents something like this in the US. There is no way the state can control a religious organization here and that’s a good thing. Americans secularism >> European “secularism”. Islamic extremism in your country is not due to lack of state control of their mosques. It’s how you have treated generations of Islamic immigrants (Turks on work visas, no citizenships, open borders with lots of “refugees”, etc). Of course they will make parallel societies. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
- vowelless 6y agoThankfully the First Amendment prevents America from doing that here. I prefer American secularism over the weird European theocratic states that you describe.