And this, folks, is why we should tax religious organizations…. Like every other country I know of. (edit, apparently I knew less than I thought I did. I think what I did was conflate a 'church tax' with churches paying income tax. apparently that's a thing where the state collects your tithe for you... if you attend or whatever.)
A long time ago, it was so that they could use the additional resources for helping the needy and less fortunate instead of the government. The idea being a Church was a community organization and would know better than the government what the community needed.
In order to get the tax credit, the church agreed to never get involved politically with anything.
Fast forward to now, and churches are violating that agreement in a big way
Historically, the church was the source of social safety nets in society. in the modern era, that's changed to government-ran safety nets (well fare, social security, etc).
there was also some even older precedence of the church running some of the government, so that was payment for that.
It seems I made a mistake in that assertion, or missremembering the last time I looked into it. regardless i was wrong about other (western) countries not including religious orgs as tax exempt.
Yeah we need to set fines to amount attempted to savelikelihood of getting away with itpenalty modifier. They do this math before committing these crimes, the fine needs to actually deter them
Nah. The first knave got away with "Holy shit! Look!" frantic pointing all day long. It was later knaves who invented religion. The fools got wise to the basics.