lol. What is the logic behind this? Why makes religious organizations special?
The response to this is literally thousands of pages long. However, even reading recent, modern western/europeans
history in depth (last 200 years), will give you more insight here.
As for "why is it still this way?", you would quite literally have to rip rights out of nations constitutions, re-assess endless past case history, get people to vote on it, and on and on.
There is literally no larger change you could pick, than changing the legal roles of church and state.
Every dollar made by every person and organization needs to be accounted for, to the government. Unless you’re a mega church?
I don’t understand why asking religious organizations to report their financial activities (especially the massive orgs that have the resources to do so, unlike teeny tiny 10 member churches) would be such a big deal. But hey, I am no constitutional or government scholar. I am just a dude sick and tired of a rigged system, what do I know?
"establishment" means declaring a religion as being "the" state religion, as the Church of England is (or at least was) for the UK, or the Orthodox Church in eastern European kingdoms.
it's not about, for example, a charter for a new religion you'd like to found.
no government interference in people's private religious choices or life, so that has been interpreted as no taxation of churches. But churches can't commit ritual murder or anything.
No they weren't! That's what the Americans were rebelling against and specifically wrote the church-state separation to prevent. The result was both Crown control over the appointment of bishops, bishops having temporal legislative power in the House of Lords, and (relevant to this story) the seizure and in some cases destruction of basically all Church property. The UK then spent hundreds more years fighting over this relationship.
The Church of England is a state religion. It is part of the state (Crown), controlled by the state (King), and until the 19th century participation in it was effectively mandatory to participate in public life. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Acts)
So does the prohibition of ritual murder. (Some of the more extreme Asatru for example do feel limited.)
When there are rules for everzone and only some organisations are excempt on religious grounds - then those religious organisation have an advantage over every not privileged organisation, making them effectivly state supported. Which I think should be indeed forbidden.
So the state can and should continue to support all kinds of social organisations. But on an equal and fair base.
Yes, the founding fathers had in mind a plurality of European religion, not every possible belief around the world from Africa to the Amazon. The idea you could create one government that could accommodate all those is the ridiculous contradiction. They would laugh at the suggestion there should be some equality of human sacrifice and communion.
It's cool. They were sloppy in their wording and their philosophy. We have almost 250 years of lived experience now, we can revisit the notion and not let it be a golden cow. It's going to be hard to wade through the myths and hagiographies, but we'll come out a better society on the other end.
Do you think it is possible to accommodate all those religions in one government?
I agree with you that it's not a golden cow, but I typically have to question posts like this one to get that admission. Claiming authority from the constitution when you don't believe in it is a cheap rhetorical technique to appear interested in historical America when you aren't.
The main conclusion I would draw is that we have no obligation of "fairness or equality" towards every religion. Our system was built to accomodate certain kinds and those that aren't in direct conflict, it seems a pretty good compromise that's hard to work around.
Maybe (I don't know enough about your founding fathers), but humanist thinkers in europe at that time certainly had the stance of total separation from church and state. Not accommodate to any of them. Keep religion as private buisness. Not interfering with them unless total necessary.
Otherwise same rules for everyone, then you can have all the weirdest religions.
(oh and there is connection of communion and human sacrifice. In the catholic church you are eating the body of Christ. Of course metaphorical, but I think in dogma it says it actually transforms into christs body. But that's besides the point. The point is, religios freedom should not override basic laws. And if they do, but only for some religions, then they come close to being state religions)
Those thinkers I've read (Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Descartes, Leibniz) also have nothing in mind that resembles a melting pot for the world's cultures and religions. One again the historical context is being tired of endless wars between protestants and Catholics and often being a member of a tiny minority of aetheists and deists.
The brand of humanism you are associating with is a much later development.
You could argue letting them hold untaxed private land in perpetuity backed by government trespassing enforcement restricts other religions and atheists and establishes them, so some taxes seem to be OK or else maybe something like allow no state enforcement of their property rights, just a free for all.
Most people and courts accept that some taxation and services and property rights are fine for religions under the establishment clause.
> Taxation, and subsequent compliance costs, serve as restrictions on such exercise.
My personal taxes more directly deprive me of life, liberty, or property, as protected by the 14th amendment. Even without money, people can worship (which is what I assume "free exercise [of religion]" means).
Trying to interpret the words ourselves is not useful. Throngs of lawyers and judges determine what the words actually mean, what's enforceable.
> Even without money, people can worship (which is what I assume "free exercise [of religion]" means).
Not necessarily. Jewish prayer requires a quorum of ten, and requires communal institutions for ritual baths.
A law such as "any property whose primary purpose is for religious observance shall be subject to an additional $x million/period 'religious property' tax" would clearly run afoul of the First Amendment.
While I typically do not respond to downvotes, this is one time I should, because downvoting someone for expressing reality, shooting the messenger, is not reasonable.
This is not a case of "omg that guy supports the church!". This is a case of nation's founding documents, thousands of years of case law, court case after court case.
Even if every single (for example) American supported a change in the legal staus of churches/religions, it would take decades, for all state govenments, federal government, and hundreds of new pieces of legislation to be passed, to even get close to changing this status.
Religions aren't generally exempt from taxation or immune to prosecution in Australia.
Those parts of a religions income that are used for charity can be exempt from taxation if the proper paperwork is filed and continues to operate in a transparent manner subject to audits, etc
> To access income tax exemption, a registered religious institution must be a registered charity and endorsed by us as exempt from income tax. [1]
Mind you Australia also recently and famously jailed a tier two 2iC Vatican official Cardinal George Pell so hardly a friend of the Church .. but a country generally agreed to be part of "the West" | "Global North" etc.
The status of churches (and especially what counts as a valid "church" or "religion", especially non-Christian ones!) varies across the Western world. There is no one approach.
> There is literally no larger change you could pick, than changing the legal roles of church and state.
Sounds like yesterday was too late then. The little good that comes from church is even these days overshadowed by how much they fuck with politics literally everywhere around the globe (= distorting elections in their favor, which means less progress/reversals and less human rights at minimum, and usually they go much further). Also their moral compass is constantly fucked up, they still are covering homosexual pedophilia on truly gigantic scale, as they were so desperately doing last 100 years.
Also, does church helps all people equally including other religions, unlike lets say "mother" Teresa who, apart from stealing millions $$ in donations was by many accounts very selective to whom to provide care, based on their religion and generally favored sick to suffer as much as possible, for some properly fucked up "christian" reasons. Some saint she was...
Lets face it, religions almost unanonymously lost god/God and the original simple ideas. I look at history, since talk is very cheap but 2000 years of walking the talk has actually some weight, I mean all the weight you ever need to make an opinion. In Christianity's case its properly trivial - you have literal 10 rules and thats it, the rest are fantasies of semi-lucid humans from bronze age or right after, that would often end up in insane asylums these days. How much mental gymnastics believers have to do daily to stick with all that bureaucratic/managerial/political/financial stuff and feel righteous and above everybody else is astounding. Also tiny fact - only 1/3rd of the world is christian. So maybe 110 billions of human souls burning in hell?
I think the smarter faithful ones realize these, so they do the usual - wrap it in "its not literal" mantra while church does exactly the opposite. And then cherry-picking some rules they like and ignoring the rest (like stoning to death non-virgin women during marriage or all gays which should include all pedophile priests, I know its old testament but since its not rejected part of christianity, its still valid). But now you created completely different sect my friends, just like Jesus(TM) created completely different sect of judaism (which is a sect of X and that's the sect of Y till we get probably to zoroastroanism or something similar, who knows what beduin tribes believed in during those times).
I simply can't, with straight face, being raised without faith (thus no childhood indoctrination thats extremely hard to shed), accept modern religions any more than I can accept say greek or roman mythology. Same type of moral stories, god(s) on par with original abrahamic god (vengeful, cruel, not caring), and lets be honest - if there is any God, it certainly doesn't completely change its personality just because somebody writes another book about it every millenium or so and claims to be his son/prophet/something. There is a million small and big facts against all this, and 1/3 books written by people millenia ago for it. Very easy to pick the side.
Probably a one size fits all approach. Small religious organisations have small-scale budgets and are overseen by their members in some form or another.
But then there's megachurches which are basically hedge funds.
That bit btw doesn't bother me either, so much as lack of transparency regarding political donations etc. Not American either so meh.
State control over church _doctrine_, yes, that's sacred, but state control over church _finance_ is a much more temporal business. Being a church isn't like diplomatic immunity.
Allowing a church to build a huge opaque financial empire is the sort of thing that leads to theses being nailed to doors.
Why? No dispute how hard it would be, after all, the pope has a lot of tanks. But hard is not the same as immense.
Churches pay wage tax, land tax, fines, church leaders even sometimes go to jail. Churches pay purchase tax, take out insurance, although they don't cover acts of God..
Is this a mangling of Stalin's "how many divisions has the Pope?" The Vatican has not had a significant military since the war of Italian Unification ended in 1870.
lol. What is the logic behind this? Why makes religious organizations special?