What if I’m gay? Ah well, too bad.
Look, you’ve made your point. I accept your point. But you’re basically arguing like a conservative here, the old “we can’t change things unless the change is absolutely perfect in any way, so too bad”. I just don’t accept the conclusion.
a guy od’d in front of my house the other day and nearly all of my neighbors came out to try to help the guy and called 911, sadly i dont think he made it, but i see charitability from strangers all the time outside of the church, and the notion that churches are the only ones that do this or willing to do this doesn’t really seem right
Whether you’re gay or not.
I don’t think changing things so that non-profits (religious groups or otherwise) file and pay corporate taxes is a change that should be made at all. So…I’m not arguing that the change has to be perfect.
Non-profits (religious or otherwise) who are just pretending to be non-profits already can be investigated. Maybe more should be, maybe not, but that is not the same thing as eliminating religious non-profit exemptions from IRS requirements.
They certainly aren’t the only ones, but they are by far the biggest and most organized. Some people like @LFS go around handing out food and water to homeless people regularly and go into prisons and jails to help people, but ask him about most of the other people doing the same thing.
I’ve volunteered at food-not-bombs, which is a pretty well known not religious organization that helps homeless people, but the whole organization is probably smaller than one medium sized church effort.
I’m a big believer in people’s impulse to help, but many are afraid to do anything without support from an organization and they end up doing something like calling 911 and the cops come and maybe make things worse.
There are lots of non-Megachurches that will get caught in that net.
Number of congregants also seems like it could be problematic. We’re gonna start requiring religious institutions to substantiate how many people go there? How are we gonna audit this? Government having the ability to demand records on who attends a certain Mosque seems highly abusable.
i mean i dont have the right take here, if it were up to me, they wouldnt exist at all, I find religion extraordinarily harmful to people
Well, I think that where most of us have ended up (maybe not exactly for your reason, though).
One time when I was 17 I saw a homeless person fall off a wall about 5’ high and hit his head on the sidewalk. I called 911, thinking ambulance, but the cops came and they put him in handcuffs and in the backseat of the police car and took him away.
Young people are less interested in organized religion than previous generations, but this isn’t true.
The religions that existed before the internet are fucked. Theologically everyone needs to reboot and start over from first principles. You can’t sell people a 2000 year old book knows everything about everything when people get smartphones before they turn 10. Jesus Christ reddit exists. They aren’t going to ask their parents the answer to a question they have about religion and then submit to the subsequent indoctrination they’re going to ask the internet. The get 'em while they’re young game is over long term.
There’s plenty of room for people who have a need for spirituality to get that need met in ways that don’t actively ruin the world. We just have a bunch of obsolete legacy players in the space that are desperately trying to cling to their rather high place in society.
what people identify as in polling is a far cry from religious participation
I think there are more religious people than we would intuitively assume based on our own experience. Some of it is definitely “cultural” religion (I have a ton of atheist Jewish friends, for example, but they still would call themselves Jewish). But there are also many, many true believers that just don’t travel in same circles as people that are not religious.
The decline of religion is great, but humans just love being part of a team/club/whatever. In the words of Don Draper, everyone wants to hear that what they’re doing is OK. Something will always evolve meet that need.
LET’S GO RANGERS!
If this were true, unions would be stronger.
Reminds me of this:
wat, hillary taken grossly out of context, say it aint so
