Church and State

[ironphoenix]

Ganked from goldsquare: an excellent opinion piece on the complex and difficult relationship between religious and government institutions in the US. The legal arguments are specifically American, but the underlying question is universal.

Even the question of what should, from a purely religious point of view, be the criteria for membership in a religion is a very difficult one for me. On a fundamental spiritual level, I take the words "Catholic Church" very much at face value, and open the doors very wide indeed, but how that relates to human institutions is ... fraught.

Comments

[zenten.livejournal.com]

My personal belief is that freedom of religious expression should be protected by the law, but religions themselves should get no special status. So a charity that happens to be run by a church would be fine as long as it followed all the rules for charities (such as not just being a means to recruit for that church, just like I don't think a charity should just be the means to recruit for a gaming club), but a church itself would receive no special tax status beyond any other not-for-profit.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Yes, a very interesting commentary. Thank you for posting a link to it. And, you're right, a lot of the details are USAn, a lot of the general argument is universally applicable.

[bastetschylde.livejournal.com]

Churches have spent member-based donations (i.e., donation baskets) on something as trivial as a statue of an angel that cost say, $40,000 CDN, which could have been put to better use towards charitable and USEFUL activities like soup kitchens and research on cures for various life-threatening illnesses. The statue incident betrayed the 'good faith', if you'll excuse the pun, of people who contributed money, unless they of course were the sole giver or organization and specified that the monetary donations should be used towards such... or that it was a majority consensus (in which I would like to believe most would disagree on).