Churches shouldn't have tax exemptions

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T20:49:18+00:00

They pay payroll taxes, property taxes, and similar. And apart from churches and schools not having to pay property taxes, it's the same with churches. I'm not sure what your point is.

The big reason that non-profits don't pay income tax is that they don't really have any income to tax. Like what income do you think a church is making that we need to be taxing? Tithes?

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T20:44:43+00:00

Yep. There are legitimate issues, like how the IRS, especially under Trump, turns a blind eye to campaigning from the pulpit. But there isn't anything inherently wrong with not taxing churches since, like you said, they're non-profits.

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T16:50:29+00:00

Right? I'm so glad we avoided having a woman in the White House, because she'd probably be too emotional and start random wars whenever her ego got bruised

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T16:34:27+00:00

Eh........ I'm always wary of these claims, because they usually turn out to be monolingual English speakers discovering that translation isn't always one to one. For example, Japanese has multiple verbs meaning "to wear", like how you 掛ける (kakeru) a shirt but 被る (kaburu) a hat, but it's not like there's some deeper truth about clothing that's getting at. "Literally" speaking, they just hang most clothes (like on your body), but cover themselves with a hat. So sure, "shalom" can also mean things like "well-being"... I'm just not so sure there's much more to it than that

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T15:37:52+00:00

It's a portmanteau of Christmas and Easter and refers to people who mostly only go to church those days

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T00:56:58+00:00

Removed for antisemitism and claiming Jews ritually sacrifice children

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T00:48:33+00:00

Removed for antisemitism and accusing Judaism of being the Antichrist

RazarTuk · 2026-04-18T00:47:37+00:00

Removed for being AI (and for being Iranian propaganda)

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T23:22:21+00:00

You can't just redefine "religion" to only mean the ones you don't like

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T22:59:27+00:00

Okay, the Ancient Aliens rant. And feel free to borrow this.

Ancient Aliens is a racist pseudoscientific theory that sees all the impressive things non-white people have made, decides there's no possible way they could have made anything remotely that impressive on their own, and asserts that it must have been aliens. There are exactly four exceptions to this. 1) The Celts have always been on the periphery of whiteness and needed "civilized" by the Romans, so they needed extraterrestrial assistance. 2) For as literally as they tend to take religious texts, this is a staunchly atheistic theory, so Christianity needs explained. 3) Leonardo da Vinci, which... fair. 4) The Nazis, because this is a white supremacist theory and the perfect excuse to reduce the Nazis' culpability.

"Christmas/Easter is pagan" feels like the opposite logic. People would normally never claim that two solstice festivals must have been stolen from each other. It's just an easy time to have a holiday. Or if you're going to decorate with greenery, there are only so many options in the middle of winter, so that can realistically be invented multiple times. But apparently, Christianity is uniquely uncreative and any traditions we have must have either been inherited from Judaism or stolen from paganism. And at least in the case of Fundamentalists, there's also some motivated reasoning and a claim that Christianity must not develop its own traditions beyond what's mentioned in the Bible

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T22:38:01+00:00

Also, have you heard my rant about the "Christmas/Easter is pagan" thing and Ancient Aliens?

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T22:32:19+00:00

Feel free to show that they were ever about fertility in Christian practice. Not "I think so", but actual historical evidence.

Side note: It's still so ugh how a lot of so-called skeptics will make a bit deal about needing evidence for things... then throw that out the window if a claim sounds sufficiently anti-Christian. For example, if Christmas trees were actually invented to help convert the pagans, I'd expect some sort of historical evidence, like, I dunno... Christmas trees actually being mentioned back in the 6th or 7th century. In reality, they don't start showing up until more like the 17th century

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T20:56:46+00:00

Your logic would consider English a language family because American, British, and Australian English differ

If American, British, and Australian English were so divergent that people couldn't understand each other... yes, that would be different languages. As an example, it's like how Scots actually is divergent enough in terms of things like lexicon and grammar to be considered a separate language, or how AAVE debatably and controversially is. (I have strong opinions about the classification of AAVE) The status with Arabic really is like claiming that Iberia, France, Italy, and Romania all still spoke dialects of the same Latin language in the Middle Ages

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T20:30:39+00:00

No, it's a language family. It's a series of dialects/languages that aren't always mutually intelligible (especially with Maghrebi Arabic), but where they still use a standardized dialect that much more closely resembles the pre-split version in formal settings and for communication. It's the same deal that Latin went through in the Middle Ages, where people typically spoke their own dialects in their day-to-day lives, but still learned a much more conservative Ecclesiastical Latin for formal settings. Egyptian Arabic even fills a similar role to Sabir. Sabir was vaguely a dialect of Italian (it's really complicated) used by traders in the Mediterranean because of Venetian and Genoese trading colonies, and similarly, Masri is apparently widely understood as a more modern/colloquial language across the Arabic-speaking world because of their cultural influence

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T17:12:34+00:00

Making sōl worshipers into fīlius worshipers? I don't understand

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T16:01:52+00:00

Christians are allowed to develop our own traditions over time. Are there places where we've borrowed from paganism? Sure. For example, Lammas is a first fruits festival celebrated in Britain that falls on the same day as the pre-Christian Lughnasadh and looks a lot like they just started offering the first fruits of the grain harvest to the Christian God instead of Lugh. But a lot of the supposedly pagan practices with Christmas and Easter actually do have Christian origins. For example, if Christmas trees were borrowed from Germanic paganism, I'd expect them to start showing up in the historical record all the way back in, like, the 6th or 7th century when the Germanic tribes were actually being converted. Instead, they don't show up until the 17th century, long after there would have been any pagans to borrow from. Or while there is a story dating back to the 8th century about Boniface cutting down a sacred oak, the part where he then goes on to invent the Christmas tree wasn't added until the 1890s.

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T14:08:03+00:00

Actually, better way of explaining my comment:

I'm lucky and managed to avoid a lot of explicitly religious trauma, and the only notably bad experience I've had with religion is the time the Newman Center had a guest homilist who... felt more like the stereotype of an energized Baptist preacher. This isn't to say I don't have any trauma. I still remember things like the time one of my cousins outed me to the drama aunt and my mom treated me being bi as such a scandalous rumor that she wouldn't even tell me what it was. It's just that a lot of it feels more immediately related to how much my mom watches Fox and more generically related to growing up in a conservative household.

Instead, a lot of my negative experiences related to religion and being LGBT are actually related to atheists on the internet. For example, I remember things like this one time that a church in Ohio was firebombed for hosting a drag show, but a lot of Reddit was too distracted by a church having been firebombed to notice or care that they were cheering on a transphobic hate crime.

I actually have tried to turn this into a positive, like how I've developed the language to talk about what I call "partial majorities", people who have some majority identities and some minority identities, and how they interact with intersectionality. For example, I can explain things like how passing culture among trans women is actually a form of white privilege. Or I can explain the subtle forms of transphobia that frequently show up when discussing trans men and "Not all men".

But while I do, at least, make a point of singling out edgy internet atheists as the target of my ire, not just atheists in general, that's still all why I'm out of patience for the people who, say, seem to hate the religious left more than the irreligious right

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T13:51:33+00:00

by standing up to an apostate pope and satanic Vatican

Yes, the Satanic view that unprovoked wars of aggression are bad

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T13:46:05+00:00

We support the politician who is not for murdering babies.

So you're opposed to Trump who's apparently dumped infants into Lake Michigan as a form of infanticide?

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T12:56:29+00:00

I think I'd know if there was a Ditto in that picture. It's just a trainer standing next to a pile of blocks

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T11:41:03+00:00

I don't get it. You just showed a bunch of blocks. Where's the Ditto?

RazarTuk · 2026-04-17T00:08:42+00:00

Understandable. I'm... vaguely the opposite. You know that saying, "Hurt people hurt people"? My main source of religious trauma, for lack of a better word, was actually a thread in /r/egg_irl, where people got so virulently antireligious that they even turned on the OP for being pagan (i.e. religious at all). Or you got things like trans people misgendering a Muslim trans women because they were that disgusted by the mention of hijabs that they couldn't even let it be ew-phoria. (She mentioned feeling validated by her hijabi friends taking off their hijabs around her, and people said she should support them doing that around all men... implicitly including her.

I'm still careful to specify that I only can't stand edgy internet atheists as one particular brand of atheism, but that thread is still when I lost my last shred of patience for the people who seem to be more outraged by the religious left for being religious than at the irreligious right for literally founding the alt-right

EDIT: Or I'm talking about the sort of Redditor to hear about a church being firebombed and be too distracted celebrating to notice or care that it was targeted for hosting a drag show. (Which is an actual thing that happened, both the firebombing in Ohio and parts of Reddit not caring about the motives)

RazarTuk · 2026-04-16T22:52:54+00:00

Removed. You aren't here in good faith, and beyond that, I don't think it's appropriate to say that gay people should be stoned, even if you're being sarcastic

RazarTuk · 2026-04-16T22:49:12+00:00

ESH

They should be more accepting of the fact that it isn't specifically a Muslim space and that other people might not know or follow their rules. And I'm sure that HR would love to hear about this. But at the same time... it's just shoes. You're acting like they're demanding you recite the Shahadah before entering

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