Religious groups shouldn't be getting tax money

all this bleating about the seperation of church and state missed a huge point: the seperation of taxpayers and their money.

As the tax burden rises, the government becomes a replacement for "charity". People who are faced with enormous tax bills simply have less to give to others.

the government, in the meantime, is showing us how our socialist future will operate. We will work hard and the government will sieze a huge chunk of our income. They will return some small portion of that if, and only if, we behave in a manner that the government finds appropriate. As I recall this is called SERFDOM.

Another huge point that angry MR Mansouri consistently ignores is the fact that the government has no proper role in anything that the church can do better. We don't need tax dollars and the attendant strings to help each other. Americans are kind and generous people. Instead of whining (that's you farnaz!) that the church should be seperated from government, you should be demanding that the government get out of the church's business!!!

Catholic schools, hospitals and social welfare agencies were originally built up by the generosity of catholic people with little if any government funding despite the fact that catholics citizens paid their share of taxes to the IRS.
No one objected to the Catholic values of great hospitals then What has changed? Catholic hospitals remain committed to the values of great medical practice.

Is the following due to the Nation of Israel's convictions or just their rules?

Last update - 04:34 17/07/2009

Holocaust survivors: Israel's Leumi bank crueler than EU banks

By Cnaan Liphshiz, Haaretz Correspondent

Tags: Jewish World, Bank Leumi

Bank Leumi's refusal to return money that belonged to Jews murdered in the Holocaust seriously harms efforts to retrieve Jewish property from European banks, leaders of restitution organizations said Thursday at a demonstration in Tel Aviv. Bank Leumi denies these claims.

About 100 Holocaust survivors demonstrated outside the bank's head office, demanding that it return NIS 300 million they say belongs to Jews murdered during the Holocaust. The bank's management - which held an annual meeting in the building - did not send a representative to speak to the elderly men and women.

Mordechai Hareli, chairman of the organization representing Jewish forced laborers, said: "We're fighting against a Jewish institution which surpasses European banks in its level of hearltessness."

Avraham Roet, founder of the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims Assets, added: "The refusal to meet us is almost as infuriating as the appropriation of funds."

The demonstration was held by Roet's company and the survivors' umbrella group, the Centre of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel. It concerned money which the bank is accused of taking from European Jews, who deposited funds before the Nazis murdered them. The Company recently sued Bank Leumi for NIS 305 million.

Leumi's spokesperson, Aviram Cohen, called the demonstration an orchestrated "exploitation of survivors by public relations people designed to cover failures." He added that the bank gave the Company NIS 20 million which has been "used for nothing."

Read the rest of this nauseating article in WaPo. See link below. Again, Vatican Nation is blaming others for its endless moral delinquency. It holds the Christian Orthodox, for example, guilty for the Italian investigation of Vatican Bank's laundering 200 million mafia dollars.

We allow this morally bankrupt FOREIGN NATION to legislate in our CONGRESS, and award it nonprofit status.
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Vatican officials defend pope on abuse

Vatican officials defend pope on abuse

By FRANCES D'EMILIO
The Associated Press
Saturday, March 13, 2010; 11:58 AM

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican on Saturday denounced what it called aggressive attempts to drag Pope Benedict XVI into the spreading scandals of pedophile priests in his German homeland.

It also insisted that church confidentiality doesn't prevent bishops from reporting abuse to police.

The Vatican's campaign to defend the pope's reputation and resolve in combatting clergy abuse of minors followed acknowledgment by the Munich archdiocese that it had transferred a suspected pedophile priest to community work while Benedict was archbishop there.

Benedict is also under fire for a 2001 church directive he wrote while a Vatican cardinal, instructing bishops to keep abuse cases confidential.

Germany's justice minister has blamed the directive for what she called a "wall of silence" preventing prosecution.

Skeptical about the Vatican's handling of abuse, a U.S.-based advocacy group for abuse victims, Survivors Network of those Abused for Priests, urged faithful to bring candles and childhood photos to vigils outside churches, cathedrals and German consulates across the U.S. this weekend to remind people to "call police, not bishops" in cases of suspected abuse.

CONTINUED

But the Holy See's so-called prosecutor for clergy sex abuse cases, providing some of the first statistics about his office's handling of allegations, decried what he called "false and defamatory" contentions that Benedict had promoted a "policy of cover up."

At the Vatican, rules on handling sexual abuse were "never understood as a ban on making a complaint to civil authorities," Monsignor Charles Scicluna told Italian bishops conference daily Avvenire.

But Irish bishops have said the document was widely taken to mean they shouldn't go to police. And victims' lawyers in the U.S. say the document shows the church tried to obstruct justice.

Scicluna contended that in countries that do not oblige bishops to go to authorities with allegations of abuse, "we encourage them to invite the victims to report these priests."

The Maltese prelate said the pope had taken on the "painful responsibility" of personally deciding to remove those priests involved in "particularly grave cases with heavy proof."

Those cases amounted to about 10 percent of some 3,000 cases handled by the Vatican in the last decade, what Scicluna described as a small fraction of the 400,000 priests worldwide, and cover crimes committed over the last 50 years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/13/AR2010031300790.html?hpid=moreheadlines

There are different opinions as to what a religion really is or what a non-profit is. To be fair therefore, there should be no tax-exemptions for any group and that includes the Democratic and Republican Parties. Faith and community initiative grant monies should also be cancelled and there should also be no tax deductions for contributions made to charities and non-profits like The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith

“The ADL has a professional lobbying staff of approximately 528 in 28 offices nationwide, of those , two staff members based in Washington DC devoted 75% of their time, and the other devoted approximately 50% engaged in advocacy on legislative proposals related to federal hate crime laws, global anti-terrorism, the Middle East Peace Process, immigration issues, the use of government money to fund faith-based organizations and counter-terrorism proposals outside Washington, DC.”

http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments//2008/131/818/2008-131818723-05791627-9.pdf

The total revenue for the ADL in 2008 was $59,960,134 mostly coming from contributions and grants.

Would eliminating the tax breaks for non-profits generate the added taxes/contributions needed to pay for universal health care??

Excellent point. Farnazmansouri has it right. There should be an absolute separation of church and state and that should include both not receiving any monies, and not qualifying for special status with respect to taxes. Citizens should not support religious groups, their followers should. And this separation, although it could "hurt" religious groups in the short run, is better in the long run to keep government out of their business. Keep religions out of the government and the government out of religions. This is the surest way to ensure both religious freedom and to keep the democracy from being overrun by any religious group's ideology.

Houses of worship should not receive government funding for governmental service delivery. Period. Our commitment to separation of "church" and state demands that those services to which Americans are entitled be provided either directly by government employees or by nonsectarian agencies.

Moreover, religious institutions should no longer be tax exempt. Nonprofit status for such entities was never acceptable, and is less so in these times of economic distress.

As for not hiring those of one's faith, I suspect that will not stand up against the Establishment clause except in those instances when sectarian credentials are clearly called for.

Finally, since lobbying by religious institutions has clearly resulted in legislation consistent with religionist demands, that lobbying must no longer be permitted. It is tantamount to establishment.

Separate church and state. The disentangling of the twain. is several centuries overdue.