Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

John_EightThirtyTwo t1_j0vb5om wrote

Reply to comment by jbphilly in Scientology tower on Chestnut. Still empty after all these years. by narkj

I don't see how you can give the government the power to decide what is and isn't a religion and still observe the First-Amendment ban on "respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".

The government tells religions they'll lose their tax-exempt status if they engage in political advocacy. I agree it would be better if they just didn't give them a tax exemption in the first place. But you can't set the government up in the business of deciding which religions are The Truth and which ones are made up and dumb. (For one thing, they're all made up and dumb.)

1

jbphilly t1_j0w1scx wrote

I agree, there's obviously a lot of sticky issues involved here. But the government does get into the business of deciding what's a real religion or not. If I declare my house the holy site of a new religion, and myself the prophet, do you think I'm getting a tax break out of that? Fuck no. So the question is already where we draw the line, not whether.

>(For one thing, they're all made up and dumb.)

My whole point is, some are vastly and demonstrably more made and up and dumb than others. A scam cooked up by a moist-mouthed creep from the 1950s is a world apart from a millennia-old collection of traditions spanning continents.

0