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'We the People' Petition To Revoke Scientology's Tax Exempt Status
An anonymous reader writes: There has been a lot of interest in the activities of the Church of Scientology recently, especially since the release of Alex Gibney's documentary Going Clear. A petition against tax-exempt status for Scientology has been started on the U.S. White House petition website. If it receives more than 100,000 signatures, it will qualify for an official White House response. Even Slashdot has had its own run-ins with Scientology in the past — one of many internet sites to face legal threats from the Church. Has the time come for Scientology go "clear?"
Okay, they got the Nazi thing wrong. But they definitely got the Scientology thing RIGHT.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
http://tonyortega.org/2015/04/13/if-you-want-the-irs-to-reexamine-scientologys-tax-exempt-status-its-time-to-get-real/
Not just Scientologism. Shouldn't we be reexamining all tax exempt organizations that promote a religious belief as their sole claim to tax exempt? Run a soup kitchen, great, soup kitchen is tax exempt. Run an empire with a soup kitchen, the empire should not be tax exempt- true for scientologists and Christians.
I would be ok with removing all tax exempt statuses from churches as long as charity work was deductible for them. We could then see which churches really do put their money where their mouth is in charitable work and donations. It would also encourage any religions which don't put much effort in helping the poor to change that behavior rather quickly.
Has the government - beyond just the white house - been inclined to revoke any tax exempt statuses in memory? I don't recall a single one. Just because Scientology has only a slightly higher public approval rate than ebola doesn't mean the government is likely to take a stand against them.
Besides, even if it was revoked, they would likely just find a really good accountant / lawyer team and end up paying the same amount (or less) in taxes. Last year Prudential insurance paid no corporate income tax and received a $106 million rebate. Time Warner cable paid no taxes on $4.3B in profit, CBS no taxes on $1.8B. Scientology could probably do better on their taxes by registering as a corporation anyways.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I have a lot of experience with the We the People petitions. Specifically, how they don't work like people think they do.
How people think it works: You gather enough signatures and then somehow, you introduce bills to congress with your stated goal
How it actually works: A white house rep sends you a generically worded statement about how in this case, the IRS is the agency in control of determining tax exempt status of the church.
There have been dozens of petitions for Westburough baptist church and Scientology and they always get the same response. "I have no control over this".
The question, I believe, is whether the CoS really is a belief organization, or a financial scam. Whether the followers have a belief or not is not something we can or should question, but we can certainly question the CoS.
Anyhow, I am all for all religious organizations losing their tax free status. It's built on a religious statement from the bible, that one should give god what belongs to god and the emperor what belongs to the emperor. Being that the law is religious based, it breaches the separation of state and church, and should be found unconstitutional.
I'm a Christian, and I would prefer that there is no such thing as a 'religious' exemption from taxation. To me, that's contrary to the constitutional separation of church and state and is an example of the state's recognition of religion (if not the establishment of an official religion, of course).
No, simply churches should have to file as non-profits, and hew to the rules (including auditing, etc) therefor. If they do, great. If they don't, too bad.
-Styopa
As long as there is a tax exemption for religion -any religion- picking on one is unfair and bordering in bigotry. We the people are not (or should not) in the business of telling people what is or isn't a religion or what to believe or not as long as it aligns with the society accepted rules (i.e. the law)
That said, I would support removing the blanket tax exemption for ALL religions activities and instead give it to specific activities benefiting the community as long as it doesn't discriminate on others based on their faith.
My question here would be, how are we deciding what is or is not a religion? You have a bunch of people with a belief system organized together... I don't know how you distinguish between a social club, a cult, and a religion other than going by what they claim for themselves. However, whatever the legal method of determining the answer to that, it should be applied consistently.
The process here should not be, "We think that Scientology is crazy and therefore not a valid religion, so we will revoke their legal protection on that basis." If there's no legal criteria to refer to, then you're setting a precedent for revoking the legal protections for any religion that you don't like. Go by the law. If the law is inadequate, then revise the law, but make sure you're comfortable with the revised law being applied consistently to all groups, including the group you belong to.
This. I tend to cringe at these megachurches that collect (metric) tons of money from poor people with the (false) promise of "health, wealth, and prosperity" - only to turn-around and spend hundreds of thousands, or even millions, to buy a fancy plane, property for a bigger parking-lot (I've personally seen that same church humiliate a poor, homeless person - by putting a suit jacket on them for service, then refuse to provide any kind of real material help.
The bible's position on it is pretty simple, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's..." - "USA" is printed on the dollar, churches ought to pay taxes. Even money that falls out of the sky counts as income.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
Show me another religion that hides their religious texts behind the concept of "trade secrets".
I mean, I can go to pretty much any church and read a Bible. Heck, I can buy a copy at practically any bookstore. Same with the Qur'an. Or the Torah.
I can have religious discussions with Christians (of varying denominations) or Muslims or Jews and find out pretty much anything I want to know about their religion and it doesn't cost me anything other than time.
You want to officially learn about Scientology? Start forking over the cash. (Yes, officially. According to the Church of Scientology, practicing Scientology outside of the auspices of the CoS is bad, mmkay? Not even the Pope tries to insist that you can't be a real Christian unless you're Catholic.)
A lot of that stuff that we know about the Church of Scientology... like Xenu, and the Galactic Confederation, and all that (from the OT III docs)? We're not supposed to know that. We only know about it because of civil trials involving the CoS, and they tried to suppress that stuff under the concept of it being trade secrets.
So yeah, show me another religion that has trade secrets. Where's that other major religion that you don't learn the 'true faith' until and unless you've invested a substantial whack of cash?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
The question, I believe, is whether the CoS really is a belief organization, or a financial scam.
False dichotomy. Why can't it be both? All belief organizations are financial scams, at least to unbelievers. All financial scams require some degree of faith from their victims.
The question, I believe, is whether the CoS really is a belief organization, or a financial scam.
Cost of reading the most sacred beliefs of all major religions: free online, or $10 for the paperback. Jedi may also need to invest in the DVDs.
Cost of reading the most sacred beliefs of CoS: $380,000 (2006 pricing: http://www.xenu.net/archive/pr... ). Discounts available by signing a billion year contract and working full time in return for food.
This just goes to show the dangers of relying on your own perception when it comes to issues like this. You can download a list of entities which lost their tax exempt status from the IRS themselves, which I am doing now, and (for those who automatically lose their status) it's a 20MB ZIP file containing text, so you can imagine how many records it contains. If their servers weren't so slow from over here I'd give you a precise number.
Don't trust that you know everything - double check you've not fooled yourself or been fooled by someone else. That has two benefits: You learn, and you decrease the chances of looking foolish.
Well, the N.F.L., N.H.L., P.G.A. and L.G.P.A are tax exempt
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor...
It would be nice to see a petition that instead makes a cogent, fact-based, reasoned argument against the COS's legal eligibility for tax-exempt status, rather than a rant consisting of a bunch of unproven allegations, unspecified accusations of government corruption that sound like they come from conspiracy nuts, some borderline libel, with a couple facts thrown in. It wouldn't be that difficult to do, and it might actually make it awkward for the White House to dismiss, rather than making it easy by inviting them to defend their tax status as an example of how the U.S. defends "oppressed" religions.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Why should charity be deductible, for churches or anyone?
Because the point of government is to support the general welfare of the population, and that's what taxes are supposed to be for. If you're doing your share of social support directly, it's rather unfair to also require you to contribute the full amount to the government pool.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I was agreeing with the thread until this point.
Here's the problem with your statement:
"prime real estate" got that way over a very long time. In the downtown parts of pretty much every major city, those churches were built long ago, when the land was essentially considered unsuitable for anything else (for commerce, farming, industry etc). Many of these places have, over time, become part church, part museum, part heritage - for both its congregation *and* the city it sits in.
Bringing down crushing property taxes on such places would eventually force any religion out of a downtown area, as it almost does for private residents now. It's bad enough that most downtown areas have pushed out anything except for ultra-wealthy corporate and private interests... if it weren't for tax exemption, the museums, churches, libraries, and most other public edifices would have been driven out of the city long ago. Now you want to start eroding that? Sure, you may say it would stop there, but fact is, it won't... someone else will find another reason to start relocating museums out to the 'burbs in order to free up uber-profitable land, then someone else entirely will start whining that big-assed libraries full of paper books on "prime real estate" are totally unnecessary in this digital age, so maybe we should just, you know...
For every "palatial manor" your proposal would dismantle, at least 2-3 small rectory houses, convents/monasteries, strip-mall-churches, *schools*, etc would be forced on the auction block, or funds would be diverted from actual charitable efforts just to pay the property tax bill (money is fungible that way). Note that I haven't even come near bringing up all the religious-run hospitals in the nation and the impact on them (there's a whole lot more than you think - enough that their absence would cripple healthcare rather harshly nation-wide.)
TL;DR - This thing is a bit more complex than you might realize, given the blanket statement. Find a better way
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The difference is, when you've been a faithful Catholic for 20 years, and tithed the whole time and whatever else, they don't take you aside one day and say "Hey, here's the super-duper secret Bible that almost no one gets to look at. You're going to love the chapter where after Jesus' resurrection, grey aliens from Proxima 9 took him on a 2-millienium mission to the stars."
Scientology does just that. If you have no idea, going in, about what thetans are, or where they come from, you don't find out about them until you're so invested in Scientology that it's very difficult to break away from it. "It has to be true, look how much time and money I've invested in it."
And that's another thing.
Let's say, for whatever reason, that I want to study up on Christianity. Well, one option that a lot of churches have are discussion groups/classes on it, especially for people who are converting to that church.
A lot of those classes are pretty cheap, if not outright free, and here's the important bit. You don't actually have to take them. I could, right now, walk into practically any church in the country and join, for free.
In Scientology, if you want to learn more (or are peer-pressured to do so), every class costs money. The higher you go, the pricier the classes. Oh, but you can get around some of the costs by signing a billion-year contract.
Yeah, that's all completely normal and above board.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I always tithe, but God doesn't want it.
end of each month I take my money and throw it in air, whatever God wants he can take, whatever lands on ground I keep.
so far he's never wanted any.
Well, the N.F.L., N.H.L., P.G.A. and L.G.P.A are tax exempt http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor...
That's because the leagues themselves are not-for-profit organizations. All of the profit in professional sports goes to the individual teams, who do (or at least should) pay taxes on those profits. Whether or not all of the "business expenses" of the leagues are appropriate is, as with any corporation, of course debatable.
Similarly, most religious organizations do not have any owners or shareholders that get dividend checks at the end of every year. I've witnessed first-hand how difficult it can be just to balance the budget; it's always a struggle between higher membership dues, cutting programs, or trying to organize a major fundraising campaign.
What's it to you if the religious text is a trade secret, you have to fork over cash to read their texts, and as far as civil trials are concerned they are operating withing the law.
The only people who are "victimized" by Scientology are Scientologists. It's not my problem nor yours.
Every organization sued or otherwise attacked by Scientology is also "victimized" by them. Are you interested in warning people against joining Scientology by telling them what it's really about? Prepare to be sued for releasing their Trade Secrets. Scientology's victims are hardly limited to their membership.
Now, if they break the law and really hurt someone - like institutionalizing the molesting small children - then that's for the cops to handle and they SHOULD be punished.
If Tom Cruise and other movie stars want to spend millions supporting the Scientolgists, that's their problem, not mine. The only problem I have with Tom Cruise is I wish he'd make more kick-ass science fiction movies.
But if we're gonna pick on kooky religions, I think we should start with the Mormons first. They actually have a history of murdering people.
In 1978 11 high ranking Scientology leaders were convicted in one of the largest counts of internal espionage of the IRS and federal attorney's offices.
In 1978 France convicted, in absentia, L Ron Hubbard of fraud.
In 1988 in Spain the Spanish head of Scientology and ten others were arrested on charges of fraud, coercion and labour law violations.
In 2009, a Paris court found the French Church of Scientology guilty of organized fraud and imposed a fine of nearly US$900,000.
Noah Lottick, died 1990
Lisa McPherson, died 1995
> Jedi may also need to invest in the DVDs.
Pro tip: you only need to buy the 3 old ones, not all 6.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That means the plane, big building, parking lot, etc. gets paid for before taxes. Same with salaries
Not exactly. There are rules about how big your expenses can be for things like executive compensation. For example, when a company pays for business lunches for its executives to dine out, it can't reduce income by the entire amount. And a firm can't deduct the entire amount of, say salary ($1,000,000 cap) or stock options (cap on deductible amount on incentive stock options, which is why they also offer "non-quals", i.e., non-qualified stock options).
In general, if the choice is between the firm paying a tax or an executive paying the tax, the firm will generally pay the tax (in the US), since corporate rates are lower than the highest personal income tax rate. But if they can defer taxes altogether, by giving the executive something that will appreciate in value (like equity) but avoids immediate income tax, they will do that.