By Josh Mitchell
River Mississippi News Opinion
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA — The amazingly ironic notion of a person believing what another person says is true is a fallacy upon the cave-wall minds of everyone, nearly everyone, in today’s Catch-22 world.
The undue trust we place in people we meet upon the streets of life is a governing association within the psyche of the individual that works by way of someone believing our white lies, which are a slippery slope to believing deeper lies told by others who push the envelope of truth further than some but not as far as others.
Thus, at the end of a decade what you get is a cesspool of truth, but it’s actually far worse than that, because some people actually, ‘specially now 33 years since the Advent of the World Wide Web, pretend to be people they are not and even go as far as pretending to be the very “things” that they are “fighting” against. This is only possible in people who have no other loyalty but to themselves, money and people they have to back scratch to keep their falseness a secret.
Churches are still tax exempt despite the fact that the requirements to become a minister have gone down drastically in the wake of the online, multi-nationally religious Internet pulpit provided by the World Wide Web. What does Net in Yahoo (.com) say? Could be just a coincidence, as in “DVD or DVD spelled backward.” That could be a stupid joke, too. Who knows?
The question at the heart of the matter is: Should “Houses of ‘Worship’” still be tax exempt from taxation under the U.S. Constitution? Are gun-selling businesses and newspapers also tax exempt since they represent the 2nd and 1st Amendments, respectively? Answer: Hell no. So why the special treatment for Worship Houses? Now there are more churches than ever in the USA, and trust in religion is at an all-time low. So is this tax-exempt plan working? Maybe it was put in there to see how the churches would react and “spring” from such an economic advantage over “other” aspects of our U.S. culture.
Maybe the goal of the insiders in Washington, D.C. was to see how far these churches would take this tax exemption in order to put a “true” litmus test on churches. Even if that were true, what would be the next step now that it is basically a certainty that many Worship Houses have taken advantage of this miraculous taxation benefit enjoyed by nearly no other sector inside the USA? Answer: Start taxing them at 10 percent per the tithe cited in the Bible. The Tax Foundation has considered taxing USA worship houses, too.
Many churchgoers want to tithe 10 percent or more but simply can’t afford to or they would not have enough gas to get back home from church once the service ended. That’s an unreasonable state of affairs in the USA unfortunately. And that’s mainly because the congregants can’t afford to tithe due to inflation. Tithing is just another aspect of American life that citizens have been forced to abandon, like buying healthy food, moving to lower crime neighborhoods and getting the medicine they need. But instead of persisting in high-crime real estate areas, letting sicknesses go unhealed and going to bed hungry night after night, the loss they feel from not having enough money to exercise their Constitutional religious freedoms through proper tithing is the absence of the true presence of God they seek to attain.
Thus, the horrible U.S. economy is now successfully taking away “souls” and diminishing the human-God connection. Many people can’t look up or inward now because doing so would be unfeasible since they do have to get gas in their cars, food on the table and medicine in their bodies so they can hopefully live long enough to see a U.S. economy that no longer keeps them from practicing the most minimal of religious freedoms: Giving to the poor in the name of the religion they profess to serve, primarily Christianity in the USA.
But if the USA were a true Christian nation, it would tax the churches 10 percent at least, reflecting the Bible’s minimum tithe for the able. Instead, we’re all the widows dropping pennies in the “offering” plates, and many people don’t do that. That’s because they have left the churches because it’s become too expensive to go, and if we do, we can’t even give 10 percent to the plate let alone that amount of attention to the teachings espoused in the pulpits.
If the churches were taxed at least 10 percent, you would see many of the false or lukewarm churches close up like any business that can no longer “balance the ledger.”
Thus, taxing the churches at 10 percent would “clear the field,” put money in the government coffers and hopefully improve the budgets of local, state and federal governments. Maybe then the individual financial situations of U.S. Americans would improve, increasing their chances of being able to give the 10 percent tithe or more they sincerely want to put in the offering plates on Sundays so they can listen to the sermons with clear minds, sing the hymns with joyous hearts and maybe even have a little money left over to give some random people on the street a little help later on during the week when they “enter the mission field.”
And it might also lead to bigger after-church Sunday meals where more families could start connecting again in the USA.
Does that preach?
