Money given to churches for historical preservation is money they can spend on their religious activities rather than taking care of their own properties. No religious institution should get one cent of public money for any reason. If a church is really worth preserving for historical purposes, then there shouldn't be a problem raising the money locally.
So now we're arguing about public monies used to support NON-ACTIVE churches versus ACTIVE churches. This is almost beginning to smell like a distinction without a difference. I know of former churches which are being used as non-religious meeting places or as museums, and if that is well-established, one could argue that public fund support for an historical structure which may once have been used for religious purposes might be okay.
Agreed, ways of putting church buildings to good use. Also, temporary homeless shelters would work. Shelters for entire family's the have no where to go that has a roof over their heads.
The couple of hurricanes in 2024 complete destroyed many houses. In my town alone plenty of empty church buildings not being used for anything.
Yes that would be the simpler and completely legal way to resolve this: have the church and government come to a rental/lease agreement, where the government uses the property for some public purpose on several days per week or several hours each day, pays rent for it, and the church can then use the rent money to pay for O&M.
"Buy and repurpose" is certainly a legally viable option for many historic churches...but not here. This one is still happily owned and operated by the religious community. So the solution to this situation can't be that.
Got something off topic that I think you folks here would appreciate. Learned over Thanksgiving that my father deconverted. I thought this was kind of odd, as he's in his late 60s, while most of us that started out religious and abandoned it later did so kind of young.
Anyways, my dad said that he did this mostly because after his older brother died, his other brothers and sisters started getting real insufferable with their Catholicism and ramming it down his throat all the time. It's kind of a big family, too, because Catholicism (my grandparents had 5 kids total)
Quite interesting. My dad deconverted at about the same age, though for different reasons. He told me several years later that he'd been Mr SuperCatholic when we kids were at home but gradually lost interest afterwards. He converted to catholicism in 1949-50 to marry my mom, and he emphasized that he still very much loved her, but no longer thought of himself as a catholic. Just before his death he described himself to me as an "unrepentant unbeliever." Funny how that works, isn't it?
I didn't start truly deconverting until I was in my mid-to-late thirties, and it took a looooooooong time once I started. I was heavily indoctrinated as a child, terrorized with hellfire and damnation sermons, sent to Bible camp and dragged to revival services every summer (including one memorable evening when all us kids were taken aside and shown "A Thief in the Night"), the works. I did have a few doubts once I started college, but I tried to bury them. If that didn't work, I'd try to ignore them. During this time, I was no longer attending church because every time I missed a Sunday service, people would start calling or dropping by unannounced, which annoyed the living daylights out of me.
What finally got to me was the proudly hateful behavior of the Westboro Baptist Church. Around the same time, I noticed the televangelist rhetoric ramping up and becoming downright demented. I also noticed the glaring hypocrisy of the Moral Majority/Family Values crowd, and what smug and insufferable shits most of them were. I tried to put them in the No True Scotsman category, because I still personally knew a few Christians I considered "good people." Thus, I was waffling back and forth between belief and agnosticism, at least until Matthew Shepherd was so brutally murdered, and I didn't hear one single solitary word from those "good Christians" condemning what had happened. If they said anything at all, it was to blame the victim.
Pretty much no turning back after that, and the process of deconverting is still ongoing. For example, a year or so ago, I walked into a bookstore that was deserted. No other customers, no one at the cash register, and no one answered when I called out. For a brief second, my heart dropped in panic and I thought "the Rapture" even though I knew better intellectually. Two seconds later, the cashier came in through the back door, said she was closing in five minutes, and could she help me find anything. I was so rattled I couldn't remember what book I was looking for, so I thanked her and left.
That crap gets buried in your psyche and it's no easy task to pull all those roots and tendrils out.
Houses of Superstition, i.e. churches, mosques, synagogues, etc., are built on faith as well as on physical materials, all of which tend to decay over time. If the members of such exclusives gatherings and blind idol worship wish to repair, restore, or expand these places, then let them pray to their Magic Sky Daddy to provide the finances for doing so and not ask/demand/require the public to come up with the funding. Or better yet, take a lesson from Jimmy Carter and build the damn things yourself! After all, wasn't Jeezus supposed to have been a carpenter?
They did pray. And God answered their prayers by having the City Council or the County Commission or the State Legislature provide them with money. See? Prayer works.
It took Notre Dame 5 years to recover from a fire before finally getting a date to reopen its doors to the public. Where was the biblical deity all that time? He certainly wasn't part of the repair crew. It was humans who put it back together.
BTW, that grand reopening is set for December 8th. The same day a devout Christian named Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon 44 years ago.
In February 1811, President James Madison, a life-long advocate for the separation of church and state, vetoed two bills: one that would have granted a charter to a church in Alexandria, and the other for the sale of a parcel of land in Mississippi for the building of a Baptist church. He vetoed both bills for the same reason: Because the bills would 'comprise a principle and precedent for the use and support of religious societies, contrary to the article of the Constitution which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment."
The author of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights was adamant about the total separation of religion from government. But it seems that from the corrupt supreme court on down to district courts, Madison - and Congress's - intention and purpose of keeping religion out of government and vice versa is being eroded away by people who clearly don't know their history - or if they do, choose to rewrite it instead.
Every infringement on our rights of conscience should be fought tooth and nail. I hope FFRF, Americans United and the ACLU appeal this appalling decision. NO ONE should be forced to support any religion or religious institution.
Yes exactly. The judge is looking in the wrong place here: at the free exercise clause instead of the establishment clause.
In any event, while discrimination is an ugly concept and should typically be avoided, it is AIUI *legal* if it the quality is relevant to job function or has some other rational basis. Here, IMO it would be both rational and pertinent to discriminate in grant applications against the applicant that will tells you they plan to use the state's grant to establish religion. It's analogous to: "Hertz doesn't have to rent a car to someone who declares they're going to do illegal street drag racing with it."
Precisely, Eric! The judge is using the wrong clause to evaluate this case. This is a use of taxpayer money to repair churches so they can continue to be used as churches. It's a clear violation of the establishment clause to require every state taxpayer to support these religious institutions. Those buildings may be old and even historic, but they are still churches in regular use, and their maintenance and upkeep are the responsibility of the religious organizations that use them. PERIOD.
It isn't discriminatory to enforce the U.S. Constitution as well as state law, which both require church-state separation.
There's a very simple solution to this problem. The owners of these historic Church buildings sell the buildings, and buy themselves a building that doesn't require taxpayer money to maintain it for the sake of history.
But the problem is, of course, that nobody's going to want to buy those buildings and just show it off as historic Church.
They want tax dollars to pay for their worship.
We need a strict separation of church and state in this country, and we need it desperately.
Great more free money for the REIT portfolio known as “Christianity”.
The Catholic shits down churches left and right in order to glom onto the real estate profiteering - not once have I heard of their properties being used to help “the least among us”, it’s literally to drum up profits for The Jesus, Inc.
"Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them."
This scripture states that all it it takes is for a few believers to agree on what they are praying for and their messiah's pappy will come through. So Morris County couldn't locate two or three devout Christians and get them to ask their savior's daddy to snap his fingers and zip, zam, zowie and swoosh? Has mere prayer failed yet again to achieve the desired results?
If a church is active and can't afford repairs without government help, it should sell the building and move to a more affordable space regardless of how historic the building is. My house was built around 1850, by a man who as a prominent citizen. He donated land to open the first school, sent sons to fight against the confederacy, among other things that made him and my home an important part of local history. I'm not getting government money for repairs. My house is being actively lived in. The same criteria should apply to these churches. If they are being actively used, the congregation needs to fund repairs. If it is only standing as a historical site, then give them the money.
It would be a "Centennial Farm" here if it had stayed in the same family for at least 100 years, but he purchased the property in 1837 and the last descendant who owned it sold in 1935.
Can confirm, I was in Two Bunch Palms spa in the high desert of California, around 2006, and the spa person was telling me about the celebrities that stayed there, and said Ozzy and Sharon were there a week before, and it's so sweet, how she just leads him around and takes care of everything.
As a church-goer who lives in Morris County New Jersey, my church took Covid relief money to ensure we could pay our staff. Once it became clear that was not needed, I am glad to say that we elected to return the money to the government. Our reasoning was that, we need to own the solution to our own problems. Or put another way, if we need government money to survive, we don't deserve to survive.
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
- Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Richard Price. October 9, 1790.
If we are going to treat them equally with the distribution of taxes, we should treat them equally with the collection.
Time for them to render unto Caesar.
Agreed, "Tax The Churches!" Frank Zappa -1980
Yes to taxing churches and oh yes to Frank Zappa.
I believe we've got almost every music he ever published.
Money given to churches for historical preservation is money they can spend on their religious activities rather than taking care of their own properties. No religious institution should get one cent of public money for any reason. If a church is really worth preserving for historical purposes, then there shouldn't be a problem raising the money locally.
Yet they claim we cannot afford school lunches for kids. Talk about fucked up priorities.
They love fucking the kids.
Metaphorically AND physically.
Why do they need taxpayer money? Don’t they believe God will provide?
Oh, I know. God will provide taxpayer money for them.
So now we're arguing about public monies used to support NON-ACTIVE churches versus ACTIVE churches. This is almost beginning to smell like a distinction without a difference. I know of former churches which are being used as non-religious meeting places or as museums, and if that is well-established, one could argue that public fund support for an historical structure which may once have been used for religious purposes might be okay.
But an ACTIVE church? Not just no but HELL, NO!
Agreed, ways of putting church buildings to good use. Also, temporary homeless shelters would work. Shelters for entire family's the have no where to go that has a roof over their heads.
The couple of hurricanes in 2024 complete destroyed many houses. In my town alone plenty of empty church buildings not being used for anything.
"Gimme Shelter" 1960 - Rolling Stones
Yes that would be the simpler and completely legal way to resolve this: have the church and government come to a rental/lease agreement, where the government uses the property for some public purpose on several days per week or several hours each day, pays rent for it, and the church can then use the rent money to pay for O&M.
Or completely buy empty church buildings sense they no longer are used to worship superstitions, myths and invisible beings.
That way they will actually serve a purpose to do good for homelessness.
Thanks
"Buy and repurpose" is certainly a legally viable option for many historic churches...but not here. This one is still happily owned and operated by the religious community. So the solution to this situation can't be that.
Got something off topic that I think you folks here would appreciate. Learned over Thanksgiving that my father deconverted. I thought this was kind of odd, as he's in his late 60s, while most of us that started out religious and abandoned it later did so kind of young.
Anyways, my dad said that he did this mostly because after his older brother died, his other brothers and sisters started getting real insufferable with their Catholicism and ramming it down his throat all the time. It's kind of a big family, too, because Catholicism (my grandparents had 5 kids total)
Quite interesting. My dad deconverted at about the same age, though for different reasons. He told me several years later that he'd been Mr SuperCatholic when we kids were at home but gradually lost interest afterwards. He converted to catholicism in 1949-50 to marry my mom, and he emphasized that he still very much loved her, but no longer thought of himself as a catholic. Just before his death he described himself to me as an "unrepentant unbeliever." Funny how that works, isn't it?
Some old dogs CAN learn new tricks.
I didn't start truly deconverting until I was in my mid-to-late thirties, and it took a looooooooong time once I started. I was heavily indoctrinated as a child, terrorized with hellfire and damnation sermons, sent to Bible camp and dragged to revival services every summer (including one memorable evening when all us kids were taken aside and shown "A Thief in the Night"), the works. I did have a few doubts once I started college, but I tried to bury them. If that didn't work, I'd try to ignore them. During this time, I was no longer attending church because every time I missed a Sunday service, people would start calling or dropping by unannounced, which annoyed the living daylights out of me.
What finally got to me was the proudly hateful behavior of the Westboro Baptist Church. Around the same time, I noticed the televangelist rhetoric ramping up and becoming downright demented. I also noticed the glaring hypocrisy of the Moral Majority/Family Values crowd, and what smug and insufferable shits most of them were. I tried to put them in the No True Scotsman category, because I still personally knew a few Christians I considered "good people." Thus, I was waffling back and forth between belief and agnosticism, at least until Matthew Shepherd was so brutally murdered, and I didn't hear one single solitary word from those "good Christians" condemning what had happened. If they said anything at all, it was to blame the victim.
Pretty much no turning back after that, and the process of deconverting is still ongoing. For example, a year or so ago, I walked into a bookstore that was deserted. No other customers, no one at the cash register, and no one answered when I called out. For a brief second, my heart dropped in panic and I thought "the Rapture" even though I knew better intellectually. Two seconds later, the cashier came in through the back door, said she was closing in five minutes, and could she help me find anything. I was so rattled I couldn't remember what book I was looking for, so I thanked her and left.
That crap gets buried in your psyche and it's no easy task to pull all those roots and tendrils out.
Houses of Superstition, i.e. churches, mosques, synagogues, etc., are built on faith as well as on physical materials, all of which tend to decay over time. If the members of such exclusives gatherings and blind idol worship wish to repair, restore, or expand these places, then let them pray to their Magic Sky Daddy to provide the finances for doing so and not ask/demand/require the public to come up with the funding. Or better yet, take a lesson from Jimmy Carter and build the damn things yourself! After all, wasn't Jeezus supposed to have been a carpenter?
They did pray. And God answered their prayers by having the City Council or the County Commission or the State Legislature provide them with money. See? Prayer works.
It took Notre Dame 5 years to recover from a fire before finally getting a date to reopen its doors to the public. Where was the biblical deity all that time? He certainly wasn't part of the repair crew. It was humans who put it back together.
BTW, that grand reopening is set for December 8th. The same day a devout Christian named Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon 44 years ago.
Dammit, John Lennon is dead longer than he was alive already.
Four years ago, I noted that John had been dead as long as he had been alive.
Oh, he was busy making sure some asshole’s local football team made it to the big championship game.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2gfr4driedf21.jpg&rdt=50545
BLOCKED BY SECURITY. Oh well, they don't need clicks.
Try this one:
https://ibb.co/KqFkzSb
Failure to communicate. This is the problem with prayer.
To be fair, if I was a benign deity, I wouldn't take calls from assholes using my name to con people, either.
In February 1811, President James Madison, a life-long advocate for the separation of church and state, vetoed two bills: one that would have granted a charter to a church in Alexandria, and the other for the sale of a parcel of land in Mississippi for the building of a Baptist church. He vetoed both bills for the same reason: Because the bills would 'comprise a principle and precedent for the use and support of religious societies, contrary to the article of the Constitution which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment."
The author of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights was adamant about the total separation of religion from government. But it seems that from the corrupt supreme court on down to district courts, Madison - and Congress's - intention and purpose of keeping religion out of government and vice versa is being eroded away by people who clearly don't know their history - or if they do, choose to rewrite it instead.
Every infringement on our rights of conscience should be fought tooth and nail. I hope FFRF, Americans United and the ACLU appeal this appalling decision. NO ONE should be forced to support any religion or religious institution.
Yes exactly. The judge is looking in the wrong place here: at the free exercise clause instead of the establishment clause.
In any event, while discrimination is an ugly concept and should typically be avoided, it is AIUI *legal* if it the quality is relevant to job function or has some other rational basis. Here, IMO it would be both rational and pertinent to discriminate in grant applications against the applicant that will tells you they plan to use the state's grant to establish religion. It's analogous to: "Hertz doesn't have to rent a car to someone who declares they're going to do illegal street drag racing with it."
Precisely, Eric! The judge is using the wrong clause to evaluate this case. This is a use of taxpayer money to repair churches so they can continue to be used as churches. It's a clear violation of the establishment clause to require every state taxpayer to support these religious institutions. Those buildings may be old and even historic, but they are still churches in regular use, and their maintenance and upkeep are the responsibility of the religious organizations that use them. PERIOD.
It isn't discriminatory to enforce the U.S. Constitution as well as state law, which both require church-state separation.
There's a very simple solution to this problem. The owners of these historic Church buildings sell the buildings, and buy themselves a building that doesn't require taxpayer money to maintain it for the sake of history.
But the problem is, of course, that nobody's going to want to buy those buildings and just show it off as historic Church.
They want tax dollars to pay for their worship.
We need a strict separation of church and state in this country, and we need it desperately.
They can be homeless shelters.
And listen for the howls of Christian protest in 3...2...1
Absolutely, should be.
Great more free money for the REIT portfolio known as “Christianity”.
The Catholic shits down churches left and right in order to glom onto the real estate profiteering - not once have I heard of their properties being used to help “the least among us”, it’s literally to drum up profits for The Jesus, Inc.
“… the REIT portfolio known as “Christianity”.”
I’d like to give you a bunch of upvotes for that phrase alone.
Jesus said it very plainly in Matthew 18:19-20...
"Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them."
This scripture states that all it it takes is for a few believers to agree on what they are praying for and their messiah's pappy will come through. So Morris County couldn't locate two or three devout Christians and get them to ask their savior's daddy to snap his fingers and zip, zam, zowie and swoosh? Has mere prayer failed yet again to achieve the desired results?
As always and forever.
If a church is active and can't afford repairs without government help, it should sell the building and move to a more affordable space regardless of how historic the building is. My house was built around 1850, by a man who as a prominent citizen. He donated land to open the first school, sent sons to fight against the confederacy, among other things that made him and my home an important part of local history. I'm not getting government money for repairs. My house is being actively lived in. The same criteria should apply to these churches. If they are being actively used, the congregation needs to fund repairs. If it is only standing as a historical site, then give them the money.
Sounds to me like you should research registering your home as a historical site and all avenues pursuant to that. 😏
It would be a "Centennial Farm" here if it had stayed in the same family for at least 100 years, but he purchased the property in 1837 and the last descendant who owned it sold in 1935.
OT
The Madman John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne turns 76 today.
It is amazing he is still alive.
The rabid bat alone might have done him in.
The bat might have given him super powers.
Maybe it was a radioactive bat.
I'd be more worried if I was the bat.
Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug.
Would you call it living? I think Sharon is the brains behind that outfit.
Can confirm, I was in Two Bunch Palms spa in the high desert of California, around 2006, and the spa person was telling me about the celebrities that stayed there, and said Ozzy and Sharon were there a week before, and it's so sweet, how she just leads him around and takes care of everything.
As a church-goer who lives in Morris County New Jersey, my church took Covid relief money to ensure we could pay our staff. Once it became clear that was not needed, I am glad to say that we elected to return the money to the government. Our reasoning was that, we need to own the solution to our own problems. Or put another way, if we need government money to survive, we don't deserve to survive.
I think it was Ben Franklin who said something similar. Thank you.
So he did!
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
- Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Richard Price. October 9, 1790.
I posted this elsewhere on the thread. Only just now seeing yours.
I think I was typing it when yours appeared.
It's worth repeating.
FWIW, I did check out all the comments before I typed mine. Dave's wasn't there when I looked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMGb_8dsYro
Tommy the Tubby is complaining Biden did something he claimed he would not do. Claims he lied, yet tubby defends the kkklown that lied 30,000 + times.
It is impossible to out-hypocrite a consewertive.
OT - From BHm
Tue 12/3/2024 10:57 AM
𝐒𝐨𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐲 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐛𝐲𝐞
Me Ohne Dich
My cousin La boheme Charles Aznavour
DM's friend Il faut savoir Charles Aznavour
My sister ? for now.
The links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIPc1cfS-oQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLc0J52b2I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6qTHqeQgOw
Thank you for being a conduit from BHm to the rest of us.
From BHm - Tue 12/3/2024 11:58 AM
"Final song Hurt Christina Aguilera"
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwCykGDEp7M