Thursday, May 09, 2002

Church or Business?

A scary NY Times article on churches that have become miniature cities makes you wonder about all that revenue escaping taxation.

Religion is one of the fattest tax shelters going. Start your own cult and make your life tax exempt. Its legal.

But back to these super-sized religious monstrosities.

The churches profiled in the Times' article are not your standard pay and pray Sunday affair.

These places have McDonald's!

At the Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston, a McDonald's will open this month, complete with a drive-in window and small golden arches.

And if that is not enough, bring on the water parks...

In Glendale, Ariz., the 12,000-member Community Church of Joy, which has a school, conference center, bookstore and mortuary on its 187-acre property, has embarked on a $100 million campaign to build a housing development, a hotel, convention center, skate park and water-slide park, transforming itself into what Dr. Walt Kallestad, the senior pastor, calls a "destination center."

Why should Water Park USA or Disneyland have an IRS bill -- while the so-called Church of Joy scams on by?

Click here to read about the exemption clergy get for their housing expenses... and how quickly our representatives are "moving" to ensure ministers keep this perk at tax payer expense.

Click here for the sad tale of how the IRS gave up and granted the Church of Scientology tax exempt status after a 25 year battle.

The "church" fought the IRS with its own intimidation methods:

Scientology's lawyers hired private investigators to dig into the private lives of IRS officials and to conduct surveillance operations to uncover potential vulnerabilities, according to interviews and documents. One investigator said he had interviewed tenants in buildings owned by three IRS officials, looking for housing code violations. He also said he had taken documents from an IRS conference and sent them to church officials and created a phony news bureau in Washington to gather information on church critics. The church also financed an organization of IRS whistle-blowers that attacked the agency publicly.

And remember this is a "church" whose central tenant is the below:

Its founder, Hubbard, asserted that people are immortal spirits who have lived through many lifetimes. In Scientology teachings, Hubbard described humans as clusters of spirits that were trapped in ice and banished to Earth 75 million years ago by Xenu, the ruler of the 26-planet Galactic Confederation.

What a wack job.

I've read quite a bit of L. Ron Hubbard's Sci/Fi and while imaginative, it isn't very well written and tends to be misogynistic and repetitive.

But he got his own cult... and if you read the linked article, the amount of money involved in tax exempt status may surprise you.

Or it may not.

posted by Bohica at 12:36 PM