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This is a silly post with silly implications, even though I appreciate its rhetorical goals
The really c/mildlyinfuriating fact is there are more empty homes in the US than homeless.
Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S. src
You don’t even need to involve churches. You need to hold individuals and businesses who hoard real estate for profit accountable. (There is also the matter of the logistics of getting homeless people into those homes, but I will not dive into that here.)
I appreciate the sentiment of this post, but please be sure to check your predetermined biases before you use the text of this meme to inform your opinion on policy.
You don’t even need to involve churches.
There are plenty of valid complaints about (many) American religious institutions, but the constant shoe-horning in of complaints about religion in unrelated posts that I see on Lemmy comes across as bitter and myopic.
Lemmy has a weird hate-boner for Christianity. It’s like a visceral toxic hatred. Sure it would make more sense for you to take from the top one percent in society to actually solve the problem, but that way you don’t get to punish an entire religious group for their vocal minority 1% who squander wealth and strive for political power, using Jesus as nothing more than a stepping stool
A lot of it probably comes from deeply negative personal experiences, combined with a general propensity for people to apply a categorical belief to particular experiences. People who were treated badly by a particular group of Christians, or people who see and hear about certain Christians advocating for some terrible politician or political goal, are applying a generalized belief to how all Christians act, and potentially to all religion in general. It’s much harder to accept that the world is a deeply complicated and messy place and that religion and religious belief is a much more complex element of human civilization, culture, and personal identity than what many people would care to acknowledge.
Yeah. I regularly attend multiple churches. There are a few bad eggs, sure, but 99% of people I talk to there are either lovely people or normal people. Same goes for workplaces as well. I don’t see Churches as being worse than any other environment I’ve been in. But when assholes are Christians, they weaponise the Bible to justify being an asshole. If anything I think Christians in general should be more vocal about things happening in churches that are not okay, but there may be a concern of causing division in an otherwise wholesome atmosphere.
I have a close friend who converted to Christianity, and they said that a fault they observe in Christians can be that they’re too nice and too vulnerable, to the point that people can get away with not very nice things.
I think Atheism gets a bad rap these days also. I’m sure most atheists are lovely people, but the people who make it known that they’re atheists, or make it their whole personality, are not.
(There is also the matter of the logistics of getting homeless people into those homes, but I will not dive into that here.)
And caring for them, because a lot of them can’t function as normal members of society for whatever reason. The real estate is only one piece of this. But yeah, if people were willing to pay for all that, it wouldn’t be a problem. As it is, it’s always the next guy’s problem.
Correct. The “whatever reasons” you cite include chronic illness, mental illness, addiction, and abusive relationships. These are not unique to homelessness but are disproportionately prevalent in the population and therefore a key obstacle to overcome.
Addressing this takes labor and money to handle, a process that is often undertaken by nonprofits with funding from government, but also from charities and churches.
I don’t follow what’s silly here. These motherfuckers are not taxed and also not obligated to give back and that should matter. Tax them, would be the obvious solution
If all churches were to be taxed, the estimated new income would be a paltry $2.4 billion yearly. source
While there is no consensus on the cost to end homelessness, estimates suggest the cost to be more than $300 billion.
So yeah. A bit silly, or at least not an “obvious solution.”
Edit: Meanwhile, taxing the rich and mega corporations is quite effective at retrieving this kind of cash, into the trillions. My personal position, if asked (though I want to be clear taxes were not the original topic at hand), is that taxing owners of multiple residential properties into unafordability is an important step toward ending homelessness.
tldr, The users downvoting this comment are letting their anti-religious sentiment cloud the noxious nature of late stage capitalism. In a world where human lives are less important than profit, for fucks sake the nonprofits are not the primary blame.
When I said “solution”, the problem I was talking about was how unfair it is that religious groups get tax exempt status despite doing nothing to earn that, and a lot to prove they should be taxed. I never said that suddenly we could feed and house all the homeless with those tax dollars
Post and my comment are about homelessness. Categorically, neither the post nor my comment were about taxes. So you changed the subject without even indicating you were doing so. 🙄
Awesome cool thank you for your contribution. But yeah glad to see we agree on an entirely tangentially related topic.
Edit: You are free to discuss taxes. But stop trying to frame it as a disagreement with my position which had nothing to do with taxes. Do it elsewhere where relevant.
The post is about the contradiction between homeless people getting the shaft while churches get handouts. There was no change of subject, you just set your focus narrowly and apparently decided anyone outside that would be wrong in multiple ways.
Misinformation. Churches do not get handouts.
Corporations do.
You are free to discuss taxes. But stop trying to frame it as a disagreement with my position which had nothing to do with taxes. Do it elsewhere where relevant.
Yeah the moral bit is we know people who hold housing for profit are douches. Churches are worse because they think they’re doing the Lord’s work and love talking about caring for people, but very few actually do any good.
Am I reading this right? Are you saying that churches are worse than house-hoarding landlords, just because they think they’re doing good but a lot of them don’t? Even the 18% of churches that rent their buildings from other churches[1] (or the ones that rent non-church properties like theaters or schools,) and thus almost certainly don’t even have a property they could give? Or what about the 48% of churches that run or support a food pantry[2], and are thus doing good?
[1] - https://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2018/fall-state-of-church-ministry/two-churches-one-roof.html
[2] - https://theconversation.com/nearly-half-of-all-churches-and-other-faith-institutions-help-people-get-enough-to-eat-170074clearing out this comment as it wasn’t helpful to the conversation
Well thanks, but to be fair, I was asking Scrubbles. When it comes to an opinion I disagree with, it’s more fruitful to talk to the person who holds that opinion than it is to deride the opinion with someone else who already agrees with me. Partially because there’s a good chance of a misunderstanding.
Not to say the rest of your remark is invalid, just addressing the first sentence where you seem to be speaking on Scrubbles’ behalf.
Fair enough! I hope I’m wrong lol.
very few actually do any good.
Cite this and I will change my opinion.
Mmm I think you’re missing one of the core points of this though: churches have historically and traditionally offered and been used as sanctuaries, often by the poor and downtrodden in a society. In the US these days, you don’t see nearly as much of that. It’s more about evangelism and dogmatism and prosperity gospel. Christians in the US demonstrably doesn’t care that much about poor people these days.
More broadly: as someone who was raised Christian but is now a staunch atheist, I and many others would have far fewer issues with Christians if they would actually fucking practice what their religion preaches instead of whatever some MAGApastor tells you that Supply Side Jesus says.
I don’t disagree with you per se? I simply haven’t seen empirical evidence to support this statement:
Christians in the US demonstrably [don’t] care about the poor that much these days.
Meanwhile the evidence that the ultra wealthy are actively screwing over the lower class piles up daily. If you have a citation for that thesis above I’d love to talk.
just 2 people
What does this mean?
If every church houses two homeless people, no more homeless people.
Maybe OP believes every town in the US has exactly 1 church and 2 homeless people and is mildly infuriated that the church doesn’t allow the 2 homeless people to live there?
My home town had four churches and no homeless people. What homeless people are those churches supposed to help?
Meanwhile, in the city I now live in, there’s tons of churches and half of them give free food to the homeless every single day, and there’s lines going around the block at all of them.
There is no magic bullet that can solve homelessness. Anything proposed must be a part of a larger solution. There are tons of proposals that, if actually done and not half-assed, would help immensely.
Those churches might have already helped. I’m no fan of religion for it’s various stupidities, but I am a fan of organized good will.
I do not understand these downvotes. Like how dare you see churches that actually help the poor like they’re supposed to?
It’s people downvoting because “Religion = bad”.
When in reality it should be “Religion = institutions and institutions can be either good or bad or mix of both.”
Edit: Spelling
It hurts because a good number of churches DO = bad, but we lack the emotional drive to identify which ones and call on their downfall. The result is we amplify blanket statements and assumptions that do nothing but give a pass of diversion to immoral soul sucking capitalists, all of whom are directly responsible for the housing crisis.
Knee jerk emotional voting. People don’t like seeing information that contradicts their deeply rooted beliefs, and downvoting is emotionally less costly than performing self-investigation.
Don’t get me wrong I would love if every problem in America could be patched by taxing some sussy non profits. But there’s no evidence for that.
At best it’s a comfy position that lets you “not my problem” your way through life, at worst it’s propganda to divert attention from the system of capital that is actually keeping the lower class unhoused and constantly struggling.
Not trying to be a smartass here, it’s genuinely just human nature to choose an emotionally efficient worldview. One-on-one conversations and counter propoganda are one solution to getting folks to see truth. It just takes energy.
You are getting downvoted but you are unabashedly correct. The rhetorical goals behind the post are noble, but the suggested solution is infeasible to a degree that verges on laughable.
Homeless people need to live in homes, of which there are plenty being hoarded vacant by the ultra wealthy.
Homes for the homeless fixes homelessness. Guess what giving a homeless person a church to live in makes them? Still homeless.
In the worst case interpretation, this meme is using churches as a polemical meat shield to protect neoliberal and corporate interests.
That rate of homelessness seems like a wild underestimate. However, I don’t know much about the southern united states other than that they basically export the homelessness they create to other states through bussing programs. So this number might be better calculated considering both the spatial distribution of homelessness and the spatial distribution of churches. With out knowing where the churches are and where the homeless are, the number is a bit beguiling. That being said, it does seem that its the areas with lots of churches that create the conditions for homelessness, and then those areas export the problem they create to other areas (rural red states have been bussing the homeless and other ‘undesirables’ to metro areas of blue states for decades, rather than fund and operate local solutions).
That being said, it does seem that its the areas with lots of churches that create the conditions for homelessness
Huh? Is this like a red state/blue state thing, or do you have something to indicate that towns with more churches generate more homeless? It doesn’t really make sense to me because homelessness is tied to housing prices, and cities are where housing is more expensive, and the ratio of church to population is probably a lot lower in cities.
It’s a red state blue state thing.
Red states (rural areas) deal with homelessness by buying the homeless bus tickets and sending them to metropolitan areas within blue states. Basically, red states create issues with homelessness because of their social policies, then externalize the consequences of those policies. This has been the case for decades. Before 2010 this was almost exclusively a red state issue. They would buy a homeless person a bus ticket to CA or NY and that was that. However, more recently some blue cities like Portland are trying the same strategy.
I thought this was common knowledge around homelessness in the US, that it was a blue state problem caused by red states.
Well it can’t be exclusively caused by red states, but I see what you mean. I’m just not a fan of the implication that churches have something to do with it.
Bruh who the duck do you think is buying the tickets.
It’s not an implication, it’s an direct consequence.
Churches are a toxic venom in the vein of society, this kind of exclusionary behavior is precisely why the exist.
I believe that number was accurate in 2022 as noted in the screenshot but has risen to 650,000 since.
I hate the idea of treating homeless like babies. Most of these people got to where they are by choices. If they wanted to stay at the church they probably can. Most churches I know have cots for people down and out. If these people wanted to stay at the church they would have.
Most of these people got to where they are by choices.
Objectively false. Huge majorities of homeless individuals face chronic illness, disability, untreated mental illness, or have been abused.
The numbers vary, but most homeless people have a job and still can’t get housing due to overwhelming unaffordability, a factor which is manipulated against them by zoning laws and corporate ownership.
If churches are going to be a tax free non-profit, we need to see ‘services done’ at roughly a similar order of magnitude as their receipts would allow. And no, a couple of cots is not the answer. Perhaps a small apartment building with 8 units that the church owns and operates, and provides permanent residency for a small local population of the unhoused.
Other wise I think they church should be disbanded and its organizers held liable for tax fraud.
Well I don’t think you should go trying to disband someone’s religion. In my area Churches usually donate people and money to organizations that help the homeless. I’ve worked in the soup kitchens serving hundreds
I mean if they’ve got the receipts of how the money is spent like any other non-profit has to provide, I have no issue with it. If they can’t provide the receipts, that’s a for-profit institution, and should be taxed as such.
By definition of non profit they should not be making profit
If I run a 501-3c (and I have), I have to provide what amounts to a complete budget of where my organizations income came from, where it went to, and how much was spent on things like overhead, office expenses, executive pay, travel, etc. My board is responsible for me getting those numbers right, otherwise we run afoul of the IRS.
Churches are not held to the same standard. A church is effectively granted tax free status on its receipts (income) and is not required to provide any charitable services as a product of those receipts. They are fundamentally different legal entities, however, I’m arguing that they shouldn’t be, and that churches and “faith based” institutions should be held to the same standards as any other charitable organization under the 501c3 definition of a non-profit.
If your church or faith based organization doesn’t exist to provide a charitable mission, then it shouldn’t be free from taxation (or it should not exist).
There are more empty homes in the US than homeless.
While churches taking extreme advantage of tax exemption is a concern, a concern that should be addressed, this situation pales in comparison to the hoarding, lobbying and zoning that goes into keeping the illusion that housing is a scarce resource up, and prices intentionally high.
