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Originally Posted by Mavdog
first, as it relates to the homeless and the phrase "get a job", the vast majority of homeless suffer fron mental illness, not a case of laziness. their capablility to get and hold a job is pretty much nonexistent.
second, as for the role of churches in determining the level of donations in the study....read the article. when the contributions to churches are removed it's about even between liberals and conservatives.
last, the discussion of if a church is a charity. a charity is an organization whose reason for existence is directing funds and effort toward helping affected people. imo churches do not come close to reaching this definition, as their first priority is their congregants, and many churches are nowhere close to providing 1/3 of their budgets towards affected people, which is a common definition of a well run charity.
the fact that some churches may provide charitable endeavors doesn't itself qualify them as a charitable organization. the firm that I work at gives support to 3 different organizations helping ill kids and women's shelters thru either money or labor....thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. does that mean the firm is a charity? nowhere close.
not to even mention how some churches (benny hinn, kenneth copeland) shouldn't be allowed to even be tax exempt, they're nothing but religious businesses...
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The IRS code defines charities. You can look there for a definition if you wish. Many churches split off their charitable branches/efforts with different names to meet the legal code issues. Many churches do have some aspects of their functionality taxed. You are over simplifying the issue.
The reason the Catholic Church created the entity "Catholic Charities" is probably exactly for the issue of dealing with the IRS code.