• setsubyou@lemmy.world
    11·
    12 days ago

    You can’t “opt out”. If you’re a member of a religious community that delegates collecting tax to the state, you pay the tax, and if you’re not, you don’t. As far as I know there are no Muslim communities that do this (only Christian and Jewish ones), so Muslims don’t pay the tax. Of course, communities might use other means to collect money from their members that don’t involve the state.

    • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      12 days ago

      If you’re a member of a religious community that delegates collecting tax to the state

      What the actual fuck?

      • setsubyou@lemmy.world
        61·
        12 days ago

        That it works this way is a result of secularization, but what’s your actual problem with it? It’s not unusual for organizations to charge membership fees, and when your members are literally a quarter of the population, it’s not even inefficient. Just to be clear, the state only collects. The money goes to your religious community.

        The actual wtf is where this idea of opting out of the tax comes from. As I wrote, you can’t opt out of the tax. It’s not the tax we’re opting out of, it’s the entire religion and paid membership in an organization. What happens is e.g. my parents had me baptized after I was born, so I was in a position where I was basically “assigned Catholic at birth” and would have had to pay the tax even though I never signed up out of my own free will and even though I never was religious. I left when I was 14, long before I had to pay the tax, and had to pay a fee to make it official. IMO paid subscriptions should always be opt-in, and never opt-out, and there shouldn’t be a cancellation fee. So for me this part is the wtf.

        Anyway, you can be assigned Muslim at birth too, but since Muslim communities don’t use this system you don’t need to opt out to get rid of the tax.

        • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4·
          12 days ago

          So what happens if you don’t pay? If it’s a literal tax, that means it’s a crime to evade it right?

          IMO getting the government to enforce a church tithe is an overreach. The church should deal with that themselves and the most they should be allowed to do under a secular legal system is ban you from the church.

          Or if the government doesn’t care whether you actually pay it or not, my entire premise for having a problem with this doesn’t apply in which case I stand corrected.