American Indians know that state and federal govt is honest to a fault!

> It has survived millennia.

By "millennia" you mean "at most 300 years, maybe"?

Here in USA. Oldest churches are from the 4th century elsewhere.

For the record: I don't think that priests should be able to buy $50M jets or keep 40% of total land of x country tax free, but they should not be forced to sell buildings because property tax is too high.

Yes. My comment was about "here in the USA" because the grandparent comment talked about churches existing "before Boston".

Churches are routinely handed over to the state or to commercial entities in order to preserve them because church membership is in rapid decline and its very expensive to take care of the church building especially if it has "survived millennia".

edit: got it wrong as per below comment

I assume they meant "here in USA" with regard to the comment about 300 years, but are pointing out that outside the US there exist churches as old as 4th century.

What has survived millennia “as it is”? The United States? It was founded scarcely three centuries ago. The Christian church? Ever hear of the reformation, of Calvin, of Protestantism? I.e. one of the main reasons the United States exists?

It absolutely has not survived millennia. What you call your Christian church today would be unrecognisable to the faithful of a century ago, never mind two, or five, or ten, or twenty. Or are you acknowledging that Christianity is the cult of Mithras, and that it’s still a death cult?

In the UK our local church is physically about 850 years old, But there was a church on the site back in 1086 and presumably before, as it was mentioned in the domesday book. It’s Anglican now, before then it was catholic, maybe it used to be a pagan worship site, maybe in future it will be for the cult of Cummings.

It has severe financial issues at the moment - maintaining the courtyard alone costs £1k a month. I’m waiting for more detailed finances on that.

Maintaining finances for any organisation is a basic bread and butter protection against corruption. I don’t see what harm there is in taxing religious organisations the same way as any other charity.