There is no longer any war in Iraq or Afghanistan

I'm sure the 7 billion dollars worth of equipment won't come back to bite us in the ass, like training Mujahideen between 1979-1989 to fight the Soviets and supplying them with Stingers did

In what way did arming the Mujahideen with Stingers bite us in the ass

Some of them got used to shoot down our own planes, no?

I've never heard of that happening

We don't always know what shot down a given aircraft, and one black-market MANPADS is much like another for most purposes, but from a search around at least one Chinook shot down in Afghanistan was thought to be by a Stinger left over from those days. Also spending a fair bit on a buyback program seems like an indication of regret.

Unfortunately in North America at least the dominant churches are politically, ideologically and increasingly "theologically" onside with wars and other fairly awful things that the government is involved in.

Grew up in an evangelical church in Alberta, Canada. It's just gotten more and more political and more and more explicitly right-wing ideological.

That and a lot of the good work many churches do is strings-attached.

That's not to say there isn't amazing charity work being done by many churches and some amazing Christian humanitarian charity work generally. But when I pay my taxes I know that the distribution of the funds is nominally under some democratic and legal governance that is not attached to someone's personal belief system. (Though that is also degrading over time)

(FWIW I've personally donated funds to charities that have church / religious affiliations despite being an atheist. But I'm extremely picky about it)

Sure, some churches are on the side of war. I grew up in such a church. Now I attend one of the "mainline" denominations (which tends to roughly mean Protestant, and not Evangelical). Mainline denominations are usually more politically liberal. Much more likely to find strident anti-war stances.

No, but they are more of a scam than most taxes. Historically speaking, churches haven't exactly abstained from war or pretty much any other atrocity. In terms of our current reality, they are usually not better value for money than taxes. Any time you can point to corruption, misuse of funds, politics or other issues, it is worth remembering that this applies to the churches as well.

Even if this is true "historically speaking", it doesn't have to be true of this guy's local church. Despite the bad press generally, an individual church can still be an unambiguous benefit to its community.

I would be willing to bet that the majority of local (single location, <400 members) churches are like this. Free meals for the community, donating money / labor / resources to homeless shelters, partnering with food banks and soup kitchens, etc are all very common. You just don't hear about it.

The larger and less accountable an organisation is, the more corruption and waste there tends to be. I would agree that donations to a large national religious movement are probably more of a scam than national taxes, but that's not the comparison being made here.

Is this more of a scam than the comment it was responding to?