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I can’t tell if you are purposefully taking the post literally just to be able to shoot it down.

Most people here are taking the post literally. A smaller, not insignificant but smaller, number are reading satire/irony (regarding tax exemption) into it but that does not mean there is only one valid interpretation.

Pro tip, if you need to reject the majority reading of a rhetorical post in order to defend it, that’s an indication you might be the one who is approaching in bad faith. Either that or the post is indefensible and needs rewritten.

I happen to agree with your position too, but just be careful about calling that commenter out for something as benign as taking a straightforward text literally.

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.

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.

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.

I believe that number was accurate in 2022 as noted in the screenshot but has risen to 650,000 since.

Fair enough! I hope I’m wrong lol.

clearing out this comment as it wasn’t helpful to the conversation

Yes. Other estimates put it closer to 650,000.

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.

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.

very few actually do any good.

Cite this and I will change my opinion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

i can’t and nor do i want to because my instance admin did me the blessed service of defederating threads ❤️

the downvotes are because the post specifically mentions Respondus, a software that does not run on Linux. the knee jerk didn’t-read-the-post response comments are not really helpful to people who don’t have a choice, not because they “refuse to admit defeat” come on now.