Flying Spaghetti Monster is not God, rules mortal judge

[Simon_Jester]

I don't see why religions need special privileges like tax exemption to be "free". I'm free to believe that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the Best Thing Ever. I'm free to start a fan club that gets together to watch an episode, talk about how the lessons apply to our lives, and sing songs from the show every Saturday. I'm even free to buy a special building just for the club to meet in. My fan club, however, doesn't get tax exemptions . . . and I don't see why fan clubs of other works of fiction should, or how being forced to meet the same requirements as my pony fan club is somehow restricting their right to like their fiction and meet to talk about it.

The biggest reason why other people's clubs are getting tax breaks and you aren't is that you're never going to worry about going to hell as a result of your My Little Pony fan club being shut down.

[By the way, in what follows I am going to capitalize "Truth" and "Falsehood." This is to emphasize that I am talking not about the objective truth, but about what is believed to be true, and of profound importance, by certain people.
______________________________

Now, we can imagine an aggressively atheist state (the Jub Tyranny Technocracy Republic), in which the state takes the official stance that religions are nothing but fan clubs dedicated to works of fiction, and deserve no more protection.

The reason this is problematic is because the state is now officially staking out the right to make a decision what the Truth is, regarding religion. And no one who disagrees with that Truth is going to be safe to have their own opinions. The Jub Republic is in effect denying people their right to their own opinions about ethics, while also dictating to them a variety of other beliefs that are unwelcome to most humans, such as "there is no afterlife, there is no mechanism by which you can acquire supernatural aid to improve your troubled life, and the fact that you socialize with other people who believe as you do is just you having a deranged mind."
______________________________

But think about that. Once the state has established its own power to declare and enforce Truth, regardless of whether or not its Truth is correct... there is really only one way to establish your right to your own opinions. Namely, to seize control of the state, or at least break it down, and oppress everybody else hard enough that they can't oppress you.

As an example of this look at conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. Western Europe was dominated by the Catholic Church, and by kingdoms whose claim to power came in part from the fact that they'd bash your head in if you didn't obey the Catholics. In short, both the secular and religious authorities declared the power to enforce Truth with violence.

Then came the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic leadership behaved in ways many of its followers could not accept, and a debate broke out. The problem was that everyone involved in the debate was accustomed to the idea that the government could use force to enforce Truth... only now there was debate over what the Truth was. Some countries experienced civil wars. Others went to war against each other, attacking neighbors who had different beliefs about the Truth. In some countries (England was a great example) wars washed back and forth across the country as successive generations of monarchs and nobles feuded over which version of Truth was correct, with each monarch brutally oppressing the people who'd followed their predecessor's Truth. The same country went back and forth, Catholic to Protestant to Catholic to Protestant to fights among different groups of Protestants.

Each time, people were driven out of the country for being too strongly in favor of the wrong Truth. They were punished, marginalized, if not outright killed. Multiply this by a dozen countries, in many of which the conflicts were bloodier. Millions were killed, a continent was thrown into chaos.

You don't get violence like this over a schism within a My Little Pony fan club. You DO get it over religion, it's happened numerous times.
________________________________

And frankly, the lesson to take away is not "religion is bad for people because it makes them kill each other." Because so far, no attempt to 'solve' this problem by banning religion has met with much success. The most successful experiment with that was the communist dictatorships of the 20th century, which banned or greatly restricted religion. But as we've seen in Russia, the religious sentiment didn't go away. And when the communist government fell, the ultra-orthodox religious faction sprang back into power and began oppressing others, just as they were being oppressed back in the 1980s and earlier.

So I would argue that the lesson here is not 'religion is bad because it leads to violence.' The lesson is "when you give the state the power to enforce Truth by punishing those who believe Falsehood, that power may end up being used in unexpected and unwelcome ways."

The most effective known solution to the problem does NOT involve somehow finding an even truer Truth and enforcing it on everyone. It involves declaring the state neutral in all arguments over the nature of sacred truths, declaring that the state does not have an official opinion, will tolerate and shelter groups that are devoted to their particular sacred truths, and in general trying to keep all the religious sects calm, secure, and comfortable enough that they don't lash out at each other, or at the secular society around them.

That is why we have freedom of religion. So that it is even possible to have an orderly, secular civil society.

[Flagg]

Well, the alternative is to accept Simon's "it has to have history and obscured origins implying authorial intent to be a religion" argument.

"If you want special considerations, jump through the hoops like every other cult did" would be more honest and direct.

More like "be old". The only reason the stupid Abrahamic fiction is considered less ridiculous than the stupid Scientology fiction is age and number of idiots who believe in said fiction. That Simon wants to keep this "false not fiction" nonsense up is really just stupid. It's semantics. Fiction is false, false is fiction.

[Channel72]

Now, we can imagine an aggressively atheist state (the Jub Tyranny Technocracy Republic), in which the state takes the official stance that religions are nothing but fan clubs dedicated to works of fiction, and deserve no more protection.

The reason this is problematic is because the state is now officially staking out the right to make a decision what the Truth is, regarding religion. And no one who disagrees with that Truth is going to be safe to have their own opinions. The Jub Republic is in effect denying people their right to their own opinions about ethics, while also dictating to them a variety of other beliefs that are unwelcome to most humans, such as "there is no afterlife, there is no mechanism by which you can acquire supernatural aid to improve your troubled life, and the fact that you socialize with other people who believe as you do is just you having a deranged mind."

That doesn't really address his point. He's not suggesting the state should oppress bad ideas, he's asking why his stupid club can't be given the same recognition and privileges as other "stupid clubs", like, you know, Christianity.

Of course, as a matter of fact, Zeropoint's My Little Pony club can obtain tax-exempt status from the IRS, just like the Catholic Church. In terms of being given special recognition and treatment by the government, the IRS merely requires your organization/religion to simply be a charity, a non-profit, and not attempt to influence legislation too much:

https://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Pro ... anizations

A lot of the stuff that has come to shape these requirements are historical, like you said. Religious organizations have traditionally also been charities, and freedom of religion, religious conflict, and state-sponsored religious persecution have played such a huge role in shaping the politics of this world that religious organizations with longstanding traditions and massive numbers of follows (Christianity, Islam, etc.) are given special treatment by the State, with the agreement that these religious organizations don't attempt too much political lobbying. In return, the State agrees to remain neutral towards any wacky beliefs. (Naturally, this agreement is entirely theoretical; in practice elected-officials regularly pursue faith-inspired legislation, and religious officials regularly seek to influence the State.)

But the current FSM silliness sort of highlights how arbitrary the technical definition of a "religion" really is. It's a very fuzzy concept. When you have huge organizations like the Catholic Church who operate massive international charities and hospitals, and whose history is inextricably intertwined with the history of the Western world in general, there's at least a certain logic behind all the special treatment and tax exemption. Non-religious charities and organizations are also eligible for tax exemption, so it's basically fair. (Well not entirely... non-religious charities usually can't avoid prosecution for organized conspiracy to protect pedophiles, but whatever...)

The problem is what happens in the borderline cases where an organization claims to be a "religion", like Scientology, where there is little history, and the belief system of adherents isn't imbued with the weightiness of something like a 2,000 year old tradition that nations used to go to war over. It doesn't help when this kind of organization does things which are often indistinguishable from a large-scale scam or pyramid scheme.

And of course, since religion is such a fuzzy concept, these kind of organizations tend to have a hit or miss success rate when it comes to convincing governments to treat them as a bona-fide religion. Germany, for one, if I recall correctly, has so far refused to give Scientology the status of a religion.

Anyway, it's completely understandable why a judge would refuse to recognize the FSM as an actual religion that people venerate - but it also kind of does highlight how arbitrary the definition of "religion" is, and how a large part of the thought processes that go into deciding what is and isn't an actual faith are based around the "weightiness" that age, history and number of followers lends to a "real" religion. Things like Scientology, which linger on the edge of kind-of/sort-of having a lot of serious followers are always going to be tough calls. (I mean, ignoring all the illegal shit they get away with, that is). I mean with Scientology it's not even clear to me how many people actually believe in any of it - versus how many people simply look at it as some kind of Hollywood social club or career boost, or how many people consider it basically a vaguely supernatural/pseudo-scientific self-help service, kind of like going to a psychic or whatever.

So it's difficult to even define religion in terms of the number and/or seriousness of actual believers. Again, it's a very fuzzy concept - and while it's pretty clear that Pastafarianism is just a silly joke rather than a religion, if it turned into some kind of larger "movement" based around Naturalism or whatever, and gained a large number of followers, it could easy gain tax-exempt status as an organization and then maybe this judge's ruling wouldn't seem so obviously correct.

[Cykeisme]

Since the delineation between "valid" and "not valid" religions isn't very clearly defined, isn't there a risk that any given religion can be declared to not be a valid and "real" religion by a judge?
It sounds like it could set a precedent for the state to infringe on religious rights. Or perhaps not. I don't really understand the implications.

I mean, if you ask me, all religions aren't real, but you understand the question I'm asking here, I hope.