The bible tells us about a nation of people who had to pay TAXES. They simply didn’t want to pay excessive taxes to Rome. But they had their own taxes they were supposed to pay to make their own nation strong. That’s the purpose of taxes. But when a church guilts you into paying taxes by using “will a man rob God” which applied to Israel’s national tax, they are ROBBING their members. Unless you are a citizen of Israel you do not have to pay taxes to Israel. You would think that all these bible scholar pastors would know that so why don’t ANY of them tell their churches that this is wrong? In America, we have a separation between church and state so churches do not have the authority to collect taxes. Even if they did, what authority do they have to collect taxes for a foreign nation? Do you really think that NO Christian pastor understands that tithes are actually taxes?
So why don’t they stop scamming people? They could easily say “just give an offering”, but they don’t. If you get duped into paying 10% of your income, no one at your church will correct you or stop you. They want you to give as much money as possible and they use the “holy bible” as an accomplice in that scam. And the funny thing is that because so many people do it, so many people believe that it’s okay. This is the downside of “group think”. Hive minds… could be a good thing unless the leader is corrupt. This is the oldest problem known to man. And when it happens in churches people of those churches tend to make excuses for it. This is what happened even with the Catholic priest sex scandals. The tendency to sweep things under the rug is powerful because the members do not want the system to fail. And isn’t that why they want members to pay as much as they can and highlight a story about a woman who gave all she had (which was chump change)?
It seems (here comes my opinion) that the fear of scarcity often creates greed that leads to hording and then when you ask for an account of where all that money actually went… it leads to the same kind of inequity we see with corporations raking in billions at the expense of customers. Christians take in billions of dollars. At least $74.5 BILLION. If you google it, you will find that according to the United Nations Food Programme, ending world hunger would require an annual investment of around $40 billion. We could end homelessness in the richest nation for about $20 billion so it would cost less to do it in other countries. And notice I didn’t include Judaism or Islam. Just Christianity. Millions of dollars are going into expensive buildings and even lavish lifestyles of some ministers acting just like CEOs of big corporations. How many Christians even question this? If we could (intellectually) defeat religion, how much of the global money supply could actually bring to life ‘some’ type of paradise on Earth?