Okay; sure. They take my collection and use it for their own needs and for others. Fine. But no church I've ever attended charged a {fee} to attend services and belong there. Like a country club or an Elks club or a Masonic lodge. That's what Laeuki is asking.

i am a member of several sites run by donations, they don't REQUIRE a fee, but they solicit them and use them to fund their activities. Is donating to wikipedia a charity? how about a webcomic repository?

I don't think he was trying to say that churches REQUIRE people to pay to use their services, but rather that churches are a social club, and donating to them does not help individuals in need. Unless it is a seperate "box" so to speak that goes specifically to the needy. churches typically organize such donation drives.

The book is extensively sourced. Again, Mumble, READ the damn book before arguing it's BS. Sheesh.

Catholic churches have two donation plates - one for the parish, and one for the wider church. Neither is explicitly used for good works, although a component of both is. Determining how much can be very easy in some places, but fiendishly difficult in others, particularly where there's differing views on charity.

You have a point here, but I don't think the political analysis is necessary - liberals, economic liberal/social conservatives, socialists, the religiously conservative, pants-wearing lesbians with strong views on turning right after stopping and other political archetypes all engage in much the same kind of 'your point is wrong because you didn't talk about x' arguments.

Honestly, and no offense intended to mumble, but some people don't like to read about things before they shoot them down. It might make them think otherwise. These people are often referred to as "liberals".

In Germany churches are tax-financed (there is a church tax). In Ireland I don't know.

My synagogue charges membership fees.

My church, First Presbyterian of Plymouth, certainly has never charged a "membership fee" I cannot beleive that such a thing would exsist. But Presbyterians are a little odd in thier form of governance, as almost all decisions about money are made by the local chuch and there is very little in the way of money we send to next level of church athortiy, maybe 20 dollars a member. That money comes out of regular offerings though, not a per head assesment.

Obviously that would never happen here in the land of separation of church and state.

Of course not. But I assumed your churches would have membership fees instead.

Note that Germany itself has separation of church and state, but the individual German states making up the federation do not. That's also why religion is tought in schools, which are subject to state law and not federal law.

To make matters even more complicated the state churches and the actual states do not even cover the same areas, since German state borders change every few decades while the state church borders have not changes since 1910 or some such date. There are churches for states that don't exist any more or have been annexed by other states and there are states that share their state church with other states and don't have one limited to their own territory at all.

And because this is Europe and things were not complicated enough, these laws also apply to parts of France that were once German. Which means that France is a secular state without a state church, the German-speaking parts of France do have a state religion, priests and pastors (and rabbis for some reason) are paid by the state, religion is tought in schools, and Christian holidays that don't apply in the rest of France do apply in the region.

I have always got to Baptists churches both in the States and in the Philippines, and not only is there no fee, but such a thing would be looked at with horror if any preacher even thought of such a thing.  The things of God are free for anyone to partake of, although church member are of course highly encourage and expected to give, but no one checks up on anyone or really even knows who gives and who doesn't.

As to the argument over whether such and a such a book is statistically accurate or not, the burden of proof is on the person making the argument.  If you say it's not accurate, then it's up to you to prove it.  It is not up to someone else on the other side to do the work for you.  That's not how debates work.

That kind of confusion simply can't survive on a scale as big as the USA.  That is why, to get things back on point, I believe we need a cut and dry stance on smoking.  Either keep it legal and allow private businesses to allow it if they see fit or make it illegal.

I don't see a difference in scale. Germany has a population of 80 million. The US have about 280 million. That's a factor of 3. It should scale about the same.

That approach doesn't work.

Why not have it legal with the proviso that it must not harm others? Isn't that the same policy we try to use for everything else? Why exempt smokers from the usual mechanism?

Sorry, I forgot which thread I was on (blonde moment)

So if I'm reading this right, the claim that conservatives are more charitable than the liberals doesn't need any evidence to back it up other than people being told to buy a book and spend their time reading it, while claims that conservatives aren't more charitable than liberals have to be backed up by a masses of evidence?!

So in the interest of maybe providing a bit of evidence that no-one has to pay for I thought I'd brush up on my now very rusty statistics and see if I could do anything (thanks to the data mine mumblefratz kindly provided).

My brief (and far from comprehensive since I didn't want to spend much time doing it) analysis is that while the dataset does appear to indicate that conservatives are more charitable than liberals, it also indicates that part of that difference is due to religion, with the 'charitable gap' between conservatives and liberals widening when failing to account for religion. However the findings weren't quite so clear cut, in that people who identified themselves as liberals were more charitable than people who identified themselves as independent (i.e. initially it seems that the more conservative you get to a liberal, the less likely you are to give money to charity, until the trend reverses).

Unfortunately the variables used were in many cases simplified (e.g. total family income was grouped and capped at $25k), and the actual line was only able to account for about 11% of the variance. I also didn't bother to check for various other problems which could render the results meaningless. The only variables I used were income, political persuasion, religious beliefs, and frequency of charitable giving. It's a shame the variables used weren't made a bit more meaningful, since someone who makes an annual donation of $10k to charity comes off as less charitable than someone who gives $1 every week. So in fact I should qualify the above and say all I really found out was that conservatives might give more frequent donations than liberals.

Maybe you had a "blond moment" too (sorry, Jill). The book and the statistics it cites is evidence.

Depends on what you want to call "masses of evidence". I do understand that a book filled with statistics is not "evidence" when it comes to conservative arguments. I also understand that liberal arguments usually have to be bought without any evidence at all and that any request for any form of evidence is considered impolite and odd.

Hence, and I cannot find another explanation for it, the term "masses of evidence" as the only opposite of no evidence at all.