Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Charity

My FRC team created a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization so that all donations to our organization would be 100% tax deductible. It's pretty cool, huh, that the government says "we want your money, but if you say that you gave it to an approved foundation we won't ask for it.". Even cooler is that a bunch of geeks building robots in some guy's basement count as an "approved foundation."

I also happen to know that our church can give you information about the amount of money (checks at least) that you gave to the church, and that you can get a tax deduction for that.

But wait! It's giving supposed to be sacrificial? If you have to give the money away to the government anyway, is it really a sacrifice giving it to an organization that you know will do a better job with it? I mean, if you give it to the government or to the church... your net wealth doesn't change. And since giving to the gov is compulsory, you're really not giving anything up anyway... you're just taking money that you would have had to give to the gov and giving it to the church.

Which is great, it means that the church is better able to function.
Which is great, it means that the gov has that much less cash to pour into welfare.
Which is great, it means that the church will probably be able to give "welfare" to the people that actually deserve it, since they know better than the gov.

Buuuut, it still isn't really sacrificial giving, is it? You're not sacrificing anything.

Actually, my dad says that the whole concept of "sacrificial" giving is bogus because it's all God's money anyway. Yeah, you can't donate something to somebody that already owns it. You can't really give something up that you don't really own.

And all of this started because I'm supposed to be fundraising for my team's trip to Atlanta. Why do I have to analyze things? Couldn't I just have gone and given away brochures?

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