Taxation in the UK

Just a small point really. An article in a daily newspaper had this headline:

Church makes more money than Starbucks or McDonald’s: Income of £1.41bn tops fast food giant’s earnings of £1.37bn – and three times higher than the coffee chain.

If the government is going after banks and companies for tax, then they should also go after the superstition pushers. In 2015, I feel it is utterly ridiculous that an organisation as large as each church can get away without paying duties to the governing body of the country in which it operates simply because it has a BELIEF in an imaginary figure that can neither be proved nor disproved, but in all likelihood, is utter nonsense. Well, my personal stance on this is that it’s the brain, and there is only “superstition” as a function of the brain, and god is a symptom, so definitely NOT real.

But let’s think about this differently. What is emerging in the church and the retail world? People, consumers are becoming much wiser, or at least, much more experienced. They are building up defences over time against nonsense like the church. This is a problem for the church, so let’s leave it with them.

But people are still creatures of habit, and they still have this function for superstition in their brains. So what is replacing religion in the average thinking consumer? I suspect you could reel off a few examples right now: football team affiliation, political party membership, blue-eyed brigade, red jumper wearers… anything that involves in-groups, basically.

So, it made me think: I wonder if Starbucks could claim religious status as its “followers” religiously attend their “chapel” every day for an habituated fix and get an enormous sense of well-being from their offering? Taxation problem solved for them!