Australian church tax law ruling against Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

According to Adam H. Kerman snipped-for-privacy@chinet.com:

Australia is not the U.S., and in particular it does not have the First Amendment or anything like it.

Courts in the U.S. have bent over backwards to avoid deciding whether a church is sincere, which has led to obvious harmless jokes like FSM being accepted as churches, and rather less harmless ones like Scientology, also.

Australia, like most rich countries other than the U.S., has largely abandoned formal religion. The Methodists, Presybyterians, and Congregationalists merged in 1977 into the Uniting church to maintain critical mass. So a judge there has a lot less reason to say that a joke is a joke and not a church.

I have nothing against FSM, and a lot of sympathy for their point that the silly things they say aren't any sillier than things that mainstream churches say, but it's still a joke.

I don't know how separation of church and state works in Australia. According to Wikipedia, their First Amendment equivalent reads thusly:

Australia has no official religion. Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia states: "The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth."

That's comparable language to our constitution.

I also don't know exactly what is being protested. Does recognition in tax law get a church a government subsidy?

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster isn't a joke religion. Through satire, it is making a serious point that official recognition that religion must play a real-world part in official government programs and services causes real-world harm in what's supposed to be a secular nation. It was founded to counter the attempt to teach intelligent design, a religious teaching (that had just been made up), in public schools.

I didn't know that; thanks.

Hey! We have a ruling here that the administrative law judge was not amused! Instead, the satire (and very bad puns) are offensive toward mainstream religion!