Right, that's why they have massive churches adorned with gold and intricate sculptures. Just because it technically isn't required to pay does not mean that years of brainwashing won't condition you to give your money away. I've only been a few times, but seeing old people queue up to give a sizable part of their pension to the church just made me sad.
Evidence for that statement? Can you give some examples?
Mostly when people say "the Bible is not true" its usually a result of misunderstanding it (e.g. adopting Biblical literalism, not understanding the culture and context, not understanding nuance).
As I understand it, there are parts of France that spent time as parts of Germany and are still somewhat culturally German that do church tax in a similar way - much of what was Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen).
To be clear: (almost) no one is forced to pay church tax in Germany - only members of the churches that have an agreement with the government to collect it on top of income tax have to pay it, and you can choose to leave those churches. For Protestants ("evangelisch"), that's usually not as big of a deal as it is for Catholics who still believe; there are plenty of non-church-tax-collecting Protestant churches around the country, including the one I'm a member of.
"Almost": there were many couples with very unequal incomes in which the non/lower-earner would stay in the church so that the family would still get the various services (baptisms, weddings, preferential admission to church-affiliated schools, etc) while the higher earner would "leave" (on paper), leaving the family paying far less in church tax. That loophole was closed - if the higher earner isn't a member of another church collecting church tax, they can be required to pay church tax to their spouse's church. I'm not sure this is still in effect, but it was for a while.
In Germany it's not really true. AFAIK you pay those taxes only if you are registered follower of 3 main religions. You literally can opt out, they are a counter example.
Poland is the one I experience it. Church is funded in multiple ways. At least 3 billion PLN a year from concordat deal from 90's. Priests have pensions and annuities. Churches pay no taxes on (heating) fuels. Schools pay for Religious Education classes, very often run by priests or nuns. Uniformed services almost always pay for cleric's services or clerics fully in their services.
Of course church still gathers funds on their own, sometimes using dark patterns.
I think tax breaks are different from direct funding, the same for payment for specific services at a reasonable price. For example the UK exempts virtually all religious bodies from tax, and its on the same basis as a huge range of things (e.g. amateur sports, equality and diversity, community facilities...). I would not consider that state mandated payment for services.
I do not know enough about the concordat or how Polish pensions work to comment on those. I would be interested but there does not seem to be a lot of information online (e.g. the wikipedia article is a stub)
I was thinking of Christianity as I was responding to a comment that used the word "church".
However, besides that, subsidies from general taxation are not the same as payments for a service received (i.e. going back to it being a "subscription service"), whereas something like the German system where the payment is linked to entitlement to services (if other comments here are accurate) can be reasonably characterised as a subscription service.
I disagree with the distinction between subsidies and payments. The math is zero sum, either way purchasing power is undesirably and forcibly reduced from one entity and given to another.
Where does the money come from? Religious services are generally funded by donations, and these donations are usually done in the open, whereby (from what I saw) regularly attending and not donating the expected amount would put you in a socially uncomfortable situation.
Back when my parents made me go to church, I remember observing that a lot of the donations being made were in envelopes that the church provided.
That's pretty private, I think, in that one's fellow churchgoers can't discern much but the thickness of the envelope. It'd look the same if the donation consisted of 5 singles, or 5 hundreds.
(I have no idea if that's standard accepted practice everywhere, though I might imagine that someone would be getting pretty uptight at some level if people weren't giving enough to put another layer of gold on the roof of a Catholic church -- envelope or not.)
No reason anyone would would feel social discomfort in my experience, which is mostly in Catholic and Anglican churches, and AFAIK money comes mostly from donations not made in public. I have not felt the least worried about what people would think when I have not had cash on me or about how much I put in.
Depending on the definition of services you are using (e.g. you only mean masses in a Catholic Church, or everything else churches do) lots of things are done without a link to donating: prayers and meditation of other kinds/formats, confession, pastoral care, food banks, religious education and discussion.... In poor countries often things like medical services.
Done the traditional way, no one can really see how much you put in the box and there is no reaction at all from anyone if you put nothing in. Only people right next to you can see anything at all.
Now churches in the UK offer envelopes on which you can write your name and postcode for tax reasons (they can reclaim part of the tax paid on the donation if you are a UK tax payer) so no one can see how much you put in if its in such an envelope.
I do know that, but I also know how donations can become an expectation.
Also, it's worth noting in the context of this thread, that people can use AI inference for free on many services, with payment only need for higher usage, and even then, if you don't care about expectations or inconvenience, it's trivial to abuse the free tier.
A thousand years? What made you go with that number?
The protestant reformation was only about 500 years ago, and I'm pretty sure that Martin Luther wouldn't have bothered that much if the expected "donations" were really cheap. And even if you do go with "a coin", which was apparently the price of an annual indulgence for a regular peasant, that was about the same price as a whole pig, or on the order of $1k in today's money, so definitely not symbolic.