Before I begin; sorry, I don't know hubski markup yet, so I don't know how to quote you efficiently. To address the first paragraph; given the democratic nature of the republic, and the past 200+ years of Judicial history, I'd say that for the vast majority of people, it does pass the sniff test. At any rate, majority has little to do with the "rightness" of a subject. If you really want me to demonstrate it, I'll start with the idea that this atheist worships the state. How do we know this? Because from the get-go, he presumes the state owns everything. This is why he willingly confuses subsidies with tax exemption. To him, it's not that the government isn't taking away something from the church. It's that they're letting them use what the government already owns, while the same privilege isn't being extended to everyone else. This is an arrangement he despises, and as such, thinks it should be changed. It's the equivalent of a petulant child demanding their mother take away their sibling's juice box because they don't have one. For the second paragraph: full disclosure - I am an anarchist of sorts. Taxation is violent theft. It's a group of people taking money away from people who've worked for it (mostly so they can buy bombs and bullets to kill brown people in the Middle East). I think it's actually unreasonable to say that someone is justified to take another person's money just because they wear a badge or sit on a seat of authority. Really, how do you justify it? I mean, really, how is that a reasonable position? How is the unilateral use of force and violence to rob people in any way remotely reasonable? The simple truth is: it's not reasonable. It's just statist philosophy; a violent, immoral system that many can't even see because they were raised in it and have had their head pumped full of statist nonsense in public schools.