The media recently reported that the chairman of a temple in Taipei is suspected of embezzling temple property. Such behavior borders on religious fraud as well as raising issues in connection with the laws on religion, the role of the religious voluntary sector and the deployment of welfare resources.
There is a pressing need to establish legal regulations for religious groups. However, "religion" has its own particular humanistic and social meaning. This makes it necessary to be extra cautious when it comes to discourse about interactions between religion and society.
Apart from thinking about tax and legal issues, we should also pay attention to religious behavior that "transcends rationality." After all, for the general population, "law" (legality) and "rea-son" (legitimacy) are not primary considerations when it comes to religious worship, making donations, or giving to religious
charities.
The significant charitable resources amassed by religious organizations have long been a thorny public issue for the government. Enormous amounts of alms, or charitable resources are accumulated primarily due to the charisma of individual religious leaders or a particular god or spirit.
The real issue here is re-thinking the designs behind the operations of religious organizations and their related charitable works.
The donations religious groups receive relate to the question of the allocation of public resources -- no matter what creed or god they profess -- therefore, large religious organizations should not be able to evade public supervision by society and the government.
But to a considerable extent, the debate over supervision re-mains mired in technicalities. This includes matters of supervision by the government, the design of management mechanisms and the question of whether corruption or abuse occurs in the financial workings of these non-profit, voluntary organizations.
As for issues such as the aims in establishing religious chari-ties, organizational goals, or religious freedom and the separation of church and state, government agencies alone cannot solve these problems. In the end, these questions await the power of collective supervision from society.
The most important starting point for evaluating a case of alleged embezzlement is to look at the systemic problem -- human weakness stemming from desire. From this perspective, inspection of the internal restrictions on religious organizations -- including operational failures -- and the differences between each religion's unique world view and the lay society's point of view, should be issues that naturally come to mind.
Religion is just another re-flection of mankind. When bestowing religion with a divine character, we shouldn't forget the human shortcomings that may manifest themselves in religious figures or representative institutions.
As for the problem of beliefs that transcend rationality, the basic approach is to look at religion as a form of discourse or a forum for dialogue.
On this basis, we can review various sorts of religious and social behavior, such as the creation of saints and gods, exorcism and possession, and orthodox or heterodox beliefs.
From this perspective, we shouldn't use overly moralistic discourse to discuss the embezzlement case. Similarly, we also needn't kneel in worship by overly inflating the importance of these religious groups or even going so far as to worship them with a kind of super-civilized reverence.
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