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Tecumseh wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:

Tecumseh wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:

Tecumseh wrote:Why is it the most wealthy country/institution in the world, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, doesn't just take care of all the homeless and sick people? Why doesn't the local church down the street raise money for cancer patients and operate a homeless shelter after church services? Why should I be forced to do that with my tax dollars. Churches don't even pay taxes but keep the money they are gifted and don't even use it for good works. Just another reason that the tax system is not fair. Churches need to start coughing up money and doing their fair share.

Don't know what planet you've been on, but churches are already doing all that and more. How much of your money goes to take care of the poor? I can tell your a certain fact that churches (and their members individually) are the ones giving the most out of their own pockets to charity. Who do you think staffs organizations like the Union Rescue Mission.......Christians and other religious people, or atheists?

Churches are absolutely doing the charitable work that others won't do, and supporting that work through the funds they raise through the tithe and other gifts. If you can't see it, it's because you don't want to.

Please post some links to support your facts.

Here is some support that says atheists are more charitable than believers.

http://www.livescience.com/20005-atheis ... ssion.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/01/c ... evers-are/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyat ... o-charity/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/05 ... us-people/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Interesting. My question is just why don't they shut down the churches or reduce the number of niceties and give to the poor? Just like when I see a welfare recipient with an iPhone and a 60 inch TV, I ask why they don't get rid of it if they need the money? Why don't churches stop their intense desire to have nice stuff if they claim they want to help others? I am sure somebody would be willing to buy some of the relics in Holy See.

Dude, how about a little intellectual integrity? Your links do NOT represent four independent sources of data. Shall I take them apart, one by one in detail.....OR.... would you prefer me to deal with them in a few sentences? Tell you what......I'll start with an artillery barrage, and then you try a coherent rebuttal, and we'll go from there, OK?

Fully THREE of your 4 links (The Blaze, Hotair, and Livescience) refer to ONE article in the July 2012 issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science....so that is really only ONE source. In fact, one of your "sources," The Blaze, referred to the Livescience page as actual DATA! You just can't get anymore intellectually dishonest than that. Even The Blaze's link to the alleged UC study links to the Livescience page, not the UC study. In fact, not one of your alleged "sources" actually links to the study.....so that's a "double blind deception." And you call that intellectual honesty? Please.

And the fourth "source" assumes that churches do not give to charity, a blatant lie which I know to be a lie from actual personal experience. The actual Philanthropy.com article does not say what Patheos.com says it says. They lied. Fancy that....and atheist lied....how can that be? The actual Philanthropy article said:

But the generosity ranking changes when religion is taken out of the picture. People in the Northeast give the most, providing 1.4 percent of their discretionary income to secular charities, compared with those in the South, who give 0.9 percent.

Patheos.com conveniently left out a paragraph:

Religion plays a major role in how much money Americans give to charity. The parts of the country that tend to be more religious are also more generous.

YOU, quite disingenuously, argue that giving to a church is NOT giving to a charity.....but that is an easily provable falsehood. Look, if you give money to a worthy cause like, say, Doctors without Borders, you know that a certain amount of the money you give is going to cover the nuts and bolts costs of administration and logistics, which cannot be avoided, and that only some percentage of your donated money is going to actually be delivered as hands-on medical care at the far end, right? Well that's what happens when people give to churches. Some percentage of that money goes to keeping the lights on and paying staff to run the thing, and a huge part of that money is delivered at the far end as shelter for the homeless, or medical care for the needy, or food for the hungry. And by the way, your Patheos.com article quotes a study done by Philanthropy.com. Please note that when divided by state, the red (more likely to be religious) states far outgave the blue (less religious) states, even when taking into account population.....like Utah gave twice as much as New York. Also, your linked page made fun of mega-churches, but the statistical FACT (which you conveniently overlooked) is that the median church size is only something like 75 attendees and the average church size is 186 attendees. (SOURCE), and in totality, 94% of all church goers attend a church of 500 or fewer attendees, and only 0.41% of all church attendees go to a "mega-church" of more than 2,000 attendees. My own church, with average weekly attendance of around 1,300 or so falls into just 2% of all churches. It's just that the mega-churches have such high profiles that they're the ones that atheists pay attention to.........so single-mindedly clinging to their scientifically unprovable prejudices about churches and charity.

So really, THIS is what your poverty-stricken dataset looks like:

1. A link to Patheos.com which misquotes and mischaracterizes Philanthropy.com by making assumptions that are not part of Philanthropy.com's dataset OR their conclusions.
2. Three links:
   
   1. Hotair.com, which points to a Livescience.com article.
   2. TheBlaze.com, which points to the same Livescience.com article.
   3. Livescience.com, a non-peer review "science" publication which makes a claim without providing any links to any data, to back up the claim. However, to be fair, let's list their alleged attribution: the July 2012 issue of the journal "Social, Psychological, & Personality Science. Just so you don't think that I faked it, HERE is a link to the table of contents for THAT issue: http://spp.sagepub.com/content/3/4.toc. Let's take a look at the article titles for that issue, shall we?
      • Value Activation and Processing of Persuasive Messages
      • When Hierarchy Wins: Evidence From the National Basketball Association
      • Intensity of Smiling in Facebook Photos Predicts Future Life Satisfaction
      • Fair-Weather or Foul-Weather Friends? Group Identification and Children’s Responses to Bullying
      • When Closing the Human–Animal Divide Expands Moral Concern: The Importance of Framing
      • Experimental Evidence That Positive Moods Cause Sociability
      • Anger as a Hidden Motivator: Associating Attainable Products With Anger Turns Them Into Rewards
      • Awareness of Common Humanity Reduces Empathy and Heightens Expectations of Forgiveness for Temporally Distant Wrongdoing
      • First See, Then Nod: The Role of Temporal Contiguity in Embodied Evaluative Conditioning of Social Attitudes
      • To Whom Can I Turn? Maintenance of Positive Intergroup Relations in the Face of Intergroup Conflict
      • Friend or Foe, Champ or Chump? Social Conformity and Superiority Goals Activate Warmth-Versus Competence-Based Social Categorization Schemas
      • My Better Half: Partner Enhancement as Self-Enhancement
      • The Dark Triad and Interpersonal Perception: Similarities and Differences in the Social Consequences of Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy
      • Lowering the Pitch of Your Voice Makes You Feel More Powerful and Think More Abstractly
      • Sex, “Lies,” and Videotape: Self-Esteem and Successful Presentation of Gender Roles
      • Two Types of Value-Affirmation: Implications for Self-Control Following Social Exclusion

I see no mention in any of those titles of the roles of atheists versus the religious in charitable giving.

Set, game, match. Come back when you have some real facts, and not some made-up garbage. BTW, how much of your own income goes to secular charities?

Sources to prove your statement? I posted links which you attacked but provided no credible evidence against.

OK, you're just being deliberately obtuse. My "attacks" against your sources PROVED they were false. Did you actually READ my deconstruction of your alleged "proof?" You offered FALSE proof, and now you accuse me of needing to still disprove your false proof? There are none so blind as those who are deliberately and willfully so.

Good luck in your fantasy world.

cb1000rider wrote:I don't care who is more charitable. It's not a contest... I'm just happy to see that someone else digs deep for facts and doesn't believe everything on face value. Thank you!

And I don't care either about who gives more.....until I see a false assertion made like Tecumseh's, which is just bone-headed. And I added to my facts, BTW. I had previously hit "submit" when I meant to hit "preview" and wasn't yet finished. His argument is destroyed.

Tecumseh wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:

Tecumseh wrote:Why is it the most wealthy country/institution in the world, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, doesn't just take care of all the homeless and sick people? Why doesn't the local church down the street raise money for cancer patients and operate a homeless shelter after church services? Why should I be forced to do that with my tax dollars. Churches don't even pay taxes but keep the money they are gifted and don't even use it for good works. Just another reason that the tax system is not fair. Churches need to start coughing up money and doing their fair share.

Don't know what planet you've been on, but churches are already doing all that and more. How much of your money goes to take care of the poor? I can tell your a certain fact that churches (and their members individually) are the ones giving the most out of their own pockets to charity. Who do you think staffs organizations like the Union Rescue Mission.......Christians and other religious people, or atheists?

Churches are absolutely doing the charitable work that others won't do, and supporting that work through the funds they raise through the tithe and other gifts. If you can't see it, it's because you don't want to.

Please post some links to support your facts.

Here is some support that says atheists are more charitable than believers.

http://www.livescience.com/20005-atheis ... ssion.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/01/c ... evers-are/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyat ... o-charity/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/05 ... us-people/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Interesting. My question is just why don't they shut down the churches or reduce the number of niceties and give to the poor? Just like when I see a welfare recipient with an iPhone and a 60 inch TV, I ask why they don't get rid of it if they need the money? Why don't churches stop their intense desire to have nice stuff if they claim they want to help others? I am sure somebody would be willing to buy some of the relics in Holy See.

Dude, how about a little intellectual integrity? Your links do NOT represent four independent sources of data. Shall I take them apart, one by one in detail.....OR.... would you prefer me to deal with them in a few sentences? Tell you what......I'll start with an artillery barrage, and then you try a coherent rebuttal, and we'll go from there, OK?

Fully THREE of your 4 links (The Blaze, Hotair, and Livescience) refer to ONE article in the July 2012 issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science....so that is really only ONE source. In fact, one of your "sources," The Blaze, referred to the Livescience page as actual DATA! You just can't get anymore intellectually dishonest than that. Even The Blaze's link to the alleged UC study links to the Livescience page, not the UC study. In fact, not one of your alleged "sources" actually links to the study.....so that's a "double blind deception." And you call that intellectual honesty? Please.

And the fourth "source" assumes that churches do not give to charity, a blatant lie which I know to be a lie from actual personal experience. The actual Philanthropy.com article does not say what Patheos.com says it says. They lied. Fancy that....and atheist lied....how can that be? The actual Philanthropy article said:

But the generosity ranking changes when religion is taken out of the picture. People in the Northeast give the most, providing 1.4 percent of their discretionary income to secular charities, compared with those in the South, who give 0.9 percent.

Patheos.com conveniently left out a paragraph:

Religion plays a major role in how much money Americans give to charity. The parts of the country that tend to be more religious are also more generous.

YOU, quite disingenuously, argue that giving to a church is NOT giving to a charity.....but that is an easily provable falsehood. Look, if you give money to a worthy cause like, say, Doctors without Borders, you know that a certain amount of the money you give is going to cover the nuts and bolts costs of administration and logistics, which cannot be avoided, and that only some percentage of your donated money is going to actually be delivered as hands-on medical care at the far end, right? Well that's what happens when people give to churches. Some percentage of that money goes to keeping the lights on and paying staff to run the thing, and a huge part of that money is delivered at the far end as shelter for the homeless, or medical care for the needy, or food for the hungry. And by the way, your Patheos.com article quotes a study done by Philanthropy.com. Please note that when divided by state, the red (more likely to be religious) states far outgave the blue (less religious) states, even when taking into account population.....like Utah gave twice as much as New York. Also, your linked page made fun of mega-churches, but the statistical FACT (which you conveniently overlooked) is that the median church size is only something like 75 attendees and the average church size is 186 attendees. (SOURCE), and in totality, 94% of all church goers attend a church of 500 or fewer attendees, and only 0.41% of all church attendees go to a "mega-church" of more than 2,000 attendees. My own church, with average weekly attendance of around 1,300 or so falls into just 2% of all churches. It's just that the mega-churches have such high profiles that they're the ones that atheists pay attention to.........so single-mindedly clinging to their scientifically unprovable prejudices about churches and charity.

So really, THIS is what your poverty-stricken dataset looks like:

1. A link to Patheos.com which misquotes and mischaracterizes Philanthropy.com by making assumptions that are not part of Philanthropy.com's dataset OR their conclusions.
2. Three links:
   
   1. Hotair.com, which points to a Livescience.com article.
   2. TheBlaze.com, which points to the same Livescience.com article.
   3. Livescience.com, a non-peer review "science" publication which makes a claim without providing any links to any data, to back up the claim. However, to be fair, let's list their alleged attribution: the July 2012 issue of the journal "Social, Psychological, & Personality Science. Just so you don't think that I faked it, HERE is a link to the table of contents for THAT issue: http://spp.sagepub.com/content/3/4.toc. Let's take a look at the article titles for that issue, shall we?
      • Value Activation and Processing of Persuasive Messages
      • When Hierarchy Wins: Evidence From the National Basketball Association
      • Intensity of Smiling in Facebook Photos Predicts Future Life Satisfaction
      • Fair-Weather or Foul-Weather Friends? Group Identification and Children’s Responses to Bullying
      • When Closing the Human–Animal Divide Expands Moral Concern: The Importance of Framing
      • Experimental Evidence That Positive Moods Cause Sociability
      • Anger as a Hidden Motivator: Associating Attainable Products With Anger Turns Them Into Rewards
      • Awareness of Common Humanity Reduces Empathy and Heightens Expectations of Forgiveness for Temporally Distant Wrongdoing
      • First See, Then Nod: The Role of Temporal Contiguity in Embodied Evaluative Conditioning of Social Attitudes
      • To Whom Can I Turn? Maintenance of Positive Intergroup Relations in the Face of Intergroup Conflict
      • Friend or Foe, Champ or Chump? Social Conformity and Superiority Goals Activate Warmth-Versus Competence-Based Social Categorization Schemas
      • My Better Half: Partner Enhancement as Self-Enhancement
      • The Dark Triad and Interpersonal Perception: Similarities and Differences in the Social Consequences of Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy
      • Lowering the Pitch of Your Voice Makes You Feel More Powerful and Think More Abstractly
      • Sex, “Lies,” and Videotape: Self-Esteem and Successful Presentation of Gender Roles
      • Two Types of Value-Affirmation: Implications for Self-Control Following Social Exclusion

I see no mention in any of those titles of the roles of atheists versus the religious in charitable giving.

Set, game, match. Come back when you have some real facts, and not some made-up garbage. BTW, how much of your own income goes to secular charities?

Tecumseh wrote:Why is it the most wealthy country/institution in the world, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, doesn't just take care of all the homeless and sick people? Why doesn't the local church down the street raise money for cancer patients and operate a homeless shelter after church services? Why should I be forced to do that with my tax dollars. Churches don't even pay taxes but keep the money they are gifted and don't even use it for good works. Just another reason that the tax system is not fair. Churches need to start coughing up money and doing their fair share.

Don't know what planet you've been on, but churches are already doing all that and more. How much of your money goes to take care of the poor? I can tell your a certain fact that churches (and their members individually) are the ones giving the most out of their own pockets to charity. Who do you think staffs organizations like the Union Rescue Mission.......Christians and other religious people, or atheists?

Churches are absolutely doing the charitable work that others won't do, and supporting that work through the funds they raise through the tithe and other gifts. If you can't see it, it's because you don't want to.

cb1000rider wrote:

VoiceofReason wrote:Complaining is easy. Tell me what you (meaning everyone) would do with the truly disabled and unemployable.

I think that's a great question. I saw one posting indicating that we don't have any sort of constitutional based responsibility to care for them. And I agree from the legal point of view, nothing in the constitution requires that... But making that comparison is a bit like looking for a pineapple in an vegetable garden. Therefore we let them survive on public good will, economic outreach from religious organizations, and private funding. Sounds good - can we count on it in all economic conditions?

No, we can't count on it, but then counting on government to do it isn't exactly working out, is it? ....no matter how high our taxes are....

cb1000rider wrote:I would establish a minimum standard of care/lifestyle and pay for it with tax dollars. I don't like it, but that's the choice I'd make. Lots of people here aren't going to like that, but how many are going to raise their hands and say that we should handle it the way we did before the 1940s?

First of all, go ahead and pay more taxes than you owe. I promise to neither protest nor try and stop you. If everybody who wanted or was willing to pay higher taxes simply shut their yaps and went ahead and paid additional taxes (roughly half the voters), is there anybody pollyanna enough to imagine that a grateful government would funnel all that extra money into supporting the poor? Please! Why do you imagine that if all of us had to pay higher taxes that government would funnel all that extra money into supporting the poor. cb1000rider, you're a smart guy. I don't for a minute think that you are that pollyanna. We can't even count on Congress to protect our Social Security investments by keeping it out of the general fund. What would make you, a rational man, think that we could count on Congress to sequester the additional tax money for relief of the poor? Simply not going to happen. It is my observation that LOTS of people say they'd be willing to pay more taxes to accomplish that goal, but NONE of them will do it unless it is compulsory for everybody. So in the end, they're not really interested in charity for charity's sake. What they want is for government to capture more of "everyone else's money." And that goes for everyone from your local mail carrier all the way up to Warren Buffet.....who is certainly in a better position than all but one or two other Americans to pay higher taxes....but won't put his money where his mouth is.

Secondly, I am old enough that pre-1940s was still fresh memory for my parents before I was born. Do you want to know what saved the economy? It wasn't FDR's New Deal, it was a little thing called WW2. Until the outbreak of WW2, FDR simply squandered the treasury in giving people "make-work" to keep them busy and collecting check, and staying out of trouble. But, THEY WORKED FOR THE MONEY! They built the great dams. They built highways. They built the Mount Rushmore Monument......etc., etc., etc. In other words, America received some benefit in exchange for the charity. Furthermore, some of FDR's economic consultants said in later years that the New Deal probably delayed economic recovery instead of helping it. It exceeds the mandate of the Constitution to provide charity of any kind whatsoever, but if you want government to provide it, then I as a taxpayer have a right to expect something in exchange for it. Put the poor to work, at a less than minimum wage salary (as an incentive for them to seek a minimum wage job instead of staying on the dole), and then stand back and watch them get themselves out of their financial holes.

For the small percentage of unfortunates who are genuinely disabled due to quantifiable physical injury or severe psychiatric disorder, the nation can make some kind of accommodation, and I would have no objection to putting money into that........if we cut money from somewhere else.....because government simply can't be all things to all people. But no more people on disability simply because they are too stressed out to work. We are ALL stressed out......particularly the self-employed such as myself.....and no more money to babymamas who keep adding ashcats to their family tree without a responsible and supportive father under the same roof.

Many years ago when I was young and single, I dated a young lady briefly. She was on welfare, and as a condition of her receiving it, she had to be involved in a job training program which she had to successfully complete in order to continue receiving welfare payments. Upon successful completion of the program, her welfare would be stopped. It was not open ended. She had to complete the program successfully by a certain date, or her welfare would be stopped. End result? She got a job.

cb1000rider wrote:It's the same sort of moral / ethical question when it comes to emergency medical care. Should we really turn people away from public care? In some cases, people will die as a result. I know that doctors are going to have a very hard time with that as a purely economic decision.

First of all, the law requires an ER to provide any and all life-saving care necessary, regardless of the patient's ability to pay for it. You are not allowed to transfer a patient from a private hospital ER to a county hospital ER if transferring the patient will put his/her health at risk. The patient must be stable and safe for transfer before they can be transferred, no matter how inconvenient that might be to the ER or the hospital in which it is located. I worked in an ER for years, and that's just a fact Jack. No hospital is going to withhold care and let a patient die simply because he or she is poor. That's not only a red herring, it's pretty insulting to the people who are actually going to provide that healthcare at the point where the rubber meets the road—many of whom...orderlies and lower order nurses and technicians....are living barely above the poverty level themselves because they are not at the top of the healthcare provision food chain.

Secondly, the problem with poor people in the system isn't the dying poor. It's the poor who use the ER as their personal physician, clogging up the system and needlessly burning up massive amounts of resources, each of whom HAS to be seen just for the ER staff to CYA and document that the patient is not dying but only has a common cold. For every dying gunshot poor patient an ER sees, that same ER will see hundreds of poor people with nothing more than the common cold. I don't know about you, but when I have a cold, I don't go to the doctor. A cold is a cold is a cold. It will go away in 7-8 days, pretty much no matter what you do, and you have to just deal with it. I don't go to the doctor for a cold because if I do, it takes about $140 out of my pocket for the visit. Poor people don't have to pay for those visits to the ER for their common cold, and so they go, even though it isn't medically necessary, and even though it is a boat anchor on the public healthcare system. It's free (to them), so why not go? "Spend more" is nothing more than a recipe for more of the same.

Now, I don't have it in for the poor, but the poor are a fact of life and even Jesus said they will always be with us. That which we do for the least of them, we do for Him, but that is a religious choice. If you make it anything more than the barest shoestring minimum of a government requirement, it is no longer charity, because real charity comes from the heart. The Widow's Mite was greater in the Lord's eyes than the largest charitable gift ever given, and the largest donation ever has no value in God's eyes if it comes from the heart of anyone but a cheerful giver. If it is paid in taxes under a threat of punishment for failure to pay, it is no longer given, it is taken, and now it is no longer a matter of the heart.

Taxes and charity are simply two completely incompatible notions.

JJVP wrote:

chuck j wrote:Your right , it's not fraud ...........it's premeditated greed .

So, corporations doing what the law allows them it do to maximize profits is greed. I guess if you put money into an IRA or 401k to reduce your taxable income, and keep more of your own money, that is also premeditated greed, right? Is it now our duty to supply the government all their wants? And if we want to, legally, reduce our "contribution" to the government, are we now greedy? Guess you don't take any deductions on your income tax either, right?

Gordon Gecko wrote:Greed is good.

God wrote:Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house.

So we can acquire as much as we want, so long as we don't want our neighbor's house.



(This is not my actual theology....it just seemed funny...)

03Lightningrocks wrote:How many in here receive chips? Again... You have no right to cry if you do. You are also part of the destruction of our country. Everyone likes their freebies and acts like the other guy is a bad guy for trying to get sum too.

I don't even know what that is. Can you please explain? As someone who pays out of pocket for ALL of his medical expenses and who is about to start being fined to pay for other people's health insurance, I am about ready to hoist the Jolly Roger. Maybe "chips" (or whatever it's called) will help push me over the edge.

cb1000rider wrote:If you want to rail against people that are abusing the system, you should read this: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

OK, so I read it, and I get it, but I still find the article disturbing. In talking about Jaleel, the "disabled" school kid who loves school. His family wants him to stay disabled because they get $700/month on his disability, and that is their primary means of income. But does the article suggest they get jobs? No. Here's what it says:

I haven't taken a survey or anything, but I'm guessing a large majority of Americans would be in favor of some form of government support for disabled children living in poverty. We would have a hard time agreeing on exactly how we want to offer support, but I think there are some basic things we'd all agree on.

Bill Clinton (to his credit) helped to put an end to it the last time we tried this........people having babies for the sole reason that they got more welfare money for it.

So at what point exactly do Americans STOP encouraging sloth? Benjamin Franklin wrote the following, and if I recall correctly, he was commenting on conditions in France at the time, but his (wise) counsel was that we should avoid the same situation:

Benjamin Franklin wrote:“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”

If 1 in 4 Americans is collecting a disability check with the numbers climbing, we have a big problem. If there are companies like Public Consulting Group getting paid, by states, $2,300 for each and every state welfare recipient they can convert over to the federal disability program (it's in your article), we have a big problem. Public Consulting Group is is getting PAID to implement the Cloward-Pivens Strategy.

How soon after the system implodes from direct actions taken to force its implosion do we resort to force of arms to defend our little pieces of turf and feed our kids? The American Model isn't failing because it can't work if left to its own devices, it is failing because there is a segment of our population who are traitors who do not not want it to work because they seek to replace it with their flavor of totalitarianism. They deserve the death penalty.