This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. Hey, is that a teletubby?
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Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. Hey, is that a teletubby?
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
This is just my take on it, so ignore it with a grain of salt.
Tithing, giving 10% of your income to the church, is basically membership dues. If you do not tithe, your good standing in the church is called into question. Boy Scouts are a charitable organization but the dues paid to be a Boy Scout are not considered a charitable contribution, they are membership dues. If you decide to give more than your required membership dues then it would be charity? Does that make sense?
… insert “folks” where previously typed “guys”…
carlie:
I have never once thought about it that way. This puts a new perspective on a lot of past attempts at relationships.
****
Joe:
Wow. Again, I never viewed past relationships through that lens.
Looking back over the last decade, I’ve put more into dating people than I’ve gotten out of it. I can think of 6 people in the last 5 years where that’s been the case. Sadly, unless my memory is wonky (which it may well be), the last time I dated someone who treated me as well as I treated him was in 2003, when I briefly dated someone in New Orleans, LA.
Lynna, thank you for all the references. Do you have any on misogyny? It’s much less well covered.
Improbable Joe
No kidding!
I think some of these people don’t anything.
Hey PZ!
We’re on page 3!
Thanks, KG and PZ.
Eggplant (Yeah, I know I’m late)
Cut eggplant in half and roast. Scoop out pulp and dice. Add sauted onions, garlic, cheese and some herbs, put it back in the eggplant shell and roast until heated through. Peas can be added for colour, flavour and texture.
In my view, tithing is not charity in large part because so much of it goes to evangelizing. Paying to try and recruit people to your religion is not charitable. As Lynna noted, little of the LDS revenue goes to “actual” charity as we would colloquially define it.
Ogvorbis makes another excellent point wrt tithing. I completely agree.
Squash was grown by indians to get containers and decoration they didn’t eat the damn things
Indians ate seeds, fruit, leaves and roots, not vegetables
corn
beans
casava
tobacco etc.
Its my story and Im sticking to it :-)
Good news everyone!
According to the stain I just did by accident, my glasses to not hydrolyze calcein! They are not alive!
Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney have a habit of claiming that people agree with them when those people manifestly do not.
So in case anyone’s wondering, the white chocolate tempering thing didn’t work out so great.
I mean, sure, it tempered. Seems to be reasonably glossy, set up in minutes, as tempered stuff is supposed to do…
But in the zone, the stuff was maddeningly difficult to handle. Really thick, difficult to get to and keep at temperature–best guess is either the specific heat is a lot higher than dark stuff, or conductivity is lower, and, obviously, viscosity of this stuff at 87 Fahrenheit is a lot higher as with dark at 89. So I got like eight truffles out of a pound of chocolate before the whole thing became an unmanageable mess, and each truffle is this freakin’ huge blob of white chocolate, with, somewhere in each, presumably, the centre…
Not sure if that’s the material I used or what. But anyway. I’m probably going to have to go back to dark stuff just to cover the rest of the centres I’ve got. Which do seem pretty promising, anyway. Mint and coffee and unadorned chocolate ones, as planned, and my ganache is now a lot easier to handle, too.
Og and Portia thank you, so stipulated 10% tithes is a membership not a charity. Fair enough, so Romney only contributes 20% of his income to charity then. That is still a sizable percentage of money being handed to others. Still cant buy your way into people liking you but still a chunk of change
Bummer, AJ.
On tithing. Another thing: you pay so you can stay cool with gawd (or whatever) and keep all your brownie points and get safely into paradise. With charity, you do it for its own sake. Ideally, anyway. Not to mention the disgusting extravagance of modern churches, which is paid for how? Oh yeah, tithing.
@broboxley
Charity usually means it will be used for people in need and not a business transaction. While it may seem like that is what is happening at smaller churches where the tithing is doing little more than paying for utilities and groceries for the priest, it is still the price of being entertained every week. Ask yourself, would they still tithe if the priest was not entertaining them regularly and/or not doing something church related?
Of course one should never have to go without food and shelter and other necessities of life, but why obfuscate the act of tithing to pay for the priest and the temple, etc., into this idea of charity and not just call it like it is: payment for the entertainment? The unwillingness of most people to look at churches as businesses is the problem.
Also, tithing has been found to hardly even go toward charitable actions at the broader level with well-organized church groups, especially the nationwide ones: http://www.secularhumanism.org/fi/vol_32/4/cragun_32_4.pdf
Simultaneous posting, broboxley, didn’t mean to pile on. You’re right, that’s a lot of money. I’m willing to bet it’s from a place of “I’m running for office for Pete’s sake!”
Yes, finally, a NEW THREAD.