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I would bet there are people with much less money coming into their business that make much more than Bakker did. The notion that no 'preacher' should be paid tons of money doesn't make sense. If their bills are paid etc, and there is money left to pay them $1mm a year, why should they not make that. If you read the news you get paid $40mm a year...
I think it's funny that some megachurch leaders are very wealthy, but I wouldn't call them scumbags for it. I don't mind a preacher making money, just a preacher that steals it.
A guy names Barry begins selling drugs to children. The profits are huge, he takes some of that profit and invests in a night club, a legitimate night club. From the profits of that night club's liquor sales he builds a park. Is that park's existence enough to forgive him from the fact that all his wealth comes from the money he made selling drugs to children?
If he sold heroin to 10 year olds, no. If he sold weed to high school kids, yes. Then again, if he sold heroin to some 16 year olds who were going to do heroin regardless of where it came from, and 20 years down the road had made billions in legitimate business all stemming from those few months of drug sales, and upon dying gave those billions to worthy charities, saving and improving the lives many thousands of times more people than he hurt through drug sales...you get the idea. There are so many grey (gray?) areas here. The ends don't justify the means, except for when they do.
Or Barry the drub dealer?
Now he's a violent offender as well?
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I actually believe that, and it's one of the reasons that I've always been a very big fan of yours. You're sincere, and the rarity of sincerity never ceases to amaze me. More importantly, though: you

I looked up that passage and didn't see where it said "salvation is by good works." 14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save t

I think it's more like, "Without faith, it doesn't matter what you do." Meaning you can't just be a good person to get into heaven.Regarding the first point, if you're standing in the middle of the r

<wakes self up from warm fuzzy daydream about milken>What we really need to settle this is a Celebrity Deathmatch, Bakker vs. Milken.
I am fully willing to concede all my winning points in exchange for the Hair of Doom to meet the Philanthropist Powerhouse I would give Milken about 48 seconds before the Tears of Hypocrisy crush his Anal Cancer Donations Punch
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If he sold heroin to 10 year olds, no. If he sold weed to high school kids, yes. Then again, if he sold heroin to some 16 year olds who were going to do heroin regardless of where it came from, and 20 years down the road had made billions in legitimate business all stemming from those few months of drug sales, and upon dying gave those billions to worthy charities, saving and improving the lives many thousands of times more people than he hurt through drug sales...you get the idea. There are so many grey (gray?) areas here. The ends don't justify the means, except for when they do.
Well with situational ethics ruling the day there is no right or wrong I guess
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I think it's funny that some megachurch leaders are very wealthy, but I wouldn't call them scumbags for it.
I would. They are a disgrace to all Christians, Christ-followers, and Jesus Christ himself.The modern day example that all pastors should model their lives after is John Piper in Minneapolis.100% of all the money he makes from his 50 or so books goes to charity.He lives in a small house that he bought with his wife in the 60's or 70's.He refuses all raises that his church offers him.
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I would. They are a disgrace to all Christians, Christ-followers, and Jesus Christ himself.The modern day example that all pastors should model their lives after is John Piper in Minneapolis.100% of all the money he makes from his 50 or so books goes to charity.He lives in a small house that he bought with his wife in the 60's or 70's.He refuses all raises that his church offers him.
But does his dog suffer through the heat?
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I would. They are a disgrace to all Christians, Christ-followers, and Jesus Christ himself.The modern day example that all pastors should model their lives after is John Piper in Minneapolis.100% of all the money he makes from his 50 or so books goes to charity.He lives in a small house that he bought with his wife in the 60's or 70's.He refuses all raises that his church offers him.
I don't have a problem with rich people.Some people can be rich and be Christians.Some can't.If the elder board is a Biblical based group of over-seers and they give a pastor a salary, I am fine with it.If the elder board is a bunch of hand picked yes men and family members, then I think there is a problem regardless of the size of his salary.Why shouldn't a man who sells millions of books and has a mega-church be rewarded with a sizable income?The sin is not in your income, but what you do to get it, and what you do afterwards.It is also fine with me if people chose not to give to a church because they feel the pastor has too much money, as long as they give somewhere else.And it is admirable when a pastor turns down a large paycheck, or gives most of it to other charities.
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I don't have a problem with rich people.Some people can be rich and be Christians.Some can't.If the elder board is a Biblical based group of over-seers and they give a pastor a salary, I am fine with it.If the elder board is a bunch of hand picked yes men and family members, then I think there is a problem regardless of the size of his salary.Why shouldn't a man who sells millions of books and has a mega-church be rewarded with a sizable income?The sin is not in your income, but what you do to get it, and what you do afterwards.It is also fine with me if people chose not to give to a church because they feel the pastor has too much money, as long as they give somewhere else.And it is admirable when a pastor turns down a large paycheck, or gives most of it to other charities.
You and I couldn't disagree more on this topic.We are all called to look out for our "weaker brothers". How much more so are pastor's called to do this? For this reason alone, I believe that pastor's will be judged harshly for hoarding money. Piper isn't hurting for anything. He can do whatever he wants whenever he wants, he just also happens to give millions of dollars a year to charity, and live humbly. Can anyone accuse him of living like a king? No. Because he is above reproach in this area, and that is key.The issue isn't whether or not being rich is sinful (it's not), it's all about perception, and when you chose to take a leadership role in the church, you are choosing to hamper your choices. You can't rent certain movies, or watch certain TV shows. You have to be very careful about smoking or drinking (even in your house). IT'S TOTALLY IRRELEVANT if any of this stuff is absolutely ok. You do not want to damage the message by your unintended actions.All you have to do is compare someone like Piper to the likes of Swaggert, Bakker, or Joel Osteen and you will see which ones will be spit out of God's mouth on judgment day.
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The premise that a man who personally gained by the foundation that Milken started, is used as a character witness, is flawed.
You never showed that said man personally gained anything from a foundation started by Milken. You simply stated it, even gave us an actual dollar amount, and then completely ignored my continued attempts to get you to explain where you read that, or how you came to that conclusion, or where you got the dollar amount from. My hypothetical response still answered it pretty well I think, but the entire question I was answering is still, itself, hypothetical until you give us the factual details, or at least show us that you didn't completely invent the entire scenario.
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Ken Hamm that owns this is pretty much the root of all evil.
hahaha
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From Ken Hamm's website,http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ke...hallenges-nasa/Nine Year Old Challenges NASAI received a letter from a nine-year-old girl who has been brought up on AiG resources. She wrote to me the following:

I went to a NASA display of a moon rock and a lady said, “This Moon-rock is 3.75 billion years old!” Guess what I asked for the first time ever? “Um, may I ask a question?”And she said, “Of course.”I said, in my most polite voice, “Were you there?”Love, Emma B
Emma’s Mom wrote a letter to us with more information:Actually, Emma, age 9, asked a bit more, but I just copied what she typed for you. She was VERY excited to share it with you, since she’s been blessed to hear your teachings through your kids DVDs and Kids Answers.I found it all quite interesting myself. We went to a portable moon-rock display from NASA here at a local festival in South Carolina. What I found strange was what seemed to be the MAIN point when we walked into the display is the presenter kept saying, “This moon rock is 3.75 billion years old!”. . . . I have no idea if she actually worked for NASA, or was a volunteer. But, Emma proceeded to answer that she thought the moon rock was probably around 6,000 years old, after the presenter asked her how old she thought it was then since she didn’t believe it was 3.75 billion years old? Then the rep asked Emma how she came up with that? Emma answered, “The Bible. If the earth was made around the same time as the moon, wouldn’t they be the same age?” Emma answered. Then the rep replied, “Oh, yeah I believe in the Bible too.” But, in the same breath said “Scientists have proven this…yada, yada, yada, blah, blah….”The first picture attached is what Emma drew for you back in March–to encourage you – [because I was disinvited from a homeschool conference]…The second is of Emma at the NASA exhibit, touching the 3.75 billion year old moon rock (yes, I like sarcasm)……and the 3rd one was what was in the exhibit in case you wanted to see it.Thanks for your time! Blessings and prayers for you and your ministry…Love in Christ…Each time I give examples in my blog posts of children who have been influenced by AiG, the atheists go ballistic on their blogs. They hate to read of instances like this. They want to teach these children there is no God and they are just animals in this hopeless and meaningless struggle of this purposeless existence.Praise the Lord, Emma has such a strong foundation in God’s Word and won’t fall for the atheist lies in their attempts to shake their fist at their Creator God.
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This post from Scienceblogs has been nominated for The Open Laboratory 2011, so I thought I’d repost it here on the new site, just in case it gets accepted.
Dear Emma;I read your account of seeing a 3.75 billion year old moon rock, and how you asked the person displaying it “Were you there?”, the question that Ken Ham taught you to ask scientists. I’m glad you were asking questions — that’s what scientists are supposed to do — but I have to explain to you that that wasn’t a very good question, and that Ken Ham is a poor teacher. There are better questions you could have asked.One serious problem with the “Were you there?” question is that it is not very sincere. You knew the answer already! You knew that woman had not been to the moon, and you definitely knew that she had not been around to see the rock forming 3.75 billion years ago. You knew the only answer she could give was “no,” which is not very informative.Another problem is that if we can only trust what we have seen with our own two eyes in our short lives, then there’s very little we can know at all. You probably know that there are penguins in Antarctica, and that the Civil War was fought in the 1860s, and that there are fish swimming deep in the ocean, and you also believe that Jesus was crucified two thousand years ago, but if I asked you “Were you there?” about each of those facts, you’d also have to answer “no” to each one. Does that mean they are all false?Of course not. You know those things because you have other kinds of evidence. There are photographs and movies of penguins and fish, there are documents from the time of the Civil War, as well as the fact that in many places you can still find old bullets and cannon balls buried in the ground from the time of the war, and you have a book, the Bible, that tells stories about Jesus. You have evidence other than that you personally witnessed something.This is important because we live in a big ol’ beautiful world, far older than your 9 years, and there’s so much to learn about it — far more than you’ll ever be able to see for yourself. There’s a gigantic universe beyond South Carolina, and while you probably won’t ever visit a distant star or go inside a cell, there are instruments we can use to see farther and deeper than your eyes can go, and there are books that describe all kinds of wonders. Don’t close yourself off to them simply because you weren’t there.I’d like to teach you a different easy question, one that is far, far more useful than Ken Ham’s silly “Were you there?” The question you can always ask is, “How do you know that?”Right away, you should be able to see the difference. You already knew the answer to the “Were you there?” question, but you don’t know the answer to the “How do you know that?” question. That means the person answering it will tell you something you don’t know, and you will learn something new. And that is the coolest thing ever.You could have asked the lady at the exhibit, “How do you know that moon rock is 3.75 billion years old?”, and she would have explained it to you. Maybe you would disagree with her; maybe you’d think there’s a better answer; maybe you’d still want to believe Ken Ham, who is not a scientist; but the important thing is that you’d have learned why she thought the rock was that old, and why scientists have said that it is that old, and how they worked out the age, even if they weren’t there. And you’d be a little bit more knowledgeable today.I’ll assume you’re actually interested in knowing how they figured out the age of the rock, so I’ll try to explain it to you.The technique scientists use is called radiometric dating. It uses the fact that some radioactive elements slowly fall apart, turning into other elements. For instance, a radioactive isotope of potassium will decay over time into an isotope of another element, argon.One way to think of it is that it’s like an hourglass. You know how they work: you start with all the sand in the top half of the hourglass, and it slowly trickles into the bottom half. If you see an hourglass with all the sand at the top and none at the bottom, you know it was recently flipped over. If you see one with half the sand in the top, and half in the bottom, you know it’s about halfway through the time it will run. And if you look at how quickly the sand moves through the neck of the hourglass, you could even figure out how long until it all runs out.In radiometric dating, the scientists are looking at how far along all the radioactive potassium is in the process of turning into argon. The amount of potassium is like the amount of sand in the top half of the hourglass, while the amount of argon is like the amount in the bottom half. By measuring the relative amounts of the two elements, and by measuring how fast radioactive potassium turns into argon, we can figure out how long it’s been since the rock solidified.It takes a very long time for the decay to occur. It takes 1 and a quarter billion years for half the potassium to turn into argon. When they measured those elements in the moon rocks, they found that the radiometric hourglass had mostly run out, so they knew that it was very, very old.Scientists double-check everything. They also looked at other elements, like how quickly uranium turns into lead, or rubidium into strontium, and they all agree on the date, even though these are decay processes that run at different rates. All the radiometric hourglasses they’ve used give the same answer: 3.75 billion years. None of them say 6,000 years.I think you’re off to a great start — being brave enough to ask older people to explain themselves is exactly what you need to do to learn more and more, and open up the whole new exciting world of science for yourself. But that means you have to ask good questions to get good answers so that you will learn more.Don’t use Ken Ham’s bad question, and most importantly, don’t pay attention to Ken Ham’s bad answers. There’s a wealth of wonderful truths that reveal so much more about our universe out there, and you do not want to close your eyes to them. Maybe someday you could be a woman who does go to the moon and sees the rocks there, or a geologist who sees how rocks erode and form here on earth, or the biologist who observes life in exotic parts of the world…but you won’t achieve any of those things if you limit your mind to the dogma of Answers in Genesis.Best wishes for future learning,PZ Myers
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PZ Meyers, isn't he the one who attacked Vox Day's family because he was frustrated how bad his arguments were painted when a little logic was applied to them?Yea, he goes for personal attacks then declares he isn't going to debate anymore because he is giving the other side credibility by having his name on the debate.Butterfly catchers are sure babies.But its nice to see that he found an equal match for his intellectual skills, a nine year old.

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Dear Emma;Don’t use Ken Ham’s bad question, and most importantly, don’t pay attention to Ken Ham’s bad answers.
I mean, that'd be great if the girl would ever be allowed to read it, which she wouldn't.
But its nice to see that he found an equal match for his intellectual skills, a nine year old.
Is there anything about his "letter" that you disagree with?
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I mean, that'd be great if the girl would ever be allowed to read it, which she wouldn't.
PZ Meyer's daughter was trained much better: ( post 35)Skatje Myers, the daughter of atheist PZ Myers, wrote:"Sexual relationships between humans and animals come as such a shock to people, but it doesn’t to me. There can be very deep, meaningful relationships between humans and their pets...That said, I remind you that my position isn’t based on my own personal wants. I just don’t see any reason to ban it other than the same reason things like homosexuality and sodomy were banned: it’s icky. I think it’s bad practice to put social taboos into legislature when no actual logical argument can be made against it.
Is there anything about his "letter" that you disagree with?
Why would I read a letter by a butterfly catcher who doges people in his field who challenge him when he is trying to argue with a 9 year old?
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PZ Meyer's daughter was trained much better: ( post 35)Skatje Myers, the daughter of atheist PZ Myers, wrote:"Sexual relationships between humans and animals come as such a shock to people, but it doesn’t to me. There can be very deep, meaningful relationships between humans and their pets...That said, I remind you that my position isn’t based on my own personal wants. I just don’t see any reason to ban it other than the same reason things like homosexuality and sodomy were banned: it’s icky. I think it’s bad practice to put social taboos into legislature when no actual logical argument can be made against it.
PZ obviously raised a daughter that is independant, smart and makes her own decision. I don't always agree with Skatje, and haven't read alot of her opinions, but undoubtedly she is very intelligent and wasn't raised under the cloud of dogma that permeates so much of America's youth. Other than that, I am not sure why you brought her up except that you are obviously for putting social taboos into law without any logical reasons.
Why would I read a letter by a butterfly catcher who doges people in his field who challenge him when he is trying to argue with a 9 year old?
Because you might learn something about how to think critically and ask the right questions instead of being proud that you have the same mentality towards the issue as a 9 year old that has brainwashed with dogmatic cultish beliefs?
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Why would I read a letter by a butterfly catcher who doges people in his field who challenge him when he is trying to argue with a 9 year old?
He's not arguing with her any more than her preacher is arguing with her.You didn't answer my question. What specifically about his "letter" do you disagree with? Anything?
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you are obviously for putting social taboos into law without any logical reasons.
Uh, well, I could make a pretty solid and logical argument for sex with non-humans being illegal for reasons other than simple social taboo.
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Uh, well, I could make a pretty solid and logical argument for sex with non-humans being illegal for reasons other than simple social taboo.
Main thing seems to be that it's difficult to judge their level of consent.
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Uh, well, I could make a pretty solid and logical argument for sex with non-humans being illegal for reasons other than simple social taboo.
I wasn't refering to that issue (as I implied), simply that it is the pot calling the kettle black for BG to bring up that comment when he is clearly in favor of irrational laws based on social taboos if it suits him. e.g. gay marraige.
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