The Easiest Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

none,and i never will…

For me, it’s at least seventy-five thousand USD, and I’m only 30. I’m a recent atheist, and when I was a Christian, I tithed reliably for years.

My total is easily in the tens of thousands of dollars, and I was only tithing to the Mormon church for about 7 years.

When I was active in church, we had one great youth minister. One summer, he had us collect and repair clothing to donate. We also raised money and donated it to an orphanage. Then we took a trip to Denver to visit the place that compressed the clothing we donated to be sent overseas and to visit the orphanage. I never felt that even one penny that I donated to the church went to the wrong place or was misguided. We were a small, independent church, so we could see where the money went–it stayed 100% in our church and with the specific missions that we decided to support. My Mormon cousins, on the other hand, were forced to tithe 10% of even their babysitting money, and it went to support their obscene church structure.

I’m still in my teen years so I never gave my own money, but when my family goes which is just basicly only at Christmas and Easter with my whole extended family. We go to a small Catholic church in small town Wisconsin. Normally it’s only a couple of dollars. But I do remember that they do the $1 challenge. Where everyone can only give at max $1 and it goes to a local charity or something like that.

It’s not just the tithing that seems such a waste, it’s the waste of real estate and property tax exemptions. The more churches your town has the more you have to pay to support them!

When I as a kid there was this man in our neighborhood. Everyone knew him…he was a bit “off,” always broke and trying to make an easy buck. I remember one day running into him while I was walking with my father. They stopped to chat and he told my dad that he was going to start a church because he heard that people who did that made a lot of money. My dad humored him for a bit and then we went on our way.

He did it. He started a pentocostal church and made a killing. From then he was always walking around in suit and driving a brand new car every year.

I grew up culturally Catholic so church attendance was never big in my family. When we did go we’d give a dollar or two when they’d pass the basket around. The mandatory tithing was one of the reasons that many in my culture give “los convertidos” (the converted, i.e. the protestants/evangelicals) the side-eye.

My sisters and I did, however, attend catholic school from K-12 (because of how truly horrible the public schools in our district were, not for religious reasons) so the church got plenty of money from us that way, though I can’t really complain on that score. The tuition the schools collected barely covered teachers salaries, and many students paid reduced rates because of need. They did a lot of fundraising to make up the difference.

If you want to see a great movie on this topic, check out MARJOE. (I saw it on Amazon Prime Instant Viewing.)

The new pastor at the Southern Baptist church my parents attended (and forced us to attend) drove a full house of people away with his fire-and-brimstone style and hillbilly ways, leaving just our family, one other family, his daughter’s family, and some older women. My dad must have been giving more than our house payment, maybe much more. Then he tried to raise $70,000 to replace the roof. And had an affair with my mother. My parents got a divorce. Oh yeah, then he had an affair with the only other married woman in the church, who wasn’t elderly or his daughter.)

So I was playing around with bad translator, and after doing a few movie quotes, I decided to do parts of mass I remember from growing up. I got this, and it seems so relevant to this topic:

Original text:

“The LORD be with you. And also with you. ”

…50 translations later we get:

“Expensive”

I have never given to a church, however my mother considers herself mormon and although she hasn’t been to the church in 15 years (due to mental conditions), she gives 10% of her disability check every month. I am just glad my father told her that she couldn’t tithe his paycheck or they would be broke.

Not so much in actual cash, maybe. Probably several thousand dollars. However, my husband and I were missionaries for several years. He left his field of education and worked in construction to make ends meet while were ministered. We lost 8 years of good pay, then 7 more as he had to go back to school to get a Ph.D. after realizing missions work was bull. So, you could say we lost about 15 years of reasonable pay and retirement savings.
On terms of a couple hundred-thousand dollars, perhaps. Stupidity tax 🙁

When I was a kid (around 8 years old), I found a $50 bill at the airport with my grandparents. At their suggestion, I gave half of it to our church because I thought it was the right thing to do. Even though I really didn’t want to deep down, I acted like I wanted to. They don’t know I am an atheist because we’re not very close anymore. Wonder how they would react.

I was a practicing Mormon until my early twenties, and I always paid my required 10% tithing. 10% of my paper-route earnings, babysitting earnings, the money I made as a soccer referee – all of this before I was 16 and started working a “real” job. They were really nice about things, though – they’d print you off a tithing statement at the end of the year, so you could make sure you’d given enough. Luckily I got out of it before I ever started making any decent money, but still…

Of course, my tens of thousands are NOTHING when compared to how much my still-religious family members have thrown away over the years.

Christians have been noted for their gullibility for millenia:
The Death of Peregrine
by Lucian Samosata

Don’t forget secretly shuttling pederasts to & fro between unsuspecting trusting parishes and then denying justice to victims of institutionalized child molestation – I mean, does the pope wear a funny hat?

I tithed to the tune of about $10K, which would be double that at 2.5% annual if I had kept it. My brother, who is quite religious, broke from his church when it demanded that the elders tithe to set a good example. My brother noted that tithing was not something that Jesus promoted, being an OT thing, but they required it anyway. Now my brother, still religious, calls himself a follower of Jesus and shuns the church politics.

Yup! It’s pretty horrible that I give money to a church and in turn they manage to feed, clothe, house and educate the homeless through City Union Mission. How dare they use my money to build schools and orphanages in Rwanda. It’s such a blasphemy that they set up a scholarship fund for the kids of my 33 yr old friend who just died from cancer. That’s terrible isn’t it?

I will say this however, there ARE a lot of scam artists who work under the disguise of church leaders. What they are doing isn’t church and they aren’t Christians. That describes 75% of all of the examples of “Christians” that you use on this site. Example” The Westboro Baptist Church. They aren’t Christians at all. But those who don’t know any better (people who run this site) go on and say “Wow! Christians are really whacky! Watch the Westboro Baptist Church!!!” I’m telling you, there are a lot of imposters out there, so PLEASE educate yourselves a bit on the subject. Do your homework. All of the atheist vs “Chrisitan” debates that I’ve seen posted around the internet by atheist friends are always between a leading prominent atheist author and some Catholic priest that nobody has ever heard of. Why is that?

The Catholic church is whacky and are money hungry. I’ve had a priest pretty much admit that to me before. So why do your prominent leader debate the imposters of Christianity rather than the real thing? Why not take on a Ravi Zacharias, Lee Strobel, John Piper, Joshua Harris, etc? Can someone help me out here?

went weekly for 10 years as a kid and my parents always gave me $5 for the plate (they dropped me off for church rather than going with me, which should have been a hint at the time.) Tack on a little extra for around Christmas and I probably gave close to $4000. Not a ton, but certainly money I wouldn’t mind having back.
More embarrassing still is the fact that, in my early teens, I was an usher for the church and was responsible for collecting the hard earned money of others.

I’ve personally never given a single cent. My grandmother, on the other hand, thought that it would be a great idea to empty out her brother’s entire life savings (without his permission, of course) and give it to some church in Florida.