Can you put a price on faith? That is the question churchgoers are asking as the tradition of tithing -- giving 10% of your income to the church -- is increasingly challenged. Opponents of tithing say it is a misreading of the Bible, a practice created by man, not God. They say they should be free to donate whatever amount they choose, and they are arguing with pastors, writing letters and quitting congregations in protest. In response, some pastors have changed their teaching and rejected what has been a favored form of fund raising for decades.
The backlash comes as some churches step up their efforts to encourage tithing. Some are setting up "giving kiosks" that allow congregants to donate using their debit cards when they attend services. Others are offering financial seminars that teach people in debt how they can continue tithing even while paying off their loans. Media-savvy pastors sell sermons online about tithing. And in a shift, more Catholic parishes are asking churchgoers to tithe.

This trend worries some church leaders. "If everyone gives 2% of their income because that's what they feel like giving, you aren't going to have money to pay the light bill and keep the doors open," says Duane Rice, an official with Evangelical Friends International, a denomination that believes that tithing is required by the Bible.  (Fortunately, the "true believers" will fork over millions without asking questions). Steve Sorensen, director of pastoral ministries at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, says the church requires its paid and volunteer leaders to tithe, and teaches new members to do so, although it doesn't make them show proof of income. "When you tithe, God makes promises to us, that he ... is not going to let anything bad or destructive come about," says Mr. Sorensen. For those who don't tithe, he says the Lord "is not obligated to do those things for you."  So if I tithe, God is obligated to do things for me? So God can be bought out like a cosmic gumball machine?

Resistance to tithing has been increasing steadily in recent years, as more churchgoers have questioned the way their churches spend money. Like other philanthropists today, religious givers want to see exactly how their donations are being used. In some cases, the growth of megachurches, some with expensive worship centers equipped with coffee bars and widescreen TVs, have turned people off of tithing.  Some Baptist churches are trying to encourage tithing by accepting credit-card payments and automatic deductions from checking accounts. Two years ago, the Rev. Marty Baker, pastor of Stevens Creek Church in Augusta, Ga., created the "giving kiosk" machine that allows congregants to donate at the church from their bank cards. He and his wife launched SecureGive, a for-profit company, which has placed 50 kiosks in churches. He says the machines can help track which families are giving the most. Why is there so much disproportionate animosity to the church over other non-profit institutions asking for money? Is it a backlash to an empire-building fixation among mega-churches? How do big churches get around that image, if at all? Then again, why should churches have to compete in the marketplace of ideas? It’s all God’s money anyway. Of course he wants you to spend it on the new building. It was created for Him so more people can hear about Him. You don’t think He can just turn up in conversation around the water cooler or in a cigar parlor?! He’s God. Jesus may have picnicked on a hillside, in the fish market or the Bethlehem Bar, but in this Season of Giving, remember, God doesn’t come on tap! Don’t blame the church for putting Him back in the temple where He belongs.

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Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study (by the Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation) says they now represent the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional districts. Franc used IRS income data on a state-by-state, district-by-district scavenger hunt (with no agenda other than the truth :) to realize that while more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in decidely Democrat-controlled Senate districts, the vast majority of conservative House members hail from profoundly middle-income districts. Franc extrapolates that that pattern shows the likelihood of electing a Democrat to the House is very closely correlated with how many wealthy households are in that district. (Or how few Republican hard core capitalists have found their way into the District yet on the ladder climb to the top). So will the class warfare that’s become a staple in the Democrats political playbook come back to bite them in the butt? How long will they be able to play both sides against the other? Haven’t we always known this? Republicans are the party of NASCAR. Was there ever a NASCAR fan born with a silver spoon in his mouth unless that spoon carried a Yoplait Yogurt or other assorted sponsorships?

The Hub Radio Show - America's First Competition Talk Show
Listen LIVE Saturdays 6pm on 920am WGKA - Streaming online at www.920wgka.com and downloading for FREE at www.thehubradioshow.com. Call in at 1-888-920-2665.

The British Government unveiled plans last week to take up to 53 pieces of information from anyone entering or leaving Britain.  For every trip, security officials will want credit card details, vacation contact numbers, travel plans, email addresses, car numbers and even any previous missed flights.  The information, taken when a ticket is bought, will be shared among police, customs, immigration and the security services for at least 24 hours before a trip is due to take place. Anybody about whom the authorities are dubious can be turned away when they arrive at the airport or station with their baggage. If this proves successful, can we be far behind? Since our government is not allowed to spy on its own citizens, can this be a way we let Britain do it for us? Will this cause tourism to suffer in Great Britain? Will Heathrow loose airline business to other European hubs-especially for connecting flight?

The Hub Radio Show - America's First Competition Talk Show
Listen LIVE Saturdays 6pm on 920am WGKA - Streaming online at www.920wgka.com and downloading for FREE at www.thehubradioshow.com. Call in at 1-888-920-2665.

The Christmas Season. The season of the inner child, innocence, magic and a growing generation of adults who remind us that there is a curious new generation social scientists are saying are not emerging into adulthood but creating “adultolescent” status. What is happening to a culture where our adolescent years are being put on overdrive into our late 20s and early 30s? Is it natural social conditioning or is it only natural because its become widely accepted? Should it be widely accepted? Is it healthy or unhealthy to have the adolescent mind in your post-college years? Do you see these activities as adolescent or just a release from the pressure cooker of life? Sure, life stages are large social constructs defined by outside environmental influences. But four factors seem to be contributing to a category of in-betweens at a level never before seen in American society. Factor one, is the growth of higher education. Much of this got its jump-start after the introduction of the GI Bill that fostered changes in the American economy, and government subsidizing of community colleges and state universities that serviced a spike in high school graduates going on to college and beyond. A second factor is the delay of marriage until one's late 20's, brought on by a prolonged need to explore options (a combination of more options and more knowlege of available options) and the unprecedented levels of freedom. A third factor are economic changes in the American economy and beyond that have undermined stable, lifelong careers replaced by lower stability, higher turnover careers. Career tracks have trumped careers in a specific company. Finally, aware of the pressures on the next generation to succeed, parents are becoming increasingly willing to subsidize their children financially and otherwise well into their twenties. This pipeline helps young adults maintain the freedom longer. The operative question is, Is this the freedom to find reality or the freedom to avoid reality? Is society enabling "emerging adults" to engage or withdraw from meaningful contributions?

China has it together. They always have. Why would question anything to the contrary? Their GNP and national financial reserves are through the stratosphere, they have graciously assumed large portions of America's national debt (along with our national pride and national production mechanisms) their people live real long time, the working conditions we have access to look buttoned up and they have the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beiijing. What's not to love? Then again, what about this high tech internet censorship operation still calling to mind the existence of a free speech xenophobe lurking just beneath the surface? If everything's above the bar in China (which of course it is, I wouldn't dare say otherwise and question their...resolve) then what are they trying to to keep in and out of the country (certainly not Wal-Mart shelf stock) and why? DO you believe, as some experts have said, that Communism is dead in the Red Giant? Sure, Friedman, open markets would (oops, WILL...Friedmian Slip) hold their political aspirations at bay. But are they really open markets or are you just trying to sell the 15th edition of The World Is Flat: The World Is Flatter: The World Is Flattest? Nothing against your book but it's still hard to innovate against a production work force that does not have to play by the regulatory rules in place for my state-side production. Indulge my ignorance, how do I innovate around sweat shops?

Attorneys in Atlanta at the firm Schiff Hardin LLP raised their collective steak knives last week with a legal victory against the Georgia Department of Agriculture for not enforcing the 1990 Humane Euthenasia Act across the board. The gassing of Georgia's yet uneaten animals - mostly domesticated and not of the bovine persuasion - continues under a grandfather clause that allowed for already existing canine concentration camps to persist. My question: If they were grandfathered in, what's illegal about that? The real issue is over a "new" facility built in Cobb County as a replacement to a chamber that had fallen into disrepair. They weren't violating as much as they were assuming operational costs. Furthermore, why not euthenize through gas chambers? How is that any less humane than lethal injections, not to mention the danger to humans that occur when administering injections that require workers to be in very close proximity to sometimes desperate animals. Either way, if you're dying you ain't gonna feel great, no matter how they put out the lights! And wouldn't you rather not be a burden on yourself and others under living conditions that could send you into a pet therapy group? What's more humane? Protracted misery or a quick fix? Thanks to that spineless wretch, Bob Barker, you've already lost your balls. Good riddance to him!

The field of international relations looks clean when packaged in a 5 minute newscast. The reality on the ground is often much more complicated as author and World Net Daily journalist Aaron Klein (who interviews senior Islamo-terrorists like you talk to your neighbor face-to-face on the front lawn) is pointing out in his startling new book, Schmoozing Terrorists. According to Klein, the U.S. has been arming, training, funding and coordinating security with known terrorist operatives including the senior leadership of one of Palestine's most active groups since before the turn of the century. Our State Department, ever the optimists sleeping with copies of Louise Diamond and Benjamin Ferencz books under their pillows at night, stood up in August to announce the training of Force 17 (an arm of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah forces) in the use of military weapons of which we are the supplier. This is all courtesy of an $85 million dollar United States Congress-approved grant. But, you say, Fatah has long been working to defeat the Islamofascism of Hamas and Hizbollah so where's Klein's beef? Turns out many of the Fatah regime and the Preventative Security Services in Palestine have been moonlighting in the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade for years. According to Klein, the Brigade, along with the Islamic Jihad terror group, has presided over virtually every suicide bombing in Israel in the last 3 years with thousands of shooting attacks and grenade launches along the West Bank to their name.

So what does a U.S. training camp for terrorists look like and what does it cover? According to Abu Yousuf, a Force 17 officer Klein interviewed, the training includes both intelligence and military tactics. Intelligence training for him included the collection of information on suspected persons, how to tail a suspect, how to infiltrate organisations and how to penetrate cells. The only thing left out was how to cook a mean chili dog and bake an apple pie! Militarily, the training included weapons and explosives, sniper techniques, special units training, et cetera. When asked about a terrorist's incentive for coughing up information on America in a Hub Radio Show interview last week, Klein explained that for Yousuf and others, it's one more opportunity to give Americans' an embarrasing paper cut in the War on Terror ink-on-paper PR war. The more grave threat are stories of the unintented use of American dollars to prop up Hamas-run schools and at least one university where the chemistry Lab Coats are turning out rockets and suicide bomb belts.

The take home of Schmoozing Terrorists and my interview with Klein were several lessons learned from the terrorists themselves. One, contrary to peace-niks who would call us warmongerers for saying it (and I can think of nothing I would rather do than promote my affinity for warfare as a heartless big business capitalist longing to cash in on the machine...NOTE: call my broker to check on the earnings status of my military contract stocks) terrorists see cease-fires as nothing more than a chance to reload. They even have Quranic support from the religion of peace-by-negotion. The Arabic word for truce is "hudna" which in the Quran falls in line with Muhammed's 10 year cease-fire in the Truce of Hudaybiyah. This "truce" refers to the attacking Quraysh tribe of Mecca in the seventh century. In Islam the principle known as "Takiya" bears the right to "fake" peace when you are weak in order to wait for a more opportune time to strike. (Gotta love a purist!) And we all know the outcome for the Quraysh tribe. (FYI- They weren't around to talk about it.) Two, unilaterally evacuated territory like the West Bank (a la the pie-in-the-sky two state Israeli-Palestinian "dis-solution") creates a vacuum that terrorists are more than willing to fill. Three, terrorists like Hamas' Abu Abdullah are calling America's bluff on the notion of a "war on terror". Says Abdullah, "How can you fight an idea?" Islamic Jihad's Abu Mosaab furthers, "You [America] fight for your own materialistic reasons...but insurgents...[are] fighting for Allah and looking to die and be killed as a shaheed (martyrs). Brigade leader Al Aqsa Adassi echoes those sentiments. "After we put aside that you are the terrorists and we are resistance movements leading a legitimate religious war that will not accept any compromise, I must say how foolish it is of Bush to launch a war against something called terror." Nothing like a little Islamo-fascist brow beating to wake you up in the morning. Aaron Klein, for one, hopes his new book will be just that - a triple shot espresso to America's regional response to terrorist relations. For the record, America does not negotiate with terrorists.