Busting the Myth That Christians Are More Generous Than Non-Believers

[TlalocW]

36. My experience (long)

I'm a part time balloon twister and magician but mainly balloon twister. Working for tips at restaurants is normally part of the job because it's a way to hand out your card to get birthday parties. I started in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which many of you know is full of religiously insane people. It's not necessarily all Christians that are bad - just the really crazy kind like you had there. I had a close relationship with the magic stores there (both owned by good Christians), and while they both looked forward to Halloween (both also had costumes), one mentioned to me the downside was all the churches were doing Harvest Parties instead of Halloween Parties in order to turn the holiday into a more church oriented one, and the bigwigs in the churches would come and look for non-spooky (because spooky = Satanic to churches who do freakin' Harvest parties) costumes and novelties to buy/rent and ALWAYS expect a discount because they were churches. The worst offender actually did spooky stuff... "GUTS Church," (cuz it takes guts to love Jesus), did a Hell House where you walked through spooky rooms like a normal Haunted House but all the rooms depict things like homosexuals burning in hell or the devil appearing to a woman about to get an abortion. I went through it once. It was interesting, and I pissed a few workers off accidentally.

That conversation happened fairly soon in my "career," and I started noticing it so when church people started asking me how much I charged, I would tell them my special Church rates were $X per hour... where $X was my normal rate, and technically it was true. I mentioned this on a balloon twisters forum and earned the ire of a big name twister (yes, we have famous twisters who put out tutorial DVDs), and I told him once they start acting like Christians and rendering unto Caesar maybe I'll give them a discount the next time.

The first time I worked outside of Tulsa was Oklahoma City. It was for an Indoor Fun Fair, which I also had worked for the previous weekend in Tulsa. Tips were soooooo much better I couldn't believe it. I'm now in Kansas City, and tips are even better than either Tulsa or OKC.

The following link is a site that unfortunately is no longer updated, but the archives are still there. Basically, it was a place for restaurant servers to come complain (and sometimes rave) about working as servers. There are two relevant stories to find on the page. Do a search for Christians, and you'll find them, and you'll see that it's not just that pastor who's a problem.

http://stainedapron.com/misc.htm

TlalocW