It would be better yet, though, for physicians just to scrap all of the above and charge cash for visits. In your opinion, why don't they? The all-cash model effectively shuts down the cost-shifting game.  That means losing the ability to do great works of altruism on somebody else's dime.  Price t...

The Surgical Center of Oklahoma is an example of an institution that has gone to an all-cash model.  http://surgerycenterok.com/  It posts its prices up front and expects cash at the time of service.  Not surprisingly, its prices are a mere fraction of what's being charged for similar proce...

I'm another one of those cash-on-the-barrelhead types, and I detest the concierge model as much as I do the rest of the cost-shifting approaches.  For one who sees a general practitioner once a year at most, $60 a month makes for a darned expensive visit, especially when you consider how much gets r...

"Religion has nothing to do with immortal souls. It’s about bodies. Especially women’s bodies. Religion is concerned with sex and with violence, in that order. Men want sex from women; men fight over women to get it. . ."

You didn't think the serpent was really a serpent, did you?

I mostly avoid the off-topic section of the forum because much of what goes on here simply makes me ill. What I most enjoy about this forum is the intellectual honesty and thoughtful analysis that characterizes most of the debate here.  I can see how that could be a problem if the agenda is more im...

According to the article, there is no suspect. 

So I guess it's just logical to assume this is the work of a Christian?

I have attached a pro non-trinitarian and a trinitarian article. Also there is a book by Kermit Zarley (http://servetustheevangelical.com/tract_the_real_jesus_4.html) about this topic as well. Any thoughts on this? I realize this gets into the weeds of Monotheism/Christianity but that why we're try...

I don't know if you are a Messianic Jew or not, but if you are then I think you are probably much closer to what early Christianity was like than are any Christian group striving for the same thing. No, just somebody trying to get to the truth.  However, near the top of my reading list are some boo...

I have a little more time this morning, so I thought I'd just sum up the most salient points pertinent to my earlier post relating to my skepticism of Paul's claim to authority and Mountaineer's question about Acts 9: Paul's "meeting" with Jesus involved a personal revelatory experience in...

Paul never met Jesus?  How do you interpret Acts 9? One very intriguing interpretation of Acts 9 suggests that Paul's revelatory experience on the road to Damascus was the fulfillment of numerous prophetic warnings, including those of Jesus himself, that there would be an imposter claiming to have ...

I was wondering if there was anyone else on this forum who is as skeptical of Paul's claim to authority as I am.  It's my own view that much of the doctrine integral to mainstream Christianity comes not from the words of Christ, but from the writings of Paul.  Indeed, the gospels take on a very diff...

I'm not so sure that the whole cause-and-effect paradigm isn't a construct of the human mind, which by its nature is hardwired to spot connections between things and to impute a variety of meanings to them.  (When you think about it, this is a highly adaptive behavior when it comes to survival of th...

You can win any argument by claiming ownership of the definitions.  I doubt that too many people would go along with the idea that anything short of full state ownership of the means of production is just another brand of liberalism.

  Cultures, over time, tend to descend into a self-righteousness based mess before recovering to interdependency.  Based upon the evolution of culture during the 20th and 21st centuries, one could easily conclude that the disintegration of society is a one-way street from which there is no possibil...

I'm afraid I'm nowhere near that exciting. . . or ubiquitous.  Thanks for the welcome.

To the believers here I would ask has God ever answered your prayers? I mean, really? If you say you aren't supposed to expect him to answer your prayers I would say what is the point then and also point out that Jesus said, "All things whatsoever you desire when you pray, believe that you rec...

This might be a good time to pose a question regarding the premise that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.  There does not seem to be much disagreement regarding the historical events that led to the compilation of the particular writings that comprise the book we now call the Bible:  In short, ...

MachineGhost wrote: But, welcome officially to the forum!  I imagine you must have had numerous temptations to register and post a thought over the years, but this one finally did it, huh?

You hit the nail on the head--and thank you for the kind welcome.

I've been a quiet lurker on this forum since the inception, and have followed the "Figuring Out Religion" thread with interest.  One thing that continually jumped out at me as I perused all 168 pages of that thread was how the discussion devolved (as usual) into either a "thumbs up&qu...