By Antiphon Freeman | 9 August 2015
Addicting Info
A Florida Pastor thinks he knows his numbers. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) better listen up to this guy. Dr. Craig Conner, Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Panama City, Florida has a solution to end the national debt once and for all – and “immediately” – according to him. He says that all you have to do is get rid of Planned Parenthood. Try to maintain composure – at least for a second. Let’s hear him out.
According to Pastor Conner, Planned Parenthood “wastes” over $540 million dollars of the federal budget, and the logic is, that’s “a lot” of money. Well, no one is going to argue that much moola isn’t a big number – but one does have to question the outlandish claims of it being the end all fix for our nation’s debt woes.
“You want to talk about reducing the national debt? We could reduce it overnight if they would defund this evil organization and put it on the national debt. Man, we could get out of debt immediately.”
Maybe Pastor Conner knows something about finance the rest of the world doesn’t know?
On the church’s website, it says that Mr. Conner holds degrees from Florida Baptist Theological College, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, the Master’s School of Divinity and Trinity Theological Seminary. Nope, no accounting degree mentioned. Where, then, is he getting his profound insights from? Mr. Conner doesn’t precisely say, but he does allude to one particular source on another issue.
In his Sunday sermon, Conner said that Planned Parenthood had met all the biblical definitions of “evil, wicked, ungodly, hellish, and shameful.” He even said that God was the one behind the Planned Parenthood operation that resulted in several undercover videos being released to the public. Maybe God also told him how to reduce the national debt? That’s a fair question.
“It must go because Planned Parenthood is to children what ISIS is to Christians. It’s an extreme threat.
I am no prophet but I believe with all of my heart and it’s my personal opinion, God is the one that has revealed these videos to give America one more chance to repent of the infanticide that is happening in our country. It wasn’t men who came up with this idea to reveal what was going on. I believe God was the one that exposed it.”
The problem is people actually believe this stuff. And, it’s hilarious on several levels. On the other end, it’s just downright scary. Some of these people hold positions of leadership in the community. The stupid just goes round and round. For starters, Planned Parenthood funding is just a pin drop in the national budget. For the fiscal year 2015, the federal budget was $3.8 trillion. $540 million dollars is basically nothing. With that said, our national debt is even more staggering, somewhere along the lines of $18,339,417,095.00. To get a more accurate picture of the debt our country faces, check out the U.S. Debt Clock HERE. It’s a fun little tool that really puts things in perspective.
What’s also comical about Pastor Conner’s statements, other than just being completely delusional and false, is that the federal government subsidizes religion in the United States by not requiring churches to pay taxes. Research has been done to figure out exactly how much the government loses each and every year because of this loss of revenue, and it comes close to $71 billion a year. Yes, billion.
If Mr. Conner really wants to start saving the government money, maybe he’s open to the possibility of finally paying taxes once and for all. Because, so far, his church and other churches like his simply haven’t been. And, it hurts the budget in a much bigger way than Planned Parenthood ever will. But, we have a feeling that God will probably have a problem with that.
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