Contrapuntal, that is the second time you have misattributed quotes I’ve made.
I’d ask you nicely not to do it again.
Besides which, you know full well I’m responding to implications that Jesus PHYSICALLY INTERVENED. Thanking Jesus is what people do when their faith helps carry them through something.
As it is, I’m past the point where I believe it to be worthwhile engaging you.
Fair enough.
I’m not the OP. My purpose here is to enlighten. 
If religion were not such a powerful force in our society, I might agree with you. And I do take your point[About the gay couple]. An expression of religion is the same as an expression of affection. I just don’t agree.
You and **Miller **are tied at the top of My Favorite Posters (with a few others.) I have tremendous respect for your reasoning abilities. Both of you, whether you remember or not, have been instrumental in causing me to re-think and eventually abandon positions I have held strongly. In light of that, I will retire to think on this some more. Thanks to both of you for your thoughts.
If anyone is claiming that they know exactly what ZJ meant, please point that out. Rather, you are the one claiming that you know with some precision what ZJ meant, and the implications therein, and people are proposing various possible alternatives.
How is it arrogant? If anything, it’s kind of humble. It’s only arrogant if viewed exactly the way you choose to view it, as “God loved me Best and helped me win over everyone else! I’m special111!!!1”, as opposed to “I believe that God gives me strength in all that I do”.
How do you know that ZJ didn’t thank God for just helping him get there the first time he played professionally on the PGA? Generally, the people we see being interviewed are the winners, not the losers. And if you’re someone who has genuine faith, but lost anyhow, (a) that doesn’t prove your faith is phony, and (b) what is there to say?
Now, why did you have to spoil this fun be being all reasonable and shit? 
**Miller **is on my “favorites” list, too, even when I don’t agree with him on a given issue. I do remember engaging in the same debates with you, but I seem to remember that we’re usually on the same side. Maybe my memory is faulty.
Unretiring just to add this. Misattributed quotes you have made? What does this mean exactly? That I claimed you said something you didn’t? Or I claimed you didn’t say something you did? Or I somehow attributed what you said to someone else, or vice versa?
What was the first time? And the second? I seriously don’t know. It is the kind of behavior I find troublesome in others, and will sincerely apologize for if I am guilty of it.
If Jesus caused Johnson to think, or behave, or relax, or become calm, then the intervention was physical. Thoughts, and physiological responses, are physical by definition.
Not really a debate. You made me think about the “Is it necessary to teach evolution in grade school” topic. I had not realized how central it was to understanding even basic biology.
Max, as I said, I am abandoning the field to think about this some more. I will gladly respond via e-mail, or PM, but I try to keep my promises.
Then what, is he thanking himself for his superior faith in Jesus?
Oh noes, a poor maligned Christian! Jesus, the slightest challenge or questioning of their dumb-ass statements, and its the height of bigotry. I’d like to think Jesus would give his followers some bigger stones to go along with their sporting prowess.
Oh, pardon me. I didn’t realize you were serious.
“In other news, Zack Johnson was banned from competing in any PGA events after failing his God test. Johnson was found to be under the influence of The Holy Spirit, a violation of PGA substance abuse policies. When asked for comment, Johnson replied, “Well I’ll be Goddamned””.
That doesn’t happen because there is no God, or he doesn’t intervene. The implication of thanking God for his help is that he does exist and does intervene.
As I said, people who make such statements are effectively claiming to have cheated, with God’s help. They haven’t actually cheated, because there’s no God to do any such thing, but if there was, being helped by him would be cheating.
The religious intolerance displayed in this thread by people who attack someone of faith strikes me as particularly amusing. The idea that anyone could be so offended by a man attributing his success to his faith says a lot about them. I suppose if the athiests who actually get offended by this sort of trivial nonsense had any faith of their own (besides questioning the faith of others), then perhaps they wouldn’t be so bitter about something so completely unimportant. If the petty arguments you’re having in this thread – which are now resorting to whether or not divine intervention smiles upon those who they essentially condemn as false prophets – are any indication, then it’s clear that your grasp of religion is probably not suitable to understanding why certain people don’t find anything wrong with letting it be known that their faith centers and guides them, as Hero Pup has been trying to say.
This thread will lead nowhere, as any thread about athiests needing to approve of how faith should or shouldn’t be applied is wont to do. He’s wronged you in a major way, I know, and his injustice is obviously nothing compared to your intolerance for his faith. Really, you ought to find something actually worth being upset about. Better still, find something to be happy about.
Well, they CAN ban rabbit’s feet. If somebody proclaims that their lucky rabbit’s foot was the reason they won, then using a rabbit’s foot would, by your reckoning, be cheating.
Now show me where PGA rules disallow rabbit’s feet.
Only if rabbit’s feet actually worked.
I wasn’t offended. I thought he made himself look silly and self-important but I wasn’t offended. I’m not bitter. I really don’t care. I was making an observation. He can be a pompous, holier-than-thou tool if he wants to. No skin off my nose.
I kinda think it’s funny. The whole thing. I mean, Jesus didn’t help you win your sporting event. Whatever it is, he had nothing to do with it. It was your skill, your training and your desire to win. Now, if you “believe” he did, and wish wif all your widdle heart to tell all those nasty heathens out there that your L&S helped you win your sporting event, music award etc., then that’s your right.
It’s also our right to point out how silly we think you sound.
If there is a god in the Christian model (or any model really) I hope wif all MY widdle heart that he/she/it is working dilligently on correcting little things like genocide, pandemic diseases, starvation and the like, AND NOT HELPING SOME BABBLING FUCKASS WIN SOME FUCKING GOLF GAME.
The guy claimed it did, he claimed to have cheated by your take on the matter. You’d think a claim of cheating would be cause for action. Well, it’s not. Claiming God helped you cheat, whether or not you received any benefit from the claim, should be just as dire a situation. It’s not.
So Johnson claimed he cheated, right there on TV. So what if he didn’t get any actual help, Jesus didn’t give him a foot wedge out of the rough, he claimed he cheated.
Right?
Right. Except that despite being such a religious country, we often act on the unspoken assumption that God is either nonexistant or irrelevant. He did claim to be cheating; nothing will be done, because acting on his words would imply that God actually does act on the world.
If you bastards don’t stop saying nice things about me, I’m going to get really pissed off.
Well… Yours was always my favorite of The Canterbury Tales.
I’ve always wanted to see one of those crucifix-wearing, cross-myself-three-times-before-batting, point-at-the-sky-after-homering baseball players come up to the plate, get struck out on three pitches - and then have the pitcher dramatically point downwards.
The ensuing brawl would be fun.
Twice on this page I’ve been reduced to laughter that’s going to wake the rest of the house… 
I wonder if this perspective might help or might cast doubt on the whole thing.
Imagine you started playing golf with your dad when you were a kid. You thought this whole clubs and ball and shiny green park was kind of fun, and you were surprisingly good at it.
Dad said, “Keep on with it, sport.”
And you did. You played golf in high school, even, but after you started as a freshman the jocks made fun of you and said that golf was a sissy sport. You wanted to give up.
Dad said, “You enjoy the game, right? Don’t let it bother you what everyone else thinks.”
You graduate high school. You start playing golf full-time. Your dad is proud, but before you can get to your first tournament, he passes away. You grieve and you consider just not going to the tournament at all, but you know Dad would have wanted you to. So you go.
You’re out on the final hole. To get that last ball in you’re going to have to concentrate, center yourself, but you’re so nervous. The nervousness reminds you of being mocked by the jocks. It reminds you of golfing with your dad and wanting to show him how much better you are than last time. You close your eyes and remember his hands over yours when he was teaching you how to grip the club. This hand here. That hand there. Not so tight, now. Easy.
Don’t be scared, son. It’s just a swing like any other one. You know you can do it.
You swing and it is perfect.
I don’t believe that God controls our actions. I think He might lean on fate this way or that, but I doubt He does more than that. We all have our free will and our natural abilities. It is believed by many that we all have our place in this world and that to be the best we can be in our place, whether it’s farmer or scientist or president, is what God has designed for us. We have to do it ourselves, though. Nobody else can do it for you, not even God.
My job involves talking to a lot of people who have a strongly developed sense of entitlement. They want something now, they don’t care if I can’t give it to them. They feel entitled to use me as a punching bag, to lie to me to get five bucks worth of credit on their accounts, to wheedle just one more chance when they’ve already used up all their credit, all their trust.
Every day I want to yell at these people. Every day I feel myself getting angry at them. How can they be so irresponsible, so stupid? How can they be so inhuman? Why do I even have to talk to them? Every day I want to start telling them what I think of them. Every day I want to take out my frustration on the people around me. I want to start cussin’ right back at the guy who calls me all manner of names.
But I stop myself and I calm myself and I ask myself: is this proper behavior? Christ can see all you do. Would he be proud of you getting this angry? Would he agree that you should take your frustration out on your coworkers or your customers? What is the model of life you should be living?
And somehow, that makes it easier to take a deep breath and treat people better. Maybe I treat them better than they deserve, but I never heard where that was a bad thing.
It isn’t Jesus making me be nice, but my faith helps me. I won’t go so far as some and say that faith is necessary to calm your temper and remind yourself about what’s important in life, but I’ll say if it is a crutch it’s a damn useful one.
Again, I haven’t heard precisely what he’s said. More to the point, I’ve heard some people say “Oh, he just thanked Jesus for being with him” and I’ve heard others indicate that he placed the credit for victory at Jesus’s feet. That one seems a little shifty to me, and I’ll certainly agree that saying “Jesus loved me so I won!” is idiotic.
But for the little hypothesis above, would you consider it wrong to say “I want to thank X, Y, Z, and my father who walked with me on that last hole. Dad, this one’s for you.” Would you lambast him for ancestor-worship? Or is it Christianity and its past relative to Western culture that bothers you so much?
If I thank Jesus – well, if I thank Jesus I do it quietly and in my heart rather than saying it on a streetcorner or on national TV. But if I thank Jesus I’m not saying that He lifted his hand and removed the scales from mine eyes. I’m saying that faith has helped me in my life. But to say “I thank my faith and inner strength, without which I would be as dust” is really, really, really arrogant.
I also submit that if he just trusted to Jesus he wouldn’t practice or buy good clubs or keep his eyes open while swinging at the ball…