It appears as though I made a sweeping generalization in my last post that was unwarranted.  I claimed that atheists lauded this idiot, who made a homeless person jump through hoops for his own amusement before he would give the needy man $20.

I found the video via ex-Christian.net.  The comments section on ex-C.net contained things like this:

• Actually the film maker didn’t seem arrogant or particularly condescending to me. It did make the man uncomfortable (although not the woman to my eyes), but its never comfortable when our deepest held values and beliefs are up for public scrutiny by someone who disbelieves them. Maybe it will give him the impetus to do some self-examination. Certainly if someone had just given them $20 without the discussion, these parents would have seen it as “a gift from the Lard!” & “God’s provisioning!”
• Hey, if it’s OK to casually ask for money on the side of the road (and guilt people into donating using “God”), then what’s wrong with casually asking someone to cross out a word in exchange for money?
• The christbots still found and jumped through a loophole to get the money.  I really wish the film maker had had ten thousand dollars in cash to really “test” their faith.
• Does anyone really believe that if he had a million bucks, as opposed to 20, that they wouldn’t have accepted? Please.
• Exactly! And if by some slim-to-none chance they wouldn’t have taken the million bucks, that alone would prove the extent of their brainwashing… or sheer stupidity.
• Sad, there they are living in an RV homeless and yet somehow think god is for them? So sad. Sadder even I used to be that stupid. Then I did what the guy in the video said, took accountability for my life.  TADA!!!!! It worked! Well what do you know?

No one is saying that what the filmmaker did was actually wrong, but I should note that the very first comment to the video repudiated him.  He defended himself:

As I say in the video, the scenario I am enacting does make me a bit of a jerk….but then again, I’m not the one on the side of the road asking for money. I’m respectful and don’t try to push any specific perspective on the family (if you note, my beliefs are not mentioned in the video – and the “a” word (atheism) is not brought up either. (emphasis added)

Classy.

Turning to the video’s YouTube page, the highest rated comment was:

This is funny. When a Christian group makes the homeless sit through a sermon for a meal it’s charity. When this guy asks another guy to give him a sign for $20, he’s a dick. I guess this video proves that it’s not only the homeless family that has their priorities backwards.

Which is interesting.  I’ve worked at a homeless shelter run by a church before, and we never made them sit through a sermon to get a meal.  That’s up to the individual homeless person should they want to learn more about why we were trying to help them.

Other comments on YouTube include these gems:

• The bottom line here is that they’d rather keep the sky fairy (who presumably put them in this position in the first place) happy than put a warm meal into their son’s belly. Nice. Religion is “harmless”, huh?
• this proves all of my views on Christians 2 be 100% true they are blind and stubborn. when u are in this situation u need the F*** cash! you need 2 eat you have a frickin kid! if u are not an atheist you are trapped in the matrix.
• You’re supposed to be prosperous if you love the Lard, wtff people , you can’t EAT your principles, you cannot pay for fuel with your principles…this is why religious people are clueless.

So there you have it.  I made my generalization based on comments such as those.  Thankfully, my atheist readers have bucked the trend.  All of them thought what this guy did was sick.

So I apologize.  I was wrong.  Not all atheists are in favor of something like this.  I suppose I need to learn that ex-C.net and YouTube aren’t representative samples of atheism.  Most of the atheists on those sites are indoctrinated to the cause of atheism and anti-theism worse than any fundamentalist they would deride.

I tend to attract atheists with better thought-out worldviews to my readership, so I should have known that my atheist readers would have thought that the filmmaker’s claptrap was awesome, not even for a nanosecond.  I guess this is one of the few times I’m glad I was proven wrong.