Posted on 08/01/2014 2:22:46 PM PDT by lowbridge
There is clearly no separation of church and plate at Mary's Gourmet Diner in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The pious ("pie"-us?) proof has been delivered unto the social media masses in the form of a picture of a receipt from the restaurant, showing a 15% discount applied for "Praying in Public."
The tab belonged to Jordan Smith, who had traveled to Winston-Salem for a business trip and stopped for breakfast at Mary's with two colleagues Wednesday morning.
She tells HLN the group "prayed over our meal and the waitress came over at the end of the meal and said, 'Just so you know, we gave you a 15% discount for praying,' which I'd never seen before."
(Excerpt) Read more at hlntv.com ...
http://www.facebook.com/MarysGourmetDiner
Dont expect this discount each and every time you go there. This wasnt usual policy, just an occasional act of kindness: "There's a lot of craziness going on in regard to the 15% discount. I will not respond to all the posts. I will say that it is not a "policy", it's a gift we give at random to customers who take a moment before their meal."
They will be sued before you can say ACLU.
Just waiting for the ACLU and Freedom From Religion Foundation to sue.
Yes I know this is a private business, and so has nothing to do with issues of church state separation regarding government. But these liberal groups could sue and say its illegal to give a discount to praying customers. Based on equal protection under civil rights laws, perhaps.
This reminds me of the discount a lot of restaurants, especially in the South, gave on Sundays to people who could show a current church program brochure to the waiter/waitress as proof they had attended services.
I loved that idea. But I think it got a lot of the godless Left angry, so it stopped, to our shame.
Bitter howls of protest from leftists to begin in 5, 4, 3....
Seriously. When will the ACLU or some idiot official take this restaraunt to court?
That is awesome
Is the restaurant “the state”??
They should bring it back
Gives new meaning to Prayer Breakfast.
A sandwich/pizza shop in Augusta, Maine was advertising a discount to state employees on a particular day of the week. This was about 3 or 4 years ago. The shop is around the corner from the capitol building.
It’s a Maine chain so I wrote a polite note to the HQ stating that it was unfair to only give the discount to state employees, especially since they have far more job security than people in the private sector. I suggested that they either discontinue the practice or alternate the discount days for people in various private sector businesses. The person responding actually agreed to me but stated that the decision to do that was the individual shop owner’s. Said she’d forward the message to the Augusta store. I haven’t seen the state employee discount advertised since then.
I’m certainly not going to stop anybody from praying in public. But I’ll pray silently in a public setting because of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6:5-7.
It has always amazed me how few people one observes praying before a meal in public.
Just don’t advertise it as church based and accept any faith related (even atheist) material and they should be in compliance. Businesses can discriminate in a lot of ways but race and religion are not two of them.
But they should be able to, constitutionally.
I'm not certain that I am right, but I read this differently than you do. Jesus is clearly condemning those who pray for the purpose of being admired by others as they make an ostentatious display of their piety. If your prayer in public is for God's glory rather than your own, to show by example that we live to do His will and all our blessings come from Him, my impression is that prayer in public is good. In that case, you are not a hypocrite (someone who puts on an insincere act for show), and as I understand this passage, you are not acting in the way that those Jesus is discussing acted. Please do not take my word for this, but study, pray (in private if need be), talk with other Christians, and see if my interpretation makes sense.
Lovely thought to this approach, but nowadays, if you involve christian prayer in a public business, you are playing with fire. Just saying Season’s Greetings could cost you a free tax audit in the Lois Lerner Era. I refuse to believe she was the only was so hateful and closeminded. That is the predominant culture in most public agencies of today. Well, this restaurant has now gotten mega-tons of free publicity, so good for her, now go ‘turn that water into wine’, Oops!
Whenever my extended family goes to a restaurant we hold hands and pray unabashedly around the table. No one ever seems to mind - in fact the sense I get from those around is “why don’t we do that?”.
“Civil Rights” Commission complaint filed in 5, 4, 3, 2 . . . .
I’ll tell you what I hear from servers who work Sundays: Sundays after church is the worst shift. People are poorly behaved and tip less than any other shift. And, for some reason, they don’t appreciate tracts in lieu of tips.
We do that also. The point isn’t for others to look at us in admiration (not that the anti-American, anti-Christian 47% would admire genuine faith). The point is both to remind ourselves that God is and ought to be at the center of our lives and to remind other Christians that they are not alone - and with luck to encourage non-Christians to open their minds and their hearts.
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