Image from worth1000.com In Boston, if you are an atheist, you can now attend Sunday services that do not feature worship of a Deity. The hour long service features homilies, songs and inevitably, a collection plate. The ceremonies are presided over by a "humanist chaplain." Atheist hymns, a category of music of which I was completely unaware up to this point, are sung, the choruses of which are presumably mumbled unmusically along to by non-worshippers who are singing-challenged, just as in a regular church full of white people.
Here is a sample lyric, according to CNN:
“I don't believe in a great power to say thank you to, but that won’t take away from my gratitude.”
I realize it's a long life nowadays, if you're lucky enough to be gifted with good health and not accident-prone, and all of us engage in our share of utterly pointless activities to pass the time, but this sentiment takes the atheist church bake sale cake. Gratitude to whom? I hope not the person who tried to teach this individual to write song lyrics that made sense. Are we talking about gratitude to a random universe whose conditions are merely accidentally and temporarily favorable to our existence? I guess you can say "thank you" for that, but don't expect to hear "You're welcome" in return.
As the author of one of the few atheist parables ever written and thus possibly a future contributor to atheist liturgy, I should be more sanguine about atheist church, but I don't hold out much hope for it. Promoters of atheist services (this particular one is held, in slavish imitation of conventional Christian church, on a Sunday) fail to realize that that most of us who have converted to non-belief were originally motivated to do so by our distaste for attending church. At least the Catholic ones were, and I am one of them. I had Catholic school inflicted upon me as well as the Catholic religion. One of the features of Catholic school was that we were usually dragged off to a special Mass by our kid selves at least once a week. This was the old school, jumping-jack Catholic Mass that required an intimate knowledge of when to sit, stand and kneel, enforced by nuns with rulers ready to wap the bottoms of the non-compliant. It was worse than sitting in school, a foretaste of the Hell in which most of us were regularly promised future incarceration.
Sunday Mass with your parents was different but hardly more pleasant. It was longer, for one, since it involved a nearly endless, incomprehensible-to-child ears homily by the priest. The nuns were there, too, and while they didn't whack us in front of our parents, if we slipped up by squirming in our pews or failing to perform the required Catholic aerobics smoothly, they shot us daggers from their steely nun eyes, laser-like stares that said Hold still, you little sin-ball.
The gist of Catholic theology at the time was that while only Catholics were eligible to go to Heaven, precious few of them actually did, owing to the fact that following nearly any natural impulse was a mortal sin. I decided that the odds weren't worth playing, and I quit. Maybe I would have hung in longer had I not been subjected to a hundred services a year when I was a child. There's the real danger in atheist church. You force your kid to go to it every week, I guarantee he or she is going to rebel against it, and shame you by growing up to be a raging Presbyterian.
Atheists should have barbecues, not services, well-fueled by alcohol and provided with plenty of roasted meat in honor of the cave-ancestors from which we all evolved. Dirty jokes and possibly wives should be swapped and the entertainment should consist of mindless music concerning sex and lecherous swaying that passes for dancing.
Of course, Catholic barbecues often consist of exactly the same things. God bless 'em.
Here is a sample lyric, according to CNN:
“I don't believe in a great power to say thank you to, but that won’t take away from my gratitude.”
I realize it's a long life nowadays, if you're lucky enough to be gifted with good health and not accident-prone, and all of us engage in our share of utterly pointless activities to pass the time, but this sentiment takes the atheist church bake sale cake. Gratitude to whom? I hope not the person who tried to teach this individual to write song lyrics that made sense. Are we talking about gratitude to a random universe whose conditions are merely accidentally and temporarily favorable to our existence? I guess you can say "thank you" for that, but don't expect to hear "You're welcome" in return.
As the author of one of the few atheist parables ever written and thus possibly a future contributor to atheist liturgy, I should be more sanguine about atheist church, but I don't hold out much hope for it. Promoters of atheist services (this particular one is held, in slavish imitation of conventional Christian church, on a Sunday) fail to realize that that most of us who have converted to non-belief were originally motivated to do so by our distaste for attending church. At least the Catholic ones were, and I am one of them. I had Catholic school inflicted upon me as well as the Catholic religion. One of the features of Catholic school was that we were usually dragged off to a special Mass by our kid selves at least once a week. This was the old school, jumping-jack Catholic Mass that required an intimate knowledge of when to sit, stand and kneel, enforced by nuns with rulers ready to wap the bottoms of the non-compliant. It was worse than sitting in school, a foretaste of the Hell in which most of us were regularly promised future incarceration.
Sunday Mass with your parents was different but hardly more pleasant. It was longer, for one, since it involved a nearly endless, incomprehensible-to-child ears homily by the priest. The nuns were there, too, and while they didn't whack us in front of our parents, if we slipped up by squirming in our pews or failing to perform the required Catholic aerobics smoothly, they shot us daggers from their steely nun eyes, laser-like stares that said Hold still, you little sin-ball.
The gist of Catholic theology at the time was that while only Catholics were eligible to go to Heaven, precious few of them actually did, owing to the fact that following nearly any natural impulse was a mortal sin. I decided that the odds weren't worth playing, and I quit. Maybe I would have hung in longer had I not been subjected to a hundred services a year when I was a child. There's the real danger in atheist church. You force your kid to go to it every week, I guarantee he or she is going to rebel against it, and shame you by growing up to be a raging Presbyterian.
Atheists should have barbecues, not services, well-fueled by alcohol and provided with plenty of roasted meat in honor of the cave-ancestors from which we all evolved. Dirty jokes and possibly wives should be swapped and the entertainment should consist of mindless music concerning sex and lecherous swaying that passes for dancing.
Of course, Catholic barbecues often consist of exactly the same things. God bless 'em.
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