Can churches for non-believers survive?

There are some new local humanist centers springing up and they resemble churches in many ways, according to an article by USA Today. What do they do?

[They meet] monthly with about 10 families. Acosta says trips to museums and a parenting course called "Compassionate Communication" are planned. The Harvard chaplaincy also hosts "Humanist Small Group" biweekly Sunday brunch discussion and buys drinks at biweekly "Humanist Community Pub Nights." Last month, it hosted holiday-style celebrations around Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and is hosting a talk by humanist writer and director Joss Whedon of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fame.

What is the long-term outlook for such groups? I have always assumed that there was something about traditional churches that would help keep the group intact, something having to do with a solution to the fear of death. Churches work hard to play up both the fear and the solution. Non-believers tend to have a different focus: the here and now.

The USA Today article quotes Richard Lints, a professor of philosophical theology who

doubts humanism can sustain itself in the local congregations Epstein envisions because community is not a natural part of humanism, where the individual is the ultimate source of meaning. If humanism becomes concerned with the "greater good," and a sort of natural moral order that implies, it starts to resemble religion and humanists will back away, he said. "At the heart of the humanist project is deep individualism," Lints said. "It's always going to be difficult to sustain a real robust community."

Certainly one of model of such a community has been successful, that of the Ethical Societies such as this one. Also, consider that many religions are not traditionally religious--they run along a continuum. As proof, consider the scorn heaped on Unitarian Churches by right wing fundamentalists. Here's one dramatic example.

Can non-theistic "churches" hold together? Time will tell.

Continue ReadingCan churches for non-believers survive?

The sacred places of people who are not religious

I've been reading more of Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis, including Chapter 9, titled "Divinity With or Without God." Haidt's travels through India led him to conclude that divinity and disgust were located on the same axis. As evidence of this, consider that throughout the world, cultures hold that divinity and disgust must be kept separate at all times. The relevant practices include "food, body products, animal's, sex, death, body envelope violations and hygiene." Haidt found that people recruit disgust "to support so many of the norms, rituals and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves." (Page 186). To know that which is sacred, identify that which elicits disgust and travel the opposite direction:

If the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that "cleanliness is next to godliness." If you don't perceive this third dimension, then it is not clear why God would care about the amount of dirt on your skin or in your home. But if you do live in a three-dimensional world, then disgust is like Jacob's Ladder: it is rooted in the earth, and our biological necessities, but it leads or guides people toward heaven--or, at least, toward something felt to be, somehow "up."

Haidt, an atheist Jew, is not suggesting a particular path to that which is Divine. He is certainly not concluding, for instance, that religion is the only path to that which is divine.  Rather, he is emphasizing that we all have a sense of what is sacred to us, what is "divine," and we justify it in various ways.  He cites Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, agreeing with Eliade that "sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of "crypto-religious" behavior." He specifically cites Eliade's conclusion that even a person who is committed to a "profane existence" has

privileged places, qualitatively different from all others--a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

Continue ReadingThe sacred places of people who are not religious

What do non-Christians do at Christmas anyway?

What indeed! Well, it may surprise some people, but we don't sit around eating freshly roasted babies in front of a roaring church fire and wiping our mouths with Bible pages while we plot the destruction of Christianity. For one thing, it's summer in Australia, which means it's bushfire season. No,…

Continue ReadingWhat do non-Christians do at Christmas anyway?

On The Buses … everywhere but Down Under

…but do I give a toss?

Recently, atheist bus ads have popped up in the UK and the US to much acclaim from freethinkers and much tiresome bitching & moaning from the usual suspects. Buses are so hot right now! However, an attempt by an Aussie atheist group to have their own ads on our buses has been unsuccessful. The Atheist Foundation of Australia wanted to buy ad space, the ad company, APN Outdoor, refused to sell it to them. And it seems they didn’t explain why. I certainly don’t see the harm in slogans like “Sleep in on Sunday mornings” or “Celebrate reason”, but I guess APN have their reasons. Such as – they’re a pack of bastards with double standards higher than Israel’s separation wall. So, yes, it’s disappointing. Even annoying! And refusing to take someone’s freely-offered money is just damned un-Australian.

Not to mention that glaring double-standard: the article explains that APN had buses in Adelaide plastered with the Bible verse John 3:16 – that’s the one about God loving the world so much that he had himself (in the form of his hippy son) tortured & executed to forgive us all of our sins, especially the original sin committed by Adam & Eve, the guilt of which apparently extends several millennia onto every last one of us, from birth – conception – no less, giving us no damn choice but to accept the hippy as our saviour. Nice. World’s oldest protection racket – “Say, that’s …

Share

Continue ReadingOn The Buses … everywhere but Down Under