Week 6: An Evangelical Christmas Carol

“Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

            -from “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” by Herbert C. Woolston

“Scrooge became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

-from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

Christmas as an atheist is pretty strange.   Seems I can’t go anywhere without nativity scenes and angels reminding me that “Jesus is the reason for the season.”  I now get a small sense of what it must be like to be a Jew or Muslim living in America during Christmastime.  It’s pretty obnoxious.  Still, as an atheist I appreciate the gift-giving, the family time, the traditions, and the spirit of goodwill, all of which can be entirely secular. 

This week’s Churchgoing Atheist destination was an Evangelical church in a blighted urban neighborhood.  I wanted to see something really different from what I’m used to.  The website suggested I could find speaking in tongues—one of my goals for this project—so I went for it.

Well, there was no speaking in tongues, but in most other ways the Evangelicals lived up to my expectations:

• It was packed to overflowing, even in a neighborhood full of boarded up houses.  Clearly, people need hope. 
• There were no Bibles—because why constrain ourselves with, you know, book-learning and such, when you can just feel the spirit?
• The music was energetic and non-traditional.  Electric keyboards and drums, on a stage at the front, accompanied the songs.
• It was multicultural.  Many African Americans, some Spanish speakers, some speaking Asian languages, and many white people as well.  I admire the inclusiveness.
• Everyone seemed ridiculously happy.  If I’m to pursue this Churchgoing Atheist project, this is something I must come to terms with.  How can I defy and criticize institutions that bring such profound joy to people every day?  (Still, it’s a delusion!  Should happiness trump truth?)

I can’t say, however, that my first Evangelical experience was a typical one because the entire service was devoted to an elaborate Christmas play, which was performed by the many children and youth leaders of the church.  I was at first disappointed that the regular service was replaced by this extended children’s lesson, but as it got going, I became increasingly horrified at what I saw.

Horrified is a strong word.  It was a cute play. It was funny.  It was touching. It championed love and kindness.  It gave many little kids a chance to act and sing for a doting audience.  And since this church is so multicultural, it was like a miniature version of “It’s a Small World,” with children of all shades raising voices together in an act of cultural unity that the world doesn’t see enough of. 

Still, horrified. The original script of this play made fun of intellectuals who study the Bible.  It made fun of Jehovah’s Witnesses, by name, because they don’t celebrate Christmas.  But more offensive to me was its message of nonsense.  It featured a girl who “corrected” the belief that the Christmas story begins with the Virgin Mary.  She described how the prophet Isaiah had prophesied the coming of Jesus (Isaiah 7:14 and 9:6).  That prophecy probably had nothing to do with Jesus, but is pretty easy to apply to Jesus retroactively.  Couldn’t Isaiah have told us Jesus’s name?  Oh yeah, he did: “Emmanuel.”  That’s not “Jesus,” but nobody seems to care.  The nonsense got worse. To express how much earlier the Christmas story began, she referred to the famous opening of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word.  She said that the Christmas story “began in the mind of God.”  How anyone could claim to know the mind of God, I don’t know.  This kind of meaninglessness persisted for some time.

The most memorable part of the play was an abbreviated production of A Christmas Carol.  After this play-within-a-play, the adult actor who played Scrooge had the opportunity to explain to the kids the meaning of the play.  He said that the Holy Spirit had visited Scrooge, and at the end of the play, Scrooge became a good person because he finally found Jesus.

What?  Scrooge found Jesus?  Was I supposed to get that from the ending of A Christmas Carol?

So I thought about this.  It is not outrageous to interpret the story this way.  I could see how Christians might view the spirits that visit Scrooge as the Holy Spirit.  Dickens was a believing Christian, so it’s possible.  And I could see that one might attribute Scrooge’s transformation to a religious conversion of sorts.  Since it takes place at Christmas, perhaps one could make the stretch that he “found Jesus.”  He became a good, charitable person who was filled with the Christmas spirit.  OK. 

But there are some problems with this interpretation.  The first is this: the word Jesus never appears in the book A Christmas Carol.  Not once.  If Dickens intended for us to read Scrooge’s transformation as “finding Jesus,” don’t you think he might have mentioned Jesus?  In order to write a Christmas story without mentioning Jesus, one would have to purposefully try to avoid it.  The absence of any mention of the “savior” is near proof that Dickens was not interested in the religious nature of the holiday.  In fact, “God” is barely mentioned at all—only a handful of times in phrases like “God bless you” and “God knows.”

But perhaps Dickens intended for the message to be implicit?  Doubtful.  Dickens rarely attempted to disguise his message for the reader.  He beats his readers over the head with his social commentary, so that they will make no mistake about the problems Dickens wishes to change.  A Christmas Carol is about kindness, generosity, love, charity, and compassion.  These are virtues that Dickens cherished, and we all should.  Christians have adopted them as “Christian virtues,” but that is an empty phrase.  They are human virtues.  No specific religion—nor even religion in general—has exclusive ownership of these virtues.  Dickens was championing an ethical approach to life (and coupling it with the holiday tradition to sell books), but by omitting Jesus entirely, it seems Dickens was making an attempt to divorce virtuous behavior from Christianity.  Indeed people do not need religion to teach them to be good.

Wait, you ask, wasn’t Dickens a Christian?  I’m no Dickens expert, but I believe he was, as nearly everyone in Victorian England had to be.  But his books are focused on social, political, and moral issues, and there is little sense of any benevolent divinity in them.  Even when he does explicitly refer to religious issues, it is in the context of social justice.  He probably best fits with a religious worldview that understands all religion to have the purpose of social justice.  Many people interpret the Gospels or other religious texts to be valuable primarily because they teach humans how to be good to one another.  For Dickens, salvation was not to be found in heaven, but in the social transformation of this world. 

Consider, for example, the end of Hard Times, when the character with the most Christian virtue, Stephen Blackpool, falls down a mineshaft.  He looks up at the star, and Dickens says it’s like the star that led the wise men to Jesus.  An explicit religious reference.  That star, however, symbolizes no saving Jesus, no merciful God, for Stephen Blackpool dies, and that’s that.  Stephen tells us what that star symbolizes to him: people should be kind to one another.  Stephen’s death illustrates that the heartless capitalist system of Victorian England victimizes good working people, and Dickens uses Stephen’s death to call for compassion and humanity in the industrial world. God is absent from the world of Hard Times, and I believe he is nearly absent from A Christmas Carol as well, or as absent as he can be in a story about Christmas.

I left the Evangelical church and their bizarre Christmas play feeling utterly sorry for those beautiful children.  Their incorrect lesson about Dickens may not matter much in the big picture, but the big picture does matter: churches teach falsehoods.  They present them with confidence and claim that those who don’t buy what they sell are missing something vital.  Churches may have good motives, but those children, all the little children of the world, are being brainwashed.  Why do they need to hear that Jesus loves them?  Why can’t it be enough to say that their parents, family, and friends love them?

 

Week 5: Is the Catholic Church…

…capitalized? To write this blog entry, I begin to type this question into Google. Wanted to make sure I capitalized the right words. But Google tried to predict my question, based, I presume, on the most common phrases typed into Google that begin like that. So before I got to “capitalized,” Google’s options were:

1) Is that Catholic Church a cult?

2) Is the Catholic Church the True Church?

3) Is the Catholic Church evil?

4) Is the Catholic Church the antichrist?

Allow me to answer these questions for the benefit of the world, since apparently a lot of people are wondering these things.

1) Defining “cult” is very slippery. Where is the line between a “mainstream religion” and a “cult”? The word cult has a negative connotation that members of mainstream religions like to give to people they find weird. As an atheist, I don’t see much difference between believing that David Koresh is the reincarnation of Jesus or believing that a divine power sent his only son to be murdered so that we could somehow be forgiven for things that god doesn’t like. Really—is it stranger to believe aliens are hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet or that Jesus will return to earth to yield a judgment sword? Improbable though it is, I’m inclined to think the Hale-Bopp comet “cult” had a better chance of being right. So the bottom line is, yes, the Catholic Church is a cult, but no more or less so than any other religious system that requires belief in the supernatural.

2) The True Church? What does that even mean? There are apparently a lot of people wondering if the Catholic Church was the first church, i.e. the church that began in the first century right after Jesus’s death. Well, there’s no doubt that it grew out of that initial community of believers, but so did every other church. More to the point, though, the answer is No because the Catholic Church that exists today probably looks absolutely nothing like the churches did in the first years after Jesus. Read the book of Acts for a sense of that first church. That and Paul’s letters in the New Testament are as close as we can get to knowing what it was like, and the Catholic Church’s emphasis on ritual, music, priesthood, and liturgy are drastically different from the charismatic, impassioned, spontaneous, spirit-driven worship of the first Jesus-believers. I heard once that the evangelical churches today are probably much more similar in nature to the first churches than Catholic or protestant churches are.

3) Yes, because it knowingly lies and shamelessly acquires wealth by deceiving people into giving them money. In my humble opinion.

4) No, because there is no such thing as the antichrist.

Now that we’ve got those big questions answered, allow me to pose my own questions about the Catholic Church. Is the Catholic Church…

…alive and well? Most certainly. This week the Churchgoing Atheist project took me to a Catholic Church, a place unfamiliar to me, a lifelong-protestant-turned-atheist. Of course I’d seen Catholic services in movies (like The Godfather, when all the murders happen) and I’d been to Catholic churches for weddings and funerals, but never had I been to the average run-of-the-mill service. I was amazed to find so many people there. 200? 300? There were more people at this service than had been at all the services of the previous four churches combined. My impression of the Catholic Church is that of a church lots of people belong to in name only, begrudgingly remaining Catholic because of lingering childhood guilt, and that prejudgment had led me to expect an empty church. I thought of Catholic Churches as dreary and dark, full of stodgy old people. I couldn’t believe the number of young couples, children, even teenagers. Everyone looked happy, or at least content. People were kneeling, praying with their eyes closed before the service began, something one rarely sees in protestant churches. I just didn’t expect the enthusiasm for a church that most Catholics I know don’t attend or attend only out of a feeling of obligation. This church was legitimately vibrant, and I was witnessing only one of the three services they hold each Sunday morning.

…subject to such strange questions on Google for good reason? I can understand people asking if the Catholic Church is the true church, because many people (like myself) question what they are told. It is perfectly reasonable to observe that there are hundreds if not thousands of variations of Christianity and wonder how that could be. Is it not strange that such disparate rituals and belief systems claim the same origin? Should we not ask what our belief in one of those systems implies about the truth of the other 99%? I can also understand the question about evil. History shows that the members of Catholic Church—in the name of the Catholic Church—have perpetrated war, murder, rape, theft, and so on. I do not wish to dwell on the evils that churches have historically done, because that subject gets a lot of attention from atheists already. Suffice to say, though, it’s a fair question. Is that Catholic Church a cult or the antichrist are nonsensical questions that I suspect get typed into Google by people who are taught to be prejudiced against Catholics. Who that might be, I can only speculate. (Mike Huckabee, I'm looking in your direction...)

…mindless? I would like to explore my protestant/atheist bias here—I don’t claim total neutrality in this project. My impression of Catholics is that they value mindless ritual over serious engagement in critical thinking. This impression comes from history class, in which we learned about the Reformation, from Catholics that I know, and from things people in protestant churches would tell me about Catholics. I believe protestant denominations, in general, encourage individual thought more than Catholics. Today’s service certainly reinforced this belief. To begin, there were no Bibles to be seen. There were books of liturgy—that is, choral responses, prayers, songs, etc.—on each pew, but no Bibles. If someone wanted to read for himself the day’s scripture, he could not. Second, the service consisted primarily of stock sayings that would be sung or spoken aloud by the congregation with no text or prompting. This suggests that the service follows the same pattern each week, and rote memorization or mindless parroting of responses allows one to participate. The sermon consisted of 10 minutes of meaningless platitudes about how God is present in our lives and brings joy to us even when we are unhappy. It did not refer to any book (other than the Bible), current event, or personal story. It did not challenge the listeners to contemplate. It merely reassured them that God was everywhere and his presence should make us happy. It was completely devoid of intellectualism. I admit that ritual has psychological value, but it seems that the Catholic Church places emphasis on ritual at the expense of critical thought. But I am open to having this belief disproved over the course of the project.

…charitable? Tough one. I believe the answer to be yes, because the hundreds of people who came to this service today brought Christmas presents for the poor. There was a huge stack of them. During the offertory, nearly everyone donated, and a second offertory was immediately held to raise money for a specific individual. This church must have raked in the cash. On the other hand, this church had the most beautiful interior I’d ever seen in an American church (I have seen cathedrals in Europe). I was struck by how a fairly bland-looking church in an urban neighborhood could have such ornate beauty inside. The wood paneling, the stained glass, the golden ornamentation, all suggest enormous cost. I can understand why people during the reformation got angry when they saw their hard-earned money contributing not to charity, but to the beautification of a building, the sole purpose of which was to make people so struck with awe that they would be more likely to give money. Still, I am sure the Catholic Church in general and this one in particular give away huge amounts of money to people who need it. This is a topic I’m interested in pursuing further, but not today.

…purposefully using guilt to control people? I just have to comment on this, since the notion of “Catholic guilt” is so prevalent. To what extent does the Church knowingly employ guilt to control people? Probably a lot, but no more so than many other denominations. I still get the guilt call from my mother, in which she expresses “disappointment” that I’m not in church on Sundays. (Why? Why disappointed? Would you prefer falsehoods and piety to truth and thoughtfulness?) I went to the Catholic Church today hoping to get some good juicy guilt preaching, but I didn’t. There were only two moments when the priest played the guilt card: the people weren’t “joyous” enough during the first hymn, and since the topic of today’s service was joy, he wanted to see them really get joyous on the second hymn. (They did not.) The second instance of the guilt card was during the children’s sermon, when he asked the children if they had all gotten their Christmas trees from this church’s Christmas tree sale. When one said no, everyone laughed, and he said, “It’s OK, there are a lot of good trees out there, but the best ones are here.” It was a subtle and harmless plug for the church’s Christmas tree fundraiser, not to the children but to the parents. Still, guilt card.

My call to Catholics: do not feel guilty for not going to church. I have spent many Sunday mornings feeling guilty for not being in church. Even if you believe in God, the notion of a God who actual cares whether you are “worshipping” him enough should be offensive to you. I tend to waste a lot of time checking fantasy football stats and drinking beer, so I sometimes feel guilty that I’m wasting my time, but I don’t feel guilty for missing a morning of being indoctrinated.

Week 4: The Quakers, Pearl Harbor, and the Hubble Telescope

John Proctor: I may speak my heart, I think!

Reverend Parris: What, are we Quakers?  We are not Quakers here yet, Mr. Proctor.

-from The Crucible, by Arthur Miller

I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends.

-John 15:15

 

This week the Churchgoing Atheist project took quite a turn.  It involved a weekend trip to Philadelphia to meet some friends, and I wasn’t sure I’d want to find a church and attend services right before a five-hour drive home.  There was also a fair likelihood I’d be hung over.  So without planning for any church service, I went to Pennsylvania—a state that was founded for the sake of religious freedom.

I found myself walking the same streets that Ben Franklin had walked, wandering around Old City, wondering if he, too, had been tipsy on those streets.  And so I was already in this historical frame of mind, impressed with the aura of cobblestone and brick, when I realized my hotel sits right next to a Quaker meeting house from the early 1800s.  I knew little about the Quakers: their official name is the Society of Friends, they are most prevalent in southeastern Pennsylvania, and their meetings consist of sitting in a room and waiting for someone to be moved to speak.  That’s all I knew, so I could not pass up the opportunity to attend the Sunday morning meeting, especially in a historic building in charming Old Philadelphia.

This was also the first week of the project that I went somewhere completely foreign to me—I had no idea what to expect.  Luckily, they’re used to visitors since it’s one of the oldest meeting houses; they have brochures and books, like many historical landmarks.  I was a bit early, so I introduced myself to a gentleman setting things up, and asked if I might join them as a visitor.  Unlike my previous weeks, this didn’t feel like I was spying for some reason.  I was just a curious tourist, and they welcomed me. 

The room itself was nearly as I’d imagined: just four walls and benches facing each other to form a square.  The very layout emphasized the equality of all members of the Society of Friends.  There is no clergy or leader of any kind; volunteers from the membership make committees to handle nuts-and-bolts issues, but the essence of their belief system is that all people have equal access to wisdom.  I cannot help but compare this to most other Christian churches, in which the ordained minister or priest stands at the front, often elevated.  Surely this setup is practical, but it is also symbolic.  It creates a didactic tone, in which the seated listeners absorb wisdom from a standing fount of knowledge.  I’m sure this is an ancient religious practice, and I should point out that it’s a psychological tool.  It helps to establish the credibility and authority of the religious leader, which would help to perpetuate that leader’s beliefs.

So I meditated.  The meeting had begun, and nobody was moved to speak at first.  There were some thirty people filling the benches, most with their eyes closed, and so I tried to join in.  For me, meditation means trying to sit still.  It is torturous.  Searching for inner peace causes me anxiety and physical pain.  I am unable to sit still due to some combination of immaturity, lack of practice, and an irresistible compulsion to stretch and pop my knuckles and other joints.  Even writing that sentence makes me need to pop.  (Cure, anyone?  Please!)  So I thought, if this is what the Friends’ meetings will be like, count me out.  I was not quaking because I was not moved by the spirit.  I was not moved by the spirit, I conclude, because there is no spirit.

But I soon became moved.  A man rose to speak.  He said that he’s troubled by the approach of December 7^th.  He was a small man, but his voice was powerful, slow, emphatic, and I was fixed on his words.  He described being a young man during World War II, moving supplies to a car factory that had been retooled to make airplane engines for the British.  He reminded us that the war helped get the U.S. out of the Great Depression, and while the Europeans were fighting we were making money before 1941. We had no commerce with Hitler’s Germany, he said, but it is ironic that we did make money selling scrap metal to the Japanese.  He ended with this statement: I hope this country soon learns which end is up.  He needed say no more.  The weight of his statement was palpable.  Rarely, if ever, have I felt the power of an unspoken implication hang in a room.  I took his implication as follows: the US is in its 8^th year of war in Afghanistan.  We are fighting an enemy that we had helped to create and supply during the Afghans’ war against the Soviets—just like how in Iraq we fought an enemy we had helped create and train during the Iraqis’ war against the Iranians.  More broadly, we should resist violence and militarism rather than glorify them.  The passionate anti-war beliefs of Quakers were evident in this man, and I was indeed moved.

More meditating, and this time, there was more to think about.  Time passed.  I was thankful when another person rose to speak.  I regret that I can only paraphrase him, for his words were beautiful and articulate.  He began with a topic I’d recently heard about myself: the Hubble telescope can look at a patch of sky that has no stars in it and no light.  After collecting data for 10 days, a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand will yield dozens of new galaxies (http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/).  He said his first thought upon reading this was “wasteful God.”  Why would he make so much universe?  But then, he thought, the universe is like falling in love.  As you begin to, you realize there is more to a person than you can ever know.  You can continue to learn about a person forever, nearly getting lost in infinity.  Learning about the universe has transformed his conception of God, forcing him to question what Jesus’s role is, and how his words can carry meaning in light of everything we now know about the universe.  And he concluded that Jesus had a simple message: love one another as Jesus loved us.  Learning about the universe doesn’t negate that, but complements it.  Both lead to grace.

Honestly, I found the speaker’s words inspirational.  Never have I seen this kind of sincere questioning and exposure of a person’s beliefs in a church.  I appreciate the Quakers’ acceptance of skepticism and their willingness to challenge conventional understandings of God in light of things like war and science.  Certainly this happens in other churches, but it is laid bare in the Friends’ meetings by average people.  Still, I must question: what is grace?  What does that word mean?  If Jesus’s words lead to love, are we defining grace as love?  Or happiness?  Or peace?  Or beauty?  Any of those words would be more meaningful to me than “grace.”  Many times have I heard, “May the grace of the lord Jesus Christ be with you forever and always,” or some similar platitude, without attempting to understand what that means.  Still, I admire this man’s eloquent words, and his awe at the majesty of the universe is something I share.  We need not see a divine creator’s hand in it, though.

I tried to meditate more, fidgeting less as I now had even more to think about.  I wasn’t really meditating.  In between thinking about war and the universe, I recalled some events from last night’s intoxicated blur.  Many Sunday mornings in college I thought about how I should be in church to somehow atone for the previous night’s revels.  Guilt is powerful, and churches serve to both create it and alleviate it.  But as an atheist, I seek no divine forgiveness, and I do not need church to somehow cancel out mistakes.  That was no different this morning, but still…quiet reflection—specifically about how one might live better—has much value.  I believe this is why many people go to church.  They don’t necessarily believe in a personal God that can hear their prayers and spends his time judging their every move.  Rather, they acknowledge that church is a valuable tool, a mechanism by which they can understand their own mistakes and make right in the future.  My mistakes?  Well, choosing Bud Light rather than a slightly more expensive option.  But seriously, wastefulness, selfishness, and immaturity.  But I knew all this already.  It doesn’t hurt to sit and think about it occasionally, but we must recognize that it is not God we offend, nor is there some good and evil balance up there in the sky that will tilt this way or that.  Rather, actions must be measured according to the joy or harm they bring to living things in this life.  This I believe, and I intend to pursue an understanding of morality in the weeks to come.

Finally meditating, now, I was nearly startled when the last person rose to speak.  She explained that she had spent a week serving on a jury, debating whether or not to convict a young man of a crime.  She had gotten to know 11 other jurors well, each of which came from a different background and religious persuasion from her own.  They had grown to understand and respect each others’ viewpoints, and the process had made her a better person.  She took to heart the words of the judge, to think of each person in the case as though he/she was a member of their own families.  The speaker said she came to a new understanding of the meaning of empathy. 

Jesus said, “I was in prison, and you visited me” (Matthew 25).  The Quakers have long been advocates for justice and compassion in the criminal justice system, and the speaker’s words reminded me of Jesus’s.  How many Christians hear this message?  How many Christians who believe life is sacred actually visit prisoners, or even treat them with dignity and compassion?  I cannot say, but I can say that in 20+ years of attending church, I cannot recall a single instance of mission work in prisons.  I certainly never would have gone. 

The meeting soon ended, and I made my way home, highly impressed.  This group of people showed that the Quaker traditions of nonviolence, social justice, and open-mindedness are alive and well.  I felt I had been sitting in a room of thinkers—that is not to say that thinkers do not exist in all churches, but rather that the Quaker church places such high value on individual thought that it forms the entire foundation for the service, whereas in other religions, thinking takes a back seat to liturgy, music, unison responses, and other traditions.  (Perhaps this overgeneralization will be confirmed or challenged in upcoming weeks and months.)  So to conclude, I return to John Proctor’s line from The Crucible that I cite in the opening.  As a Puritan, Proctor is scolded for speaking his heart.  Quakers were instrumental in founding Pennsylvania as a haven of religious tolerance because they believe that reasonable people must be allowed to speak their hearts.  The authoritarian character Parris criticizes Proctor and the Quakers for the very belief that should be most lauded, a belief essential for democracy, essential to a tolerant society.  I may be an atheist, but I write this blog because I feel compelled to speak my heart, as the Quakers do.

Week 3: Jesus is Everywhere, Man

“Nowhere man, please listen.”

-The Beatles

“And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body.”

-Common phrasing during church communion ceremonies

A few items about my Sunday morning before we get to the church.  I began by lying to my brother.  He was visiting for Thanksgiving, and I have not yet told my friends or family about my little project, so I couldn’t tell him the real reason for my going to church.  He had to leave to drive home, so I knew he wouldn’t want to go along, so I was able to say I’ve been looking around at churches, conveniently leaving out that I was doing so as an atheist researcher-critic-spy.  I’m not exactly “out” as an atheist—not entirely.  When the subject comes up among my co-workers or friends, I’ll express my skepticism, or depending on the company, my outright disbelief.  But the family is a different issue.  Most of them are believing Christians.  I’ll have to confront that down the line.

Second item from Sunday morning: as I was lying to my brother, I was watching Fox News Sunday.  I had the pleasure of listening to former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee talk about health insurance as though he cared about logic and reason.  He will attempt to use logic to fight against the Democratic initiative of providing health care to the poor.  However, he will reject logic if it runs counter to the creation story in Genesis.  I fondly recall the presidential debate in which he said that he didn’t know about evolution because he wasn’t there when God created the heavens and the earth (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-BFEhkIujA). It’s funny and terrifying to me that this kind of thinker is shaping millions of opinions.  But I’m not too worried about another Huckabee presidential run, because a majority of the nation, I trust, realizes it would be a mistake to elect someone who’s an even bigger religious nut than Bush.  Also, coincidentally, at the very time I was watching Huckabee on Fox News, four police officers were being shot in Washington State by a career felon that Huckabee had granted clemency to and released from prison as governor of Arkansas.  This tragedy will stick with him, I suspect.

Third item from Sunday morning: apparently WCMF does “Breakfast with the Beatles” on Sundays, so my stumbling upon the Beatles three weeks in a row is not divine providence.  It’s just a program I was unaware of since only recently have I started doing something on Sunday mornings other than sleep, watch political talk shows, and play video games.  (I did those things for years on Sunday mornings before I became an atheist, so don’t be too quick to blame the atheism for my laziness.)  Today’s show presented me with “Nowhere Man,” and I think the Beatles’ exhortation to “please listen” is apropos for this morning’s trip.

I was hoping to hear some speaking in tongues, frankly.  The website said that the this week’s church (a different Reformed church from last week) has a healing service in the last Sunday of each month, and those who wish can have hands laid upon them for healing.  I wanted to see that in person, because when I see it on TV (Sunday mornings, surfing channels during the commercials) it seems staged and unbelievable.  Unfortunately, nothing remotely like that took place, so I was confused and disappointed.  I intend to seek out and find some faith healers before this project is over.

I was hoping to hear some good Christmas music. I used to genuinely look forward to Advent services; Christmas music really does move the soul.  But for the first Sunday in Advent, this was one lifeless place.  Yes, they sang some hymns and played the organ, but there was no joy.

I was hoping to hear a sermon with a little more substance than last week’s.  So I listened, and determined the truth or falsity of some of the snippets. 

This is what I heard.  “Jesus was one of us.”  True.  This was the theme of the sermon, which the pastor repeated to emphasize Jesus’s humanity. Jesus was indeed human.

I also heard this: “Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit?  Yeah, right.”  My sentiments exactly.  Here, the pastor was conveying the attitudes that must have confronted the young Joseph and Mary when it was discovered the unmarried couple was going to have a child.  He avoided coming right out and saying the virgin birth was true or untrue; I couldn’t tell what he believed about it.  I imagine he wanted it that way, since it is indeed a touchy subject for any liberal-minded religious leader.  Even the Bishop of Oxford admits that it’s not essential for Christians to really believe in the virgin birth (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S--X7n3TxI).

I also heard this: To merchants, Christmas is an opportunity to fill their registers.  True.  The pastor took the first Sunday in Advent as an opportunity to remind people of the fact that Jesus is the reason for the season.  I, too, am somewhat turned off by the rampant materialism in our society, and I don’t mind if churches combat this.  Family, fellowship, and a spirit of giving make Christmas a holiday worth keeping.

So there were some parts of the sermon I agreed with.  But…

I also heard this: “Satan said ‘yes’ to death, and God said ‘no’ to death.” False.  I think this was to illustrate that Jesus rose from the dead, but the speaker introduced Satan out of nowhere at the end of a meandering sermon, so I’m really not sure what this was supposed to mean.  Since both are fictional anyway, I’ll move on.

I also heard this: “To many of us, Jesus is a brother and a heartwarming friend.”  Perhaps true in people’s minds, but false in reality.  We should have relationships with real people, find inspiration in learning, and find comfort in truth.

I also heard this: “Jesus is one of us.”  False.  Jesus is nowhere, man.  This was the dramatic climax of the sermon, in which the speaker transitioned from past tense (“was one of us”) to present tense.  His point was to emphasize that Jesus is alive in people’s hearts and minds.  Yes, people may believe in Jesus and that might make him real in a metaphysical way, but it’s wish-thinking, so we should ultimately reject it, even if that belief itself does have some positive results. 

…Or maybe this is true.  Jesus’s molecules may very well be part of us.  Mathematicians have estimated the number of molecules that will be part of a given individual’s body and the likelihood that those atoms might be recycled by the environment and end up as part of us.  I am not a mathematician, and I don’t necessarily trust all the assumptions made in this calculation, but if it’s anywhere in the ball park, then it’s quite likely that we all contain some atoms that once belonged to Jesus.  So I guess Jesus isn’t the nowhere man—more like the everywhere man, though not in the way my church told me when I was little.  And now that I think about it, that bread we eat might actually be Jesus’s body.  (Judge the math for yourself.  It was done for Shakespeare, but the same reasoning would apply to Jesus. http://www.jupiterscientific.org/review/shnecal.html).

Since I was listening so closely, I’ll end with some commentary, not about the substance I heard, but about its presentation.  Why do religious leaders need to speak in such an unnatural way?  OK, I’m fine if they speak slowly.  That’s good practice when speaking publicly.  They want people to really hear and think about their words.  Good.  And I get that they’re impassioned, so emphasizing words and taking dramatic pauses is part of the passion.  There’s an element of entertainment in what they do, and they need to keep people listening. 

But there are aspects of the speech I’ve heard recently that are just obnoxious.  They leave pauses in random places: “This is the (pause) day the Lord (pause) has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad (pause) in it.”  It’s difficult to recreate in text, but anyone who’s been to a church probably knows what I’m talking about.  It’s as though religious speakers need to give additional weight to their words with an affected style of speech.  The quotation at the start of this entry about breaking bread is another example.  The speaker uses the archaic “brake” for the past tense, rather than “broke.”  This is the wording in the King James Bible.  I would not have an issue with this, except that nowhere else in the service did he use a King James translation.  It’s as though the formal sound of the archaic word “brake” somehow adds extra importance to the act.  (Though many people probably thought he was speaking poor English: “He break the bread…”)

I think there’s probably a very logical explanation for the value religious speakers place on an elevated tone. Our brains learn to process language in different tones differently, so a police officer or business executive or salesperson uses a tone suitable for his/her specific purposes.  (Can you imagine if your waiter spoke like your priest?)  Speech about religious material is sacred by nature, and a tone of high reverence has probably always helped to lend the appropriate weight to those words.  I suspect a particular manner of speech has evolved during the thousands of years humans have been telling sacred stories.  The extent to which some speakers take this, however, is ridiculous, such that the manner of speaking obscures rather than enhances the meaning of the words.  It becomes a distraction.  It is a tool by which religious speakers convey that what they say is deep and profound and listeners have been trained to process the tone of voice rather than process the meaning of the words themselves.  Caveat: this is certainly not true for all religious leaders.  I was married by one who gave intelligent, eloquent sermons in speech that was engaging and unpretentious.  But during my first three weeks of the Churchgoing Atheist project, I’ve noticed the affected speech a lot—from the pastors in weeks 2 and 3 and many of the lay people reading prayers or Bible passages.  

Thanks for sticking with me on this entry.  When you really listen, there’s a lot to talk about, and I intend to keep listening.

Week 2: The Puppet's Message

"For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory..."

-The Lord's Prayer

"Love, love me do.  You know I love you."

-The Beatles

The Beatles are on the radio again.  I’m driving to church, and I realize that the famous Beatles lyric doesn’t really make sense.  Sounds good, though. 

My second outing in the churchgoing atheist project takes me to a Reformed Church.  The Reformed Church is the Dutch equivalent of the Scottish Presbyterian Church that I knew growing up, so once again this week’s service is familiar.  I’ll broaden my horizons as the project continues.

Familiar it is, but looking at the ritual with fresh atheist eyes still yields a great deal to write about.  The best part of the service is the children’s sermon.  There is a puppet theater standing at the front of the sanctuary, a tall wooden box with a window and curtain.  The children walk up front (there are a handful of children at this church) and the puppet show begins.  It consists of a single Sesame-Street-looking puppet saying The Lord’s Prayer.  But as she begins, “Our father,” the voice of God responds over the sanctuary’s PA system: “Yes?”  And in the conversation that ensues, God explains to little Suzie what the prayer means.

Little Suzie doesn’t want to hear it.  She tells God that she just says her prayers because it’s routine.  She doesn’t know what it means, and it doesn’t matter.  It makes her feel good just to say the words, even if they don’t mean anything.  God explains to Suzie that it’s important to think about the words in prayer and to actually mean them when you say them.  And God has hit the nail on the head. 

I don’t believe most Christians listen to the words of the prayers in church.  Now we can never know for sure what’s in other people’s heads, so maybe I’m just assuming that because I spent years not listening to those words myself.  But I’m pretty confident in this belief, partly because the words of those prayers are pretty bizarre when you do actually think about them.  Consider the prayer of confession that is printed in this week’s bulletin: “We confess that we have not bowed before Jesus and are slow to acknowledge his rule.  We give allegiance to the powers of this world and fail to be governed by justice and love…”  If people actually listen to this, they will realize it promotes Jesus as a ruler in this world.  It is not a metaphor; it explicitly says that Jesus should be crowned ruler in place of the governments of this world.  It ends with the idea that people should “obey the commands of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  If people actually obeyed those words, they would invite the poor and the blind to feasts (Luke 14), or if they really obeyed, they would sell everything they have and give it to the poor (Luke 18).  I’ll resist the urge to pursue this line of thought further at this time.

Returning to my belief that Christians don’t actually listen to the words of prayers in church, I need only look to this children’s message for proof.  The church leadership is aware that people—children, at least—don’t think about what they say.  I would extrapolate this to the bulk of the people.  They read the prayers like automatons, performing the weekly, mindless ritual of recitation without reflection.

The lesson from little Suzie isn’t over yet.  God has some moral teaching for the little ones.  He explains each line of The Lord’s Prayer, and when he gets to “lead us not into temptation,” he must explain to Suzie that he’s aware she sometimes tells lies.  Sometimes she watches things on TV that she shouldn’t.  She has friends at school that do bad things.  And God explains that Suzie shouldn’t put herself in situations that will make her do bad things.  God will “deliver us from evil” if we do not put ourselves in positions to be tempted.  While on its face this is good moral advice to give to young people, it is a logically twisted explanation that is typical of Christian attempts to explain religious beliefs.  If it is our responsibility to avoid evil, then what are we asking God for?  I’m sure this fits into the whole “free will” thing—it would be too easy for God to just deliver us from evil, so he puts evil temptation in the world and puts the onus on people to avoid it.  If they do, chalk it up to God’s guidance.  If they don’t, chalk it up to individuals’ weaknesses.  This is a nonsensical explanation to give to children under the guise of logical moral advice.  It’s provided by a voice in the sky (the PA system), which also gives children the bogus idea that God listens to their prayers and responds in personal ways.  Anyone who really believes this is sadly misled.

Although the structure of the service looks exactly like the Presbyterian services I’m used to, there’s one unusual addition.  Early on is an “Exhortation to Self-Examination.”  I’ve never seen this before.  It’s self-explanatory, though: it was simply a call to the congregation to think critically about their own behavior.  This is consistent with God’s message to Suzie in the children’s lesson.  It’s ironic that the service seems to emphasize this need for people to actually think critically about their religious lives.  I appreciate that idea, but I find that that kind of reflection about religion only leads away from the groundless superstitions of church.

Having written way more about the children’s lesson than I’d intended, I’ll keep the rest short.  The sermon was given by a guest pastor.  It was about the kingdom to come, in recognition of the last Sunday of the liturgical year.  The speaker attempted to reconcile Jesus’s statements that the kingdom was at hand with the obvious fact that it is not here, even 2000 years later.  I’ve read and heard many attempts to explain the “kingdom” that Jesus refers to.  The bottom line is that nobody knows what the kingdom means, and there is a wild variety of interpretations of it.  This particular speaker argued that we continue to wait for the kingdom, and that we must avoid the “secular despair” that we are tempted into by its absence. He claims that we can’t even imagine how God’s kingdom is going to be when it happens, and all we can do is “bear witness” as we wait for it.  We must create pieces of that kingdom in Christian communities here on earth, so that what God has promised will be visible.  This will make it so that people will not be justified in their disbelief.  We won’t know when or how God’s kingdom will come, but we are assured that it will.

If people indeed think critically about this, they will realize it is a devious trick.  It is a logical trap.  The pastor argues that it is impossible to know when or how God’s kingdom will come, or what it will look like when it comes.  If these are necessary components of the definition of God’s kingdom, then Christian communities are tricked into forever waiting in ignorance.  Theologians have gotten away with this cruel game of blind anticipation for 2000 years.  I do wish the parishioners and leadership of this church would listen to the puppet’s lesson, because the advice to actually think about what churches say is the most intelligent thing I heard in this building.  

"Love Me Do" doesn't make any sense.  It sounds good and means nothing, just like today's sermon.  The difference is that the Beatles don't claim any special insight into God's plan.

Week 1: The Uncomfortable Start of a Project

"This is the day the lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."

-Common expression to open church services

"Little Darlin', it feels like years since we've been here."

-The Beatles

Waking up on Sunday mornings is pretty alien to me, at least recently. 8:30 seems ungodly early for a weekend. But I am intent upon suffering so for my first trip to church in two years. It would not be church if it didn’t feel like a chore, right? But as I wake up, I get this unusual feeling—I’m looking forward to church. Weird, I know. I begin the drive to church, and it’s a beautiful fall morning. The air is fresh. I see neighbors walking dogs, raking leaves, talking to one another, and they seem happy. The sunlight is coming from a strange direction, lighting the trees into a blaze of orange and yellow. I turn on the radio, and the Beatles are singing “Here Comes the Sun.” The world is conspiring to make me happy about church.

One cannot help being tempted to see God’s hand in this beautiful morning. It’s as though he is thanking me, welcoming me, approving of my decision to attend church again. Or perhaps he just made such a beautiful morning in an attempt to prove his existence to me, an unbeliever.

If there were a God, he would know that I’m attending to church in order to look at it with atheist eyes. He would be offended that I will sit and pretend, sing along, read the prayers, listen to the sermon, and not believe a word of it. But I’m not worried about an imaginary God being offended and striking me down for unbelief. I will pursue my project: I will attend a different church every Sunday and write about it from an atheist’s perspective. Simple as that.

But where to begin? I want to ease into this project—nothing too crazy yet. So I choose a mild and liberal Baptist church near my house, and a church that will probably be similar to the Presbyterian ones I spent so many Sundays at earlier in my life. It will be nice to start with something familiar.

Approaching the church, I begin to worry about the empty parking lot. And where is the front door, anyway? I end up circumnavigating the building looking for a front door, but there are only about 15 cars in the parking lot, and no obvious influx of people. My plan to blend in and observe inconspicuously will not be easy if there are only a few people here. Not finding the front door, and feeling pretty stupid about it, I make my way in through the church office, and find the sanctuary. I must be early.

I'm not early. It's 9:55, and there are still only 10 people in the congregation, and I’m feeling pretty conspicuous, but at this point I’m committed. Five people in the front row. Not wanting to be too rude sitting in the back row, and I take a seat a few rows behind the crowd at the front, thinking I can hide behind them. 9:59. The five in the front row get up and relocate to the choir’s bench, leaving me in the very front of the congregation, right as the music begins. Awesome.

As the service starts, though, I’m oddly relaxed. Who cares if there are 10 blue-hairs wondering about the random guy in the front row? I do a half-turn and get a quick glance at the crowd behind me as the service starts, and I realize I’m attending a dying church. There’s almost nobody here.

It’s a strange mix of emotions I feel. There’s something comfortable, familiar, and almost joyful about being here. I spent so many hours in church growing up that it’s like returning home, or seeing an old friend again after many years. The comfort to be found in church is real. But I’m conflicted because the premise on which it’s all founded is nonsense. I’m angry I spent so many hours praising something that was never there. The people sitting in the rows behind me draw inspiration and guidance from a system that is a lie. So why am I depressed to see so few people here?

But when the pastor speaks, I like him immediately. He’s wearing a bowtie. He begins, “So the hated Yankees have won the world series,” and proceeds into a discussion of sports. Interesting, but it doesn’t seem like a sermon. I look at the bulletin and realize this portion of the service is the children’s lesson, and then it really hits me—there are no children here.

What do I really believe about the church? If I believe there is no god, and I believe religion is an enormous delusion, then should I be happy that there are no children to hear this lesson? Certainly church is not going to disappear anytime soon, if ever, but this one is—that is a near certainty. A church without children is doomed.

Growing up, I never used to listen to the sermon. But this one is good. The pastor touches on one of the best aspects of religious belief: charity. I cannot deny that religion makes people more selfless and compassionate than we are naturally inclined to be. The pastor builds his sermon around the passage from Mark in which a woman pours expensive oil on Jesus, and the bystanders protest that it could have been sold to give money to the poor. The pastor attempts to make sense of this strange action and Jesus’s approval of it. It is a perplexing section, and the pastor weaves it together with stories of charity and transformation from the local Rochester community. He focuses on Foodlink, an organization that provides huge amounts of free food to hungry families all over western New York. He asks the questions: will there always be destitute people? Will it always rain in our lives? Will there always be suffering around us? He answers those questions by saying that there will always be suffering until the kingdom comes and everyone is called back to god again. In the meantime, though, in our lives, god will rain blessings upon us in unexpected ways, as Foodlink does for the Rochester hungry and the woman in the gospel does for Jesus. People can give of their deep passion as expressions of charity, and others can be transformed by that.

A beautiful message, and artfully delivered. I wholeheartedly approve of his message of charity, and I believe the congregation, small though it is, follows through on this message with their actions. But do we need the Bible to inspire this? No. In fact, I do not believe that the gospel passage he analyzes conveys this message of charity. Though it was a passionate sermon, it was based on an illogical interpretation of the passage. If Jesus really believed in charity, he would not have applauded the woman for her kind act of anointment. The bystanders were right; the woman’s action was foolishly wasteful. I’ve been to Foodlink to volunteer*, and they have pallets of food as far as the eye can see, and each day we’d move a different food item. One day I was there, it was bananas. The Foodlink analogy doesn’t work, because the modern day equivalent of the woman’s action would be a Foodlink worker taking a pallet of bananas, turning them into a giant banana milkshake for Jesus, and then pouring it down the drain after he tasted it. Those bananas might be given to Jesus out of her deep passion, it may be a beautiful gesture of appreciation, but it removes food from the destitute who need it. The bystanders were right to protest. As far as I can see, this Bible story doesn’t make any sense in a 21^st-century context, and maybe not in any context. Unfortunately, every Sunday religious leaders must attempt to explain and find relevance in Biblical texts that sometimes defy logic. Jesus was dead wrong here, if we read the story from the perspective of the hungry.

I believe human morality has its basis outside of God and religion. We do not need to play games of logic in order to find moral messages in a biblical text that may contradict what we know to be right. The church's minister, in his message of charity, was right, and Jesus was wrong. But the logical gymnastics are a sad necessity of religious belief, and one that most believers choose to ignore.

As I leave the church, I shake the pastor’s hand and thank him for having me as a guest. I genuinely liked the service, the sermon, and the people. Still, I feel like a liar and a snake, because I’m pretending to be a believer but I’m secretly there to dissect and criticize. Those few people in the congregation will stay to discuss their charity work, and I will go home to type up an arrogant critique and then watch football.

This church is dying, and it does sadden me. Though I am sure belief in god is wrong, I’m surprised that I find myself thinking the world will be slightly worse off if this congregation dissolves. I realize that I should approach this project with a spirit of intellectualism, but also with humility and an open mind. I have much to learn.

*Incidentally, I can’t claim to be a particularly charitable person. Saying I volunteered at Foodlink makes me sound much better than I am. The volunteer work at Foodlink was part of my college fraternity’s charitable work. We figure that a few days of volunteering balances out four years of reckless drunkenness.