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 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.