Tag Archives: Secular Student Alliance

Today’s Church Experience

Posted on by

Today I attended Sunday morning services with four other atheists from the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Louisville. For an explanation of what we were doing in a church, see my post immediately before this one: I am going to church tomorrow and here’s why. If you haven’t read that one yet, I recommend it for the back story before you continue with this post.

The church we attended was Walnut Street Baptist Church in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. The service was very typical of my experiences both growing up in the Church of the Nazarene and in visiting Baptist churches when I was looking for something different. The sizable sanctuary was well filled with mostly white  but also a scattering of black middle-class families, mostly dressed in casual and semi-dressy clothes. As far as looks go, our group fit right in. No one would have known we were not typical church-goers unless they recognized us or heard our post-service conversation.

wsbc

This is the view from where we were sitting. This photo was taken while the choir was singing.

The order of the service was as I expected, except that the taking of the offering happened at the end just before the benediction, and not right after the congregational singing. Otherwise the service was pretty much identical to the ones I had grown up in. The call to worship (the opening song) was “Because of Who You Are,” and it felt surreal to me to sit and listen to it because I used to be incredibly moved by that song but now I was just rather bored and waiting for it to end. I thought the same of most of the song service, which was a mix of contemporary songs and hymns. The one song that I enjoyed was “It is Well With My Soul.” It is a pretty song and was always one of my favorites. It started out with a trumpet solo and then the congregation joined in and I sang as well. It was the best part of the entire service.

The sermon was about worry and anxiety, and drew from Matthew 6:25-34. It started with an anecdote about distraction, namely the distraction of the pastor himself when he was a young child on a baseball team. As we all know, very young children are very distractible. He transitions into the rest of the sermon by saying the things that distract Christians the most from following Jesus are worry and anxiety. Without reproducing the entire sermon, which was fairly well organized with three sets of three points each, I’ll jump straight to the main point. According to this sermon, anxiety is experienced by Christians who forget to keep their focus on Jesus and instead worry about making preparations for their future. The point of the passage is that we should not worry about what will happen tomorrow or what we will eat or wear, since God will take care of all that. And Jesus is good and doesn’t want us to be anxious. Given that everyone in that congregation looked pretty well fed and clothed, I doubt that this pastor was making points about basic sustenance (like Jesus was) as much as about desiring the best clothes or the best food–things not necessary for survival and a basic level of sustenance and personal security.  I assume that at least the adults in the congregation are not so naïve as to think that they should not therefore store up provisions for the future for themselves and their children. After all, even the bird of the air starve to death when there is a drought or overpopulation or other such misfortune. In part because, as the Bible says, they don’t store up in barns. Perhaps we should be more like the squirrels of the trees than the birds of the air…but now I am getting off topic.

The part of the sermon that bothered me the most was the pastor’s response to the obvious objection to his message: What about when God is NOT providing for me what I need? After all, there are a lot of starving people in the world, and some of them are Christians. Here is his answer: “God will provide what is sufficient to do what he wants us to do.” In other words, if you are praying and begging and not getting what you need, it’s all part of God’s plan. He will reward you in the afterlife. Oh, also “your definition of good is not the same as God’s.” Well then. Stop complaining and trust the one who is invisible and inaudible. Just don’t worry.

I was also disappointed to not hear him mention the real things that any person, Christian or not, can do to help deal with anxiety: taking to friends, journaling/blogging, not procrastinating, avoiding negative thinking, and even seeing a therapist and taking medication in extreme cases. If all you knew about anxiety and its causes came from this sermon, the take away message would be that the reason you are anxious because you do not have enough faith in Jesus. It’s long been my problem with preachers that they are very good at times at pointing out real problems, but their advice usually misses the mark by so much that it would be laughable if it was not so sad. I always got frustrated with sermons because I have expected them to give a rational and persuasive case, but most church sermons are not persuasive speeches. You just either just believe what the pastor says, or you don’t.

It was an interesting experience to see church though the eyes of a total nonbeliever, as an open atheist. As expected the people were precious and I would have no problem associating with any of them. But (most of the) music and the doctrine and sermons are clearly not for me. But I don’t mind attending to raise money for a worthy cause. :)

ssa_uofl

I am going to church tomorrow and here’s why.

Posted on by

ssa_uofl

Over the past few weeks, the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Louisville held a fundraiser called “Send an Atheist to Church.” Here is the basic idea. There is a fundraising jar for four different religious groups: Baptist, Mormon, Muslim, and Catholic. Anyone could “vote” for groups with their dollars and whichever group had the most money in their jar at the end of the fundraiser would get to have some atheists attend a service at their place of worship. The money the fundraiser will be donated to the Kid’s Center for Pediatric Therapy.

The chart below shows the progress of fundraising from the start to the end of the fundraiser. The line at the top is a total of funds raised, and the other four lines correspond by color with groups listed below. End the end, $170 dollars was donated to the Kid’s Center for Pediatric Therapy and the Baptists came out on top. Tomorrow is the planned day for a few members of the SSA at UofL to uphold their end of the bargain and attend  Sunday services at a local Baptist church.

SendAtheistToChurchGraph

I graduated from UofL several years ago, before there was a Secular Student Alliance there, so I am not a member of the SSA myself. However, as they have invited members of the Louisville Atheists and Freethinkers to participate I have decided to join in. I have pretty clear expectations for what the service will be like, because I was raised in The Church of the Nazarene which is very similar in service style to the Baptists. I expect the service will go something like this: announcements, then song service, offering, about a 30-40 minute sermon, prayer, and benediction. I expect the people will generally be friendly and welcoming. What will make this church visit different than all the previous times I have gone is that I will be going as a known atheist and I expect that will have some effect on the tone of interactions with the people there. I wonder if the paster will make any changes to the sermon in light of the fact that there will be a handful of open atheists among the congregation. In fact, I expect the people will probably be extra friendly for that reason in order to put on a good impressions and make sure we know that Jesus loves us.

I’ll post an update tomorrow on how it goes.

 

“Are Christians Losing Rights in America?” Part 2

Posted on by

As promised, Warrioress has provided a list of examples of Christian rights being eroded in the United States at Erosion of Religious Rights in America. Starting with a long list of cases that the ACLU has presented in court on behalf a Christian plaintiff. That list can be found here: ACLU Defense of Religious Practice and Expression.

The warrioress surprised me a bit here, because most conservative Christians I talk to totally despise the ACLU, which is a secularist organization and strong upholder of the separation between church and state. Several of the higher profile cases they take on are actually to defend non-Christians against Christians. For this reason they make a huge point on their website to prove they are not anti-religion, by posting such lists as the one I posted above. The ACLU, which I usually agree with and to which I give a monthly donation, has shown a track record of defending the rights of US citizens of every religion.

In light of all this, I can only see this long list of Christian lawsuits upheld by the ACLU as legitimate Christian (and other religious) rights upheld in the secular court of law, not eroded. So the bulk of her own examples belies the point she was trying to make.

The next example is of a Campus Crusade for Christ group that had difficulty getting approval to organize a group on their campus.

They denied Campus Crusade status as a student group, citing concerns about the group’s leadership, their views on homosexuality and the negative connotations of the word “Crusade.” As a result, student government said that Mark and others with Campus Crusade couldn’t advertise, seek membership, have an office or hold meetings on campus.

source: http://www.ccci.org/ministries-and-locations/ministries/campus-ministry/religious-freedom-attacked.htm

For all I know, this may very well be a legitimate case of discrimination, though a couple of red flags pop out at me. Later in the article it reads:

Across the country, there has been increased pressure on college campuses to quiet Christians about their beliefs. The challenges come on many fronts — restrictions on evangelism, “speech codes” (rules about what to say about sensitive topics like religion or sexual orientation), and about the teaching of evolution as the only acceptable view in science classes.

Which makes me wonder…were they really being blocked from creating an organization because they were harassing fellow students (“restrictions on evangelism”?), and discriminating against homosexuals for membership (which is easily against school policies)? Like I said, it’s possible that this could be religious discrimination, but I’d need to see the school official’s side of the story before making any judgement.

The other college example clearly had the group violating the anti-discrimination policy towards homosexuals. Apparently many colleges don’t consider discrimination based on sexual orientation to be a religious right.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/is-vanderbilt-university-denying-religious-freedom-to-christian-groups-on-campus/

And even if these are examples legitimate discrimination, would it really be a sign of a larger erosion of Christian rights? After all, just about every college campus in the country has Christian and other religious student groups. But there has also been an amazing surge of atheist and freethought student groups in the past few years, both in high school and in college, yet many of them face severe obstacles in getting the official recognition of their schools for no apparent reason other than their being atheists. The Secular Student Alliance does a great work in getting atheist campus groups started, and helping them when they face the typical obstacles. Many of these stories are not posted online in order to protect the privacy of the students involved, but this summary of the purpose of the SSA states exactly why we need secular clubs to assure that non-theistic students have their rights protected just the same as the religious students.

Here is a specific example I found from earlier this year in a very quick Google search. Southern Illinois University Rejects Atheist Student Group… Then Quickly Backtracks. And there are plenty more where that came from.

Christian rights are not being undermined in this country. They have been losing their accustomed privileges, such as the ability to discriminate against others based on sexual orientation without consequence, as shown above. And when their rights really are being stepped on, they will be defended in the court of law even by a secular organization like the ACLU.

(There was also one other example given, of the guy who was denied a post at the University of Kentucky in part because of his creationist views, but not because he is a Christian. There is a lot to that one, and that was a case I followed as it was unfolding, and it will take up a whole post of it’s own. And I need a break after writing this one, so I will address it later if needed. )