Journeyman Philosopher talks about the lack of correlation between religion and morality.
So... religion isn't the key to intelligence nor is it the key to morality. And you already know that I think Christianity is strange. And yet thousands of Mississippians are going to wake up on Sunday morning, find a church, sit through the service, praise a god, and then find something to eat afterward.
With the exception of "praise a god", I'm going to do the same thing, just like I've done every weekend for the past few years. I find a Mississippi church and sit through the service. In the back of my mind, I say, "This will be the service that convinces me that there's a god above." It's my effort to keep an open mind on supernatural matters. Each week I walk away having learned more about the church that I visited than anything supernatural. In two years of actively visiting churches, interviewing preachers and reading Christian apologetics books, I have found nothing that requires me to conclude that supernatural forces exist. I've blogged about many of those experiences here at Mississippi Atheists. There was one church that I attended that I've yet to blog about. Just for the record, I visited the local Oxford Church of the Nazarene but never wrote a post about them. I reached a point where there was nothing new to say.
If there is one positive aspect to religion, it's this: religion provides a unified community framework. Sure, the basis for that religion may be mythology, but the unified community framework is still there. Despite no interest in worshiping mythology, atheists, agnostics and freethinkers still seek that sense of community. I now know a handful of nonbelievers who attend the local Episcopalian church because they are tolerant to the views of others. I've started attending the local Unitarian congregation where I am encouraged to be open about my non-belief. It really is like having my cake and eating it too. I get the community involvement where I can openly discuss spiritual matters without having to worship mythology. I also visit The Orchard, a local Methodist affiliation. They have an active community outreach program that focuses on service.
But let's not forget the negatives. I think back to my visit to the Yellow Leaf Baptist Church. Here's a church that is warm and hospitable, and yet they have a warped view of history. This church wants us to believe that the United States was founded as an exclusively Christian nation. One of the things the pastor warned me about was people trying to rewrite the history of our country when it was he who lacked the understanding of basic US history. Their religion supports this strange viewpoint, so I doubt they will ever change. I also think back to my second visit to the First Baptist Church. I blogged about them once and they personally invited me back. The second time around, the pastor had an anti-homosexual, anti-secular subtext to his sermon that I found to be offensive. If this view is representative of the entire church, then I certainly don't want to be part of that congregation. I want to tell the pastor that if he keeps preaching an anti-secular message, he'll never win a new convert. Better yet, I shouldn't tell him anything.
Michael Shermer once said, "Religion is good when it does good, and bad when it does bad." From what I've seen in almost 20 Mississippi churches, I can vouch for that remark. There's a book titled, "They Like Jesus But Not the Church." It's a series of interviews with people who don't attend church and why they do not. Here's a message that I would like to tell to Christians: I'm no longer interested in your Jesus, but I am interested in your church. What do you have to show us? Where do you get community right and where have you been wrong? The one thing that I feel the freethought community in Mississippi lacks is a real presence in the greater community.
One last thing: three different members from the Oxford Church of the Nazarene have sent me personal e-mails asking me to return. They are certainly an example of positive community.
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