I met a pentecostal…

Today I met with Matthew Glombick, the Pentecostal chaplain at the University of Alberta.

He’s a nice guy, very much in the feel-good christian framework.  He was very curious and seemed reasonably intelligent.  He is ratifying a student group for pentecostals, EPIC, that is more of a “church community,” as part of the church planting campaign the pentecostals in Edmonton (and everywhere) are pushing.

He asked about what meaning in life there is in atheism, where morals/ethics come from, are there objective morals without god, etc.  He also thought that since most people (ever) have believed in something supernatural (and that’s counter-intuitive to the simplest assumptions we should make), that that gives credence to the supernatural.

What is clear to me is that in the next year the UAAA will have to do a lot more work talking about the common misconceptions surrounding atheism.

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7 thoughts on “I met a pentecostal…”

  1. Chris says:

    I dont know why new Christian groups keep popping up if they all rehash the same old arguments. More importantly, why does the Student Union keep allowing more Christian groups, with only minor superficial differences between them? Wouldnt it make more sense to have a singe “Christian Students Association” or somesuch? I bet if we tried starting a second Atheist group, claiming “Oh we’re different because we don’t accept the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a valid parody religion”, I doubt it would get very far.

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  2. Alan says:

    We could point that out by trying to start up 8 different athiest organizations like the pharyngulistas (a more ‘millitant’ group) or separate atheist and agnostic groups (because segregation is totally the way of the future). Is there an explicit counter to the annoying pro-life group? There would also need to be a campus crusade for cthulhu.
    I wonder what the response to a huge number of atheistic and pro-science and skeptical groups would be? It’d be a stack of paperwork, but it might prove a (somewhat silly) point.

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  3. Alan says:

    And i think the ‘common misconceptions about atheism’ could turn into either pamphlets or even a series in the gateway.
    I always thought it would be neat to ask people what they think science can’t explain(even benign delusions like the persistent belief that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly) and turn it into a vaguely regular little blurb hidden somewhere in the gateway.

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  4. Ian says:

    Since Amanada Nielsen, a secular humanist and member of UAAA, is the Student Groups Director, I doubt we’d have problem ratifying any groups, as long as there were (slightly) different mission statements, and potentially a different 10 members starting each (with some overlap). I agree about the paperwork though, and I think for now we’re stronger united than divided.

    As for pro-choice groups I know the Women’s Rights group or something like that was posting pro-choice flyers a couple times in response to Go-life.

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  5. Ian says:

    I should also say that our main pamphlet does have an atheist FAQ, and the Society of Edmonton Atheists has a nice FAQ too.

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  6. Alan says:

    Nice. Perhaps I should get a little more involved before I start making suggestions…

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