Atheists in church

I have many religious friends, ranging from the most evangelical Christians to the parted with the church atheists.

But something surprised me recently with a couple of my semi-regular church attending friends.  It turns out that they basically don’t buy it.

On the supernatural stuff, they agree with me almost completely in that its all made up. Yet they still go to church.

So I had to ask why.

The most surprising answer was “for the morals.” (The least surprising was “for the girls”.) The other common answers include for a community, and the ceremony.

But the morals issue still sticks in my head. It really demonstrates how much of a stranglehold religion has had on morality for far too long.  That’s not to say there hasn’t been secular ethos presented, but merely that its been widely ignored (or unseen).

So here we find one key argument that religions have that the atheists lack.

There is no world atheist church on par with any religious group of equal size.

Consider this: there are around 13 million Mormons in the world, and potentially over 700 million non-theists. There are Mormon temples in every major North-American city, but freethought groups are very sparse and often flop.  The Center for Inquiry is arguably the first major attempt to provide a community for humanists and naturalists, but it only exists in a handful of major cities, and nowhere in rural communities. Even Alberta claims upwards of 25% non-religious on the last census, yet we only just formalized our first CFI branch.

With this lack of secular alternative, it’s no wonder that many turn to liberal religious services (United Church, Unitarian-Universalism, even the Anglican Church sometimes).  But all of these are still based upon some supernatural belief, and therefor preclude many non-religious.

So I think there are two things that need to take place.

First, secular alternatives need to be set up.  Every major community should have some form of group for the non-religious and naturalists.  This isn’t evangelism, this is merely providing an alternative secular community for the large numbers of unaffiliated (I realize that many will remain unaffiliated, however, no one is forcing attendance).

Second, archaic supernatural rituals should be exposed for what they are – superstituous relics from a prescientific age.  When PZ Myers stuck a nail through a cracker, he wasn’t setting out to discriminate and offend scores of Catholic soldiers, he was exposing the fact that some people actually still believe, and are willing to utter death threats, for something so simple as a metaphorical exercise in papal brain-washing.

I imagine that I too could sit through a Communion ceremony, if I thought no one else believed it.  Or at least if the majority of the congregation didn’t buy it.  But to know people are willing to curse and threaten others for merely suggesting that they would laugh at their beliefs completely prevents me from ever connecting on that level.

So to all of you still attending church for the community, morals, girls or whatever else, while not believing any of that supernatural stuff, seek out other non-theists and break the last shackles of religion.

No sooner did I finish writing this as I found one more reason why some community is better than no community.