Churches and Atheism

I've just read an article on RD.net entitled "If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House". I wrote a short comment on the site about the article, but I feel the need to expound on my feelings here. First of all, I will take issue with the title of the article. God isn't dead because there never was one. It's really annoying when people associate atheists with hating God or thinking that he's dead. All of the atheists that I know including me don't believe that there is or ever was any god to hate or think is dead. This is simply ridiculous. Unfortunately, however, many theists (Christians, in my experience) associate atheism with hating God as was demonstrated by navyjake95 on another RD.net thread yesterday. I believe the term he used was something like "God-hating commie Athiest(sic) Jihad bastards". I commented that this was the epitome of all oxymorons. Last time I checked, it was pretty hard to hate something that one doesn't believe to be in existence, but maybe I'm wrong. It happens every once in a while. Also, if one were an atheist, I'm pretty certain that you couldn't be a Jihadi as well, as that would require belief in Allah and the tenets of Islam. Then, of course, there's the "commie" part. I'm assuming this is coming from the tired old Argumentum ad Stalinium/Pol Potium (Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists so therefore all communists are atheists). This is the stupidest part, so I'm not even going to bother with a refutation as this argument has been refuted ad nauseum in various other places.

And after that tangent, now on to the meat of this post. The subject and thesis of the article are basically that supposedly many atheists have some sort of void in their lives once the sense of community that they felt from the church is removed from their lives. Perhaps it's that I am biased as a result of my personal experiences with church in childhood (being that I was brought up in the Lutheran Church), but I think that my story is similar to a lot of my peers and spurred the mass rejection of religion (and perhaps God) that we see in the current young generation (as demonstrated by the Pew poll that said that 25% of 19-29 year olds did not affiliate themselves with any religion).

Growing up, I was always involved in a lot of things. I was a brownie/girl scout for a couple of years, I danced (ballet, jazz, modern mostly), I played the piano and the violin (in high school), I was a cheerleader, I was in chorus, I always did well in school, etc. So as you can see, I was a busy girl. I've always had a lot on my plate, so to be forced by my parents to add something else to the equation that was no fun and caused me to have to get up early on my only day to sleep in, I was understandably not overjoyed. Not only was church not just no fun, but it was also terribly boring. Sunday school required getting up even earlier than regular service did and so any fun that I may have had there was negated by the fact that I had to get up extra early and church service itself was incredibly boring. It was basically an hour of silence, standing up and sitting down, kneeling, mumbling some words that I said so many times I didn't think about them, and finding something to do or think about while the pastor gave the sermon for 10 to 15 minutes. Then there was the constant scrutiny that I was under from my step-dad to sit still and not put my feet on the "kneelers" under the pew in front of me. He paid more attention to what I was doing than he ever did to the service. I also had to go through several weeks of preparation for my "first communion" which required that I do homework. Any school-age child being told to do more homework that they don't receive any real credit for will obviously not be overjoyed. I was also forced to go through Catechism which consisted of two years of going to stupid classes every few Wednesday nights during the school-year which also required extra homework (which I never did). The first year was taught by Pat who was our Youth Director. Her name was Pat and she looked just like "It's Pat" from SNL. Needless to say, no one took her very seriously. The second year was taught by our no-nonsense pastor who didn't like my questions about whether or not non-Christians could go to heaven and that it wasn't fair for God not to have chosen everyone to be a Christian.

The only pleasant experiences I can recall from church were singing in the youth choir for a few years, doing the crafts at Bible School (until the year that I ate a cashew which caused me to go into anaphylaxis and both of my lungs collapsed which almost caused me to die...I didn't like Bible School after that), and the couple of ski trips that I went on in high school with other churches (since my church was too lame to do their own trip). I did attend a program called "Young Life" in high school that was fun. We played games, sang songs, and the "leaders" performed skits for us for an hour every Monday night. The boring part was at the end when one of the "leaders" would talk about Jesus. I always zoned out during that part.

Anyway, the point of all of the gibberish above is that most people my age were involved in numerous activities and church was just a chore to them. Indeed, my closest friends from the time are not religious (even if they aren't necessarily atheists). We found senses of community all over the place in the various activities that I listed above among many others. Perhaps generations older than mine only had a sense of community from church as there weren't as many options for extra-curricular activities in the past, but such was not the case for me and is not the case for future generations. Kids now are involved in even more things than I was involved with and I'm sure the options will only continue to grow, so this whole nonsense about needing a "church for atheists" seems outdated to me. There are many groups for adults to join as well. I participate in a cycling group and a running group. We even have shirts that say so. I also go to the gym where I see certain people regularly. There are many many options and if atheists think that they need some sort of church to replace the feelings of community they lost when they left the church, they aren't paying attention to the plethora of communities surrounding them. Personally, I relish my one day to sleep in.