A reader sends in this question. "If the number of Christians in the next generation is declining, as recent surveys suggest, what will happen to all the churches in America? There are so many new ones in the South with huge parking lots to accommodate the faithful. These will be empty someday if numbers continue to decline."
The reader goes on to make a suggestion of his own. "Turn these into big movie theatres." He wonders what other readers of this blog might suggest for unused churches. In England, churches are resold as private houses, but buyers can be put off thinking something bad will happen if you use a former church as a domestic residence.
Another reader from Mississippi wrote yesterday: "Like you, I'm an atheist, but not quite as polite about it as you are. It's especially difficult here where there's a scripture of the day every day in the paper. I've been reading a lot of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Philip Pullman, all highly recommended."
Thank you for sending me your thoughts and opinions. I love to get e-mail from previously unknown readers.
Continuing on with the religious theme:
GIVE Richard Dawkins a child for a week’s summer camp and he will try to give you an atheist for life.
The author of The God Delusion is helping to launch Britain’s first summer retreat for non-believers, where children will have lessons in evolution and sing along to John Lennon’s Imagine.
The five-day camp in Somerset (motto: “It’s beyond belief”) is for children aged eight to 17 and will rival traditional faith-based breaks run by the Scouts and church groups.
Budding atheists will be given lessons to arm themselves in the ways of rational scepticism. There will be sessions in moral philosophy and evolutionary biology along with more conventional pursuits such as trekking and tug-of-war. There will also be a £10 prize for the child who can disprove the existence of the mythical unicorn.
Domestic notes:
Another beautiful day in the UK. The sun is beckoning to me so I am going to abandon my chores and sit outside in the morning sunshine before it gets too hot.
I made ice cream last night. I have a little European ice cream maker so it can only make a quart but it broke so I had to put the ice cream in the freezer and stir it manually until it froze. It's delicious. I 'tested' a spoonful of it this morning and kept going back for a few more Quality Control tests with my spoon until my husband said, "Why don't you just put some in a little bowl and eat that?" But then those calories would count. As long as I'm only 'testing' it with a spoon, that's not real eating, is it??
Recipe:
1 pint double cream
1 pint full-fat milk
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
What could be easier than that?
Going out into the sunshine now. See you later.
26 comments:
What about movie thetres? They have the seating already and some have audio-visual systems.
Or maybe convert venues. Demolish the pulput and build a stage.
Plenty of parking too.
Make it into a soup kitchen so the homeless can be helped.
I think the aim of the camp is to teach kids how to think and not what to think, so the aim is not to "make" atheists that would be hypocritical IMO; clearly though, once you start thinking for yourself about ethics, science and religion then Atheism is a likely outcome.
Religion is so transparently false and man-made that even kids can see through it, that's why the indoctrinators like to get'em young and scare the livin b'jebus out of them.
I hope this antidote becomes a widespread phenomenon but I expect there will be a lot of vested interests working to make sure that doesn't happen.
I remember disbelieving some of the religious crap people told me as a kid, but then when someone told me that no two snowflakes are the same, I thought that sounded like rubbish too.
I was a bit put off by the way this camp was described too: "he will try to give you an atheist for life" It doesn't really seem to make sense that atheists have goals for people to be indoctrinated - that's one of the ways we proudly differ from many religious people, we want people to think (and think well) for themselves.
Lisa I suspect the sound-bite is not genuine and the camp is not his idea, it is based on a similar scheme in the USA (same company I believe), more likely just a journalists' invention designed to make it/him look much more "strident" than really is.
If you look at the BBC story you get a much more balanced view.
I wouldn't get too happy about the demise of Chrisitanity. It's just being transformed into something else. Google "transforming chrisitianity ecology worship" or similar terms to see what I mean.
Why waste a lot of good irrational belief when it can be transformed into support for sustainable development? The credulous are useful.
Marty said: I wouldn't get too happy about the demise of Chrisitanity.
Eliz: We could give it a try though. I'm sure people said the same thing about the Greek and Roman gods when people stopped believing in them.
Those gods didn't go anywhere though, they just morphed. Take Circe, she became kirk, and that became church, and fills her belly with fattened humans all over the land. Sacrifices to her became donations to building funds.
The company I work for just bought a 100 acre tract of land with a big church on it, and four other buildings. It's the new training center and parking lot for employees. The church people needed more space.
Looking at the devotional scenes which accompanied the cult of Michael Jackson around makes me start to think organised religion is a safer concept than corporate collusion elevating individuals or classes onto a podium for baseless profit motives.
You can't get rid of spirituality so it's necessary to separate it from the state and prevent any overweening influence over society.
I don't agree with any single belief system, but I also don't think we should discourage positive efforts to improve any aspect of life wherever it is found.
But worshipping Michael Jackson must be less harmful to society than organized religion.
I guess people have empty lives - would be nice if they could fill it with books, music and helping others instead of worshipping MJ though.
I read that some people flew from America just to see Michael Jackson make the announcement of his tour. So they did all that plus waited hours because he was late to hear him say about 10 words.
Aren't you concerned about the deification of MJ by the media and their reasons for doing so?
It didn't do him much good - his private life (financial management, relationships, prescription drug addictions, anorexia etc) shows it clearly has a psychological impact, but on the other hand harm IS difficult to quantify.
I guess it depends on whether you think we should raise individuals up to suffer on behalf of and in abeyance for the masses, or whether we must learn to accept and deal with our own sufferings that are a natural part of existence.
Do you mean that they deified him recently? Because he has been a figure of ridicule for a long time in the media. I thought this would be more of a 'they love you one minute & hate you the next' thing for a news cycle to sell newspapers.
Isn't that the mark of a true god: to be revered and ridiculed in equal measure?
Personally I prefer Seneca - "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
To his landlord who was charging him how many times market value, to the promoter who booked him for 50 shows when he thought he was only agreeing to 10, to all the other corporate weevils who indulged his caprices for a price, they all found a use for him, and of course all the attention his death is getting just sparks another round on the house.
When ws the fist time he was ridiculed? For his sexualised whooping as a pre-teen, for singing a paean to a rat, for appearing in an all-black version of the Wizard of Oz?
I think it was all just grist to the mill of promotion initially cultivated by the master promoter Berry Gordy when he was at Motown - nothing sells quite like controversy!
I was disappointed to see only one tasteless MJ joke on this site! A few that I heard and enjoyed recently are:
Q: What is the difference between Neil Armstrong and Michael Jackson?
A: The first one did a moon walk, and the second one f**ked little boys.
**********************
Q: Why does Michael Jackson hope to come back as a set of Legos?
A: So little boys can play with him for a change.
**********************
The final autopsy report is in. Micheal Jackson choked on an eight-year-old wiener.
**********************
Never having had any interest in him, I was rather lost in recent conversations about him. I tend to get the Jackson Five hits mixed up with those of the Osmond Brothers---after all, they were of the same era, and both groups featured a cute little brother singing falsetto lead while a hulking chorus of siblings woo-wooooed and doo-wopped in the background.
I do so wish that Donny Osmond had taken a parallel path with his (once) darker teen-idol colleague. Think about it! Donny could have had multiple skin-dye treatments and labial collagen injections to turn himself into a faux-negro, frizzled up his hair, and had rhinoplasty to give him a bulbous Hattie McDaniel nose.
Oh, that poor idiot Jacko---somebody should have told him he was a BOY, so he wouldn't have bought into all this "my looks aren't good enough" BS that (according to this site) is the dreadful fate of WOMEN only!
Hi OP, are you saying that the purpose of religion is not baseless profit?, or just that they say it's not. They mostly seem to do rather well to me ;-)
MJ was certainly exploited as most of his ilk are, the system exists to make money after all; but on the other hand he earned a lot of cash himself too and he lived a life of fabulous luxury and whim, whereas most people in the world have never even made a phone call.
I find it hard to feel sorry for him.
Hey Brenda, you reminded me of a Mike Tyson joke:
Why does Mike Tyson cry after sex?
It's the mace!
GOOD ONE Giant Willy!
And Steve, yes, I too have less-than-zero pity for celebrities who court public favor (or rather, court money for their silly pop studio-doctored songs, viz: Britney Spears, GAG) then turn around and whine that they "have no privacy" or are being "demonized" by the public. "Hounded by the paparazzi!" Just imagine the decibel level of their howls and whines if the paparazzi ignored them! Fate worse than death, for these fools.
They can't have it both ways. If they prefer a quiet life, prefer to be left alone by the public, then they should go teach Comparative Lit at a small private college, not shine their asses in weird costumes and grab their crotches on camera.
LOL - Marty, that's my favourinte so far!
As a point of interest on the Richard Dawkins element of this post, he sent a letter to the times about the source of this article, here is what he said:
The Editor
The Sunday Times
London
Sir
The duplicity of Lois Rogers' title, "Dawkins Sets up Kids' Camp to Groom Atheists" (Sunday Times, June 28th), is exceeded only by its Jesuitical opening line, "Give Richard Dawkins a child for a week's summer camp and he will try to give you an atheist for life." I had nothing to do with the setting up of Camp Quest, and it is not, in any sense whatever, inspired by me, or influenced by me. The British version, run by Samantha Stein with no help from me, follows the admirable American model founded some years ago by Edwin and Helen Kagin, of Kentucky.
Lois Rogers asked me for a quotation, and she thanked me warmly for the following: "Camp Quest encourages children to think for themselves, sceptically and rationally. There is no indoctrination, just encouragement to be open-minded, while having fun." Isn't that about as far from Jesuitical grooming as you could imagine? One of my dominant motivations, passionately expressed in The God Delusion, is an abhorrence of childhood indoctrination, of atheism just as much as of religion. It is in this spirit that the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science has made very modest contributions to Camp Quest. Lois Rogers' traducing of both Camp Quest and me is, alas, par for the course for religiously motivated journalists. Fortunately, I am not the litigious type, but an apology would be nice.
Richard Dawkins
Oxford
Thank you for putting the letter in; I completely missed that.
It was good also that you pointed out how differently the news was handled in different papers -- it's so easy to forget when reading that the info is being skewed.
E, The less charitable among us would call it "lying for Jesus"..
Another memorable phrase from you, thanks. Good book title but would need a plot with lots of sex and violence to sell the manuscript.
E, that book has already been written, its called the "old testament"??
Hmmm. You're right. Guess I couldn't really update it and try to sell it; no one would believe it.
Isn't the 'old testament' what retired priests gave the courts during their trials for paedophilia..?
Thanks for posting that Steve, much better than the journalist's version.
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