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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 12:20 pm
My best church experience? My parents volunteered us to usher for the services, basically handing out the program pamphlets and ushering people to seats. (It was a mega-church in Orlando) When the service started, me and my little brother would "volunteer" to man the doors and make sure people don't interrupt the sermon, but we'd go out to the basketball courts and play basketball in our Sunday best. My parents would wonder why we got all sweaty. (It was FL, even in the dead of winter it's 85 and 100% humidity)
The worst? All those weird culty youth group meetings at school and at church that I was forced into. It wasn't even a super fundie church, but I feel like it was a meeting of 90% homeschooled kids and the rest are the preacher's kid type children. Weird. Even the FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes) meetings my mom made me go to in middle school were just awkward. It was like a pizza party where you had to memorize bible verses to get food.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 12:23 pm
(March 3, 2014 at 12:20 pm)SteelCurtain Wrote: It was like a pizza party where you had to memorize bible verses to get food. Because that's scriptural 
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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 1:03 pm
(March 2, 2014 at 12:34 pm)xpastor Wrote: This is for the benefit of atheists who never went through a religious phase and have no idea of what goes on in a church.
The post is from The Clergy Project, a group to which I belong, made up of clergy, both former and active, who have abandoned all supernatural belief. I have edited the post very slightly to make sure that the author and his denomination cannot be identified.
Quote:I just got home from a church council meeting. We spent two hours discussing dysfunctional programs that attract no people and fixing up the building in which those programs don't happen for when those people who don't come show up. We budgeted money for such essentials as paint, rust removal, cleaning, postage (for invitations to those people who don't come to the programs that won't happen) and rodent removal (getting rid of the only lifeforms who seem to actually enjoy the church). We discussed outreach with a youth group that doesn't exist to a youth community that sees nothing relevant in the building that is so well maintained for people who don't show up for the programs that don't work. All of this for a non-existing god who is half-heartedly worshipped (but ardently prayed to when bills come due) with bad music from the turn of the century (the turn before this last one) and with empty platitudes and a lot of complaint and griping (which I am continuing here).
The whole thing seems like a giant Rube Goldberg machine. Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist who came up with designs for impossibly complex machines that did nothing constructive.
I commented:
Quote:I almost split my sides laughing. But if I weren't 30+ years away from my little Lutheran congregation (average attendance 35) I would have been crying.
Why don't they just axe the programs, and sell the building?
Run it like a corporation! :p
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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 1:17 pm
Yeah..outsource it to BanglaDesh.
Meanwhile, X-P, I spotted this over at Jim West's blog and thought you'd get a kick out of it.
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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 2:05 pm
(This post was last modified: March 3, 2014 at 2:09 pm by xpastor.)
(March 3, 2014 at 1:17 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Yeah..outsource it to BanglaDesh.
Meanwhile, X-P, I spotted this over at Jim West's blog and thought you'd get a kick out of it.
Thanks It had a few bits of good satire. It was all too evidently Lutheran in the strict equation of "gospel" with forgiveness of sins.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people — House
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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 2:48 pm
I worked at my mom's church as the secretary for awhile. It was all politics. Don't talk to Mrs. Smith about Financial Committee business. Don't talk to Mr. Howard about the Fellowship Committee because Mrs. Smith can't get any information about the Financial Committee.
I swear "Mrs. Smith" would sit in her massive Cadillac across the street from the church waiting for "Mr. Howard" to pull away so she could rush in to talk to the pastor about whatever injustices she was dealing with that day; "Mr. Howard" would pull out of the church parking lot, and into the exact spot "Mrs. Smith" was just lurking in, and when she pulled away, he'd rush right back over to drill the pastor about whatever conversation took place.
It was like a fucked-up game of tag with geriatrics.
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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 3:18 pm
West is a strange duck, X-P. He's a baptist preacher from Tennessee but he is best buddies with Niels Peter Lemche, Philip R. Davies and Thomas Thompson, all of whom trash the historical reliability of the OT.
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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 3:43 pm
(March 2, 2014 at 1:04 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Funny. I live near 3 large retirement communities; Sun City, Sun City West, and Sun City Grand. The oldest, Sun City opened in 1960 and it was dotted with large churches. You almost can't spit without hitting a church. Something tells me that you test this as often as you can. For science!
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 3:45 pm
Science requires sacrifice.
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RE: What really happens in churches
March 3, 2014 at 5:50 pm
(March 3, 2014 at 2:48 pm)rexbeccarox Wrote: I worked at my mom's church as the secretary for awhile. It was all politics. Don't talk to Mrs. Smith about Financial Committee business. Don't talk to Mr. Howard about the Fellowship Committee because Mrs. Smith can't get any information about the Financial Committee.
I swear "Mrs. Smith" would sit in her massive Cadillac across the street from the church waiting for "Mr. Howard" to pull away so she could rush in to talk to the pastor about whatever injustices she was dealing with that day; "Mr. Howard" would pull out of the church parking lot, and into the exact spot "Mrs. Smith" was just lurking in, and when she pulled away, he'd rush right back over to drill the pastor about whatever conversation took place.
It was like a fucked-up game of tag with geriatrics.
This is where the standard atheist reply should be to note how the church offers refuge to those who never want to grow up. The only thing stopping me it the realization that it requires no degree of maturity to leave the church and neither will leaving the church ensure a prompt growth spurt in maturity.
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