I am pretty Catholic - admittedly not much of an evangelical one. But I don’t really understand the need to share my spirituality at nearly every opportunity with nearly everyone. I don’t hide it either, but there are times and places where I think it is appropriate, and times and places where it feels a bit self serving or boastful for lack of a better word.
IMO - If you are in an official capacity in a government setting in the USA, living your faith is a way better than public pronouncements about your faith.
Mike Weinstein simply wants what the first amendment intended and that is no official government religion or favoring one religion over another. The incident at the AF Academy happened when there was an increasing christian evagelical movement there from leadership. In other words they were preferring one religion over another. Everyone was and should be able to worship whatever they want but advertising it in a government building is promoting one religion over another by government. Go to your mosque, chapel or synagogue but leave it out of the hallways and classes. I am as much against evangelical christian law as I am against sharia law as there is not much difference. The writers of the constitution knew from experience the damage an official religion could cause so they wisely wanted to be sure religion and government were separate. I am not religious but have voluteered in times of need with groups from the Baptists, Mennonite, the non-denominational Red Cross and few atheists with Doctors without Borders. It’s nothing to brag about and religious groups have no monopoly on helping others. Just what you can do if you can help out.
All I know I have observed from ten years as a disaster relief responder is that while there may have been an unbeliever amongst the Red Cross workers, (Never met any Doctors Without Borders, they were all overseas somewhere. ) but I never saw an “atheist” organization trying to help. I’m just saying.
Posting “tongue in cheek” but with a “good” Christian crew, there is less chance the Old Man has to go through bars, dives, and certain types of houses trying to round up his crew which are hungover, drunk, or needing penicillin.
equally tongue in cheek - not sure there is a ton of evidence that religious affiliation has cause any noticeable effect on “hungover, drunk, or need of penicillin”
My experience has been that religious morals along with other morals are geographical in nature. The further from home and their peers the more they diminish.
This saying needs to die. It allows people to spout off anything no matter how insane, factually untrue, or biased and accept no responsibility for it or the consequences. It’s what all the podcast types use to keep themselves out of lawsuits.
What is an atheist organization? I’ve worked with MANY “good, God fearing Christians” that were absolute huge pieces of S**t in day-to-day life. Openly racist, totally ok. Cheat on their wives while in the shipyard, totally fine. Backstab a coworker to further their career, everything is fine if you go to church on Sunday and get your sins wiped clean each week.
I don’t care if there is a religious service on a boat, as long attendance isn’t required or coerced. I don’t care if people are religious on my boat, as long as stays out of the job.
how about just a secular one ? Maybe the non-theists don’t feel the need to advertise their non-theism while assisting others - so don’t form an “Atheist volunteer army” ?
Although - would be a great idea. Advertise “The Problem From Evil” - show up at natural disasters with banners that say
" Your omnipotent, omniscience, and omnipresent god let this happen - we are here to help"
Mark Twain after his daughters death wrote the following. He also wrote a short story called the Mysterious Stranger which is interesting. In light of the recent deaths in Texas at a “Christian” camp for children this is some food for thought. “A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell–mouths mercy, and invented hell–mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!”
The Problem from Evil - is the most powerful argument against Theism -
There are several theodicies that address this.
In my view, unless you have thought about this deeply, and found some way to have your individual Theism co-exist with this. You still have the juvenile faith of your childhood.
Personally - as I said in an earlier thread, I view doubt and faith as a process - 2 sides of the same coin and don’t view either condition as good or bad or true or false, I view this process as just part of being human, part of what being a thinking human is. My Catholicism, more precisely my Ignatian Spirituality is a tool or a language that i use in this continuous process of doubt and faith I live in.
Oddly enough one of my best friends at one time was a Catholic priest of the Jesuit and Ignatian persuasion. Great guy and did a lot of good for many people. Sadly he ended up in prison in Canada for supposedly molesting young boys while working in the Caribbean.
I don’t think you understand. On a disaster relief operation, there are no “anonymous” DR organizations. In order to accomplish anything involves “organization, equipment, personnel” that would be difficult to stay “undercover”.
My last post on this topic. While working in Texas after Hurricane Harvey, the NC Baptist on Mission had a charter bus that would take volunteers to Texas and bring a team back for several weeks. Our DROC was based out of a large Baptist church in Nederland, Texas. Our portable kitchen, Manna One was used to prepare many thousand of meals for flood victims, in cooperation with the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and horrors of horrors, the NATIONAL GUARD, a clear violation of the 1st Amendment and the so-called “Separation Clause”. Hard to believe Little Mikey didn’t file a lawsuit. Better people go hungry than violate his interpretation of the US Constitution. You can reply if you wish, but I won’t see it. Nuff said.
Same experience. It was always the same religious hypocrites who tried to make everyone pray at the end of every pre-tour meeting on the ship who were first to hit the hooker bars in Okpo. At least two that I worked with divorced their wives so they could bring their side-piece back to the US. But of course it’s the homosexuals who were ruining the institution of marriage, those heathens!. /s
) but I never saw an “atheist” organization trying to help. I’m just saying.
