It tends to trouble me that so often a church will speak of the millions of Christians worldwide to demonstrate Christianity’s vast acceptance, when truthfully the only belief most of the varying denominations have in common is that Jesus Christ is their savior. On the flip side, anytime any of those denominations do something crazy, they’re shrugged off as not “real” Christians, thereby removing any sense of responsibility for their actions, all the while still including the denomination in the total numbers.

To me it seems disingenuous, and an attempt to have the best of both worlds: the strong numbers and lack of responsibility for the terrible things some (usually very small percent) of those numbers do.

I’m an atheist myself, but overall have no problem with people believing what they wish to believe, but if another atheist does something stupid in the name of atheism, I’m not going to shrug, roll my eyes and say “well he’s just not a real atheist.” I’m going to call him (or her) out on doing something stupid. He’s still a real atheist, just a dumb one that’s making the rest of us look bad!

Sorry for the rant .. good blog posts often do that to me

As far as weddings and funerals go, if the people hosting them wanted to do them in churches or whatever, as an atheist I wouldn’t care, I’d attend if I was invited because those people must care about me and I would care about them.

But as far as prayer in public goes, well, you and I starkly disagree. Because when I think public, I think, schools, hospitals, court rooms, government buildings etc. I don’t want religion to be so pervasive in society, so ubiquitous you can’t go anywhere without being surrounded by religious iconography or psalms or concrete monuments of the 10 commandments, that really does happen in a lot of places. Give people an inch, they’ll take a mile.

I think they manage to do that themselves pretty efficiently!