Hey Gordon Klingenschmitt, Challenge Accepted

A school in Wisconsin was recently told that they could not have their graduations in the church they'd been having them at because it was obvious violation of the Separation of Church and State.

Republican candidate for the Colorado General Assembly, Gordon Klingenschmitt, had an interesting response to this.

If the atheist complainer is so uncomfortable when they walk into a church that there's something inside of them squirming and making them feel these feelings of hatred toward the cross of Jesus Christ, don't you think it's something inside of the atheist complainer that's wrong?

I have a solution.  Let's do an exorcism and cast the Devil out of them and then they'll feel comfortable when they walk into church.

I'll leave the correcting of his errors to Hemant Mehta, who's already covered it better than I could, because I have a different response.

Challenge accepted.

I welcome Mr Klingenschmitt to come to Nebraska and perform whatever exorcism he likes (within legal & medical limits, of course) on me.  We can record the process if he wants.  I will go to any venue within 50 miles of Omaha, Nebraska for the event.  If he's any good at it, he should be guaranteed to leave the event fully satisfied that any demons currently in me have left.

While, I'm obviously comfortable enough inside a church to attend services occasionally, I am regularly offended by things I see there, and I do have my own fights on Separation of Church and State.  I challenge Klingenschmitt to come to Omaha and perform an exorcism on me.

If he has any faith his ability to exorcise demons, or in his god, he should have nothing, including failure, to fear.  Or is he afraid that I'll still be an atheist/secular activist after he gets the demons out of me?

On The Similarities Of Mormons And Atheists

I'm at the American Atheists convention in Salt Lake City this weekend.  I caught a tweet, retweeted by Recovering From Religion, from an LDS member who works near the convention hotel and wanted to spend his lunch hour with some atheists.

It was an interesting experience.  Time was limited, so I intentionally avoided topics that would become debate, but I got to pick his brain a bit about Mormonism.  We talked about the colleges around town, I asked about Book of Mormon, and I finally learned what the deal is with the Institute of Religion that is near the University of Nebraska Omaha campus.  They're places to take courses to learn about Mormon theology, and they're intentionally put as close to colleges as possible.  It's presented as educational, but I suspect the purpose is to proselytize.  Either way, I hope to get a better look at them sometime this year.

If I keep talking to the guy I met, one thing I plan to dig deeper into is his comparison of Mormons & atheists.  At first it was based on the fact that both of us are seen as outsiders to the general Christian community in America, which goes along with the premise of a Daily Beast article today about the convention.

The convention this week will bring together in Salt Lake City two distinctly American movements, with remarkably similar demographics, that are in the process of emerging into a public sphere that has long considered them suspicious outsiders.

That part is true.  Both groups are seen as outsiders.  The thing is, it's for very different reasons.

For Mormons, that suspicion goes back to the 1800s, when, as a young movement, they were driven from town to town and subject to anti-Mormon riots (the Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, was killed by a mob in Illinois). 

The article does touch on one similarity in where the hate for both groups comes from.

That suspicion subsided a bit, helped by the church’s renunciation of polygamy in 1890, and cropped up again in the 1980s and 1990s, the result of scandals, a slow adoption of racial equality, and attacks from some right-wing evangelical Protestants.

The Christian Right are no fans of the Mormon Church, and they're certainly not fans of atheists.

The article doesn't mention that Joseph Smith was convicted of fraud, or the other issues that lead to Mormonism being not trusted.  It also doesn't mention that the main source of the mistrust toward atheists is Cold War anti-communism.

One hilarious similarity that my lunch companion made was the claim that both groups reject the supernatural.  I think the premise he intended was that both groups reject the supernatural more than Creationists like Ken Ham, and I suspect that's true to a degree.  Mormons do describe their god in less supernatural way than fundamentalist Protestants.

God is perfect, all wise, and all-powerful; the ruler of the universe. He is also merciful, kind, and just. He is our Father in Heaven. We are created in His image (Genesis 1:27). He has a body that looks like ours, but God’s body is immortal, perfected, and has a glory that words can’t describe. Because we are His children, He knows and loves each of us individually. He has a plan to help His children find joy in this life and return to live with Him when this life is over.

But they quite clearly believe in the supernatural.  It's kind of a requirement of being Mormon.  Or any other religion.

The author of the Daily Beast piece and my lunch companion were right about our 2 groups having some similarities, but we don't have similarities on any of what is the core of either group.  Mormons are still a religion, founded by a con man.  Atheism isn't a religion at all, and attendees of conventions like this one are primarily people who have escaped religion.

But the Daily Beast did get one thing right.

Well, the Mormons just had their Moment. And as for the atheists? While churches might be in decline, their numbers are growing.

Atheism is growing, and religion is shrinking.  And with good reason.  It's the same reason Phil Ferguson told a story on today's Dogma Debate about how, to get some kids to rethink their Christianity, he gave them both Bibles and asked them to read them.

Omaha Has A Few Crazy Ass Religious People

I'm a weird atheist.  I listen to Christian radio.  I go to church^[1].  Not only that, but I'm an atheist who feels bad when he goes too long without going to church.  But it's not so much guilt as it is regret in missing a show that seems like it would be fun.  Plus, it's guilt for not working on a project I care about continuing.

Recently, I've had an abundance of places I'm interested in visiting.  A local church's banner recently got the attention of Reddit.  I made it to that place and wrote about it^[2].  But there's a few other, less open minded churches, I'm still eager to investigate.  I still need to make it to Candlewood Church, the people behind the creepy^[3] UNO student group The Rock^[4].

I was mildly curious about Wellspring Lutheran Church before Hemant first wrote about their crazy ass pastor^[5].  That made me quite interested in seeing them up close.  My interest grew when their pastor caught Hemant's attention again^[6] by thinking magic is real.

Now another church in Omaha that I was mildly interested in has been moved up to the top of the list, Westside Church, in Omaha.  One of their members, Amber Dee Parker, has written a book for kids to teach them to hate^[7].

Endorsed by the American Family Association^[8]?  If that was all you knew about this book, that would be enough to know it's anti-gay.  The fact that this woman used an interracial couple^[9] for this hate-pushing book is deliciously hilarious.

I'm eager to see what her church is like.  I've got a feeling she's far from the only hateful person in there, which makes me sad because it's a massive building.

Her promotional video^[10] for this piece of shit has garnered  a couple of responses on YouTube.

[11]


[12]

Thanks to that video, I now know what she looks like.  If she's there when I am, I might get to call her a hate monger to her face.  That should be fun.

And if church members see this before I get there and kick me out, then it'll simply be a different kind of fun.

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1.  http://allthesepiouspeople.blogspot.com/
2.  http://allthesepiouspeople.blogspot.com/2013/04/moderate-christians-cognitive-dissonance.html
3.  I've heard some very disturbing stories from students describing them as very cult-like.
4.  http://youtu.be/ab2WyM6osZI
5.  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/05/30/christian-pastor-claims-to-have-irrefutable-mathematical-proof-for-christianity/
6.  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/07/12/christian-columnist-really-believes-magicians-can-levitate-because-of-satan/
7.  http://journalstar.com/news/local/same-sex-marriage-debate-comes-to-children-s-book/article_6e1e675a-192b-5c90-9f50-06dc201cbe96.html
8.  http://aparticularblogbyaparticularatheist.blogspot.com/search/label/American%20Family%20Association
9.  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2011/06/24/16-of-white-evangelical-christians-oppose-interracial-marriage/
10.  http://youtu.be/vuWLeqAe5iY
11.  http://youtu.be/aw1ZLsTSVzc
12.  http://youtu.be/JSCA42uOCac