Throw Out Baby Jesus, Keep the Bathwater

Atheism starts its megachurch: Is it a religion now? - Salon.com:

 "“The church model has worked really well for a couple of thousand years,” Dodd muses. “What we’re trying to do is hold on to the bath water while throwing out the baby Jesus.”"

For ages, man has uttered the aphorism "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" ... man has finally become so lost that rather than keeping the baby -- the center, the sacred, the important, the motto is changed to purposely keeping that which is unclean, unuseable, and defiled.

The Atheists are working on a church -- here is what they have against the "Unitarian Universalist Community Church" :

“The Unitarian Church has this idea of ‘radical tolerance.’ It respects everything. It’s all good. Well that’s fine on one level, but at some point it becomes a little diluted.” Dodd was looking for a more robust secularism.

This is pretty much all the information one can get out of the article. Their problem with the Unitarians as stated in the quote was not enough "robust secularism" ... but it seems that the direction the "Sunday Assembly" is going is toward avoiding in your face atheism.

As the atheist church becomes more church-like, however, it seems to be deliberately downplaying its atheism. Where the Assembly once stridently rejected theism (at April’s Assembly, Jones poked fun at the crucifixion), it is now far more equivocal. “How atheist should our Assembly be?”, Jones wrote in a recent blog post. “The short answer to that is: not very.”

Hard to define yourself purely by what you are against. Certainly those that "poke fun" at those who think differently from themselves are widely respected in secular culture depending on what it is they poke fun at -- the Bruce Jenner Halloween costume was so open mindedly received!

Either way, Sanderson Jones is confident that the model will spread. “We have the most natural human urge to do this,” he insists: to organize ourselves around institutions of meaning. I am inclined to agree that “Live Better, Help Often, and Wonder More” is a lovely motto to build around.

We live in a "Goldilocks Universe" tuned precisely to our existence ... to unimaginable numbers like 10 to the minus 128 needing to be "right on" for us to be here. Amazingly, on top of that we have this common urge to "organize ourselves around institutions of meaning" -- or, as we did for thousands of years, worship God.

The atheist looks at a universe impossibly built for his existence and declares it a matter of pure random chance against all odds. He then realizes that he has a "soul hole" -- something is missing, his life lacks meaning. So he postulates that against all odds, on top of his impossibly random universe, random selection has put a "God shaped hole" into his consciousness -- meaningless and randomness has most strangely selected to imprint a drive for him to seek some sort of "meaning" for his life in this universe that he has decreed to be meaningless and random.

So he grabs his bootstraps and pulls. The futility brings tears to my eyes ... and I'm sure to Christ's as well.

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