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Do atheists need a church? New York Magazine. If God Is Dead,  Who Gets His House? The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith  at all. And now some atheists think they need a church. By Sean  McManus Published Apr 21, 2008 It seems unlikely that many of the 850  or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday  night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist  Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous  atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a  PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of  the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually  flicking away a few of His last crutches. Doesn't God provide people some  solace? asked an audience member. Isn't that a little  childish? Dawkins replied. Just because something is comforting  doesn't mean it's true. Then someone asked about death, and  Dawkins quoted Mark Twain: I do not fear death. I had been dead  for billions and billions of years before I was born. The room  erupted in loud applause. God had definitely left the building—if he were  ever here at all. Dawkins and his colleagues had helped to produce a kind  of atheist big bang, a new beginning. But what kind of new structures  might evolve? The Society for Ethical Culture was formed in  1877, eighteen years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin  of Species and made the religious universe wobble on its axis. But  godlessness can be a little scary, even for an atheist. Ethical  Culture's imposing 1910 edifice on Central Park speaks to its patrons'  wealth, as well as their concern that society might fall apart if  it didn't have a church. But for all the grandeur of its  secular cathedral, Ethical Culture peaked at maybe 6,000 members, with  only about 3,000 today. Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh  sense of mission. The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith  at all. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the  results of its Religious Landscape survey in February and found that  16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. The number  is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18-  to 29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in  a similar survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has  existed as a kind of civil-rights movement. Groups like American  Atheists have functioned primarily as litigants in the fight for  church-state separation, not as atheist social clubs. Atheists  are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don't  feel like they need an organization, says Ellen Johnson, president  of American Atheists for the past thirteen years. They're so  independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don't join  an organization—they start their own. The quartet of  best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of New  Atheism—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the  Four Horsemen, as they are now known)—has succeeded in mainstreaming  atheism in a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the  process, catalyzed a reexamination of atheistic raison d'être. But for  some atheist foot soldiers, this current groundswell is just  a consciousness-raising stop on the evolutionary train, the atheist  equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these people, the Four  Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism's great awakening is  in need of a doctrine. People perceive us as only rejecting things,  says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York  City Atheists. Everybody wants to know, `Okay, you're an atheist,  now what?'  So some atheists are taking seriously the  idea that atheism needs to stand for things, like evolution and ethics,  not just against things, like God. The most successful movements  in history, after all—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.—all  have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics,  and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs, goes  the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build  communities. Science and reason are important, says Greg Epstein, the  humanist chaplain of Harvard University. But science and reason  won't visit you in the hospital. Many atheist sects are  experimenting with building new, human- centered quasi-religious  organizations, much like Ethical Culture. They aim to remove God from the  church, while leaving the church, at least large parts of it, standing.  But this impulse is fueling a growing schism among atheists. Many of them  see churches as part of the problem. They want to throw out the baby and  the bathwater—or at least they don't see the need for the bathwater  once the baby is gone. On a recent chilly Friday night, a few  dozen members of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism were  gathered downstairs at the Village Community School on West 10th Street  for Shabbat. For them, this is a monthly ritual that includes  lighting candles and singing Jewish songs that have been carefully excised  of a deity. Where is my light? asks the song Ayfo Oree. My light is  in me. According to the congregation's leader, the humanist rabbi  Peter Schweitzer, who wrote much of the secular Shabbat service, as  well as the lyrics and verse for the congregation's life-cycle  events like weddings, funerals, and bar and bat mitzvahs, Judaism is  mostly a culture— religion is just one component. So he simply takes  a red pen to the God parts. We offer a different door in,  says Schweitzer. One that doesn't ask you to compromise your lack  of beliefs. Next: The oxymoron of atheist  orthodoxy. Schweitzer tells me that Humanistic Judaism was founded  in the early sixties by a former Reform rabbi from Michigan named  Sherwin Wine. Wine, Schweitzer explains, coined the  term ignostic—you're never going to know what God is, so why waste  your time worrying about it? God is a construct of the mind, he  says. Maybe you get there. Maybe you don't. Schweitzer sees  Humanistic Judaism as an obvious extension of a North American Jewry that  is already highly secular—one that for decades has made the deli a more  significant cultural force than the synagogue. Many secular Jews continue  to feel a strong connection to their cultural roots. Jews need a  place to go, especially during high holidays, where they don't have to  check reason at the door, he says. This is honest religion. A real  gift. After Shabbat, I talked to a retired philosophy professor,  Marvin Kohl, an expert on Bertrand Russell, who admitted, reluctantly,  that he believes in God. I like the intellectual side, he says of  the meetings. Before the night was over, a speaker from Jews for  Racial and Economic Justice gave a talk about affordable housing.  Then Schweitzer reminded the congregation that it needs new office  space. There aren't enough members to afford a synagogue. Atheist  orthodoxy for the most part has been an oxymoron, partly because atheist  leaders have tended toward a certain eccentricity. Before the Four  Horsemen arrived, the face of atheism in this country belonged to Madalyn  Murray O'Hair— Mad Madalyn —the pugnacious founder of American Atheists  who disowned her son when he became a Baptist preacher and publicly  pronounced it a postnatal abortion. Angry and overweight, she was the  muse of daytime-talk- show host Phil Donohue and a speechwriter for  Larry Flynt. In 1964, Life magazine crowned her the most hated woman  in America. O'Hair was murdered and dismembered, allegedly by her  office manager, David Roland Waters, in 1995, but this wasn't  discovered until six years later, prompting speculation in the meantime  that she had fled to the South Pacific with piles of atheist loot.  January 2001 signaled a low point in contemporary atheist history. The  same month Waters led police to the remains of the woman  who successfully fought to end prayer in public schools, a Pew survey  found that only 19 percent of Americans thought schools should  avoid prayer or similar reflection. Orthodox or not, for many  traditional atheists, the word church is taboo, even if God is definitely  not in residence. When Tim Gorski, a Texas physician, approached Paul  Kurtz, an influential atheist who now chairs the Center for Inquiry, an  atheist think tank, about his plans to start the North Texas Church of  Freethought in the nineties, Kurtz discouraged him, on the grounds  that atheists don't need church. And about ten years ago,  American Atheists turned down Gorski's bid to sign on to an atheist  advertisement published in USA Today. Individuals and organizations could  put their names on the ad. Churches could not, Ellen Johnson wrote me in  an e-mail, while insisting that American Atheism's   eleventh commandment is to never criticize or rebuke kindred  organizations. Since they were technically a church, we said  no. Gorski believes that a church is not necessarily God's house.  It belongs, first, to the people. Many atheists, he  says, misunderstand why people go to church in the first place. It  isn't the specific doctrines, he says. [Church] binds people  together and relates them to one another and gives them each a  personal, private, and, of course, quite subjective understanding of  themselves and their world. Every service is different, says  Gorski. For example, we created a serial feature called `Moment of  Science,' where we look at something recent or not so recent but something  from science that informs our everyday experience. Economists tell  us that if our neighbors live in nicer houses, we're unhappy. We share  this with members, so that next time they're unhappy, they can think about  why and hopefully change that. atheism's bitterest schisms, no  surprise, were often formed in church. Gorski
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New York Magazine. If God Is Dead,  Who Gets His House? The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith  at all. And now some atheists think they need a church. By Sean  McManus Published Apr 21, 2008 It seems unlikely that many of the 850  or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday  night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist  Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous  atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a  PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of  the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually  flicking away a few of His last crutches. Doesn't God provide people some  solace? asked an audience member. Isn't that a little  childish? Dawkins replied. Just because something is comforting  doesn't mean it's true. Then someone asked about death, and  Dawkins quoted Mark Twain: I do not fear death. I had been dead  for billions and billions of years before I was born. The room  erupted in loud applause. God had definitely left the building—if he were  ever here at all. Dawkins and his colleagues had helped to produce a kind  of atheist big bang, a new beginning. But what kind of new structures  might evolve? The Society for Ethical Culture was formed in  1877, eighteen years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin  of Species and made the religious universe wobble on its axis. But  godlessness can be a little scary, even for an atheist. Ethical  Culture's imposing 1910 edifice on Central Park speaks to its patrons'  wealth, as well as their concern that society might fall apart if  it didn't have a church. But for all the grandeur of its  secular cathedral, Ethical Culture peaked at maybe 6,000 members, with  only about 3,000 today. Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh  sense of mission. The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith  at all. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the  results of its Religious Landscape survey in February and found that  16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. The number  is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18-  to 29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in  a similar survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has  existed as a kind of civil-rights movement. Groups like American  Atheists have functioned primarily as litigants in the fight for  church-state separation, not as atheist social clubs. Atheists  are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don't  feel like they need an organization, says Ellen Johnson, president  of American Atheists for the past thirteen years. They're so  independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don't join  an organization—they start their own. The quartet of  best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of New  Atheism—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the  Four Horsemen, as they are now known)—has succeeded in mainstreaming  atheism in a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the  process, catalyzed a reexamination of atheistic raison d'être. But for  some atheist foot soldiers, this current groundswell is just  a consciousness-raising stop on the evolutionary train, the atheist  equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these people, the Four  Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism's great awakening is  in need of a doctrine. People perceive us as only rejecting things,  says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York  City Atheists. Everybody wants to know, `Okay, you're an atheist,  now what?'  So some atheists are taking seriously the  idea that atheism needs to stand for things, like evolution and ethics,  not just against things, like God. The most successful movements  in history, after all—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.—all  have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics,  and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs, goes  the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build  communities. Science and reason are important, says Greg Epstein, the  humanist chaplain of Harvard University. But science and reason  won't visit you in the hospital. Many atheist sects are  experimenting with building new, human- centered quasi-religious  organizations, much like Ethical Culture. They aim to remove God from the  church, while leaving the church, at least large parts of it, standing.  But this impulse is fueling a growing schism among atheists. Many of them  see churches as part of the problem. They want to throw out the baby and  the bathwater—or at least they don't see the need for the bathwater  once the baby is gone. On a recent chilly Friday night, a few  dozen members of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism were  gathered downstairs at the Village Community School on West 10th Street  for Shabbat. For them, this is a monthly ritual that includes  lighting candles and singing Jewish songs that have been carefully excised  of a deity. Where is my light? asks the song Ayfo Oree. My light is  in me. According to the congregation's leader, the humanist rabbi  Peter Schweitzer, who wrote much of the secular Shabbat service, as  well as the lyrics and verse for the congregation's life-cycle  events like weddings, funerals, and bar and bat mitzvahs, Judaism is  mostly a culture— religion is just one component. So he simply takes  a red pen to the God parts. We offer a different door in,  says Schweitzer. One that doesn't ask you to compromise your lack  of beliefs. Next: The oxymoron of atheist  orthodoxy. Schweitzer tells me that Humanistic Judaism was founded  in the early sixties by a former Reform rabbi from Michigan named  Sherwin Wine. Wine, Schweitzer explains, coined the  term ignostic—you're never going to know what God is, so why waste  your time worrying about it? God is a construct of the mind, he  says. Maybe you get there. Maybe you don't. Schweitzer sees  Humanistic Judaism as an obvious extension of a North American Jewry that  is already highly secular—one that for decades has made the deli a more  significant cultural force than the synagogue. Many secular Jews continue  to feel a strong connection to their cultural roots. Jews need a  place to go, especially during high holidays, where they don't have to  check reason at the door, he says. This is honest religion. A real  gift. After Shabbat, I talked to a retired philosophy professor,  Marvin Kohl, an expert on Bertrand Russell, who admitted, reluctantly,  that he believes in God. I like the intellectual side, he says of  the meetings. Before the night was over, a speaker from Jews for  Racial and Economic Justice gave a talk about affordable housing.  Then Schweitzer reminded the congregation that it needs new office  space. There aren't enough members to afford a synagogue. Atheist  orthodoxy for the most part has been an oxymoron, partly because atheist  leaders have tended toward a certain eccentricity. Before the Four  Horsemen arrived, the face of atheism in this country belonged to Madalyn  Murray O'Hair— Mad Madalyn —the pugnacious founder of American Atheists  who disowned her son when he became a Baptist preacher and publicly  pronounced it a postnatal abortion. Angry and overweight, she was the  muse of daytime-talk- show host Phil Donohue and a speechwriter for  Larry Flynt. In 1964, Life magazine crowned her the most hated woman  in America. O'Hair was murdered and dismembered, allegedly by her  office manager, David Roland Waters, in 1995, but this wasn't  discovered until six years later, prompting speculation in the meantime  that she had fled to the South Pacific with piles of atheist loot.  January 2001 signaled a low point in contemporary atheist history. The  same month Waters led police to the remains of the woman  who successfully fought to end prayer in public schools, a Pew survey  found that only 19 percent of Americans thought schools should  avoid prayer or similar reflection. Orthodox or not, for many  traditional atheists, the word church is taboo, even if God is definitely  not in residence. When Tim Gorski, a Texas physician, approached Paul  Kurtz,
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On Apr 21, 10:19 pm, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wrote: Do atheists need a church? New York Magazine. If God Is Dead,  Who Gets His House? The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith  at all. And now some atheists think they need a church. By Sean  McManus Published Apr 21, 2008 It seems unlikely that many of the 850  or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday  night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist  Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous  atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a  PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of  the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually  flicking away a few of His last crutches. Doesn't God provide people some  solace? asked an audience member. Isn't that a little  childish? Dawkins replied. Just because something is comforting  doesn't mean it's true. Then someone asked about death, and  Dawkins quoted Mark Twain: I do not fear death. I had been dead  for billions and billions of years before I was born. The room  erupted in loud applause. God had definitely left the building—if he were  ever here at all. Dawkins and his colleagues had helped to produce a kind  of atheist big bang, a new beginning. But what kind of new structures  might evolve? The Society for Ethical Culture was formed in  1877, eighteen years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin  of Species and made the religious universe wobble on its axis. But  godlessness can be a little scary, even for an atheist. Ethical  Culture's imposing 1910 edifice on Central Park speaks to its patrons'  wealth, as well as their concern that society might fall apart if  it didn't have a church. But for all the grandeur of its  secular cathedral, Ethical Culture peaked at maybe 6,000 members, with  only about 3,000 today. Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh  sense of mission. The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith  at all. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the  results of its Religious Landscape survey in February and found that  16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. The number  is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18-  to 29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in  a similar survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has  existed as a kind of civil-rights movement. Groups like American  Atheists have functioned primarily as litigants in the fight for  church-state separation, not as atheist social clubs. Atheists  are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don't  feel like they need an organization, says Ellen Johnson, president  of American Atheists for the past thirteen years. They're so  independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don't join  an organization—they start their own. The quartet of  best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of New  Atheism—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the  Four Horsemen, as they are now known)—has succeeded in mainstreaming  atheism in a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the  process, catalyzed a reexamination of atheistic raison d'être. But for  some atheist foot soldiers, this current groundswell is just  a consciousness-raising stop on the evolutionary train, the atheist  equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these people, the Four  Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism's great awakening is  in need of a doctrine. People perceive us as only rejecting things,  says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York  City Atheists. Everybody wants to know, `Okay, you're an atheist,  now what?'  So some atheists are taking seriously the  idea that atheism needs to stand for things, like evolution and ethics,  not just against things, like God. The most successful movements  in history, after all—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.—all  have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics,  and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs, goes  the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build  communities. Science and reason are important, says Greg Epstein, the  humanist chaplain of Harvard University. But science and reason  won't visit you in the hospital. Many atheist sects are  experimenting with building new, human- centered quasi-religious  organizations, much like Ethical Culture. They aim to remove God from the  church, while leaving the church, at least large parts of it, standing.  But this impulse is fueling a growing schism among atheists. Many of them  see churches as part of the problem. They want to throw out the baby and  the bathwater—or at least they don't see the need for the bathwater  once the baby is gone. On a recent chilly Friday night, a few  dozen members of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism were  gathered downstairs at the Village Community School on West 10th Street  for Shabbat. For them, this is a monthly ritual that includes  lighting candles and singing Jewish songs that have been carefully excised  of a deity. Where is my light? asks the song Ayfo Oree. My light is  in me. According to the congregation's leader, the humanist rabbi  Peter Schweitzer, who wrote much of the secular Shabbat service, as  well as the lyrics and verse for the congregation's life-cycle  events like weddings, funerals, and bar and bat mitzvahs, Judaism is  mostly a culture— religion is just one component. So he simply takes  a red pen to the God parts. We offer a different door in,  says Schweitzer. One that doesn't ask you to compromise your lack  of beliefs. Next: The oxymoron of atheist  orthodoxy. Schweitzer tells me that Humanistic Judaism was founded  in the early sixties by a former Reform rabbi from Michigan named  Sherwin Wine. Wine, Schweitzer explains, coined the  term ignostic—you're never going to know what God is, so why waste  your time worrying about it? God is a construct of the mind, he  says. Maybe you get there. Maybe you don't. Schweitzer sees  Humanistic Judaism as an obvious extension of a North American Jewry that  is already highly secular—one that for decades has made the deli a more  significant cultural force than the synagogue. Many secular Jews continue  to feel a strong connection to their cultural roots. Jews need a  place to go, especially during high holidays, where they don't have to  check reason at the door, he says. This is honest religion. A real  gift. After Shabbat, I talked to a retired philosophy professor,  Marvin Kohl, an expert on Bertrand Russell, who admitted, reluctantly,  that he believes in God. I like the intellectual side, he says of  the meetings. Before the night was over, a speaker from Jews for  Racial and Economic Justice gave a talk about affordable housing.  Then Schweitzer reminded the congregation that it needs new office  space. There aren't enough members to afford a synagogue. Atheist  orthodoxy for the most part has been an oxymoron, partly because atheist  leaders have tended toward a certain eccentricity. Before the Four  Horsemen arrived, the face of atheism in this country
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Do atheists need a church? New York Magazine. If God Is Dead,  Who Gets His House? The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith  at all. And now some atheists think they need a church. By Sean  McManus Published Apr 21, 2008 It seems unlikely that many of the 850  or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday  night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist  Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous  atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a  PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of  the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually  flicking away a few of His last crutches. Doesn't God provide people some  solace? asked an audience member. Isn't that a little  childish? Dawkins replied. Just because something is comforting  doesn't mean it's true. Then someone asked about death, and  Dawkins quoted Mark Twain: I do not fear death. I had been dead  for billions and billions of years before I was born. The room  erupted in loud applause. God had definitely left the building—if he were  ever here at all. Dawkins and his colleagues had helped to produce a kind  of atheist big bang, a new beginning. But what kind of new structures  might evolve? The Society for Ethical Culture was formed in  1877, eighteen years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin  of Species and made the religious universe wobble on its axis. But  godlessness can be a little scary, even for an atheist. Ethical  Culture's imposing 1910 edifice on Central Park speaks to its patrons'  wealth, as well as their concern that society might fall apart if  it didn't have a church. But for all the grandeur of its  secular cathedral, Ethical Culture peaked at maybe 6,000 members, with  only about 3,000 today. Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh  sense of mission. The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith  at all. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the  results of its Religious Landscape survey in February and found that  16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. The number  is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18-  to 29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in  a similar survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has  existed as a kind of civil-rights movement. Groups like American  Atheists have functioned primarily as litigants in the fight for  church-state separation, not as atheist social clubs. Atheists  are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don't  feel like they need an organization, says Ellen Johnson, president  of American Atheists for the past thirteen years. They're so  independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don't join  an organization—they start their own. The quartet of  best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of New  Atheism—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the  Four Horsemen, as they are now known)—has succeeded in mainstreaming  atheism in a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the  process, catalyzed a reexamination of atheistic raison d'être. But for  some atheist foot soldiers, this current groundswell is just  a consciousness-raising stop on the evolutionary train, the atheist  equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these people, the Four  Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism's great awakening is  in need of a doctrine. People perceive us as only rejecting things,  says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York  City Atheists. Everybody wants to know, `Okay, you're an atheist,  now what?'  So some atheists are taking seriously the  idea that atheism needs to stand for things, like evolution and ethics,  not just against things, like God. The most successful movements  in history, after all—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.—all  have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics,  and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs, goes  the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build  communities. Science and reason are important, says Greg Epstein, the  humanist chaplain of Harvard University. But science and reason  won't visit you in the hospital. Many atheist sects are  experimenting with building new, human- centered quasi-religious  organizations, much like Ethical Culture. They aim to remove God from the  church, while leaving the church, at least large parts of it, standing.  But this impulse is fueling a growing schism among atheists. Many of them  see churches as part of the problem. They want to throw out the baby and  the bathwater—or at least they don't see the need for the bathwater  once the baby is gone. On a recent chilly Friday night, a few  dozen members of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism were  gathered downstairs at the Village Community School on West 10th Street  for Shabbat. For them, this is a monthly ritual that includes  lighting candles and singing Jewish songs that have been carefully excised  of a deity. Where is my light? asks the song Ayfo Oree. My light is  in me. According to the congregation's leader, the humanist rabbi  Peter Schweitzer, who wrote much of the secular Shabbat service, as  well as the lyrics and verse for the congregation's life-cycle  events like weddings, funerals, and bar and bat mitzvahs, Judaism is  mostly a culture— religion is just one component. So he simply takes  a red pen to the God parts. We offer a different door in,  says Schweitzer. One that doesn't ask you to compromise your lack  of beliefs. Next: The oxymoron of atheist  orthodoxy. Schweitzer tells me that Humanistic Judaism was founded  in the early sixties by a former Reform rabbi from Michigan named  Sherwin Wine. Wine, Schweitzer explains, coined the  term ignostic—you're never going to know what God is, so why waste  your time worrying about it? God is a construct of the mind, he  says. Maybe you get there. Maybe you don't. Schweitzer sees  Humanistic Judaism as an obvious extension of a North American Jewry that  is already highly secular—one that for decades has made the deli a more  significant cultural force than the synagogue. Many secular Jews continue  to feel a strong connection to their cultural roots. Jews need a  place to go, especially during high holidays, where they don't have to  check reason at the door, he says. This is honest religion. A real  gift. After Shabbat, I talked to a retired philosophy professor,  Marvin Kohl, an expert on Bertrand Russell, who admitted, reluctantly,  that he believes in God. I like the intellectual side, he says of  the meetings. Before the night was over, a speaker from Jews for  Racial and Economic Justice gave a talk about affordable housing.  Then Schweitzer reminded the congregation that it needs new office  space. There aren't enough members to afford a synagogue. Atheist  orthodoxy for the most part has been an oxymoron, partly because atheist  leaders have tended toward a certain eccentricity. Before the Four  Horsemen arrived, the face of atheism in this country belonged to Madalyn  Murray O'Hair— Mad Madalyn —the pugnacious founder of American Atheists  who disowned her son when he became a Baptist preacher and publicly  pronounced it a postnatal abortion. Angry and overweight, she was the  muse of daytime-talk- show host Phil Donohue and a speechwriter for  Larry Flynt. In 1964, Life magazine crowned her the most hated woman  in America. O'Hair was murdered and dismembered, allegedly by her  office manager, David Roland Waters, in 1995, but this wasn't  discovered until six years later, prompting speculation in the meantime  that she had fled to the South Pacific with piles of atheist loot.  January 2001 signaled a low point in contemporary atheist history. The  same month Waters led police to the remains of the woman  who successfully fought to end prayer in public schools, a Pew survey  found that only 19 percent of Americans thought schools should  avoid prayer or similar reflection. Orthodox or not, for many  traditional atheists, the word church is taboo, even if God is definitely  not in residence. When Tim Gorski, a Texas physician, approached Paul  Kurtz, an influential atheist who now chairs the Center for Inquiry, an  atheist think tank, about his plans to start the North Texas Church of  Freethought in the nineties, Kurtz discouraged him, on the grounds  that atheists don't need church. And about ten years ago,  American Atheists turned down Gorski's bid to sign on to an atheist  advertisement published in USA Today. Individuals and organizations could  put their names on the
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decended from monkeys they will rationalize and reason like monkeys. Obviously they do not understanding that GOD is not a religion. Religions are man made organizations just like the cult that the atheists are now persuing ( in some circles ) to organize. If you seek a physical GOD you will never know GOD. Spare not the spiritual in you and apply the reigns on the senses; so that you may not get trampled over by the four hoaxmen. *************************************************************************** *************************************************************** On Apr 21, 10:19 pm, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wrote: Do atheists need a church? New York Magazine. If God Is Dead,  Who Gets His House? The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith  at all. And now some atheists think they need a church. By Sean  McManus Published Apr 21, 2008 It seems unlikely that many of the 850  or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday  night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist  Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous  atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a  PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of  the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually  flicking away a few of His last crutches. Doesn't God provide people some  solace? asked an audience member. Isn't that a little  childish? Dawkins replied. Just because something is comforting  doesn't mean it's true. Then someone asked about death, and  Dawkins quoted Mark Twain: I do not fear death. I had been dead  for billions and billions of years before I was born. The room  erupted in loud applause. God had definitely left the building—if he were  ever here at all. Dawkins and his colleagues had helped to produce a kind  of atheist big bang, a new beginning. But what kind of new structures  might evolve? The Society for Ethical Culture was formed in  1877, eighteen years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin  of Species and made the religious universe wobble on its axis. But  godlessness can be a little scary, even for an atheist. Ethical  Culture's imposing 1910 edifice on Central Park speaks to its patrons'  wealth, as well as their concern that society might fall apart if  it didn't have a church. But for all the grandeur of its  secular cathedral, Ethical Culture peaked at maybe 6,000 members, with  only about 3,000 today. Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh  sense of mission. The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith  at all. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the  results of its Religious Landscape survey in February and found that  16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. The number  is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18-  to 29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in  a similar survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has  existed as a kind of civil-rights movement. Groups like American  Atheists have functioned primarily as litigants in the fight for  church-state separation, not as atheist social clubs. Atheists  are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don't  feel like they need an organization, says Ellen Johnson, president  of American Atheists for the past thirteen years. They're so  independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don't join  an organization—they start their own. The quartet of  best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of New  Atheism—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the  Four Horsemen, as they are now known)—has succeeded in mainstreaming  atheism in a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the  process, catalyzed a reexamination of atheistic raison d'être. But for  some atheist foot soldiers, this current groundswell is just  a consciousness-raising stop on the evolutionary train, the atheist  equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these people, the Four  Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism's great awakening is  in need of a doctrine. People perceive us as only rejecting things,  says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York  City Atheists. Everybody wants to know, `Okay, you're an atheist,  now what?'  So some atheists are taking seriously the  idea that atheism needs to stand for things, like evolution and ethics,  not just against things, like God. The most successful movements  in history, after all—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.—all  have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics,  and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs, goes  the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build  communities. Science and reason are important, says Greg Epstein, the  humanist chaplain of Harvard University. But science and reason  won't visit you in the hospital. Many atheist sects are  experimenting with building new, human- centered quasi-religious  organizations, much like Ethical Culture. They aim to remove God from the  church, while leaving the church, at least large parts of it, standing.  But this impulse is fueling a growing schism among atheists. Many of them  see churches as part of the problem. They want to throw out the baby and  the bathwater—or at least they don't see the need for the bathwater  once the baby is gone. On a recent chilly Friday night, a few  dozen members of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism were  gathered downstairs at the Village Community School on West 10th Street  for Shabbat. For them, this is a monthly ritual that includes  lighting candles and singing Jewish songs that have been carefully excised  of a deity. Where is my light? asks the song Ayfo Oree. My light is  in me. According to the congregation's leader, the humanist rabbi  Peter Schweitzer, who wrote much of the secular Shabbat service, as  well as the lyrics and verse for the congregation's life-cycle  events like weddings, funerals, and bar and bat mitzvahs, Judaism is  mostly a culture— religion is just one component. So he simply takes  a red pen to the God parts. We offer a different door in,  says Schweitzer. One that doesn't ask you to compromise your lack  of beliefs. Next: The oxymoron of atheist  orthodoxy. Schweitzer tells me that Humanistic Judaism was founded  in the early sixties by a former Reform rabbi from Michigan named  Sherwin Wine. Wine, Schweitzer explains, coined the  term ignostic—you're never going to know what God is, so why waste  your time worrying about it? God is a construct of the mind, he  says. Maybe you get there. Maybe you don't. Schweitzer sees  Humanistic Judaism as an obvious extension of a North American Jewry that  is already highly secular—one that for decades has made the deli a more  significant cultural force than the synagogue. Many secular Jews continue  to feel a strong connection to their cultural roots. Jews need a  place to go, especially during high holidays, where they don't have to  check reason at the door, he says. This is honest religion. A real  gift. After Shabbat, I talked to a retired philosophy professor,  Marvin Kohl, an expert on Bertrand Russell, who admitted, reluctantly,  that he believes in God. I like the intellectual side, he says of  the meetings. Before the night was over, a speaker from Jews for  Racial and Economic Justice gave a talk about affordable housing.  Then Schweitzer reminded the congregation that it needs new office  space. There aren't enough members to afford a synagogue. Atheist  orthodoxy for the most part has been an oxymoron, partly because atheist  leaders have tended toward a certain eccentricity. Before the Four  Horsemen arrived, the face of atheism in this country belonged to Madalyn  Murray O'Hair— Mad Madalyn —the pugnacious founder of American Atheists  who disowned her son when he became a Baptist preacher and publicly  pronounced it a postnatal abortion. Angry and overweight, she was the  muse of daytime-talk- show host Phil Donohue and a speechwriter for  Larry Flynt. In 1964, Life magazine crowned her the most hated woman  in America. O'Hair was murdered and dismembered, allegedly by her  office
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On Apr 21, 10:19 pm, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wrote: Do atheists need a church? New York Magazine. If God Is Dead,  Who Gets His House? The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith  at all. And now some atheists think they need a church. By Sean  McManus Published Apr 21, 2008 It seems unlikely that many of the 850  or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday  night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist  Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous  atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a  PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of  the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually  flicking away a few of His last crutches. Doesn't God provide people some  solace? asked an audience member. Isn't that a little  childish? Dawkins replied. Just because something is comforting  doesn't mean it's true. Then someone asked about death, and  Dawkins quoted Mark Twain: I do not fear death. I had been dead  for billions and billions of years before I was born. The room  erupted in loud applause. God had definitely left the building—if he were  ever here at all. Dawkins and his colleagues had helped to produce a kind  of atheist big bang, a new beginning. But what kind of new structures  might evolve? The Society for Ethical Culture was formed in  1877, eighteen years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin  of Species and made the religious universe wobble on its axis. But  godlessness can be a little scary, even for an atheist. Ethical  Culture's imposing 1910 edifice on Central Park speaks to its patrons'  wealth, as well as their concern that society might fall apart if  it didn't have a church. But for all the grandeur of its  secular cathedral, Ethical Culture peaked at maybe 6,000 members, with  only about 3,000 today. Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh  sense of mission. The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith  at all. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the  results of its Religious Landscape survey in February and found that  16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. The number  is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18-  to 29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in  a similar survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has  existed as a kind of civil-rights movement. Groups like American  Atheists have functioned primarily as litigants in the fight for  church-state separation, not as atheist social clubs. Atheists  are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don't  feel like they need an organization, says Ellen Johnson, president  of American Atheists for the past thirteen years. They're so  independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don't join  an organization—they start their own. The quartet of  best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of New  Atheism—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the  Four Horsemen, as they are now known)—has succeeded in mainstreaming  atheism in a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the  process, catalyzed a reexamination of atheistic raison d'être. But for  some atheist foot soldiers, this current groundswell is just  a consciousness-raising stop on the evolutionary train, the atheist  equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these people, the Four  Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism's great awakening is  in need of a doctrine. People perceive us as only rejecting things,  says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York  City Atheists. Everybody wants to know, `Okay, you're an atheist,  now what?'  So some atheists are taking seriously the  idea that atheism needs to stand for things, like evolution and ethics,  not just against things, like God. The most successful movements  in history, after all—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.—all  have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics,  and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs, goes  the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build  communities. Science and reason are important, says Greg Epstein, the  humanist chaplain of Harvard University. But science and reason  won't visit you in the hospital. Many atheist sects are  experimenting with building new, human- centered quasi-religious  organizations, much like Ethical Culture. They aim to remove God from the  church, while leaving the church, at least large parts of it, standing.  But this impulse is fueling a growing schism among atheists. Many of them  see churches as part of the problem. They want to throw out the baby and  the bathwater—or at least they don't see the need for the bathwater  once the baby is gone. On a recent chilly Friday night, a few  dozen members of the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism were  gathered downstairs at the Village Community School on West 10th Street  for Shabbat. For them, this is a monthly ritual that includes  lighting candles and singing Jewish songs that have been carefully excised  of a deity. Where is my light? asks the song Ayfo Oree. My light is  in me. According to the congregation's leader, the humanist rabbi  Peter Schweitzer, who wrote much of the secular Shabbat service, as  well as the lyrics and verse for the congregation's life-cycle  events like weddings, funerals, and bar and bat mitzvahs, Judaism is  mostly a culture— religion is just one component. So he simply takes  a red pen to the God parts. We offer a different door in,  says Schweitzer. One that doesn't ask you to compromise your lack  of beliefs. Next: The oxymoron of atheist  orthodoxy. Schweitzer tells me that Humanistic Judaism was founded  in the early sixties by a former Reform rabbi from Michigan named  Sherwin Wine. Wine, Schweitzer explains, coined the  term ignostic—you're never going to know what God is, so why waste  your time worrying about it? God is a construct of the mind, he  says. Maybe you get there. Maybe you don't. Schweitzer sees  Humanistic Judaism as an obvious extension of a North American Jewry that  is already highly secular—one that for decades has made the deli a more  significant cultural force than the synagogue. Many secular Jews continue  to feel a strong connection to their cultural roots. Jews need a  place to go, especially during high holidays, where they don't have to  check reason at the door, he says. This is honest religion. A real  gift. After Shabbat, I talked to a retired philosophy professor,  Marvin Kohl, an expert on Bertrand Russell, who admitted, reluctantly,  that he believes in God. I like the intellectual side, he says of  the meetings. Before the night was over, a speaker from Jews for  Racial and Economic Justice gave a talk about affordable housing.  Then Schweitzer reminded the congregation that it needs new office  space. There aren't enough members to afford a synagogue. Atheist  orthodoxy for the most part has been an oxymoron, partly because atheist  leaders have tended toward a certain eccentricity. Before the Four  Horsemen arrived, the face of atheism in this country belonged to Madalyn  Murray O'Hair— Mad Madalyn —the pugnacious founder of American Atheists  who disowned her son when he became a Baptist preacher and
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