My Public Service Announcement (PSA)

The last two weeks, I was reminded of why I hate church, with two examples.

1) Last weekend, my wife's sister "dedicated" her daughter in a church ceremony. This church has replaced baby baptism with baby dedications where the parents publicly announce they are dedicating their child to God. Though I have a lot of issues with forcing the Bible down children's throats, more directly - brainwashing them, especially since the Bible is conspicuously vague on how to handle children, I'm actually okay with the dedication vs. the baptism. It is a commitment by the parents to raise their child according to their beliefs, which is really what we should expect of parents (and hope they believe the right things).

However, while I was there, the church did an "advertisment" - there really isn't a more descriptive word - for their "Biblical Finance" class. On the surface, I support its intent - speak to the congregation about how to stay out of debt using a language they are used to following - scripture. Where I have a HUGE issue, is that they charge a fee for the class and consider it part of the non-profit arm of the church.

A church has a non-profit designation because it relies on "donations". There is no cover charge to attend a service. Churches that charge a mandatory fee for anything - Bible study, camp, etc - explicitly violate the charter of a "non-profit" and should pay tax as a capital enterprise. This church also has a book store in it that sells religious goods. Again, a RETAIL enterprise inside the church! Didn't Christ destroy the merchants at the temple in a rage??? This is the type of hypocrisy that sets me off.

2) I had an interesting combination of television this evening. We watched the movie "Mississippi Burning" - a movie about the KKK murder of activists in the 1960's - and then watched a documentary on the current day evangelicals in America. What was absolutely shocking to me, and quite scary, was how close the rhetoric of the modern-day evangelicals is to that of the Klan. They hate gays. They hate Jews. One "man of God" even complained that the IRS was auditing his "ministry" because of their involvement in politics because he is white! "They don't do this to Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson", he actually said on camera.

When you look at Jim Baker and Terry Haggard, it is quite clear what these men are really after - POWER. Jerry Falwell (alive when I wrote this) and James Dobson are the most evil men in the world because they take the most fundamental part of a human - the search for truth - and turn it into profit for themselves.

Finally, nothing angers me more than when "Christians" completely miss the greatest gift God gave us. It is not, as many would have you believe, His Son, Jesus. God gave us all a gift long before that, and is the most fundamental gift - an "inalienable right", one could say - that He ever gave us. God gave us "Free Will".

Without free will, there would only have ever been Adam and Eve. God recognized that the only true love is the love that is not forced. The love that comes willingly. Our founding fathers acknowledged that gift by separating church from state and allowing us to worship our God in our own way. Free will is not only fundamental to democracy, it is the first gift God ever gave us.
If we want to see what a theocracy looks like, we can look at Tibet, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, Pakistan, Iran. I will not let America become that. I will not let America become a nation ruled by the same zealots that threw Copernicous and Galileo in prison as heretics because they contradicted religious "fact" - and ultimately were proven correct.

"Church" is why the greatest scientists in history were athiests.

...the more you know.