Purdue has been full of events dealing with religion lately. Yesterday I ran into this group:
Some of my club members mentioned they were on Memorial Mall on Wednesday, so when I saw they were still there, I dropped by. One of my friends blogged about his reaction, which was different than mine since he grew up Jewish. He initially thought the event was going to be something anti-Semetic since Jews are often persecuted with the explanation that they’re the ones who killed Jesus.

I ended up talking to some of the people there for about an hour. They were very nice and thoughtful, definitely not extremists or anything. I was kind of amused because a couple recognized me – they’ve read my blog (hello!). I assume this is because the pastor that’s leading their Q&A session tonight (which is what this was advertising) is Brent Aucoin, who you might remember as the pastor who visited my presentation on the Creation Museum.

That being said, I still fundamentally disagreed with what they believed (big surprise, right?). Most of the stuff we discussed has been gone over a ton by other people already, so I’ll just touch on what I thought were some of the more interesting points.

1. I really need to brush up on my philosophy/theology. Everyone has their area of expertise, and mine is definitely the evolution/creationism debate. I don’t think someone should be expected to be an expert on everything, but I feel kind of stupid when I can’t coherently discuss religion on the spot. I definitely feel more comfortable when I have a moment to reflect, which is why I like blogging. Not signing up for a debate any time soon.

2. One of their main points was that they don’t believe that salvation is works based. The most important thing is to accept Jesus and believe in God, and once you do that you will live your life accordingly. Even if you’re a good person, you would go to hell because everyone in a sinner and rejecting God is pretty much the worst thing you can do. Obviously I don’t believe God even exists or that Jesus had any supernatural abilities (I doubt if Biblical Jesus even existed), which kind of makes the point moot, but let’s just say they’re right.

On one point, I agreed with them. You don’t want people doing good acts just to be rewarded, or avoiding bad acts just so they won’t be punished. You want people acting good for goodness’s sake. But that’s where the agreement stopped. I just can’t imagine a God so full of himself that the most important thing in the universe – punishable by eternal suffering – is not worshiping him. In their point of view, God is awesome so that is awful if you don’t see his beauty – but if it’s so important, why does he even give you the ability not to believe in him? God gave us free will and the ability to do evil things, or to reason and come to the conclusion that he doesn’t exist. He also knows everything that will happen in the universe, so he knows people will end up doing things that will damn them. So didn’t God therefore do the damning?

tl;dr, free will and omnipotence makes absolutely no sense.

3. Another point they made was about how Jesus sacrificed himself to us. A member brought up an interesting point at our meeting on Wednesday, so I asked them. Is it really a sacrifice if there are no consequences for Jesus? Jesus is God and knows that when he dies, he’s going to come back from the dead and ascend to heaven, so dying really doesn’t matter. It’s like this: if a policeman pushes someone out of the way of a bus and dies, that’s a sacrifice. He saved someone else’s life at the expense of his own. But if Superman pushes someone out of the way of a bus, there’s no sacrifice because he knows he’ll be totally fine.

Their answer was that the sacrifice wasn’t death, but being pulled away from God. Jesus took on all of our past and future sins, and that brought him as far away from God as possible, which was agonizing to him. …This still doesn’t make any sense to me. Jesus is God, so how can he be brought away from himself? Even if that was somehow possible, he still knows it’s all going to be okay, since he’s God and all and knows the plan, so any agony is only temporary and not really a sacrifice. They then admitted the holy trinity doesn’t really make sense to them, which was yet something else we could agree on.

While I don’t agree with their beliefs or their reasoning, I was happy that they could intelligently talk about things. I’ve run into far too many people who belief something just because that’s what their parents told them, and they’ve never given it any thought. These people are definitely thinking, even though I think they haven’t reached the correct conclusions. They’re promoting discussion rather than just talking at you, which is always a good thing.

I’m interested to see what they say at tonight’s Q&A session – I’m guessing it’ll be similar to the discussion I had with them. Unfortunately for you guys, I’m not going to be masochistic and sit through it for your reading pleasure because I’m going on a date (amazing, I know). Sorry – unlike Jesus, I only make so many sacrifices.

No, this isn’t some religious rant from me. A religious student group at Purdue, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, invited me and other members of the Non-Theists to an event they were holding today on Memorial Mall. They had a black board with “I HATE RELIGION BECAUSE…” written in large red letters, and invited students to write their opinions on the board.I ended up talking to some of them for a while (even though it was really cold outside, boo Indiana weather), especially the pastor who works with the group. He explained that they wanted to generate discussion about religion so they could learn from the different viewpoints and think about why some people dislike religion. Much like our Blasphemy Day event, they wanted to let people know it was okay to criticize religion – in fact, they encourage it. They don’t want people to blindly accept what they may have grown up with, be it Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, atheism. College is a place to question things and learn about different beliefs, and that applies to religion as well.

While they said no one was disrespectful, they were sad about some of the things written on the boards…not because they were mean, but because they were true about far too many religious people. Hatred of gays, lack of acceptance of science, judging others, being hypocritical…these are all things they concede that some Christians do in fact do. This group was more of the “Christianity is about a personal relationship with God, not organized religion, just love everyone and be a good person” thing. While I still don’t agree with the supernatural aspects (we had a long discussion about my atheism*), I really don’t mind these types of theists. They’re all about being moral people and loving others, and recognize you don’t need their brand of Christianity to be moral (and eagerly agreed that atheists can be moral).

Though, this one (temporary) counter protester amused me…
Why temporary?

Him: I actually came out because I thought they were those Non-Theists saying bad stuff about religion.
Me: I’m the President of the Non-Theists.
Him: …Oh.

After his initial embarrassment, he was actually pretty nice to talk to. I tried to make a point that we can dislike some aspects of religion but still like religious people – that we’re not just a bunch of cranky rabid anti-theists. I think I made my point, since he was friendly when I left.

EDIT: See that part that’s scribbled out? Apparently a friend of mine wrote “It’s okay to be gay” there, and the guy didn’t like it so much. Yeah, great Christian tolerance there.

I made one comment that I think the event’s organizers hadn’t thought of, and they were intrigued by. When the Non-Theists do a practically identical event – actually, more innocuous because we didn’t have “I hate religion because…” as the prompt, we just let people write whatever we want – people see us as hateful. “Why are those cranky, meany-head atheists going around criticizing religion? Can’t they just leave us alone?” But when a Christian group does the same exact thing, they’re praised for it. “Yes, we should definitely be critical of hateful, ridiculous things in religion! Speak up, question things!” It’s a double standard that really shows people’s biases.

If you’d like to see what people wrote, click the close ups of the signs below. Can you guess which one is mine?
*It always amuses me when I introduce myself as an atheist to religious people. 90% of the time there’s a look of awe/confusion, then they ask me why I’m an atheist. I really need to come up with a concise reply, but there isn’t one. My atheism, like most others, developed over decades and took a lot more thought than can be summarized in a short conversation. I generally try to explain my atheism as a null hypothesis, but non-scientists don’t really appreciate that. I also had to explain how my atheism is not a faith, what purpose there is to life (none, more shocked looks), and the other general things you hear over and over again… At least they were very thoughtful about my replies.