ChurchLite: Goes down easy, comes up how?



Wu ("Without")



There’s a movement afoot in San Diego.  The pitter patter of atheistic soles can be heard crossing into the Lite – ChurchLite, that is.

Although ChurchLite professes to have “no need for God,” it nevertheless confesses to having a need for such warm and fuzzy things as the fellowship of disbelievers, action-based judgment, and non-genitalized morality.  This Church is therefore described as “a place for us to come together and

celebrate life…  to share our triumphs…  to seek support in our trials…  to laugh at life’s absurdities, and shout at its injustices knowing that our voices will carry farther if we shout in unison.”  Not only that, ChurchLite purports to offer all this with “half the guilt, and 0 grams of metaphysics per service.”

The Reverend James Huber (whose stated influences have been Zen Buddhism, Universal Unitarianism, Neo-Paganism, Carl Sagan, British comedy, sunsets, and a – pardon the term – “host” of others) is one of two listed ChurchLite staff members - the other being “serene” (aka “Sandra Vannoy”), who “likes to say that one day she saw God and left the church.”  Reverend Huber (aka “jhuger” in Internet land) proclaims

that when his diabetic blood-sugar levels “were about 3 times normal,” never once was he “tempted to blame God or call upon His help.”

This “churching of atheism” seems, in part, to be a response to the “throw out the bathwater with the Baby Jesus” type of atheism that was espoused by Christopher Hitchens.  In Austin Cline's article subtitled Religion and Atheism Are Not Contradictory Or Opposites, Cline points out that “Atheism is not the same as being irreligious; theism is not the same as being religious.”  He then claims that because atheism is “nothing more than absence of belief in the existence of gods,” it can still include belief in the supernatural and the irrational.  Cline also explains that there are religions (such as “many forms of Buddhism”)  that are

“essentially atheistic” (in that “often they dismiss gods as simply irrelevant to the important task of overcoming suffering.”   

Resources

http://churchlite.org/

http://atheism.about.com/od/atheismquestions/a/AtheismReligion.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%BA

Copyright March 11, 2012 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved