[These are my thoughts and not those of Campus Crusade or my parents]
Here are the facts about religion and chaplains in the military:
1. In the military, there are Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Islamic etc chaplains.
2. Each chaplain is free to share his faith beliefs all he wants within the military guidelines given him. They are not muzzled.
3. Each chaplain is responsible for providing for the spiritual needs of all the soldiers under him or her. Therefore they provide and announce:
On Sundays, on many bases, there are different services available for Roman Catholic and Islamic and for any chaplain who chose to provide his.
Buses pick up some to go off post to Synagogues, Mormon temples, Greek Orthodox etc.
Even Wiccans can meet as a group as long as the meeting is open to anyone.
No one is compelled to attend any meeting but can attend any if they choose.
4. Any chaplain can use volunteers to teach classes on Sunday morning as long as that volunteer teaches under his or her supervision.
Chaplains can recruit their volunteers from the community.
5. All belief groups want to share their beliefs to the world. In the America, they are free to do this as long as they do it by the rules.
For some reason those who are not followers of Jesus have problems with Christian groups ministering to the military. Here is what I want to know:
I want to know if there are Pagan, Wiccan, Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jewish and other groups who send missionaries to the military who raise their own financial support?
Are their atheist groups who raise their own financial support to assist the military in their emotional and educational needs?
Show me where the Military Ministry of Campus Crusade has violated the Constitution? The Separation of Church and State was to protect the Church from the State not the other way around.
What harm is being done to our military?
Do those who have a beef really care about the military personnel or are they trying to make a political statement?
These are questions I want answered. I’m tired of being called a “right-winged bigot” and a “fundamentalist” and every form of profanity in the book. Personally I’m ready for the US to leave Iraq but I support or military and our leaders. I’m a follower of Jesus who wants to fulfill the calling God has given me. I follow the laws and I’m tolerant of other’s beliefs. It’s time the “other” beliefs showed a little tolerance of Christ followers too.
On Sunday mornings, most parents who don’t believe in the Christian God, or any god at all, are probably making brunch or cheering at their kids’ soccer game, or running errands or, with luck, sleeping in. Without religion, there’s no need for church, right?
Maybe. But some nonbelievers are beginning to think they might need something for their children. “When you have kids,” says Julie Willey, a design engineer, “you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on.” So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.
An estimated 14% of Americans profess to have no religion, and among 18-to-25-year-olds, the proportion rises to 20%, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies. The lives of these young people would be much easier, adult nonbelievers say, if they learned at an early age how to respond to the God-fearing majority in the U.S. “It’s important for kids not to look weird,” says Peter Bishop, who leads the preteen class at the Humanist center in Palo Alto. Others say the weekly instruction supports their position that it’s O.K. to not believe in God and gives them a place to reinforce the morals and values they want their children to have.
Something about this story just breaks my heart. I just don’t get it. It is one thing for a mature adult to reject God but to teach children in a Sunday School…Breaks my heart….
An increasing number of young people in America - and adults around the world - don’t believe in God. Greg Epstein, who advises fellow atheists and agnostics at Harvard University, wants to create a kind of church for those who reject religion. But he’s encountering resistance from some of the very people he wants to unite.
Greg Epstein, 30, has become a kind of ministerial paradox, a member of the local clergy who disavows God, preaches to atheists and agnostics, and seeks to build the equivalent of a church for nonbelievers and others skeptical of or alienated by religion. A former lead singer of a rock band, he now serves as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, one of a small but growing number of such chaplains for nonbelievers on college campuses. In his position, which is endowed, he has helped marry and bury fellow atheists. He has presided over baby-naming ceremonies and organized a “coming out” ceremony for a congressman, Representative Pete Stark of California, one of the few public officials to acknowledge he doesnât believe in God. He also counsels students and approximates evangelizing by handing out pamphlets with the question: “Are you a humanist?”
Epstein, a Jew from New York City who trained as a “humanist rabbi” after becoming disillusioned by the music industry during a year and a half crooning for a band called Sugar Pill, embodies that generational shift. He calls himself a humanist, because he sees it as a more embracing term than atheist. “Atheism is what I donât believe in; humanism is what I do believe in,” he says. He defines it as a “philosophy of life without supernaturalism that affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment aspiring to the greater good of humanity.
I don’t get it. What would you do in a gathering? Who are they worshiping, themselves? I’ve been to several funerals where I knew the person was not a believer. They were the most depressing services I have ever been too. There was no hope. For people who don’t like religion it sounds like they are making another one.
For the record, I don’t like religion either. I’m not religious, but I am a sold-out follower of Jesus Christ.
What do you think?
Ask an Atheist was having so much fun with this I found a recent worship service at this place.
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