Monday, February 27, 2006

The eBay Atheist Still Going Strong

My precious link to the Off the Map blog of Hemant and Jim's experiment is getting buried so I thought I'd bump it up and let y'all know that Hemant has visited two more Chicagoland churches since Willow; Parkview Christian Church and Park Community Church.

Here are a couple of my favorite bits from Hemant's last report:

The band that I watched was, like the others, great. Though some of the lyrics were questionable: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody. it may be the devil; it may be the lord.” Really? So, you’re either with them or you’re evil? That whole mentality is why religion has such negative connotations in my Atheist community. And I realize it’s just a song, but the message stuck out at me because I’m not serving the lord… so what does that make me? Not welcome, that’s for sure… at least not initially. But it got much better later.
...
I’ve also noticed another change. Whenever I used to think of a church, I thought of a boring place that people never looked forward to going to… you’d have to wake up early, put on dressy clothes, listen to a boring sermon… that’s not happening at the places I’ve been to. Is that a recent change? People (and kids) never seem to be complaining, and I can understand why. It’s not such a bad place to be.

2 comments:

Friar Tuck said...

The YOU GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY is a Bob Dylan song.

Kimberly Cangelosi said...

We have that Dylan album (Saved) and it's a cool song, but I can see how it might make a visitor feel, in Hemant's words, "unwelcome." Is that really what we want to do in our Sunday services? I'm not suggesting that we should be walking around on egg shells - it's impossible to please everybody - but a song lyrics that could be read to imply that unbelievers are alligning themselves with Satan seems unnecesarily divisive.