Rev. Michael A. McGee on Atheism

Bennettresearch said:

Try taking a deep breath before you slam down on something.

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Jayhawker Soule said:

A Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington (UUCA) sermon reads, in part ...

“Atheism: Being Religious with No Invisible Means Of Support”​

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My hope is to challenge you to struggle more intensely with what you believe and why you believe it, as well as to reflect on how you live out your beliefs in your everyday life. And I charge you to see not only the uniqueness of each belief system but the commonality that binds us all together in a diverse and welcoming community. We desperately need in our world today an understanding of the most sacred in life that unifies the people of the world rather than dividing it.

But that understanding is hard to find. We seem to have this deep down hunger for a relationship with something greater than ourselves. But the word God has been stretched and shaped so much throughout history that there are those who must negate that relationship in order to find a more profound one.

The Hopi Indians of southwestern America have a special ceremonial person they call a kachina. A kachina is a person dressed up as a god who runs into the middle of the village, does a wild and exuberant dance, and then suddenly vanishes.

The children are raised to believe that the kachinas are real gods, but at a certain age all the children are gathered together in the middle of the village, and the kachinas come out into the circle and begin again their wild and exuberant dance, only this time they are not wearing their masks or their costumes.

When they come out the children discover that the kachinas are not real gods or spirits, but instead they are their fathers, brothers, and uncles. Often these Hopi children are emotionally and spiritually crushed when they realize that there are no gods in their life.

One Hopi girl looks back over that experience of losing her god with these words: "I cried and cried into my sheep skin that night feeling I had been made a fool of. How could I ever watch the Kachinas dance again. I hated my parents and thought I could never believe the old folks again wondering if Gods had ever danced for the Hopi as they said and if people lived after death. I hated to see the other children fooled and felt mad when they said I was a big girl now and should act like one. I know now it was best and the only way to teach the children but it took me a long time to know that, it took me a long time to know..."

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Only a small part of the sermon has been quoted. All of it, in my opinion, is worth reading. Enjoy!

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CMIYC said:

But don’t we do the same with SANTA CLAUS?

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