Kids Without God

But that's the thing, they aren't trusting the children with any decision. It's the parents making the decision, likely without any consideration given to the child's personal opinions on theology.

And this, I think, is a perfect segue into what I find most troubling about this ad. It has nothing to do with hurting the feeling of Christians in the abstract, because I could give a flying fuck about that. Rather, it's just bad strategy. See, if you're the atheist organization, your target audience should not be dedicated believers (bad return on investment) or existing athiests (mission already accomplished). Rather, it should be the teens/young adults who grew up with some degree of religious structure (church, school, parents, etc), but who are now beginning to question some of the underpinnings of the applicable faith. That's fertile ground for growing the community of self-identified atheist/non-believers. However, in targetting this group, it's important to realize that religious organizations aren't merely a source of theological ideology. They also play a significant cultural and social role in the lives of many of these people. Therefore, a softer message ("hey, it's okay if you don't believe in God, it doesn't mean you're a bad person/immoral etc, and here's why...") is likely to be much more palatable to this constituency then "anyone who believes in God is the mental equivalent of a five-year old" because it assures them about their doubts without shaming them and their likely ongoing ties through family and friends to the religious community.

Erk, you're right, I'm mixing up my Catholic rituals. I've only been inside Catholic churches for (extremely tedious) weddings.

If you think THOSE are tedious, you should see the MARRIAGES! Thanks, folks, I'll be here all week.

Most people don't stop believing in or doing objectionable things until they get called out for it. The call out doesn't have to be gentle, it needs to be strong enough to reach the people who have serious but hidden doubts. The need to tease people with strongly held beliefs is extremely important. Wherever extremists of any stripe are not allowed to be teased with impunity, about eighteen months later they start setting people on fire.

Oh man, Carly Fiorina! I was just reading about her in the crazy pages recently.

Sorry, but all I'm reading from that ad is "we're a bunch of smug assholes!"

That said, I'm not familiar with religious ads in the US, so maybe this is par for the course. I'm from Australia, where we can have an atheist Prime Minister and gay High Court Justices without anyone really giving a shit.

Yeah I recalled his story about harassment in Canada and explicitly said this is why locationism (my new word, usage part deux) isn't a great way to determine exposure to that kind of crap. I wrote like two sentences and even coined a goofy word explaining what I mean, so I'm not sure how it got so muddled one reply later. :(

OMGHAX

A kid without a god is like a fish without a bicycle.

When I die come find me and we can argue about the after life. In the meantime I've got this life to lead.

I dont mind what you believe, follow it to the letter if you want to as long as I don't have to as well.

Me? I've nothing to sell, my only advice is don't be a shit.

Hope I'm not derailing too much.

For me, it's not that I've been confirmed. It's the fact that I was forced to lie not only through the actual confirmation but during the weeks before that (preparing for confirmation like talking about the Bible and how Jesus and God affected my life). It felt like denying who I was.
Oh, and there were these two American boys (it was an English speaking church) and the way they talked about their faith creeped me out. I didn't realize it might've had to do with their country of origin.

Fair enough, lying to priests was certainly a reason I didn't even consider a Church wedding (much to the surprise of HIS family, mine wasn't surprised at all).

In my experience Confirmation was the best catholic sacrament. By that time I was already atheist, and I had to lie to the priests and suffer through an extra-long mass, but then all my extended family had to give me TONS of money (by young teenager standards). I remember fighting with my catholic parents 'cause they knew I didn't believe in god, so they wanted me not to take Confirmation. Something about being serious and true to my beliefs, and while today I agree with them at the time I was like, so all the other kids are getting TONS of money and I'm supposed to give it up just because I'd have to lie to the priest?! Fascist oppression! In the end, they let me do it.

Confession, though, that's some damaging bullshit. Usually they impose it on you when you are very young and still take that kind of stuff seriously. And you have to monthly confess your sins to a scary priest who knows you AND YOUR PARENTS and damn was I scared shitless the first few times. Luckily the local priests were relatively good people, so the penances were always symbolic, I never got asked embarrassing questions, and as far as I know they never betrayed my dark secrets (I stole some sweets, I said bad words, I fought with my brothers, I lied to my parents) to the authorities. And when I got old enough to confess more "serious" sins I was already avoiding mass and sacraments like the plague.
I still remember though, one time in elementary school I was arguing with a friend and I swore I knew for a fact that the thing we were arguing about, which I long since forgot, was true. Then I got home, chatted about the same thing with my dad, and he mentioned that it wasn't true. I spent the rest of the week terrorized, I had committed a mortal sin, so I could not take the communion - lest I commit an even deadlier one - but if I didn't people at mass would KNOW. And how could I confess such a terrible sin anyway? I ended up crying about it to my mother, who was catholic but sane, so she casually told me not to worry about it. Oh, the sweet relief.
I guess the moral of the story is that 8yo children can be quite impressionable, even if the adults aren't actively trying to scare them (in Sunday school the teachings were mostly benign, the hell part was barely mentioned) so things called MORTAL sins should be left for later years?

My biggest religion-based argument as a child was during Lent. I was in second grade, in a Catholic school (for reasons too dull to go into here). My mother had packed me a tuna fish sandwich. Some other girl got all up in my shit about how I was totally eating meat on a FRIDAY during LENT, that is a SIN. And I knew, I knew my mother would never pack me sin for lunch. So I said no way, fish doesn't count as meat. Other Girl thought this was RIDICULOUS, and I could see her logic, but I was positive I was right technically. So we brought in a nun for the ruling, and I won, bitch. I won.

And that's why capybara are fish in the eyes of Catholics (or at least you can eat them during Lent).

I don't understand. You phrased this like it was some kind of burn, but capybara totally hang out in water, which I'm pretty sure is something only fish do. Hence, fish.

It's an example of how most religious "laws" that affect things of the material world as opposed to the state of the soul are just plain stupid and inexcusable. "Don't eat meat... but fish is okay. Oh, you have a lot of these big hairy rats? Sure, those can be fish, whatever." - if you're going to have rules, stick to them. Otherwise admit it's all bullshit.

Holy shit brother, your sarcasm detector is as broken as they come. That capybara thing is world-class nonsense, obviously.

We've got a whole thread here full of Protestants. I feel at home. ;)

I never can tell! You could be a filthy Papist for all I know! They look just like people!

The capybara story may be apocryphal, but here in Michigan, muskrat is lenten-friendly. I am not making this up.

So it's not really a sin as long if it's objectively shitty. Like how sex before marriage isn't a sin if it's really bad sex and someone is crying at the end.

I don't think the capybara story is apocryphal.

Also, you can eat as much beaver as you like.

It is, because no one's been able to point to any historical evidence to back that up.

From your link:

http://jimmyakin.com/2005/02/rous_rodents_of.html

If there really was a papal decree or a Vatican dispensation, there'd be some evidence of it.

Not necessarily, as what legend streamlines into papal decree or whatever takes many forms in practice and there is no reasonable upper limit to the amount of paperwork that has been lost or simply not properly organized. However, I think you're on the right track, as these links are uniformly terrible at sourcing their claims and it just sounds like latter-day apocrypha.
I think the main thing is that it's easy to confuse the highly abstracted arguments about theological categories for things that were actually put in practice in anything but a scattershot manner and then became tradition because people love doing goofy things for ostensibly important reasons.

I love this sentence (and the whole story) so much.

Dude this is not something we need to let out. The rest of the country thinks we're backwards enough already.

I frequently consider nailing my change management requests to my boss's door.

It was the "We brought a nun in to judge" part that sold me <3

I always say, "At least it's not raccoon."

You can't eat radscorpion, duh.

Yeah, the whole no meat during some Friday's was one of the first things to make me reconsider the whole religion thing (I was pretty young at the time). Seemed like such a dumb thing for an omnipotent and omniscient entity to care about...

He doesn't. There is literally no place in Scripture, not even in the Old Testament and not even in some really niche translation of a specific set of parchments, that prohibits certain foods on only certain days of the week. IMO it's one of the clearest examples of the many historical problems of Catholic theology; when I was going through my "searching" phase many years ago, Catholicism got knocked out pretty quickly due to things like this.

shift6 how do you feel about "the host must contain gluten." This ridiculous (IMO) doctrine has caused a great deal of grief for celiac suffers, in particular young children making their First Communion. It infuriates me as yet another instance of form over substance. Curious as to your scholarly take.

It is ridiculous. There were two "types" of bread in the Bible when it came to ceremony: unleavened and leavened, i.e. bread without yeast and bread with yeast. Unleavened bread represented clealiness, holiness, lack of sin. It was used ceremonially by Ancient Israel concerning various rites and feasts representing their holiness as a chosen people before God, and was passed forward to Christians through Jesus as Communion.

Accessories such as olive oil and salt and honey were included in various ways as well due to their various symbolisms (and deliciousness). There were even discussions about types of loaves: flat pan fried, round baked, etc. But other than yeast/leaven there's really nothing about the contents of bread in the Book as far as I know. So if the Vatican makes a pronouncement like this it's probably 99% controlling legalistic religiousness, aka no big surprise.

The argument is that Jesus gave the disciples "bread," and that if it doesn't have gluten, it's not "bread." For reals. Because apparently the Jesus who can insert himself into a piece of food upon request can only do so if the food matches what he had on hand at the time (even though I strongly suspect he didn't hand out unleavened white wafers).

Remember, kids, dietary rules made after late antiquity are controlling legalism, while those made up to that date were holy mandates given directly by god to Protestants.