Church of No, Thanks Celebrating Personal Liberty since 2008

Who needs religion? Well, it seems lots of people do, or think they do, otherwise we'd live in the world John Lennon "Imagine"d.

Most of the atheists I've met (and living in Rhode Island, I can tell you I haven't met all that many) have been the sort that were religious at some point and left their churches as adults, and had come to miss certain aspects of church participation.

Another, smaller category is folks who've been atheists all their lives (raised without religious indoctrination, and never picked it up on their own) but, on some level, wished at least part of the god/religion story was true.

Those are the people who, I think, will find The Church of No, Thanks most appealing. Hard-boiled, dyed in the wool atheists (like myself) might find it amusing to see a god-free church started by an atheist, and rightly so, because, in a sense The Church of No, Thanks is a parody religion. In fact, it's also a meta-parody religion.

I saw what Bobby Henderson did, with The Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, and realized that it was a good start. I think he's done something amazing, and there is a worthy cause at the heart of FSMism. Where I think FSMism is lacking, though (but I'm not suggesting that Bobby try to push it down this road, because I think it would tend to distract from what he's trying to do) is in it's lack of focus on self-improvement. Don't get me wrong, I think the beer volcano and the stripper factory in FSM heaven are fantastic, but they're really just MacGuffins. Sadly, they don't exist in the reality we all occupy. They serve as parodic placeholders for the whacked-out things promised to the believers of "real" religions. Don't get me wrong, though.... I applaud Bobby, and his grass-roots campaign to keep "Intelligent Design" out of public school science curricula. Hell, I even have a JollyFish tattoo on my leg!

I also think that what they're doing over at Landover Baptist Church is positive. Kudos to Pastor Deacon Fred, Betty Bowers and all the rest!

With The Church of No, Thanks, I want to do something different. I understand that part of what draws people to "goddy" religions is the sense of community, as well as the promise of "salvation", or at least guidance. Once they're in, they get used to the rituals and eventually find them comforting. The sad thing is that a lot of the ritual in goddy religions does little but further ingrain "the faith" in the believer's mind. I want to have rituals that mean something, even outside the context of The Church, whether or not there's a god, and irrespective of whether there's a heaven or a hell. I want to have self-defeating rituals; rituals which make themselves unnecessary.

What? Yes, I'm serious. The Buffet of Personal Affirmation, for example, is a ritual which serves a purpose. That purpose is to help the participant become comfortable with resisting Peer-Pressure, and making his or her own Choices. The ultimate goal of the ritual is to have the participant no longer need to participate. A little bit Zen? Maybe.

So, who needs religion? Maybe you do. Maybe you don't. I can tell you one thing, though, you don't need the lies and the Peer-Pressure.

C'mon over. We have Fudge.