CRACKER BARREL, City of Dis, Friday (NTN) — The Church of Satan is reaching out to schools and playgroups to attract more young people into the faith and cull the nation’s goat population, amid fears that a generation of children have become disconnected from religion.
The Church will also establish breakfast, homework, sports and sacrificial orgy clubs in schools to ensure as many young people as possible have “life-enhancing encounters with the Satanic faith and the person of our Unholy Master Beelzebub,” says the internal planning document Goating for Growth.
“We need to reconsider how we engage with and express Satan’s wrath to this generation of children and young people, whoever and wherever they may be. Children are vicious little arseholes by nature, so it shouldn’t be too hard. The challenge is how to creatively offer young persons encounters with the Satanic faith and its beliefs. Except those little shits playing music on their mobiles on the bus, they can star in tonight’s sacrifice.”
The policies, which include providing religious materials to schools to help them abide by the curriculum requirement to provide a daily act of worship, have been criticised by secular campaigners.
“I’m not sure they’re much better than the Christians,” said Richard Dawkins, “particularly considering how many of them are also bishops in the Church of England. Let’s face it, if the Church of England was relying on Christians it’d be sharing a room with the Flat Earth Society. The Satanists’ approach to religion is entirely too namby-pamby and hands-off. They’ve also stopped inviting me to the midnight orgies ever since I was kind enough to point out to them in detail the logical errors in their faith while they were naked, screaming, drenched in goat’s blood and orgasmically invoking fell spirits with random coupling and loud enthusiasm. This demonstrates their deficiencies with regards to intellectual rigor.”
In the comments of a recent thread, another poster pointed out that religious individuals tend to report higher levels of happiness than nonreligious individuals. I suggested that the social network of churches, rather than the direct effects of theistic belief, might be responsible for this difference, and after doing a bit of searching around to see if the available studies support such an explanation, found a study that indicates that this is indeed the case.
Religious churches may be far from optimal in the services they provide to communities, but they have a great positive impact on the lives of many individuals. And not just as friendly social gatherings and occasional providers of community service; I've known priests who were superb community organizers and motivational speakers, who played an important role for their congregations to which I know of no existing secular analogue.
It seems probable that a secular organization could effectively play the same role in a community, but would anyone be likely to take it seriously? Since people who're already religious may be inclined to reject the value of a secular authority filling the role of a church, and atheistic individuals may not be inclined to attend, either due to reversing the stupidity of religion, or due to asocial and anticooperative values, it's uncertain whether a secular organization that adequately filled the role of a church would get off the ground in the first place in the present social climate.
So, what are your feelings on the prospect of secular church analogues? Do you think that they're appropriate or practical? Do you expect them ever to become common in real life?