Secular Sunday Schools

This is something that always appealed to me:

With an estimated 14 percent of Americans professing to have no religion, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies, some are choosing to send their children to classes that teach ethics without religious belief.

One of the reasons we came up with our July 20th ceremony was part of a broader effort to formalize our belief system. Several of the people that I was hanging out with at the time wanted to have a place to take their kids to learn their own belief system, rather than a Christian one.

My problem is that, while I’m not a theist, I’m not an atheist (in the sense of someone who believes there is no God) either. I’m a skeptic. In fact, the Unitarian Church can serve the function described above (I actually did attend a Unitarian Sunday school as a teenager). The problem with Unitarians is that they tend to be “progressive.”

Back in the eighties, Keith Henson and I used to occasionally discuss trying to take over, or start up, a Unitarian congregation that would be libertarian, rather than “liberal.” But it seemed like a lot of potential effort, with an uncertain outcome, and nothing ever came of it. In the nineties, he decided to crusade against Scientologists instead. It probably would have been smarter to take on the Unitarians…