Anyway, the church I went to on Sunday would not have been on my short list, all things being equal. Last year I asked the pastor of the church I go to in GP for a list of churches of the same denomination in Portland area, so I could find something low-risk to go to (last year). He passed the job off to one of the young people in his church, and I guess she Googled the generic denomination name. Last year the closest on the list to where I was, was the same denom. This year the camp director put me up two blocks from the campus building where we're meeting, so I picked another church from the same list within walking distance -- about the same distance I walk to church in GP. The music was more familiar than the church in GP, the offertory solo was moving, but the sermon was... odd. I gather he's a recent hire (interim pastor), and this might have been his first sermon, which he titled "Living on the Brink" (his name is Sam Brink). His text was Mark 3:20,21, where the family of Jesus came to get him because he was acting "crazy." The pastor's point seemed to be that we should be "crazy" for God. Not a bad goal, but a little thin on content.
They had Sunday School classes, but they were unannounced anywhere. This was the first Sunday they tried eliminating the bulletin, so I couldn't look there either. After the service I mentioned to the senior pastor how useful bulletins are to newcomers like me, and he handed me a mini-bulletin that they'd only made a few of. It didn't mention SS either, but one of the older folks mentioned a SS class "up the stairs." There were only older folks in the room, so I'm guessing the tradition is dying out, and when the last of the geezers is gone, there will be no SS classes any more. You see that in churches where the tradition (as well as the traditional theology, you know, where God is God and He makes the rules, and if you don't like it, tough) is dying out. I only have four (maybe three, if my friend in Spokane extends another invite) weeks and then I'm outa here.
There were maybe four or five couples in the SS class, and the teacher announced his topic as "The Exodus," which he discussed only generally, no specific Bible references to look up -- some of the incidents I knew where to look, so I looked them up anyway, others I hunted around but didn't find, or more often found long after he had moved on to some other incident. One of them concerned the numbering of the Israelites at about 600,000. That figure is actually in Numbers, two books later. Anyway this fellow allowed as the Hebrew word did not necessarily mean "men" but could have meant "persons" (unspecified gender) and I was really curious what Hebrew word that might be. I had my Hebrew Bible, so I looked. The word used in reporting the actual numbers is derived from the verb "PQD" ('pakad') usually translated "visit" but also with a wide range of meaning, like to say David's place at Saul's table was empty, and sometimes in military contexts where it is translated as "muster" or "arrange" (in battle array). This context is clearly military, because the sentence goes on to say "all those able to be part of an army" for each of the tribes as numbered. Sending women to war is a modern idea among atheist countries (including now both the USA and Israel, which is probably the same thing), certainly not in cultures where combat was hand-to-hand and women on the average were no match for men. Ancient cultures like in the Bible had better science than the feminazis of today, so the Biblical head count is necessarily adult males only, not women and children, and the total number of people in the desert was probably closer to 2 million. Archeologists have not found evidence of 2 million (or even a half million) people trekking across the desert some 3400 years ago for 40 years and leaving their dead bodies there -- every one who came out of Egypt, except Joshua and Caleb, died in the desert. Me, I think the dates are wrong, and the location is wrong: Somewhere I saw images of Egyptian chariot wheels littering the bottom of the gulf of Aqaba, not the marshy Sea of Reeds west of there.
One of the other guys piped up and said it just isn't possible for that
much water to come out of a rock in the desert. I suspect he didn't really
want to be there in the class, but came because his wife insisted, and
he wanted us all to know it. I said "God can do anything He wants to."
A woman across the circle from him and me said "You are looking at it from
the human perspective, [not God's]." The teacher said nothing to his remark,
and moved on to his next point. When I got home and read through the denominational
flyer, which grants to their members "freedom of conscience" or something
like that, I can see why he couldn't say anything. That's also why I could
never be a member there. People can believe any silly thing they want to,
but Christian church membership should be limited to those who "confess
Jesus as LORD" -- meaning He (Jesus,
not we) gets to decide what God can or cannot do.
This guy's religion does not include any gods. That's not happenstance
or accident, nor does it rescue him from having a religion: the existence
of a Creator God confers on that God the right to tell His creation what
to do, and many -- perhaps most -- of us don't like to be told what to
do, so we choose a religion (which defines for us what is really true)
that excludes gods with that right. When it's a conscious choice, it's
self-deception. I like to believe that most atheists did not so much choose
to ignore the facts of the universe, as they were deceived by the gatekeepers.
It's much harder to change your religion late in life, but people do it.
Earlier is better.