From PZ Myers:
I haven’t done one of these in a while — it’s a dispiriting time to be an atheist — but I was inspired by a sign near my house. This is a truly excellent motto.
Expanding Minds & Inspiring Service
That would be a great theme for an atheist community, but of course, that sign was posted outside the Campus Lutheran Ministry Christus House, which is cause for some reservation. Religion does not expand minds, but instead narrows them. You would not go into the Campus Lutheran Ministry and find the pastor explaining how you should question everything, explore the wide world of ideas, and be reluctant to accept dogma, because their mission is to get you to accept their peculiar, limited, tightly circumscribed interpretation of Jesus Christ. The place where you’ll get your mind expanded is a few blocks north, on the campus of the University of Minnesota Morris, a secular institution.
I’m not going to accept the literal truth of that part of the sign. It’s a nice ideal, though. Too bad they don’t implement it.
The second part of the sign, though, “Inspiring Service”, is more legit. I remember from my church-going days that that was a serious and important message. Some of it was self-serving: service meant volunteering for the church or donating money to the church. Some of it was well-intentioned but horribly harmful: we were regularly exhorted to support missionary efforts in Africa. There was also, however, real good that was done. There were food drives to help the poor, visits to shut-ins, call for donations to help those who had fallen sick, requests to assist the elderly. I mowed the lawn of one little old lady who would invite me in afterwards to say a little prayer and praise the Lord. I went along with it, to be nice, and because she definitely didn’t need an argument.