A few more interesting things he says:

1). He *assumes* the guy is from West Africa.

2). He refers to the black man as being *imported* (as if the black Priest was a commodity rather than a human being...)

3). He is obsessive enough about proving this towns racism that he looks up what party the town voted for; even though it was a minority, ha *assumes* the people at the church *must* be right wing nationalists.

4). He also treated his grandmother with mildly veiled contempt.

Chances are that this is all a story, completely fictional.

He suggested it was true.

If it wasn't, then he was flaming, and should be hanged anyway.

second part of the story is up

surprisingly enough though, apart from the Christmas songs, not much of what the priest said was about Jesus, the Bible or God in general. Most of his talk was about human misery, wars, climate change.

This sentence brings to mind an interesting point of analysis and discussion: 1) Was the priest wrong in not infusing his sermon with more "spiritual" and "religious" knowledge and making it more Biblical? 2) Should churches infuse their sermons with current political and social issues?

My Hindu temple deals exclusively with religious lectures and stories...in fact my priests are almost apolitical. Our sect is militantly against abortion...yet my priests have never spoken or dealt with social/moral issues that have significant political overtones. Perhaps people who go to Church could give me their perspective.

Edited 1/1/2016 17:29:02

The Bible is a highly political book, so even if you were just talking solely about the bible, it would still be political. Also don't get me wrong, there were plenty of religious stuff in his sermon, but he made it more in context with the world issues. He apparently also talked about praying for dead aborted babies, but i didn't hear it, my father told me heard it. Maybe my subconscient just blocked the stuff i wasn't interested in and only processed the good parts. Makes me feel like a religious person when i think about it :)

Hitchslap, your as religious as Hitler, which, by the way, is not meant as an insult.

you mean like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-E9EmeFXjk

By the way, thank you very much wct for trying to reason with these people, i certainly wasn't going to do it. They probably damage themselves more than me by publicly displaying their broken thought process and lack of critical thinking. So unless a valid point comes up that i feel need clarification, i won't respond to the random garbage comments people make in this thread.

It is a bit worrisome and sadening though, that so many people here, some of them adults i assume, are reading what they want to read rather than what is in the text; reorganizing, dismissing and adding words as they please, with contempt to the original text.

"Tell me how you read and i'll know what is in your mind, not for sure what is in the text"
Tariq Ramadan

Edited 1/1/2016 20:36:11

Wow you all took this way wrong. I thought this was a nice story, and i'm glad you found a religious community that wasn't full of asshole bigots like this forum.

and i'm glad you found a religious community that wasn't full of asshole bigots like this forum.

I'm a bigot?

OTP:

Hitchslap is a bigot. Not a racist, but a bigot he definitely is.

OnlyThePie +1

I thought exactly the same!

Everyone who took this post in a negative manner is a bigot.

Gosh, guys, why do you take everything so seriously? Paying attention to someone's skin colour doesn't mean it's racist ^

I understood it that way : the narrator, an atheist, went to a church for Christmas along with his family mainly because his grandmother asked. The respect to his grandmother he has shown (or not shown) has absolutely nothing to do here. It's a personal reflexion and basically, from what I've seen, Hitchslap isn't treating the Christian religion nor all the rituals very seriously, but overall, the visit in the church pleasantly surprised him. The fact that the priest was a black guy with a strong West African accent was amusing, and remarking it wasn't racist. He was very different from what Hitchslap (and the other people) could have expected, so of course he was amused.

I feel a bit weird explaining such basic stuff to you as you're only picking certain fragments of his story and criticizing them, not taking into account the whole context, which is wrong.

So, resuming, just a short story from his life. The narrator is presenting his way of thinking and you can agree or disagree with some parts, but most of it is objective. It's fine if you think in a different way, guys... but pointing out the flaws in someone's thinking is wrong, especially if it isn't wrong at all. He has a different opinion than you. Deal with it, dammit.

psst... this isn't /r/atheism

*claps for death*

Death, his words show that he thinks Nationalists are racists. Am I not supposed to think he's an idiot?

^

alright, lets clarify that. I think people voting for the "Front National", are more likely to be mildly racists in the same way that i think people voting for Trump are more likely to be mildly racists than say people voting for Bernie Sanders. If your party is basing 80% of his narrative on immigration, foreigners, refugees, ect, and its leaders are known to have made arguably racist statements repeatedly, then yes i think racist people are likely to be attracted by this party.

Also, by "mildly racist", in this context, i refer to the well known fact that people living in small rural communities, with little to no contact with other type of culture/ethnicity/etc, are more likely to have some kind of predjudice toward anything outside of their own community. Its basically the fear of the unknown at play. I obviously wasn't talking about a KKK/skinhead type of racism.

I don't think that this clarification was needed, i think that this is what any reasonnable person would understand from what i wrote, but at least now we can put the false controversy to rest.

Edited 1/1/2016 21:42:43