Numbers don't lie: Godless families raise better children

As I said, it was just generalizing an overall rationale of why Sunday services are shorter.

 

I understand that. I'm just pointing out what the post implies. I don't think you meant to be disrespectful of people who practice other faiths, but I can see how it might be taken that way.

 

Is Tom Crean going to be fired?

 

He better start praying.

 

Oops. Wrong thread.

 

As regards this whole length-of-the-service bit ...

To proffer some underlying rationale as to whether particular denominations have (relatively) shorter services than others is so much post hoc rationalization. These things have just evolved over the years into, roughly, an hour(-or-so)-long service in most denominations. Especially in non-liturgical traditions, there's nothing that absolutely has to be done in a given service. And even in liturgical traditions, there can be substantial leeway regarding: 1) what must be done; and 2) how what must be done can be accomplished.

When I was a kid growing up in a small town in the deep South, the norm among the Baptists* was: 1) Sunday school + worship on Sunday morning; 2) worship again on Sunday evening; and 3) what was called "prayer meeting" on Wednesday night. And if you were a Baptist and didn't go regularly to all three ... well, there was certainly more than a little tut-tutting about you. Yet now I see that the First Baptist Church of Doctorquantville doesn't have a worship service on Sunday nights. Rather, they have some alternate version of Sunday school. Twenty, thirty years from now, who knows what patterns of worship the membership will settle into?

The point is, especially in the non-liturgical traditions, there's really no rhyme or reason as to why services are as long (or short) as they are.


*I didn't grow up a Baptist, but my parents did. My very devout paternal grandmother always thought it such a shame to be associated with such apostates as my branch of the family, who had the audacity to first become Methodists, then allow the only son to fall into Episcopalianism!

 

Facebook friend from high school has three sons, the youngest of whom has/is Downs Syndrome. He goes to high school, and one of the girls (a senior) who helps with his class approached his parents a couple of weeks ago. She asked them if it would be OK to ask him to be her date for her senior prom. When they said yes, she did the whole "prom-posal" bit.

Effing evangelists. If she'd been brought up to be an atheist, she'd be a much better person.