Growing up in the Adventist church I hated alter calls. They weren’t all that common, but each and every time they were little more than a manipulative move into guilting people into stroking the preacher’s ego.
As I recall, when I was preaching, the only alter call I gave was the last time I preached when it was a required part of the program for the evangelistic series I was trying to preach. It was in part due to my disdain for the whole manipulative move that they are, but it was also because I wasn’t confident enough in the message I was presenting to want to try to guilt people into accepting it.
That being said, I’m more confident about the atheist gospel I preach here on this blog. I still hate the idea of an alter call, but just as an interesting exercise, here’s my crappy attempt at putting together an atheist alter call:
Come now sisters, brothers, and everyone in between, now is the time to embrace reason and throw the monkey of irrationality off your back!
I don’t care if it’s alternative medicine, spiritualism, religious faith, pseudoscience, or your whatever your favorite brand of woo happens to be that has you trapped. For you own good you should let go of it and embrace a life of reason and skepticism. Don’t you think you would be more confident in your decisions and opinions and more likely to make the right choice if you did so because it’s where the evidence leads?
Think about your morals and values for a moment. Do you do what’s right because you think you’ll get some reward for it? If you do the right thing for karma or to get into heaven, hell, if you just do it to please your imaginary slave owner, then you’re doing the right thing for the wrong damn reason. You should simply do good for goodness sake. You’re a human being. Have some fucking empathy for what others are going through and help them out with no expectation or even desire for reward, temporal or otherwise.
Think about yourself. Alternative medicine won’t cure cancer and neither will your sky daddy. You know what will? Real, science based medicine practiced by a trained and licensed physician. That’s right, science can save your life, but you have to accept it at least long enough to reach out to a good doctor before you can enjoy the rewards of their work.
Do you really want to live your life under the rules of a capricious, hypothetical tyrant? It’s ridiculous to let someone you’ve never even seen, heck, someone you can’t even prove to exist, tell you how to live your life, who to love, or how to love. Why the hell would you want to be a slave of a supremely powerful being who cares more about what you do in the bedroom than the starving children in Africa, that is even if there was such a being?
Come now and leave behind your shameful past. Come to the alter of reason.