Instead of praying on the National Day of Prayer, the Lincoln Secular Humanists and the Secular Humanists of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will eat spaghetti.
Their protest to prayer is to respond with reason – The National Day of Reason.
The dinner will be at 5 p.m. May 7 inside the Nebraska Union. Spaghetti has symbolic correlation to UNL humanists president Thomas Zimmer's involvement with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The noodle feed will raise money for the American Civil Liberties Union, a group dedicated to protecting citizen rights.
"The main issue of the National Day of Prayer is that it's government sponsored," Zimmer said. "Particularly when the government and religion mesh, we get aggravated."
The Lincoln Secular Humanists group is aimed at informing the public about the importance of a secular society and encouraging scientific reasoning and research.
"Basically what we try to do is educate people about secular humanism and promote it," said group coordinator for the Lincoln Secular Humanists, Brian Ellis. "Our mission is the separation between government and religion.
Both Ellis and Zimmer believe the National Day of Prayer should not be a national holiday, because not everyone is religious. According to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, 15 percent of Americans don't identify with any religion.
The non-religious members of these groups protest any relationship between the government and religion. They view prayer as ineffectual.
"It's hard to offer an alternative to prayer when you find it completely ineffectual," Zimmer said. "One might say that sitting on a couch is more effective."
But the mission of these secular humanist groups is far from plopping down on a couch.
"The reason we set up some sort of charitable or humanist work is because we really do view prayer as very ineffectual," Ellis said. "We need to actually roll up our sleeves and take some action. … Religion may encourage inaction. Instead of actually going out to do something, people just pray for things to get better."
Zimmer said he hopes the National Day of Reason will someday replace the National Day of Prayer, earning actual, national status.
"I live under the hope that it will happen eventually."
ELLENHIRST@DAILYNEBRASKAN.COM
in 1802 Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists on the topic of seperation of church and state. He states that the government should have no part in religious organizations, however he doesnt intend for the government to be totally wiped clean of all traces of faith. The original notion of seperating church and faith were to establish an unbiased governing body over the people without sway from one religious group or another. So people could practice whatever faith they chose. The fouding fathers didnt want a "national religion" that everyone was required to participate in. I'm sure they would be appalled to find the degree to which we have taken this concept and twisted it to mean something entirely different.... i could go on and on about this topic so im just going to stop here.