Atheist Clergy

BeckonKing · Unread post Fri May 04, 2012 7:01 pm

Of course people are going to get frustrated if their most trusted member of their group suddenly decides to quit. what are they supposed to do, send him flowers? church may be some of those peoples entire lives and the pillar has just crumbled, i'd be pretty angry too and people expect it, not scream and holler and woe to themselves. its a normal reaction

ant · Unread post Fri May 04, 2012 7:33 pm

Dexter wrote:
ant wrote: Who are "these religious folks"?

What charitable endeavors are religious folks involved in? Have you researched any, or are you only interested in tales like this one?

Are there a few bad apples in every group of people, or is this strictly a "all religious folks have no compassion" flimsy conclusion?

Are we practicing critical thinking skills here?

What might be the motive of this emotive tale?
Do you really think this is anomaly for people in a religious community who admit they don't believe? I'd be willing to bet you'd get a hostile reaction in the vast majority of cases.

Are religious people involved in charity? Sure. So what?

Hypocrites and the like abound. You demonstrate little with your call for Jihad on religion.

DWill · Unread post Fri May 04, 2012 10:43 pm

Robert Tulip wrote:
oblivion wrote:a place where active clergy could make the transition from Sunday mornings in the pulpit to Sunday mornings in bed.
This seems just a flippant line, but it suggests that the community gathering role of churches is worthless. That to me is the big danger of atheism, the promotion of an individualist culture where people do not participate in their local community in any structured ceremonial way.

People ought to be able to understand that the symbols of Christianity are allegories. Sacraments such as communion and baptism have great ritual beauty, and the meaning is far deeper if people can bring themselves to understand there is no supernatural magic involved.

These apostate clergy would deserve even greater respect if they were able to speak to their congregations about their real views. Sadly that is generally impossible, due to the emotional wall of faith that blocks out all reason.

I agree with a part of this, Robert. If we open our eyes we humanists/atheists can see the resources and energy that religious organizations have mobilized for the greater good. We have a lot to answer for in that regard, and the individualism you speak of has something to do with it.

Horror at the professing of belief in something not scientifically founded isn't good, either. That belief does no harm in most cases, and unlike you I don't think these religious symbols and rites can possibly survive on any scale without the allure of supernaturalism. It's just something many people need to have, plain and simple.

johnson1010 · Unread post Sat May 05, 2012 8:57 am

Did something go bad for you recently, Ant? You've been getting pretty touchy lately.

Unread post Sat May 05, 2012 9:21 am

ant wrote:call for Jihad on religion

That sort of misquoting is unhelpful. No one here has called for a holy war against all religion. Observing that honest pastors get persecuted by bigots does not amount to an effort to dismantle religion.

ant · Unread post Sat May 05, 2012 7:59 pm

Robert Tulip wrote:
ant wrote:call for Jihad on religion
That sort of misquoting is unhelpful. No one here has called for a holy war against all religion. Observing that honest pastors get persecuted by bigots does not amount to an effort to dismantle religion.

I was being ironic.

Unread post Sun May 06, 2012 5:01 am

ant wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:
ant wrote:call for Jihad on religion
That sort of misquoting is unhelpful. No one here has called for a holy war against all religion. Observing that honest pastors get persecuted by bigots does not amount to an effort to dismantle religion.
I was being ironic.

The irony is lost on me ant. Jihad is a very loaded term, and you are accusing atheists of fanatical opposition to religion. Atheists are primarily evidence-oriented and not fanatical, whereas Islamists believe their supernatural fantasies. It is fair enough to debate with atheists on facts and logic, but there is no need for exaggerated slander.

Unread post Sun May 06, 2012 6:31 am

At my church today, I was asked to give a short talk on what the resurrection means to me. My attitude in this circumstance is that I do not wish to upset believers in the congregation, but nor do I wish to contradict my own views. This requires a balancing act. In particular, I did not state that I regard the ideas attributed to Christ as fictional rather than historical, but my view on this is that comments from an invented person can be just as meaningful as comments from a real person.

One thing I found interesting was that only one person afterwards spoke to me about what I said. It illustrates that even in a liberal church, most people are simply not interested in debate about theology. The sort of views I present at Booktalk seem to be too confronting for most people, so while I am happy to tell people what I think if they ask, I find that no one does ask.

Here is the talk I gave.

What the resurrection of Jesus Christ means to me.
The return to life of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday is central to our faith in a God of love and justice. In The Last Week, which many of us have been discussing in small groups over Lent, the authors Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan suggest that the meaning of the resurrection is primarily a symbol of our confidence in the triumph of life over death. The resurrection tells us that salvation is possible, that as human beings we are part of a divine reality, and that the integrity and clarity of Jesus provide a model for ethical life connected to God, in confrontation with the evil of the world.

Crossan and Borg suggest that the descent of Christ into hell on Easter Saturday is a story full of symbolic meaning, but if we take a simple conventional account as the only truth, we will miss the big picture. My reading of the descent to hell is that the cross itself is a symbol of hell, and how our world seems lost. The terrible unjust suffering of Jesus on the cross shows that without God we are living in hell. Humanity is so disconnected from God that we crucified the Lord of Glory, failing to understand him when he walked among us. But the resurrection tells us that there is an alternative, that we can be saved from hell. The cross looks like a historic failure after the messianic promise at Palm Sunday of a new beginning, but the resurrection shows that through Christ, God is with us.

The Gospels present the resurrection as the path of hope. The cross showed that our world is fallen from grace into corruption, and is on a path to destruction. However, Jesus lived a life of perfect integrity. When the representatives of our corrupt world nailed him to the cross, in a vain effort to dismiss his message as worthless, the grave could not hold him. Persecution and suppression were exposed as evil and powerless, and Christ was vindicated as our connection to the eternal truth of life and love.

The story of Easter still has great meaning for the world today. Our planet is groaning in travail under the weight of human evil and delusion. Christ tells us that complete honesty is the path to salvation. Problems such as world poverty, climate change, political corruption and the threat of war pose grave and immense risks. Christ calls us to follow his way of the cross, speaking truth to power, living with integrity and rejecting hypocrisy. We struggle to see what this narrow and hard path could mean. The situation seems hopeless, with the forces of darkness in control of our world. And yet, a light shines in the darkness, and Easter Sunday tells us that the truth will set us free.

What is truth? This was the pragmatic question put by Pilate to Jesus at his trial. Jesus tells us that the truth is that we can emerge from the corruption of the world into the light of grace. A new world is possible. We struggle to open a conversation about how we might live in truth under the light of eternity. The cross shows that without this conversation we stand condemned, continuing to fail to heed the message of Christ, living in a hellish world where the response to truth is crucifixion. The message of the resurrection is that truth will be victorious. We can be forgiven for our failure to understand, but only if we show integrity by truly confessing our failure and repenting.

A big part of this conversation about the meaning of truth is the relation between religion and science. The mocking of Christ by modern scientists shows the difficulty of this conversation. Many ideas in conventional religion now have to be recognised as symbolic rather than literal. Christians find this conversation confronting, challenging us to consider the truth of things about the Bible we may have taken for granted. In this conversation Jesus stands on the side of the angels, as the way, the truth and the life, the door to salvation, vindicated in his resurrection from the grave. Easter Sunday is our symbol of faith, hope and love, our recognition that the last will be first, that Jesus stands in solidarity with the poor and the lost. This message is not about political revolution, but rather the transformation of our world into a new heaven and new earth. Christ’s saving message of integrity and truth requires a robust and courageous commitment to honest dialogue and evidence. Easter Sunday is the cornerstone of a vision of transformation, a real path out of the darkness of corruption into the light of grace.

Dexter · Unread post Sun May 06, 2012 6:36 am

Is there another atheist in the world like Robert Tulip, speaking to a church about Christ? I'm not sure about that!

I might have asked before, do the people there know your views?

Unread post Sun May 06, 2012 7:46 am

DWill wrote:If we open our eyes we humanists/atheists can see the resources and energy that religious organizations have mobilized for the greater good. We have a lot to answer for in that regard, and the individualism you speak of has something to do with it. Horror at the professing of belief in something not scientifically founded isn't good, either. That belief does no harm in most cases, and unlike you I don't think these religious symbols and rites can possibly survive on any scale without the allure of supernaturalism. It's just something many people need to have, plain and simple.

Modes of belief evolve gradually. No one sensible believes in flat earth theory or young earth creationism any more, although these used to be widely accepted. The arguments and evidence for the invention of Christ are strong, and this debate is just starting to get over the public threshold as a major implication of atheist science. But it raises some complicated social questions that have not been widely discussed.

Apologies for raising some diverse issues here, I hope they are all related to the topic. I am sympathetic to clergy who struggle with atheism, but I fear that sometimes too much confusion is produced by superficial analysis of the conflict between science and religion.

Science lacks capacity to organise people in community around a shared narrative. That is the function of religion. The social function of religion cannot be replaced by sport or music or hobby clubs, because these are essentially meaningless, except in the case of music where it touches on mythic themes such as why we are here and how we should live. Nor can religion be replaced by science while science neglects the need for consensus on universal values except under the banner of human rights, and while science also fails to understand the psychological and social benefit of cultural symbols and ritual.

The social importance of ritual is illustrated by Confucius, whose essentially atheist views emphasised the importance of good order, ceremony and music for the proper governance of state and society - eg http://history.cultural-china.com/en/16 ... y5899.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(Confucianism)

The origins of modern science in partnership with the intensely individualistic ethics of capitalism means that science has largely ignored local social mobilisation which it leaves to religion and politics. But this has allowed a rather dangerous disconnect to grow between the social identity and emotional support provided by religion and politics on the one hand, and the rational knowledge of science on the other. The complex exception here is socialism, which Marx claimed was a science of politics, but was actually just trying to exploit the prestige of science for unscientific ideological purposes.

(As a mildly off-topic aside, my view is that the climate debate is undermined by the alliance between science and left wing politics, where advocates wrongly seeing this alliance as having potential to build a successful popular front.}

Bart Ehrman's attempt to flog the dead horse of literal historical Christianity by his shallow attacks on the mythicist view in Did Jesus Exist? have mainly served to alert many people to the question of whether the horse he is flogging is alive or dead. He has had to eat crow over errors in his book, and is now being criticised for censoring even mild comments at his blog. This debate illustrates the superficial quality of much debate over religion.

I disagree with you about whether Christianity can survive without supernaturalism. I think it can, because it started as a natural cosmic myth, and has greater ethical and historical meaning when considered in that light. Seeing Christianity as a myth also helps to expose the scale of ignorance and delusion in human culture. Such exposure shows that myth is socially necessary, and opens up a need to analyse the psychology and politics of myths that have been widely believed to be literally true.

Dan Barker is a prime example of an apostate Christian pastor. In reading his work, I have been disappointed by his apparent inability to see any symbolic meaning behind the literal pronouncements of faith.

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