Pastors Who Don't Believe in God

[Bar Sinister]

I found this CBC program interesting. Apparently in recent years a number of supposed Christian priests and preachers have come to the conclusion that god does not exist. However, secure in their chosen profession, they continue to preach; all the while not believing the most fundamental tenets of the religion to which they belong.

CBC.ca | Tapestry | Preachers Who Don't Believe in God

There are also a number of articles dealing with the same issue.

AlbertMohler.com – Preachers Who Don’t Believe — The Scandal of Apostate Pastors

 

[Trotz]

Bar Sinister,
you couldn't post the abstract?

There are systemic features of contemporary Christianity that create an almost invisible class of non-believing clergy, ensnared in their ministries by a web of obligations, constraints, comforts, and community. Exemplars from five Protestant denominations, Southern Baptist, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian, Methodist and Church of Christ, were found and confidentially interviewed at length about their lives, religious education and indoctrination, aspirations, problems and ways of coping. The in-depth, qualitative interviews formed the basis for profiles of all five, together with general observations about their predicaments and how they got into them. The authors anticipate that the discussion generated on the Web (at On Faith, the Newsweek/Washington Post website on religion, Disbelief in the pulpit: On Faith at washingtonpost.com) and on other websites will facilitate a larger study that will enable the insights of this pilot study to be clarified, modified, and expanded.

Canada is not even mentioned in the article and Southern Baptist is mentioned as a church; so this doesn't have anything to do with my country.


Regardless, it does remind us of how low individuals are willing to go in order to access power. We have to wonder if this guy: Robert J. Bentley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
is even honest to his word.
I bet; like a lot of Christian Republicans in the US, Bentley probably hangs out at the gloryhole at the local gas station.

Even thought of becoming a pastor myself,
it's a job which pays $60,000 a year, the church pays for your house and "religious conversion" trips to Africa and Asia and you get to rant all day about the war in Iraq; et al, it's otherwise a therapeutic pyschologist without a degree.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

...a number of supposed Christian priests and preachers have come to the conclusion that god does not exist.

Yeah, I heard that when it was originally broadcast. I thought while listening that it's not quite accurate to say they've concluded god doesn't exist. They've just come to the view that a particular concept of god--the traditional monotheistic concept as presented by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--has no reality, but they've got it neatly rationalized into a sort of pantheistic metaphor in the style of Spinoza, that god is all that exists, god is the cosmos, god is manifest in creation and the laws of physics, stuff like that. Whatever it takes to keep the job, eh? It seemed fundamentally dishonest to me, that they could continue in their roles as Christian pastors when they have a concept of god that their parishioners almost certainly would not and could not identify with. With a concept of a deity like that, the story of Jesus makes no sense, it depends critically on a personal deity that exists as a distinct character and personality, with plans, priorities, and an ego, that has some interest in us. If you don't buy at least that minimal notion of god, you can't be a Christian.

 

[Trotz]

These were the same people who were devout Communists and upper party members in the Soviet Union. In time, every organization will be inflitrated and cracked by those with desire for power and unimaginable wealth at consequence over everyone else.. It happened to the Catholic Church in the 1500s and it has happened to Democracy in the 2000s.