Pastoral Care for Atheist Clergy

[JustinL87]

I think im going to back out of this one. I dont want to drag out thr dead horses and beat them more.

[Robert Tulip]

By check with scripture, I do mean to imply that the bible is Literally innerrant. How old do i believe the universe is? I can't say. I personally think roughly around 6000 years or so. Maybe slightly older or younger but nowhere around billions of years.

Hi JF. Your enlightening comment here illustrates the difficulty some clergy have in staying in the church.

The scientific consensus based on overwhelming coherent evidence is that the universe is more than 13 billion years old, since the Big Bang. Outside of sectarian church groups, anyone who disagrees with the scientific consensus is considered a fool. So there is a cognitive dissonance for clergy who wish to maintain cordial relations with both mainstream society and their ignorant church members.

Such clergy have to avoid offending bigots in the church who stridently argue for blatantly wrong views. At the same time, they have to explain to sensible people why they work for an institution that apparently promotes error. This can be a complex and difficult balancing act, reliant on the continued effort to maintain a mental schizophrenia between faith and reason, checking their brains at the door when they enter church on Sunday morning.

Many clergy find such intellectual gymnastics stressful, and do not like living a secretive double life.

I myself resolve this difficulty by supporting both Christianity and atheism, using Calvin's heuristic, as cited by Karen Armstrong, that whenever Scripture appears to be in conflict with science it is evidence that we need to read the scripture as allegory.

[JFRobot]

Science may be good for some things. But it is also my belief that certain aspects of science can be looked at at a specific angle so that it only supports Atheism.

Science may find that the earth seems billions of years old.
Eliminate what the bible says of creation and a person will come to believe that the earth is one billion years old.

Howev, pay attention to what the bible says about creation, here's what you find:

God made man and woman as an adult, animals were made as adult animals, plants were already blossoming and bearing fruit, light was already on the earth, sun, moon and stars were already formed, so on and so forth at their prime.
Had you seen adam without prior knowledge of the biblical creation story, you would automatically assume that adam was a 20-30 year old man and so on.
But he's not actually 20-30 years old but rather he is a few minutes-hours old.
So, likewise i could assume that earth, like everything else, was made at the beginning of creation as an "adult" planet and, while radiometric dating may cause earth to come up as so many odd billion years, in actuality, it is only some odd thousand years.

Atheistic perspective would rather chuck that detail out the window and state the earth is some odd billion years old. After all, they prefer to have nothing to do with the bible.

[LanDroid]

Heh, that's a good 'un, don't think I've heard it before. Gawd made the Earth 6K years ago, but pre-aged it to "adulthood" to appear 3.5 billion years old. Ohhhh that pesky Yahweh, what are we gonna do with such a tricky-trixster?

Mr. Tulip said, "...Bultmann holds to many untrue supernatural claims..."

Glad someone can sort it all out...

[youkrst]

Ohhhh that pesky Yahweh, what are we gonna do with such a tricky-trixster?

i can almost hear him singing...

Regrets, I've had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption
I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this, I did it YAaaaaaaH.......WEH...

I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create calamity. I am Yahweh, who does all these things.

yeah rock on Yahweh you giant Numpty

[Interbane]

Scientific evidence can either be looked as in support for God or it can be looked as a way to deny God.

You may cherry pick some evidence to support your belief. But if you view all the evidence together, without excluding any, the idea of a god doesn't parse. Only those who cherry pick some evidence and rationalize other pieces of evidence can come to the false conclusion that they support the idea of a god.

Eliminate what the bible says of creation and a person will come to believe that the earth is one billion years old.

There is no need to eliminate what the bible says of creation to come to the conclusion of an old Earth. The sum of evidence points inexorably to that conclusion, regardless of any other information you think has bearing on that conclusion.

You must first 'assume' there is some inherent authority behind the bible before you value it's conclusions enough to compete with the conclusions of science. For science, there is no assumption necessary other than those required for basic interaction with our world - faith in sense-datum and in the existence of the world around you.

That assumption of biblical authority is baseless. Before you trust the bible's own self-proclaimed divine origins, you must first assume it has the authority to make that proclamation. It's circular and rests entirely on the initial assumption. But once you take the leap and make that assumption, pascal's wager closes the door behind you and you find yourself in an internally consistent worldview, a 'belief-trap'.

[JFRobot]

Heh, that's a good 'un, don't think I've heard it before. Gawd made the Earth 6K years ago, but pre-aged it to "adulthood" to appear 3.5 billion years old. Ohhhh that pesky Yahweh, what are we gonna do with such a tricky-trixster?

so let me ask: would a baby survive on a planet filled with baby animals with only small plant sprouts on an earth that may not be suitable for inhabitation?

[JFRobot]

You may cherry pick some evidence to support your belief. But if you view all the evidence together, without excluding any, the idea of a god doesn't parse. Only those who cherry pick some evidence and rationalize other pieces of evidence can come to the false conclusion that they support the idea of a god.

it is my belief that some evidence is falsely put together to support theories that are against God.
If you have no clue what a human skeleton looks like and you see a whole bunch of human bones lying around, are you going to automatically assume that the bones are apart of a human skeleton? I, personally, would think not.

There is no need to eliminate what the bible says of creation to come to the conclusion of an old Earth. The sum of evidence points inexorably to that conclusion, regardless of any other information you think has bearing on that conclusion.

You must first 'assume' there is some inherent authority behind the bible before you value it's conclusions enough to compete with the conclusions of science. For science, there is no assumption necessary other than those required for basic interaction with our world - faith in sense-datum and in the existence of the world around you.

That assumption of biblical authority is baseless. Before you trust the bible's own self-proclaimed divine origins, you must first assume it has the authority to make that proclamation. It's circular and rests entirely on the initial assumption. But once you take the leap and make that assumption, pascal's wager closes the door behind you and you find yourself in an internally consistent worldview, a 'belief-trap'.

Whether or not the earth is so many odd thousand years is not really doctrinally important. why? because the bible isn't a book that is supposed to tell you how the mechanical things of the world work. it's a book to tell you of a huge problem in human life. but i won't bore you with the details here.

[Interbane]

it is my belief that some evidence is falsely put together to support theories that are against God.

I'm sure some are put together falsely. Those should be ignored as well. But when all the evidence is taken as a whole, instead of cherry picked for or against god, the conclusion is at the least agnostic.

If you have no clue what a human skeleton looks like and you see a whole bunch of human bones lying around, are you going to automatically assume that the bones are apart of a human skeleton? I, personally, would think not.

No, I would not automatically assume. We would want to compare the idiosyncracies of the remains with what we know of human anatomy. If the cross referencing deductively eliminates all related primates or other organisms with a skeleton that resembles a human, then we can be comfortable concluding that the remains are human. If there is still doubt, there are many other methods to increase our level of confidence.

My advice is definitely NOT to automatically assume. My advice is the opposite, gather as much of the evidence as we can and look at it in whole.

Whether or not the earth is so many odd thousand years is not really doctrinally important. why? because the bible isn't a book that is supposed to tell you how the mechanical things of the world work.

Then why are you basing your conclusions of the mechanical things of the world on what the bible says? You're going against your own wisdom!

it's a book to tell you of a huge problem in human life. but i won't bore you with the details here.

There are modern books that are far better at explaining the huge problems in human life. With these modern books, you don't need to worry about misinterpretation leading to religious crusades. You also don't need to worry about disregarding certain parts about killing your family or friends at the city's gates. The bible is outdated, which I'm sure even you can agree with.

Only through cherry picking can you claim it applies to modern life, by ignoring certain parts. That's an inescapable truth of the bible, it must be interpreted before it can be applied. Otherwise, the literal interpretations are well understood by modern society to be immoral. We can and have done better, but people continue to cling to this ancient outdated morality.

To start the excavation of the tip of this iceberg(modern moral frameworks), start with a humanist manifesto. Follow the links and discussions, and you can find alternatives, competitors, and permutations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_Manifesto

[Interbane]

so let me ask: would a baby survive on a planet filled with baby animals with only small plant sprouts on an earth that may not be suitable for inhabitation?

No, the babies would not live. What's the point of this question?