Atheist pastor keeps job because 15% of pastors are atheist

i could summarize this article in Ekklesia magazine... but i really think it has to be experienced to be believed.

So here's the rub, and i'm going to try and explain this as straight-faced as i can:

An openly atheist Dutch pastor named Klaas Hendrikse faced disciplinary action for his beliefs. He rejects the existence of God (he's a strong atheist). He believes in God... he just doesn't believe that God exists. In other words, he thinks God is a useful fiction.

Now the Dutch church was understandably upset by this. They started an inquiry into what to do about Hendrikse.

What that inquiry found was that "one in six clergy of the Protestant Church were either not sure about or did not believe in the existence of God", and that the longer you've been a member of the clergy, the more likely you were to be atheist.

Well... now they had a problem.

What they opted to do is give Hendrikse a pass, saying that his atheist beliefs "are not of sufficient weight to damage the foundations of the church".

-------------------------------

Now, usually what i'd do in a situation like this is pick a specific aspect of the issue to discuss. But... holy monkey balls... where do i begin?

How about... what do you think are the ethical implications for Hendrikse: to be teaching in his sermons a fact that he himself holds to be false? What about Hendrikse's so-called philosophy, where he openly admits that God wasn't necessary to create morality (because God doesn't exist, according to him), yet apparently thinks that God is somehow still necessary for morality (for example - there are hundreds of contradictions with Hendrikse's position)?

Or, what about the position of the church itself on the matter: while asserting a fact as true as part of the core of its very foundation, it is willing to look the other way when people just pretend to believe so long as they play ball. Is that ethical? Is the church's position in any way not hypocritical? Is it true that asserting a fact in direct contradiction to the core teaching of the church doesn't count as an act "of sufficient weight" to "damage the foundations"?

Or let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Is there anything ethically wrong with allowing people to be pastors when they don't believe in the religion? Could i be a pastor? What about the statistics of disbelief among pastors... is this reasonable? Should one expect more experienced pastors to be less likely to believe than ones fresh out of the seminary? Why?

See... i don't even know where to start. So... go nuts.

I have to agree that the Atheism of the pastors is "not of sufficient weight to damage the church". Their churches are clearly performing little function than to entertain a few people on Sunday mornings.

Throughout history, there have always been a significant number of pastors who preached because they considered it a convenient occupation, not out of strong desire to share the gospel. In some cases, they have honed their craft well and may be a substantial influence for their congregation, in spite of their weak or entirely absent faith.

On a related note, who knowingly attends an atheist-pastored church?
What's the point?

I really do not go nuts over this - it is probably completely normal!!!

Because they are looking for an old man with a big white beard Smile

and where is that to be found??

also it is a powerposition to have!!??

Well, I guess it's a job like any other. And they may still feel like the shepherds of the people, utilizing a fictional character as a way of conveying care over the "herd". They may still try to positively influence people, you know, like reading a good fiction book may influence you. Especially when you are able to directly speak to people.

Out of curiosity, are you Dutch?

For starters, this certainly does surprise me. All of the pastors that I have dealt with in my life (several family members and family friends growing up) I personally believe have a genuine strong faith and belief in the god that they worship. I do not think for a second that there's even a remote chance of them being atheists. But... I've only gotten to truly know about 10 U.S. pastors - about, according to these statistics, 3/20 pastors are atheists... so I'm not that statistically amazing.

Now on a psychological note: this does make sense. You once told this forum (this is directed at Indi) that you have never believed in God in your life (is there anything that you can compare this with so that you can understand my viewpoint?). I have. I've only been an atheist for a few years. Let me tell you, it's extremely difficult to give up your religion. This isn't just for me. I have plenty of atheist friends that were raised in a religious household and they were Christians at one point. It truly becomes ingrained in you. I remember always doubting God's existence and I would force myself to shove those thoughts out of my mind and tell myself, "God exists! God exists! I can't go to Hell!" You start to battle with yourself and the religious aspects of your life slowly start to decay and you slowly start to chip them away. Now, I have absolutely no problem admitting to myself, or other people, that I am an atheist. At all. I have no fear over going to Hell. To prove this fact to people, I've raised my middle fingers towards the sky and screamed "[swear word] you God!" The point that I'm trying to make is that for a couple of years before I became an atheist, I was a "Christian Atheist." I was truly an atheist but I tried so hard to be a Christian*.

So does this really surprise me afterwords? Not really. I think that if 15% of pastors are atheists then 20% of Christians are probably atheists... Maybe not 20%... It's too hard to poll this because I was an atheist as a "Christian" and if you had polled me back then, I would have told you that I was a Christian...

*This is often an argument I use towards Christians. How could God send someone to Hell for not believing in him when really it's not your choice if you believe in God? It's not like a good deed, where I can choose to do it or not. I have no choice in my atheism, as I proved by trying so hard to believe in God when I really didn't believe in him...

@Indi. OK. Now that you have defined the parameters specifically:

It makes the church in question a business, and there is nothing moral or religious about it. For example an employ of a brand can keep its job as long as he advertise and market its product regardless of his personal believe about its products.

Well at least one can say that the religious community in the Netherlands is really small. Only 20% of its citizens are attending church. 15% of congregations serving 20% of the people has to be a very small number of people. If my calculations are right, out of 16.5-million people in the Netherlands (refer Wikipedia link below) 20% is approximately 3.3-million of the population (less than 20% go to church). 15% of those going to church is 495,000 people? Or 3% of the total population? Religion seems to be on the wane, so possibly people of the Netherlands are not very much into persecuting pastors in the Netherlands?

I don't know what you're getting butthurt about...

You can have whatever opinion you like. Post to your heart's content. I was merely quoting the obvious rebuttal to what you said rather than have someone type it out again. The opposing view in respect to your post is that the job/duties of a pastor are very different from those of a teacher.

You weren't flamed. The discussion wasn't closed. It was simply an attempt to show there is an opposing view to what you said in your post and that it was already discussed. I thought perhaps you would be interested in the opposing argument. Perhaps not. Enjoy.

OK, suppose you have a nice job as a pastor. It is the only way you know to make a decent living. You have always accepted the existence of God, of the gods, or whatever your religion is about, just because all your friends believed, and you never questioned it. Then somebody suggests it might be a myth and you realize you have never seen, or even looked for evidence for your belief. How do you justify continuing to collect you salary? You have to tell yourself that the church serves some good purpose even if God does not exist.

There was a 19th Century German political figure, whose name I do not remember, who said he considered the church a branch of the Police Department, because the fear of Hell reduced the crime rate. That could justify being an atheist pastor, and would explain why there used to be so many Hell-fire sermons. Now that there are lots of atheists who don't commit crimes, that argument does not carry as much weight as it did then, although crime has increased quite a bit since fewer people believe in Hell.

Other pastors probably decide the church is a nice social club, so that makes it worthwhile. "Brave New World" described possible future churches like that. That might explain the emphasis on community, fellowship, quality music, beautiful church buildings, and relief from the stress of worldly activities nowadays. The trouble with this is that no church can compete with the nearest barroom for fellowship and relief from stress. That may be why the churches that de-emphasize faith are losing members faster than the ones that stress it.

My church had a lot of priests and nuns leave in the '60s and '70s, and a lot of priests molested altar boys, which was a serious breach of the law and against the fundamental teachings of the church. Some of them have died. Maybe they didn't believe in Hell anymore, or maybe they didn't believe the teachings of the church about homosexual rape were true.

I had a crisis of faith myself when I was a young man, but I was not a pastor, so it was a personal problem only. There was only one sure way to find out. I got down on my knees and asked God to show me whether he existed. The next day I read about a miracle. Since then I have read about and witnessed many miracles. A miracle, by definition, is something only a god could do, so now I believe. If God had not existed, of course I would not have got an answer. There would have been nobody on the other end of the line.

Paul Alciere

First, lets go over a statement I believe you misunderstood.

"Now that there are lots of atheists who don't commit crimes, that argument does not carry as much weight as it did then."

I was saying that lots of atheists do not commit crimes, and therefore belief in God and Hell are not necessary to keep the crime rate down. It appears that atheists were much more rare in the 19th Century, or if there were a lot of them, the general public was not aware of how many there were.

Second, there are degrees of belief. There is casual belief, which consists of accepting what someone has told you and not examining it because you do see a need to question it. Most of us have a lot of beliefs like that, especially if believing does not cost us anything. If a lot of people express doubt about the belief or belief is an impediment to something you want to do, that is a different story, and since you have never bothered to research the subject you can suddenly find yourself not believing or not believing as confidently.

As for my belief based on miracles, consider the following syllogism:

1. The power light on my laptop can only light up if electrical power is flowing through it.

2. The light is lit.

3. Therefore there is power flowing through the bulb.

It's conceivable that some heretofore unknown phenomenon could light the bulb. It's conceivable that I am only dreaming that the bulb is lit, but I feel reasonably confident that my laptop is turned on. So would any technician trying to diagnose the cause of some malfunction.

Likewise when someone says a simple prayer and his fractured femur heals instantly and he gets up and runs for a bus something most people would call a god has answered that prayer.

I signed up with Frihost yesterday to get the free website but I think these forums are going to be even more of a nice thing than the website.

The miracle I described was thoroughly investigated by the Medical Bureau of Lourdes.

Pierre de Rudder was struck on the femur by a falling tree, causing a compound fracture. About three quarters of an inch of bone were shattered. This was in the 19th Century, and the only thing the doctor could do was remove the crushed shards of bone and offer to amputate the leg. De Rudder refused treatment and went about with the useless leg swinging about. It got infected. He joined a pilgrimage to a place in Belgium named Oostacker, where he prayed at a replica of the grotto at Lourdes. He walked back to the bus, completely healed.

In 1953, when I had decided that I had not seen enough evidence to convince me that there is a god, this was one of the miracles that convinced me that there was sufficient evidence that I would not be intellectually imprudent if I believed in God. There have been about 150 so far.

I belong to a small group that meets every Tuesday evening to pray for people and things. We have had people tell us that our prayers have been answered miraculously.

The most recent was my friend, Bill, who has been in a nursing home for many years. He was given an overdose of a psychiatric medication and lost the use of his tongue. He could not speak, or swallow without food going into his lungs instead of his stomach. We took him to a neurologist who said there was a treatment he could try, but it would cause Bill a lot of suffering and would almost certainly fail. A speech therapist friend of mine told me this condition is generally considered permanent. We prayed over him several times and now he is speaking fairly clearly and eating whatever he wants.

Miracles are unusual, nevertheless. Sometimes God says "NO." or "Not yet." Sometimes we find out why He doesn't do what we ask for. Here is an example.

On February 18th, 1999, I was scheduled for my regular cancer check. It was the anniversary of the first apparition at Lourdes, so I drove to a church where there is a replica of the grotto at Lourdes in the parking lot. I prayed for negative results from the test. God knew that was not what was best for me, because I had cancer. The cancer did not show up on the ultrasound, so you could say I got negative results, but at nine o'clock that evening the doctor called to say one of the six random needle biopsies had hit a tiny cancer. Radiation completely destroyed the tiny cancer. I was a little tired toward the end of the treatments, but otherwise I suffered no discomfort. If that needle had not hit the tiny cancer we would not have found it for another year. Sometimes there is a reason why God says "No".

Best wishes,

Paul

i'm reminded of an anecdote from Anatole France. He and a friend were touring some religious hospital. Along one wall there were dozens and dozens of crutches. Each crutch was allegedly from a person who had been lame, but whose lameness had been miraculously healed when it was not expected to be. France's partner looked at all the crutches, and this was essentially his comment to France:

"A single wooden leg would have made their point much more succinctly."

------------------------------------------

Now for the other side of the Pierre de Rudder story.

De Rudder's injury was not an injury of the femur. Nor was any bone shattered (certainly not three quarters of an inch worth of bone). It was, in fact, an injury of the lower leg. The tibia and fibula were broken - not shattered. Pictures of the bones (they were preserved by Lourdes) are available online if you don't believe me. You can see the breaks.

The doctor did recommend amputation, but the shard thing is pure fiction.

Now, the bit about walking about with the leg "swinging about" is partially true, and critically important, so i'll get back to it. First, let's look at Mr. de Rudder.

Pierre de Rudder was a worker for some count or another, and he busted his leg when a tree fell on it. That much is not in dispute. What is also not in dispute is that once he was hurt, the count gave him worker's comp - and a handsome sum, too. Mr. de Rudder was, therefore, now living comfortably sitting on his ass. Several people accused de Rudder of milking it, saying that he was faking a lingering injury that had long since healed to stay on his welfare. None of that is in debate - it is all included in the Lourdes report.

For years, when someone asked to see his injury, here is what de Rudder would do. He would twist his foot all the way around to show that the bones were still broken. But... he did this without taking off his pants. He never showed the actual break to anyone for years. Now this is a point of contention, because the Lourdes conclusion was that he did, but all of the physical evidence says he didn't. Lourdes claims that doctors saw the injury, but the same doctors' letters explicitly say they did not. According to all documentation from people who wrote about it at the time, no one saw the injury except de Rudder and his family. When Lourdes did their "investigation" decades later, they met people who claimed they saw it... but no one at the time saw it. The "proof" appeared decades after the miracle, in the form of people "remembering" seeing the injury that no one wrote anything about at the time. (And, it had grown in the telling, from a gash, to an open wound where you could see the bone, to an infected open wound with shattered bits of bone in it.)

And it gets better.

The count died. His heir believed de Rudder was a fraud, so he cut off his welfare. Again, this is not up for debate - that fact is in the Lourdes report. It was a few weeks after that that de Rudder was praying for a miracle because he was (allegedly) broke and unable to work... and then he emerged completely healed. From the injury no one had seen for years.

Ah, but not completely healed. The scar remained, and, according to the doctors who examined it after the fact, looked like an old scar. That fact is also not up for debate: Lourdes not only agreed that the scar looked old, they use that as evidence for the miracle!!! They said that it could only be a miracle that a wound just healed had a scar that looked years old. i shit you not. Those are the facts. Literally. From Lourdes - not from a hostile source.

So let's review. De Rudder gets injured, and his leg is examined by a doctor who suggests amputation. De Rudder says no, he'll just weather it out and hope for the best. The count starts giving him compensation pay for his injury. After a few months, people start saying that de Rudder is not really hurt anymore, and is just milking it to keep getting compensation, so he starts doing this thing where he twists his foot all the way around... fully clothed... without showing people the wound. After years of this, the count dies, and the new count doesn't believe de Rudder is really hurt anymore, so he cuts off the welfare. Weeks later, de Rudder walks out of a shrine miraculously healed. Doctors examine his leg, and note that he has a scar, but that it is years old. All of this is fact. All of it is included in the Lourdes report on the case except the part in green. Decades after this incident, Lourdes starts doing their research, and now people start claiming they saw infected wounds and such. The letters written by people at the time saying flat out that no one ever saw the wound mysteriously disappear (but we know their contents because for years they were pressed between other pieces of paper, and left tracings).

And that my friends, is the best evidenced miracle they have.

------------------------------------------

There is a lesson to be learned from the de Rudder incident. i have heard tales of miraculous events from several religions, and from many non-religious beliefs (Sasquatch, aliens, etc.). i get told these fantastic, amazing stories, and at the end challenged: "explain that".

And then, i do the research.

And all those fantastic, amazing stories start to fizzle out. One little strand at a time, the whole tapestry comes undone. What was, in the story, hundreds of witnesses, turns out to be three or four witnesses, all believers (see the de Rudder case for that... not only were the few witnesses believers, they were also family with a vested interest in the story). What was, in the story, an undisputed phenomenon, turns out to be heavily disputed by dozens of sources - or, quite often, people write one thing at the time and say something different years later.

i see here someone who claims this particular fantastic story convinced them that "there was sufficient evidence that {they} would not be intellectually imprudent if {they} believed in God"... yet they didn't even get the injury - the focal point of the whole thing - correct. Oh, they get the name of the shrine right (Osstakker), and they don't fail to mention the authority of the Medical Bureau of Lourdes... they just flub the most important parts: the nature of the injury that was so miraculously healed, and the suspiciously fortuitous nature of this injury that stays bad so long as the money comes in then gets miraculously healed when it stops.

Frankly, if you really cared about evidence for your beliefs as much as you pretend to by rattling off this miracle as justification, you should really have done a better job of looking into that evidence. If you really needed this evidence to convince you to believe in God - if you wouldn't have believed in God anyway without this evidence - then how can it make sense to just take the word of the Domain without bothering to ask how "thorough" their investigation was. Were you even aware before just now that the investigation took place decades after the fact? Did you know that counter evidence mysteriously vanished? i'm guessing not. i'm guessing you were a believer regardless, and this "miracle" provided nothing more than support for your already entrenched beliefs - you felt no need to look any deeper into it because it agreed with what you already believed.

Well, some of us are still searching for truth, and stories like this are opportunities to discover more, not simply bias confirmation. For us, this "miracle" is... underwhelming.

This god you claim miraculously cured de Rudder of a bone he broke like ten years before is apparently the same god that created the universe. i don't think i'm being unreasonable to say say that de Rudder's discarded crutch doesn't impress me as much of a display of this god's ability, and that i want to see a discarded wooden leg instead.

Sorry about the femur / leg thing. I was writing that post from memory long after I had read the book from which I first read of this incident. The book definitely says "leg". More later.

I was confused by the words.
You mentioned religion, not the church, and said people might have been more 'open for wishing', which implies........in fact let's not go there. I agree with you.

Anyway, after I had read about Lourdes and some other miracles, I tried praying for things, since there seemed to be evidence that prayers are sometimes answered. I asked God to help me find a good wife, and a few days later I met the most fantastic woman in the whole world. A few years later, iin 1956, she and I asked God for help in finding a new and better career. Within a few days a guy in another part of the National Security Agency begged me to try my hand at programming their new-fangled computers, even though I protested that I had no qualifications. 1956 was a good time to get into programming.

For the last 35 years or so I have been in a prayer group that meets weekly to praise God and pray for people, animals and things. Usually we don't encounter miracles, but once in a while we do, at least in our opinion and that of the doctors in charge of the cases.

The latest miracle I have seen was about a month ago, when two of us prayed over a friend who had Tardive Dyskinesia as a result of an overdose of Haldol. We had gone with our friend to consult with a local neurologist, so see whether there was any chance of restoring his ability to use his tongue properly. The nerve that runs from the brain to the tongue had been badly damaged so that he could not speak and sometimes when he swallowed food would go into his lungs, so he had to be put on a feeding tube. Speaking and eating were important to him, so we asked whether he could be cured. The neurologist said that there were treatments available, but they would subject our friend to a lot of suffering and would almost certainly be unsuccesslul, so he recommended not doing anything. We agreed.

We did, however, pray over him each time we visited him, and in about a week he began to be able to speak. His speech therapist also managed to train him to swallow correctly, so now he no longer has to communicate by pointing to letters on a board, and he eats solid food regularly again.

I strongly recommend you try prayer. It is inexpensive, can be done anywhere, and you can do it without your atheist friends knowing you do it. If you don't happen to need any favors from God right now, there are people in Haiti, Darfur, New York and elsewhere who could use some miracles.

You don't need to join a church in order to pray. You only need a church if you want to pray with other people in inclement weather, or if you decide God would like you to join a particular church.

Best regards,

Paul

OK, a few points.
a) Placebo coupled to increased optimism in outlook is a potent mix.
b) The only thing I would say was unlikely is the last story but it doesn't really make the case for a miracle. Why would God make him slowly better - in fact I'll bet it is pretty well correlated to other things, like physiotherapy, self-motivation and some professional help from speech therapists.
Surely God would just sort it out, straight away, wouldn't he?
Add to that the lack of data available (ie we have one anectodal source) and I find the miracle explanation to be much less likely than any number of physical explanations.

It is also a very strange belief, because it relies on such an ego-centric approach. You must know intellectually at some level that millions of people pray just before reaching a horrible end. Were these prayers not worthy?

What you are basically saying is that you think prayer has worked for you. I'm happy for you...really. But my Grandad attributed his long life (he died two years ago at 100) to smoking. Now, I'm pretty sure that everything you think was a result of prayer was in fact a result of a positive mental outlook on your part, a basic human inability to remember events accurately, and a misunderstanding of basic probabilities which leads to you 'calculating' that certain events were extremely improbable without prayer.
You say that you do a lot of praying..and I'm guessing some of it is for people you know. So the basic question then becomes : do nice things happen to people in the normal run of things? Do unexpected things happen? Do you think you might have been ready to get married and therefore relaxed enough to talk to a woman who liked you and eventually married you? Statistically some people are going to have long relatively happy marriages. You are one of them. There is no way to know what would have happened without the prayer, but it seems odd to attribute that to the suprnatural when it is really just a perfectly normal life as enjoyed by many who pray and many who don't.

The basic problem is what I call the blade of grass fallacy. You are playing golf, and you hit a great 200 yard drive. Now, the ball lands on a particular blade of grass, inevitably, but as you approach the ball you think 'surely the chances of that ball landing on that particular blade of grass must be quite remote'? So you do some estimating (say a 50 metre square landing zone where you could expect to hit the ball on most attempts, multiplied by, say, 4 blades per square cm) and you arrive at an extremely improbable situation - the chances of you having driven that ball onto that blade of grass are over half a million to one. Surely a miracle?

If you believe prayer works, and you spend a lot of time praying, and you tend to attribute any nice happenings to prayer (whilst conveniently forgetting that the same logic holds the other way - all the improbable bad things that happen must be God getting bit miffed), and you live a relatively long life, then how unlucky would you need to be to arrive in later years with nothing you could attribute to prayer? You'd have to be some sort of unlucky person not to be able to remember a half dozen wonderful things in your life...

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