Another Christian Pastor Who No Longer Believes

[stromboli]

http://www.lfpress.com/2014/09/26/ripley-how-my-mind-has-changed

In over 25 years of writing a column every week, this one may be the most challenging. For you and for me.

As with my years of preaching, my writing has tried to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Whether you agree or disagree with something in this column, the goal is always to provoke thought.

That said, I need to tell you that I’ve changed my mind. Where once I proclaimed the doctrines of Christianity with passion and sincerity, I am now convinced that religion, all religion, is man-made. As with the long line of deities dotting the history of our species, the idea of one God, Yahweh, made manifest in Jesus of Nazareth, is our means to an end â€" to explain how we got here, for instance, or to avoid looking fate in the face or to gain an edge over our enemies.

Deep breath. This was not an overnight decision. I didn’t go to bed one night this week a believer and wake up an unbeliever. I wasn’t blinded on Tuesday by the light of reason that led to a deconversion. I began this journey more than seven years ago. It led initially to me taking early retirement from ministry and has continued over the ensuing five years.

There is not the space here to detail each signpost along my sojourn from faith. They are meticulously chronicled in my latest book, Life Beyond Belief: A Preacher’s Deconversion, being released this week.

In short, after pondering the age and span of the cosmos, the elegant simplicity of evolution by natural selection, the ruthlessness of the God of the Bible, the enigma of expiation for sin by blood sacrifice, the discrepancies in Scripture, the antagonisms and animosities derived from religious fervour and the violence and corruption in church history, adherence to my former beliefs was no longer possible.

Why not keep my doubts to myself? Part of me would like to keep silent out of the fear that people may think less of me or get angry with me and tell me so. After all, I have been writing this column for some time without revealing my growing unbelief. I could take this secret to my grave.

But I also know how crippling secrets are and that it is important every once in a while to tell the secret of who we are. If we don’t, we risk coming to believe the edited version of ourselves we hope others will find acceptable.

All of us, religious or not, should value authenticity. If we do, then we should encourage not only critical thinking but also intellectual honesty without fear of rejection or reprisal. My disclosure carries the risks of losing friends and facing disappointment and disapproval from those who once admired my spirituality. Belief, however, is not something you can fake, or should fake.

Let’s return to my two overriding motives in preaching and writing: comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

If you are wrestling with the tenets of your religion and/or the increasing insights of science to explain reality, if you have elected to eschew religious creeds quietly so as not to offend or feel isolated, then you may be comforted to know that you’re not the only one.

If you are a committed believer, my testimony of deconversion may challenge you to take your convictions more seriously than ever before and examine evidence you may never have encountered before. My goal is not to disabuse you of your faith but to share my personal testimony of deconversion and with it a call for all of us to constantly test and examine our assumptions.

As a dear friend who leads a church in Brooklyn writes in the forward to Life Beyond Belief, “if you’re a Christian, you should take this book seriously, and if you’re not . . . you’ll find companionship.”

If all this makes you sad, I’m sorry. Please remember that I have not changed. The heart that was once surrendered to Jesus Christ, that gave itself to others and infused a vocation with kindness, still beats in me. If you have ever met me, know that the person I was then, I am now, still striving for integrity and capable of profound love.

I’m not lost. I began this journey by asking questions. It continued by not being content with trite cliches or lazy affirmations. Curiosity is an amazing accelerant. I am a passionate advocate for unremitting intellectual honesty, for reason and reality, for love and learning. My advocacy simply no longer assumes a deity.

I still believe. I believe no person or group of persons is inferior to any other. I believe that what matters is not so much what we believe, but how we conduct ourselves for these few short, fragile years of being alive. I believe that being aware of the beauty and wonder of the universe, including this pale blue dot in the remote corner of one of billions of galaxies, is an indescribably wonderful privilege.

On that, at least, I hope we can all agree.

Rev. Bob Ripley is a retired United Church minister.

Could not have said it better. follows closely what happened to me in many ways. I really admire this guy for his courage. This is the kind of information that needs to be spread as widely as possible, that good men who were believers are not liars or charlatans but speak from experience and from a long history of belief.

[Hydra009]

I began this journey by asking questions. It continued by not being content with trite cliches or lazy affirmations. Curiosity is an amazing accelerant. I am a passionate advocate for unremitting intellectual honesty, for reason and reality, for love and learning.

No wonder he no longer believes.  He's doing religion totally wrong!  You're supposed to be content with trite cliches, you're not supposed to ask questions, be curious, or be intellectually honest.  And you're definitely not supposed to particularly value either reason or learning.  Sheesh!

[stromboli]

Yup, critical thinking will ruin it every time.

[Solitary]

Maybe he met the pastor at this church:

[Atheon]

It warms my heart to see someone awaken to reason and reality, and free themselves from the shackles of magical thinking.

[SGOS]

"Deep breath. This was not an overnight decision. I didn’t go to bed one night this week a believer and wake up an unbeliever. I wasn’t blinded on Tuesday by the light of reason that led to a deconversion. I began this journey more than seven years ago."

Losing one's faith, as shallow as faith is, is not an easy thing for most of us.  But there does come a moment where the eventual atheist crosses over, and the light comes on.  That moment is probably going to stand out in our memories as a major flash of insight, but there was for me a tremendous amount of grappling and processing before that moment.  Years and years of it, observing, learning, reasoning, and sometimes fumbling, with moments of anxiety during the process.  But the eventual freedom is breathtaking, almost beyond description.

[Munch]

Ah this is nice, it's always comforting, when someone follows the path of reason and real wisdom, when they show how they have an analytical mind and question everything within reason. It's actually heart warming to think of that level of reason breaking through all the indoctrination

[Hydra009]

Yeah, it's great.  It also shows that people can change their beliefs, and by extension, that religion isn't some unbeatable opponent.  Stuff like this really undermines that fatalistic outlook that crops up from time to time.

[stromboli]

Put this in the Dafuq? thread yesterday, but it applies.

[Munch]

Maybe its just me, but I've been making comparison to how I view children in the same way I view theists.
Children believe in fantasy and fairy tales. They do or say whatever they feel like even when asked why or told not to, even at the expense of other peoples patients and sanity, and they even resort of violence when they don't get their way.
To me, theists are just children who never grew out of that mind set, but unlike theists, at least children have a chance to grow out of that stage.

[Johan]

...But I have thoughts, and that can really fuck up the faith thing. - Lewis Black

[aitm]

Maybe its just me, but I've been making comparison to how I view children in the same way I view theists.
Children believe in fantasy and fairy tales. ....................To me, theists are just children who never grew out of that mind set, but unlike theists, at least children have a chance to grow out of that stage.

The growth of a child is very much like the growth of religion. As they age, their reason and cognition develops and differing ways of viewing "life" take hold. Like our early ancestors, a child will attach human attributes to inanimate things, then they talk to imaginary friends and attach a "spirituality" to deceased people as a way of coping with fear and loneliness. Much like humanity started with animism and totenism and then to shamanism and to deities. I have for a long time found this remarkably similar but hardly ever approached as a valid argument.

[Munch]

The growth of a child is very much like the growth of religion. As they age, their reason and cognition develops and differing ways of viewing "life" take hold. Like our early ancestors, a child will attach human attributes to inanimate things, then they talk to imaginary friends and attach a "spirituality" to deceased people as a way of coping with fear and loneliness. Much like humanity started with animism and totenism and then to shamanism and to deities. I have for a long time found this remarkably similar but hardly ever approached as a valid argument.

yeah, the evidence of human nature and its belief in these things across the world and though time is there for all evidence to see, but instead of people looking at this and considering perhaps this is just what human beings do to rationalize their lives and fear they have, they instead just take whatever they were brought up to believe as being 'the' system, like cave paintings in their region is the only thing that matters, unlike the cave paintings in another region.

There was a funny recent episode of the bible reloaded of one of Jack Chicks latest chick tracts. in it he writes a story about a white christian girl seeing her friends being converted into muslims, and stops the muslim boy from doing it, making the argument that 'we all know about adam, but did you know Muslims made up a story about how mohammad of 90 feet tall!", attempting in his fundamentalist christian mind to try to accuse Muslims of making up stories in the Koran be using the bible as his version of the truth.

Its so funny when two theists argue over their fairy tale god being real and what said true, while the other theist's god is a lie. Its literally like children fighting over whos action figure is the best.

[Moralnihilist]

Its literally like children fighting over whos action figure is the best.

Yea because we all know that my Deadpool action figure is the best.

[Munch]

Yea because we all know that my Deadpool action figure is the best.

My mask action figure could beat deadpool in a laugh off easily.