08AR13-04

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Apologia Report 13:4

January 31, 2008

Subject: Increasing numbers of clergy denying God?

In this issue:

ATHEISM - considering what lies behind the neo-atheist movement

MORMONISM - the fatal flaw of popular LDS/Evangelical comparisons

UNIVERSAL CHURCH OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD - growing influence in Brazil, the world

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ATHEISM

"An Atheist in the Pulpit" by Bruce Grierson -- the subtitle asks: "What happens when religious leaders lose their faith?" Several examples are given, and Grierson sees a trend. "The spiritual struggles of ministers and priests and rabbis remind us that, amid encroaching fundamentalism, atheism is also on the rise. The neo-atheist movement is fueled by outspoken academics and intellectuals including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others who bombard the airwaves and bestseller lists with their calls for deconversion. You can now send your kid to an atheist summer camp or get yourself certifiably 'de-baptized.' (Britain's national Secular Society offers the service: 'Liberate yourself from the original mumbo jumbo that liberated you from the original sin you never had.') There are hundreds of college-campus groups devoted to secular humanism. The Atheist Alliance International reports 'so many speaking requests that leaders of national atheist groups can't keep up.' ...

"Richard Dawkins is convinced that [the loss of faith among ministers] situation is common; in fact, he hopes one day to address it through 'clergyman-retaining scholarships,' set up through his charitable foundation, to 'bridge the gap between living a lie and getting a new life,' as he puts it.

"[This] dilemma is familiar to Dan Barker, who coheads the Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF)." Barker's ex-Pentecostal background is discussed. Then, "Says Barker: 'We surveyed our members 10 years ago, asking them: 'If you were raised religious, why did you change your mind?' ... [T]he answer people gave more often than any other was that it was intellectual: Religion eventually just did not make sense."

One of the testimonials from an "atheist in the pulpit" is that of Carlton Pearson, once "a Pentecostal bishop, [who] was among the most prominent and beloved fundamentalist preachers in the American South, heading up a megachurch in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a loyal congregation 5,000 strong." Grierson briefly describes the path that Pearson took, starting with the rejection of the doctrine of hell. "He was eating dinner in front of the TV ... Peter Jennings was revisiting Rwanda, investigating the fallout from that country's civil war. The scene was nightmarish: tiny infants, flies in their eyes and hair red from malnutrition groping at the empty breasts of their skeletal mothers. Carlton looked over at his own plump-faced child, then back at the TV. These African kids would soon be gone. Gone where? According to his own formal belief system, they were bound for hell. ...

"And so instead of abandoning God he [Pearson] invented a new theology that he calls the 'gospel of inclusion,' and he hung out a new shingle for a church he calls New Dimensions. It's a theology that gives everyone, not just avowed Christians, hope of salvation - and spares everyone the eternal fire of hell. ...

"After he was officially declared a heretic by the College of Pentecostal Bishops, the Unitarian Church of Christ opened its arms to him; and since it preached an inclusiveness he appreciated, the denomination seemed as good a place as any to hang his hat."

A sidebar, "Not by Reason Alone: Can You Argue People Out of a Belief in God?" (p84), begins with a description of Richard Dawkins' "basic premise" in his book, The God Delusion [1]: "Show people data, and enough of it, and in a process as inevitable as Darwinism itself, people will drop their babyish dependency on magical thinking and return to their natural state, which is atheism (or at least a sober agnosticism). ...

"But this trajectory contradicts what we know about emotion-laden beliefs, which are extraordinarily robust and resistant to change. Religious belief, not disbelief, has been the default state of the human psyche for most of its recorded history. Faith allays our deepest fears and mitigates unbearable losses. Religious beliefs confirm our intuitions about the way the world functions, and satisfy a need for meaning and order. To override spiritual beliefs with mere 'acts,' no matter how persuasive, means trumping the genetic instructions that hardwire us for faith."

(And here perhaps we gain an insight into the tenets of the neo-atheists: trading in belief for science. - RP) "Dawkins doesn't see it that way. 'What that argument says is that what is psychologically easy is what people will naturally do,' he says. 'But if what gives us a good feeling doesn't tally with the evidence, then we should be able to reject the thing that gives us a good feeling. Neither I nor most of my friends have difficulty with that idea.' ...

"The question is whether science alone can really ever scratch the same itch. [Anthropologist and biologist David Sloan] Wilson isn't so sure it can.

"'The more precarious our lives get, the more we need meaning systems that serve as a practical guide to life,' he says. And science, he points out, can tell us how to do better, but not how to be better; it is incapable of delivering the practical directives we crave.

"Enter moral philosophy. Dawkins argues that thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Bertrand Russell can help us wrestle with how to live from a nontheistic point of view. Could you embrace pure science without entertaining the added dimension that moral philosophy brings to the big questions? You could, Dawkins says, but 'you'd be an incomplete person.'" Psychology Today, Jan/Feb '08, pp78-86.

Responding with insightful commentary on the above is journalist Mollie Ziegler who posts to the "Get Religion" blog. Among her chief complaints: "[T]he examples from the story do a horrible job of making Grierson's case that there's an epidemic of clergy struggling with atheism." <http://www.getreligion.org/?p=3111>

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MORMONISM

Bill McKeever considers just one chapter of Claiming Christ: A Mormon-Evangelical Debate, by Gerald R. McDermott and Robert L. Millet [2]. (His review begins on the Jan/Feb '08 cover of the Mormonism Researched newsletter.) In doing so, McKeever spotlights a crucial flaw that too frequently accompanies the ecumenical approach. Claiming Christ fails to compare viewpoints that carry representative authority.

"Wishing to 'put some old staples of evangelical anti-Mormon apologetics to rest,' McDermott says that instead of comparing evangelical doctrine to that which is only 'true of some Mormons in the pews,' we should compare it to official statements and Mormon scripture." What an irony that with this very book McDermott settles for less. McKeever explains why Millet hardly represents mainstream Mormonism. Traditional LDS teachings, which do not receive fair representation in the book, are identified by McKeever, who shows how misleading such Evangelical vs. Mormon debates in print tend to be.

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UNIVERSAL CHURCH OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD

"If Redemption Fails, You Can Still Use the Free Bathroom" (no byline) -- "The best guess of the World Christian Database, an American statistical service, is that Brazil has 24m Pentecostal Christians, compared with 5.7m in the United States, where modern Pentecostalism began.

"The Universal Church is only the third-biggest Pentecostal group in Brazil, but it is the most ambitious. It has branches in 172 countries, but in Brazil it also has its own political party (the Partido Republicano Brasileiro, or PRB) and owns Rede Record, the second-largest television network (which includes a 24-hour news channel).

"The man behind this religious conglomerate is Edir Macedo, known by his followers as 'the Bishop.' ...

"From its foundation in 1977, the Universal Church has stressed that the faithful would be rewarded for sacrifices, usually of a financial kind. Followers are asked to give 10% of their income; 'the church of results' will then reward them with blessings, in the form of miraculous healing, or success for their families or at work. Church services often revolve around testimonies of such results. 'Offerings [to God] are investments,' says Macedo." The Economist, Jan 5 '08, p31.

Nothing is said about the fact that the emphasis on prosperity is all too common within Pentecostalism in general.

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Sources, Monographs:

1 - The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, hardcover, 288 pages)

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618680004/apologiareport>

2 - Claiming Christ: A Mormon-Evangelical Debate, by Gerald R. McDermott and Robert L. Millet (Brazos, November 2007, paperback, 224 pages) <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587432099/apologiareport>

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