So I guess this is becoming a thing now? Clergy who are “coming out” atheist?
Clergy losing faith is nothing new, of course, but it’s now a trendy news item. This latest article concerns a preacher named Jerry DeWitt, whose path to atheism began when he started questioning the existence of hell.
DeWitt’s transition from true believer to total skeptic took 25 years. It began, he said, with the idea of hell. How could it be, as he had been taught and preached, that a loving God would damn most people to eternal fire? “This thing called hell, it began to rock my world,” he said.
I realize that since this is USA Today, we don’t have much to go on here. I’m reading a lot into it. But it sounds like DeWitt’s primary objection to God is moral. If you’re keeping score at home, a moral argument against God’s existence might be the worst reason to be an atheist.
For one thing, it’s a form of circular reasoning that goes something like this: “If God exists, God is loving. I know this because that’s what the Bible and Christianity tell me. But the Bible and Christianity also tell me that God sends people to hell, which doesn’t seem like something a loving God would do. Therefore, God—who, according to the Bible and Christianity, is a God of love—must not exist.”
In other words, he rejects God because of God. He’s enlisting the God of love in his argument against the God who sends people to hell and concluding that God doesn’t exist. Shouldn’t his cognitive dissonance over hell instead lead him to conclude the following: that the Bible and Christianity are wrong about the character of God (who may otherwise exist), or that God (who may otherwise exist) isn’t as loving as he thought, or—best of all—that since smarter Christians than he have dealt with these questions for 2,000 years, maybe he’s wrong and has a lot more to learn about the Bible and Christianity?
More importantly, apart from God, DeWitt has no moral foundation for judging God. Right and wrong don’t exist in any objectively meaningful way, so there’s no sense in getting worked up about what’s loving or not. That right and wrong seem to exist and have meaning, however, ought to serve as a rather conspicuous signpost pointing to God.
I thought this was funny:
DeWitt, who lives in Southern Louisiana, went public last October when he posted a picture of himself with the prominent and polarizing atheist Richard Dawkins, snapped at a meeting of atheists and other “freethinkers” in Houston.
Speaking in March before a cheering crowd of several hundred unbelievers at the American Atheists conference here, he described posting the picture as “committing identity suicide.”
But if that’s true, how do we explain this picture? Hmm…?
