Why Pastors Feel Worthless

"A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live." --Voltaire

Favorite Lyrics

I believe I've past the age of consciousness and righteous rage;
I found that just surviving is a noble fight;
I once believed in causes too, I had my pointless point of view;
but life went on no matter who was wrong or right.

--Billy Joel


Gods of the season, lead me to my next incident.

--Collective Soul


I'm all out of faith...the perfect sky is torn

--Natalie Imbruglia

Nothing more

I fear that religion is nothing more than superstition. That's difficult to admit, given the resources and time I have devoted to Christianity. However, it is a conclusion to which I am driven when I note how Christian people think and act. Rites of the church, like infant baptism, are treated like magical actions whose very performance (opera ad operata) produce actual benefits in the person who undergoes them. Rites have become invested with mysterious power to effect salvation.

Superstition is the false attribution of causality. It seems to me that's what religion--or at least church--is all about. As we pastors 'dance between the altar and the mercy seat', are we not in reality continuing to employ smoke and mirrors to deceive people about the nature of things, i.e., the way things really are, and the way things really happen.

God, the superhuman, personal deity made in our image, does not exist. Shouldn't we be honest and let people know Christianity is a manufactured deception that has been kept alive for centuries, ever since the first believers feigned knowledge of a resurrection.

Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition. --Paul Keller

Francis Bacon (Head, VI)

"Also, man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. I think that even when Velasquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, they were still, whatever their attitude to life, slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has had canceled out for him. Man now can only attempt to beguile himself for a time, by prolonging his life--by buying a kind of immortality through the doctors."

Does one really need the hope of an afterlife or a sense of ultimate purpose and meaning (a la Rick Warren) to live a good and enjoyable life? I think not. I enjoy my favorite brews without in any way ascribing to the experience a sense of self-evident or objective meaning. It seems to me that metaphysics, particuarly of the religious variety, gets in the way of life. It is only when we create our own limited meanings and purposes that we are freed to live in the way I think Jesus meant us to live.

Reading the Bible

It is remarkably difficult for some people to read the Bible in any other way than a straightforward narrative. They assume the old objectivist 'picture' view of language, whereby words picture objective realities, i.e., they accurately convey information about things, events, people.

From a literary standpoint, they fail to understand that language is more than an informational tool. Language is also an artistic event. It can be analyzed from the perspective of form and genre, not just from the perspective of content. When studied from the standpoint of artistic expression, words take on an inspirational, even rhetorical meaning. At times, one might even say that the literary purpose dominates, rendering the historical or informational value of texts negligible.