I am a great admirer of the eloquent yet simple advice you give on Friendly Atheist. I have been “out” as an atheist for about one year now. I work in a Divinity Faculty, where I am surrounded by liberal, thoughtful, sophisticated religious believers, and recently I have been having thoughts about becoming an ordained minister in the Anglican Church. I feel that this job would give me personal fulfillment and allow me to do what I really want to do in my life, which is to, well, ‘minister’ to people’s needs, to be there for them in the hard times and help them celebrate the good times. I believe that religion does not have to be about beliefs, but actions, that it can be a force for good rather than hatred, and that “God” can be useful as a symbol which can provide many different meanings and frameworks for different people. I also believe that I would perhaps be more use to the furthering of reason and tolerance if I were within ‘the system’, promoting religious moderation than simply being an outsider.
My question is: should I pursue this career path, whilst remaining an atheist (or a ‘theological non-realist’ to give it a ‘theologically acceptable’ term)?
I would greatly appreciate your advice on this issue, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Best wishes,
Conflicted
Dear Conflicted,
You’ve expressed two goals that you would like to accomplish in your life. One is to “attend to the wants and needs of others, to give aid or service,” which is one of the definitions of the verb “to minister.” Most people would agree that that is a very noble and admirable desire.
Your other goal is to bring about positive change in the church, making it more responsive to a wider range of people’s needs, and to improve its influence on society; to in a way, humanize it. Many people would approve of that as well.
However, your proposed method poses some ethical and pragmatic difficulties.
It isn’t clear from your letter, but I’m going to assume that if you were to apply to the ministry, you would do so openly as an atheist, just as you are now at your workplace. I’m assuming this because I think you know you wouldn’t be able to cover up your lack of belief for very long.
There are clerics who become free of their faith while they are ministering to their flocks. Many leave the clergy, some famously, because they cannot abide the conflict of promoting and reassuring beliefs in others that they no longer hold for themselves. They see it as hypocrisy, and it is too painful for them. An unknown number of these people continue on in their ministry as secret apostates, keeping up a deception for either selfish or noble reasons. Perhaps they just want to keep their jobs, or perhaps they want to keep on helping others somehow, “ministering” in that decent and generous meaning of the verb to which you aspire.
Being secretive about your atheism would pose ethical problems, and being open about your atheism would pose pragmatic problems.
Concealing it would require lying. That by itself is an ethical breach that should not be acceptable to a person who wants to be a professional helper in any capacity. Hiding it would most likely also cause injury to others. Since people look to their ministers for ethical guidance and moral modeling as well as spiritual solace, a closet atheist minister would be running a serious risk of implanting terrible cynicism, bitterness and deep hurt in those who trust in him, once the truth eventually comes out.
Because eventually, it always does.
Being open about your atheism might stop you right at the front door of the Anglican seminary or divinity school. From what I can find in a quick online search, the initial process of “discernment” involves intense and intimate examinations by your own personal priest, a discernment committee, a commission on ministry, a Bishop, and perhaps even a mental health professional. These people will assess the suitability of your intentions, personal history, values, attitudes, ideas, goals,
and your beliefs.
If you don’t believe in their god, they may see you as missing an essential prerequisite. Your openhearted desire to help others and your open-minded desire to bring more breadth, reason and tolerance to the church from the inside may not be enough for them to trust you with either their doctrine or their flock.
Even if you somehow get past all those barriers and become a minister, the hardest questions will come from the people whom you are trying to help. They will look you in the eyes and say, “My little girl died today. Please tell me that she’s going to heaven.” Will you respond with reason, or with the comforting myth they so desperately want to hear you confirm?
Conflicted, I don’t want to extinguish your wonderful longing to be of service to others, to “be there for them in the hard times and help them celebrate the good times” as you so movingly put it, by only listing reasons why your idea may not work.
Perhaps your experience in the divinity faculty and your knowledge of the Anglican Church is extensive, and you know how you could overcome those pragmatic hurdles. I’m certainly no expert on that.
Perhaps you can find ways to reconcile a person’s desire for a reassuring bedtime story with your rational mind’s demands to tell them the truth as you see it. I don’t pretend to be that wise, but I don’t assume that no one else is.
Perhaps also, your broad vision of God and religion, and how you could influence the church from the inside toward embracing more reason, tolerance and moderation is somehow attainable. When people propose lofty aspirations, I never use the word “impossible” because thousands of people have personally amazed me.
However, I can point out that you have other options, other venues for helping people on a personal level. For instance, you sound like you’d make an excellent counselor. That is a broad and varied field, and you don’t necessarily have to specialize too narrowly into one kind of need to fulfill. It has a challenging and interesting process to qualify, just as would the ministry. My years as a counselor were immensely fulfilling. I made a positive difference, and I even saved a few lives. I still get great pleasure from the little bit of service I can offer with this column.
But if the path of the psy does not appeal to you, there are many other ways that you could find satisfaction as well as sustenance by making the world around you a little better than it was before. That is the whole point of life for people like you and me; that we somehow, even in small ways, make a positive difference in others’ lives.
Use your imagination. Your generous spirit can be of great value in so many unexpected ways. Find them all!
Richard
You may send your questions for Richard to . All questions will eventually be answered, but not all can be published. There is a large number of requests; please be patient.
You’ll all be happy to know that this conversation took place in my classroom yesterday:
Me: …and that’s how you do a Geometry proof. Any questions?
[Male student raises hand]
Me: Yes…?
Student How does a tampon work? I can’t figure it out!
Me: FML…
Good times.
On top of that, I was at school all night for parent-teacher conferences. So I’m a little exhausted.
I did have some exciting news to share about the current SSA fundraiser and I posted that below.
For the rest of today, though, I’m turning the blog over to my friend, Jesse Galef, who will offer a few postings of his own.
…
We are almost there.
You see the thermometer in the side bar. We’ve gotten contributions, large and small, from so many people and we’re unbelievably close to reaching the $50,000 mark set by Todd Stiefel when he made his matching offer.
Todd told us the deadline was December 21st. We felt there was a lot of support for us out there, but to raise that much money in only 2.5 months was an admittedly daunting task.
Is it possible to raise it all within a single month…?
Please help us get there and make the campus environment a safer haven for student activism, expressions of freethought, and intelligent conversations about religion.
We’ve received donations of money and items to give away from all over the nation, but we need more. We need to let more Atheists know about this project, so we can help more homeless folks.
The goals of this project are, in order of priority:
1 To help some folks in need,
2 To show by example that the idea that Atheists don’t care and don’t help people in need, is very very false, and
3 To have fun.
We have until December 21st to meet the match. Your help is needed and appreciated!
***Update***: If you’re planning to book any flights/hotels/cars in the future, please use this link as your gateway. If you find that you’re paying the same amount you would elsewhere, and you purchase it from that link, the SSA will receive a portion of the purchase price.
A handful of organizations around the country are hosting events to mark the occasion, including hosting food drives, cleaning up highways, and donating blood. Good for them and I hope other groups will join in on the action.
I hope the event is a success. But that success will not be judged on just what happens today. It depends on whether this event happens year after year and whether more events get scheduled. It has to have support well after the book has been released.
Without that, I fear it will be seen as much a promotional tool as it is a gesture of goodwill.
I have recently organized for my body to be donated to science when I die. It will go to the nearest University for use by trainee doctors. I feel that my body would be better off used for the benefit of other people rather than just buried and wasted.
The problem I have is that my parents, particularly my mother isn’t happy with this and is having trouble accepting my wishes. My father is an atheist but my mother likes to conform to the Anglican way of doing things. How can I make her understand my humanist point of view?
Thanks,
Dan
Dear Dan,
I commend you for a level of generosity that will reach beyond your lifespan. To give so freely to strangers a gift so intimate, to give literally of yourself is deeply inspiring and praiseworthy. I hope that everyone reading your letter makes the same arrangements, as I did long ago. My spare parts are pretty shopworn, but if what’s left can help medical students learn to help the living, hey that’s fine with me.
First, let’s dispel any notion that the Anglican Church has any objections to donating one’s body to science. If that is all the problem is for your mother, this will be fairly easy to resolve, but I think that this may not be what is really troubling her.
I searched several sources about the funerary customs of the Anglican and Episcopal churches, and I found this from a handbook about funerals (PDF) at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Buffalo, NY:
DISPOSITION OF THE BODY
There are three basic options for the disposition of the body, all fully acceptable in the tradition of the Episcopal Church:
1. Donation of the body to science and/or parts of the body for transplant.
2. Burial or entombment of the body.
3. Cremation, with several options for the disposition of ashes.
I also found these passages in a pamphlet about funerary customs published by the Anglican Diocese of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada (emphasis mine):
The chief emphasis of Christian Burial should be not upon death but on Life Eternal…
…In the making of Funeral arrangements, we are reminded as Christians of the simplicity of our Lord’s own burial… Any undue concern about the body is a worldly and pagan emphasis, not a Christian one.
So as far as I can tell, the Anglican Church has no official opposition to you giving your body as a gift to help the rest of us. You might want to speak with someone in the Church who has specific knowledge and authority, just to be sure.
But perhaps your mother’s unhappiness over this is not about religion, but a very basic human characteristic, her attachment to you.
She bore you, your body came from her body. She carried, held, protected and suckled you. More than anyone else in the world, she has an intense connection and identification with your physical body.
Talking with your mother about the disposition of your body can bring up for her or any parent a deep, instinctive aversion to even the thought of the death of their child. The fact that she is more likely to die before you does not reduce this visceral reaction against the idea that you will be no more. She wants there to be something left of you. Your body that she so lovingly grew and protected must somehow continue. The idea of your body being completely gone in any form, not even as a few bones in a grave, is too real, too stark, too final, too bereft for her.
She may have troubling thoughts about “strangers” handling your body, and unpleasant visions of what will be done with it. These thoughts will also trigger that same protective instinct.
Our intellects may tell us that our lost loved one’s body is not what we should cling to and cherish. But our own bodies, being the living, uninterrupted continuation of cells for billions of years, are far older than our puny little intellects, and so they have their own very powerful priorities. Primal grief and longing for the physical presence of our loved ones can utterly trump our minds’ attempts to reconcile the loss. Rational thought takes a very long time to have any soothing effect at all on such heartache.
Drawing only upon your brief letter, I may be making more of her instinctive anguish than is really there, but regardless of how strongly this distress is affecting her, if it is at all, my suggestions of what to do will be the same:
First, find enough printed material, or get some pastoral support to be able to set aside any concern she has about “conforming to the Anglican way of doing things.” If that is all there is to it, then she’ll be satisfied that it’s not against the teachings. Be prepared to describe a memorial service that would be acceptable to both of you, one that would not require the presence of your body.
Then begin to talk to her about your humanist values, about compassion, respect, commitment to truth, equality, and promoting freedom. She is probably proud of you, as most parents are prone to be proud of their children, and she is probably especially proud of the good things that you do in your life. Your life is not made meaningful by your body doing all that breathing, eating and digesting, it’s made meaningful by what you do with it, and in your case, as a humanist, by practicing those humanist values for the benefit of others. Describe for her examples of how you put those values into action. Then show her how in this last act of yours, your death will share the same purpose as did your life, to be of service to your fellow human beings in any way you can.
By donating your body to science, you will be adding one more piece to the positive effect, the positive influence, the meaning that your life has already had, and that benefit will last beyond your physical life. Regardless of who outlives whom, that will be something unique to you and beautiful about you for your mother to cling to, to be proud of, to focus her love upon. Her son is a man who makes the world around him a little better because of the way he lives, from beginning to end.
Listen to her concerns carefully, ask open-ended questions about her feelings, accept her feelings without arguing against them, and respond with love and respect. Simply the ability to make her thoughts and feelings more clearly understood may help to reduce whatever is the root of her objection to your unselfish bequest to your larger family, humanity.
Richard
You may send your questions for Richard to . All questions will eventually be answered, but not all can be published. There is a large number of requests; please be patient.
Our staff has fostered this climate for growth, created a resources for educators and a fantastic brochure (PDF) for high school teachers who may have non-religious students in their classroom. They organized a conference for over 100 secular students and a trip to the Creation Museum (with special guest PZ Myers) for 300 skeptics who left the museum armed with knowledge of its misinformation campaign, able to spread the message. They are currently developing three separate student conferences for 2010, all over the country.
I just read through our annual activity summary (PDF) and was amazed by how much our staff has done with relatively few resources and how much our affiliate groups have accomplished.
I can’t stress this enough: when I say “our staff,” I’m only referring to two full-time staff members (who are seriously underpaid) and a handful of interns and volunteers. We’re reaching the breaking point where our level of growth is surpassing our ability to support the groups adequately. We need at least one other staffer and the board would love to be able to pay all staffers closer to what they’re really worth.
As it happens, we have a chance to remedy this.
An SSA member/donor named Todd Stiefel has presented us with a challenge:
Any amount we raise — up to $50,000 — by December 21st, he will match dollar-for-dollar.
In other words, your $20 contribution will bring the SSA $40. Todd’s not kidding about that dollar-for-dollar thing, either. (It’s not like we can raise $3,000 and he’ll give us the whole $50,000 amount anyway.)
This means we have a little over two months to raise an incredible amount of money — a larger amount than we’ve ever had to raise before.
The SSA staff and board are going to be doing everything we can to make this happen — meeting donors, writing letters, etc.
We could use your help, though.
If you’ve never given before, we could use your contribution now more than ever. If you have given before, your continuing support would help us even more!
If you haven’t told your friends about the Secular Student Alliance, please tell them who we are and what we do. We’re the largest organization in the world starting, supporting, and maintaining campus atheist groups. We have the ear of the White House. We helped found the Secular Coalition for America and continue to be a proud member of that group. We are also a 501(c)(3) non-profit and donations are tax-deductible.
If you have a blog or Twitter feed or Facebook, please spread the word about this challenge.
If you have any questions about the SSA, I would love to answer them in the comments below.
In the meantime, I’ll be giving updates on how we’re doing over the next several weeks.
It would be incredible if we could meet this goal.
I’m putting a ChipIn widget below (feel free to put it on your site), but you can give to us in a variety of ways.
Kiva Microfunds is an organization that allows people to lend money via the Internet to microfinance institutions in developing countries which in turn lend the money to small businesses…
Kiva allows you to lend money in groups, and the Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious group has been among the mostgenerousteams for the past year.
I am now able to say the following with great pride:
The atheist team has more members than any other group. They have 6,002 members as I write this. (Kiva Christians are in a distant third.)
The atheist team has given out more loans than any other group. They have given away 33002 loans. (Kiva Christians are in a distant second.)
AASFSHNR, just over 1 year old, is the first group to reach $1,000,000. Despite the modest goal of $50k in four months, 10 days after creation AASFSHNR hit $10,000. As the loans were paid back, or new money was lent, the group total climbed faster and faster.
Head over to the team’s blog to congratulate them. Or, better yet, join the team, make a microloan, and help change lives because it’s the right, Humanistic thing to do.
Foundation Beyond Belief is a 501(c)(3) charitable and educational foundation created (1) to focus, encourage and demonstrate humanistic generosity, and (2) to support a nationwide education and support program for humanist parents.
(Full disclosure: I’m on the board of directors)
I say pre-launch because, come January 1st, the full website will be available to use (including a social network, discussion forum, a list of beneficiaries to support, etc).
Here’s Executive Director Dale McGowan explaining what FBB is all about:
I’ve had the privilege to be on ground zero of two organizations as they formed from scratch. The first one was the Secular Coalition for America and you’ve all witnessed the phenomenal rise of that group. This is the other one. Just as I was with SCA, I’m *very* excited about the potential this group has. Finally, there’s an organized way to get Secular Americans to donate to good causes. It’s a perfect example of how Humanism works in action and how “immoral” atheists can indeed do very ethical things.
When Foundation Beyond Belief (that’s the placeholder website) officially opens shop on January 1st, 2010, we’ll be needing bloggers to help us out.
If you know an atheist/humanist who blogs brilliantly about the environment, poverty, peace, child welfare, animal protection, human rights, education, health, and/or general issues in philanthropy, please nominate by adding a link to this thread. We’ll invite a few to kick us off in January, then gradually add more voices as we go. Self-nominations gladly accepted!
You can nominate yourself or someone else right here.
Secular Student Alliance Member Todd Stiefel has agreed to match all donations to us by 12/21/2009 up to a total of $50,000. Double the value of your support and help us get the whole match by donating now.
. All questions will eventually be answered, but not all can be published. There is a large number of requests; please be patient.
