Knowing I will be chided, I'm going to relate a personal anecdote:
During the time when I was transitioning from being a nice young Christian kid to an atheist, I was looking into many things regarding religion and belief. I was 18 years old, out of high school, and on my way to starting my first experiment with being a college student.
I had grown up in a traditional Presbyterian church, and had glommed onto its teachings early on, which were Calvinistic in nature, although not conservative Calvinistic. I had many conversations with the very patient pastor at my home church, asking difficult questions, which he did his best to answer. I had studied a lot about Presbyterian doctrine, which had led that church to offer to pay for four years at a theological college. I might have been a pretty good pastor, people apparently thought.
Well, one day, I asked a question that involved some differences between Presbyterianism and Roman Catholicism. My church's pastor admitted that he couldn't answer my question, since he wasn't completely familiar with that particular doctrine in Catholicism. So, he called a priest he knew who was the primary assistant to the local Catholic Bishop. Anyhow, he arranged for me to visit that priest so I could get the answers I was looking for.
I did visit him. He was an affable man in his mid-30s, with a good sense of humor, and was willing to tolerate an 18-year-old who was asking difficult questions. He dealt quickly with my question about transubstantiation and explained the Catholic doctrine to me in detail. Then, the conversation went in other directions, including my leaning toward not being able to believe any of the supernatural aspects of religion and my declining to attend a theological college. To my surprise, this priest who was a Bishop's assistant said, "That is not surprising, really. I stopped believing in that a few years ago, myself."
I asked how he managed to act as a priest without believing in the divine nature of Jesus and the other two entities of the Trinity. He said, "Well, I minister to my congregation in accordance to the teachings. It is not necessary for me to believe in the supernatural reality of God to do that. If those I minister to believe, that is enough for them. I assist them in their belief, which is enough for me."
I have thought about what that priest said to me many times. He saw his position not as a representative of some supernatural deity, but as a representative of those he served. He "assisted them in their belief." That was his accommodation to his atheism and he seemed quite content to act in that capacity.
That's my anecdote. Here is what I took from it:
That was OK for him, but it wasn't something I would ever be able to do. It helped confirm for me that I made the right decision in not accepting a full scholarship at a theological college. Given my state of near total disbelief at that time, clearly I would not have been acting honestly had I become a pastor. To this day, over 56 years later, I still wonder what accommodations one would have to make to be a priest who did not believe that any supernatural entities actually existed. I could never make such accommodations.
I continue to wonder how many priests and pastors out there might be doing the same thing that priest was doing - serving their flocks, but lacking a personal belief in deities. Few, I think, would admit such a thing. I suppose I caught that particular priest off-guard and in a mood that allowed him to share it with an 18-year-old who was questioning his own belief. Remarkable, really, I think.
The takeaway for me is that religion doesn't necessarily require actual belief in deities. Many have such belief. Others do not. Personally, I cannot follow a religion, because I don't believe that the initial premise that a deity exists is true. If the initial premise is not true, none of it is. I wonder at those who can manage that logical conflict.
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