WELL, here’s a bit of encouraging news: Holland has Protestant Church minister who tells his congregation to make the most of life here on earth as there is no such thing as a post-mortem existence, and that the Bible’s account of Jesus’s life should be regarded as a mythological story about a man who may never have existed.
The Rev Hendrikse
Needless to say, not everyone is pleased with the good Rev Klaas Hendrikse. According to the BBC a book he has written – Believing in a Non-Existent God – led to calls from more traditionalist Christians for him to be removed from his post at the Exodus Church in Gorinchem, central Holland.
However, a special church meeting decided his views were too widely shared among church thinkers for him to be singled out. A study by the Free University of Amsterdam found that one-in-six clergy in the mainstream Protestant Church, and in six other smaller denominations, was either agnostic or atheist.
Hendrikse gives his congregation a distinctly humanist message:
Make the most of life on earth, because it will probably be the only one you get … Personally I have no talent for believing in life after death. No, for me our life, our task, is before death.
Nor does Klaas Hendrikse believe that God exists at all as a supernatural thing.
God is not a being at all… it’s a word for experience, or human experience.
And he’s not the only one preaching good sense at the Exodus Church. The Rev Kirsten Slattenaar, a regular priest there, also rejects the idea – widely considered central to Christianity – that Jesus was divine as well as human.
I think ‘Son of God’ is a kind of title. I don’t think he was a god or a half god. I think he was a man, but he was a special man because he was very good in living from out of love, from out of the spirit of God he found inside himself.
Dienie van Wingaarden, who’s been going to Exodus Church for 20 years, is among lay people attracted to such free thinking.
I think it’s very liberating. [Klaas Hendrikse] is using the Bible in a metaphorical way so I can bring it to my own way of thinking, my own way of doing.
And Wim De Jong says:
Here you can believe what you want to think for yourself, what you really feel and believe is true.
Professor Hijme Stoeffels of the Free University in Amsterdam says it is in such concepts as love that people base their diffuse ideas of religion.
In our society it’s called ‘somethingism’. There must be ‘something’ between heaven and earth, but to call it ‘God’, and even ‘a personal God’, for the majority of Dutch is a bridge too far.
Hat tip: Rosemary Parks
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
August 5th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
See Barry, not all Christians are brainwashed zombies. Many of us do think for ourselves.
August 5th, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Makes you wonder how many “Christians” in England actually believe in God? I was at a conference attended by chaplains last October putting a sceptical secular perspective, and one of the chaplains said he was a Christian but that he didn’t actually believe in God. He did acknowledge that his views were “quite radical” though!
August 5th, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Well, obviously all the peds and abusers don’t believe, so that’s quite a lot.
August 5th, 2011 at 7:13 pm
We’ve been here before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J....._Woolwich)
I remember well that controversy from my student days!
August 5th, 2011 at 7:19 pm
Seems to me that all that Klass Hendrikse and this congregation have to do is toss out the bible, change their name to The Exodus Freethinkers of Gorincham and they´re home and dry.
August 5th, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Halle-fucking-lujah!
August 5th, 2011 at 7:47 pm
I’ve thought for a long time that most clergy don’t believe what they preach. I remember a curate many years ago telling me that if he preached from the pulpit what he was taught and what he and other students discussed he would be thrown out of the church. They have jobs, they have careers, many are unfitted or too late to do anything else so they play the game.
Rowan Williams, whatever you think of him, is a very intelligent man as are many of the bishops. They don’t believe the nonsense preached to the unthinking flock – who don’t believe it themselves except for a couple of hours on Sundays. Even the clergy must find themselves repelled by what is served up by the banal Thought for the Day.
Keep going, folks. This is a game we can’t lose.
August 5th, 2011 at 7:47 pm
Personally, I don’t even buy into ‘somethingism’. But I’d take ‘somethingism’ over sky-fairyism and all the appalling shit that goes with it any day of the week.
August 5th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
I have a problem with this guy’s assertion that the teachings of Mr. Jesus have any value whatsoever to anyone who wishes to live a good life. Anyone who has actually read the Gospels must realise that the cherry picking has to be pretty extreme to take anything positive from them. Not only that, these positive elements have been stated by much wiser men centuries earlier.
The negative elements that need to be ignored are numerous. Make your life as wretched as possible in order to gain the best bits of Heaven. Give all of your possessions away. Hate your family and abandon them. Make no plans for the future, the world is going to end soon anyway. Forget critical thinking, it is much better to be totally gullible and believe anything that you are told. Don’t think that you can abandon all those barbaric and pointless Mosaic laws, they stand until Heaven and Earth pass away. Not sure where you are going to live out the rest of your eternal life when they pass away but hey, mysterious ways and all that.
Good on them for coming clean but I think that these doubting Revs should shut up and get a real job.
August 5th, 2011 at 8:58 pm
I find this very encouraging. As one who left ministry in order to tell the truth and live free of super-naturalistic views, I am intrigued by the possibilities this presents. With conservative churches breaking away over doctrinal/biblical interpretations, what might happen if there were breakaway places where freethinkers could “celebrate” reason, compassion, community and true freethought? I wish I could reach these pastors to carry on a conversation. I’m not finding their website. I would be happy to discuss this with anyone through my blog: http://www.beyondgod.wordpress.com
August 5th, 2011 at 9:54 pm
I agree with you on all but that last part, Stonyground. Jesus was no saint and much of his teaching is destructive and divisive, but I actually am pleased to see preachers who will admit that the Christian faith is baseless and Jesus is best used as a shorthand symbol for being nice to one another. Very, very few Christians seem to have any real idea of what Jesus actually said and did and have only really heard the highlights like turning water into wine and the crucifixion, so the ‘Jesus’ they think of is probably a decent rolemodel. Except for the whole problem of mortals not being able to actually copy him because we don’t have magic powers.
Still, I’d rather there be preachers encouraging their flock to think and take of the blinkers of literal, dogmatic interpretations of their holy books. At least they might spread the good news – you don’t have to be afraid of burning in hell because you let some gays sleep in your bed and breakfast.
August 5th, 2011 at 10:16 pm
I agree with the latter comments. He is still asserting that Jesus was “a special man” – ie a figment of his imagination. This all has echoes of John Robinson to me. The evangelicals hated him, yet he had, ironically, an almost fundamentalist belief in the historical Jesus (minus miracles and resurrection, of course), an early date for the Gospels, the authenticity of “Paul’s” writings, and so on. You have to ask: if he was such a brilliant scholar, what Gospels was he actually reading, because they can’t have been the ones that I’ve read!
August 5th, 2011 at 10:26 pm
Robinson proposed abandoning the notion of a God “out there”, existing somewhere out in the universe as a “Cosmic supremo”, just as we have abandoned already the idea of God “up there”, the notion of the old man up in the sky. In its place he offered a reinterpretation of God, whom he defined as Love. After endorsing Paul Tillich’s assertion that God is the “Ground of all being”, Robinson wrote: “For it is in making himself nothing, in his utter self-surrender to others in love, that [Jesus] discloses and lays bare the Ground of man’s being as Love”. He also wrote: “For assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love”. (Wikipedia)
Pure fantasy!
August 6th, 2011 at 12:29 am
A friend of mine was going through the final examinations before ordination as a Catholic priest – but failed when he refused to accept dogma as literal rather than metaphoric. One wonders how many priests lied at their ordinations, and for what reasons.
August 6th, 2011 at 1:47 am
And when you do, John, we are more than happy to acknowledge the fact. Shame we have so few opportunities to do do.
August 6th, 2011 at 3:28 am
Radical theology can be a handy way-station for those otherwise rational types who, for whatever reason, cannot live without the word “god” in their lives. The anecdotes above suggest that true belief may be a minority position even among the “religious”, with Xtianity’s position maintained solely by the blustering and bullying of its most ignorant, brainwashed and frightened members.
The only issue I would have with this sort of theology is that “god” is redefined in a Humpty-Dumpty way to mean whatever the believer finds convenient.
Oh well, good first step …
August 6th, 2011 at 7:11 am
Mr Gronk: They are claiming (like John Vinals, above) to “think for themselves”, yet they are totally unable to abandon their “comfort blanket” called “God”. How strange!
August 6th, 2011 at 11:08 am
What we need now is for an imam/mullah/ayatollah to find the courage to step forward and say similar things about Islam. I fear they’d need far greater courage than the minister, though.
August 6th, 2011 at 11:13 am
barriejohn,
I tiotalt agree with your use of ‘comfort blanket’, but, on the other hand, it’s a step in the right direction. I have always felt that, with religion, the only way to wean someone off it is by their own realisation that it’s all bollocks.
August 6th, 2011 at 11:46 am
“What we need now is for an imam/mullah/ayatollah to find the courage to step forward and say similar things about Islam. I fear they’d need far greater courage than the minister, though.”
And possibly better police protection, Brian!
August 7th, 2011 at 12:28 am
Barriejohn
Patience, mate. Their comfort blanket helps believers deal with the dread of death. Most people (myself included) find this a scary thing so I don’t scoff too loudly at their choice of anaesthetic. I merely point out its nasty side effects and suggest secular philosophy as a more humane and dignified alternative.
In any case, radical theologians seem to accept that their deaths are final. “God” starts to become a threadbare blanket indeed when it doesn’t give a believer even the comfort of an afterlife. So, as I said, it’s a handy way-station to the final shedding of that blanket.