The unique and foolish status of the clergy

Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and gain delighted praise for the trenchant wit of their review. But in criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a ‘rant’.

– Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)

Representatives of religious institutions, from popes and archbishops to country vicars to American single church pastors, with age-old public permission, stand apart from everybody else. They are beyond criticism as they proclaim their presumed theological knowledge, emphasised by their exclusive apparel, aloof circumstance, and a suite of exclusory rules that apply nowhere else.

They may designate themselves humble, but just look at them, distanced from the common throng, whether in dour suit and dog collar, cassock and surplice, or episcopal opulence. The clergy may present themselves as of the people, but when preaching, they are always not only separated from but also physically elevated above their congregants, looking down upon and speaking down to them. When they preach, their opinions, interpretations, and advice are presented as incontrovertible and true, no matter that they might actually be sheer drivel. The people simply accept what they are told while correction and debate from the pews is mutely agreed by all to be taboo.

In most walks of life, discussion and criticism—constructive or even hostile—is normal and expected, but the clergy are immune, by training and profession as well as by the passive acceptance of their—to unbelievers, inexplicably—compliant followers, obedient to their God and obedient to His self-appointed commissioners.

In the lecture theatre, where real knowledge is imparted, the seating rakes upwards from the presenter’s podium, whereas in the church, where dogma is enforced, the priest stands above the auditors (or in the case of bishops and popes, sits upon an elevated throne). This exclusiveness is enhanced by their furniture of elevation: from the medieval rood loft to the pulpit that replaced it, to the altar steps, to the Vatican balcony. Even the ‘thy end is nigh’ street preacher perches on an orange box.

Out of habit, instilled into society these past two thousand years, the faithful comply with religious instruction, in droves, unquestioningly.

Disclosure

I am a lifelong atheist with a satisfactory lifestyle uncluttered by religion. Religion has never been necessary to me. I have never detected the slightest hint of any god or Jesus, in my vicinity or in the claims of others, a perfectly good reason not to believe, and I have a well-informed idea what it is I do not believe. I have spent my seventy-six years surrounded by, at times immersed in, Christianity, taught about it from at least the age of five when at Sunday School in 1953 I was presented with a Coronation New Testament, then all the way through school, in the Wolf Cubs and Boys’ Brigade, and as a condition of service while a chorister in a Cambridge college, 1957-1961.

In my later teens, during the mid-1960s, I honed my latent atheism in the company of close friends, who were also coming to terms with the world, and a girlfriend who was determined that I should become, like her, a Christian. Contrary to her expectations, her proselytising steered me away from Christianity. We young people discussed or argued about religion, frequently into the night, so that when I was seventeen and taken along to the Student Christian Organisation at the Round Church, my reasoned atheism had become established and I confidently ‘came out’ to a bewildered rector and his wife. She took a particular interest in me, concerned that, as she perceived in my unchristian opinions, I was experiencing an existential breakdown requiring her caring remediation. She was gloriously naïve and wrong. At the next meeting, she beetled up to me with that soppy, hand-wringing attitude only the faithful can adopt and asked if I had got over my problems. Problems? What was she on about? After an awkward pause, the penny dropped. Oh, you mean… I still recall how firmly I felt my feet planted on solid ground when I replied, and that is where they stayed.

Late in life—as if I had nothing better to do—I embarked upon a non-theologian’s study of the Bible, in moderate detail, discovering and exposing hundreds of anomalies that have shown me just how appropriate, indeed how rational, my Christianity-influenced atheism is.

All you have to do to find out how bad the Bible is, is read it with your brain switched on.

The book that emerged from that investigation has yet to be published. Its current working title: JESUS SAID … (no, He didn’t). Why that title? Because His story (the four gospels) was written, long after He left the world, by anonymous scribes who had only hearsay as their information, driven by a cultural mission of the time to create a religion based on an emerging myth. Jesus, who might have been just one of many Jewish preachers, was singled out for a fictional life story. How could they have reported, in quotable form, what He said and what He did, particularly in private circumstances? For instance, at His encounter with the devil in the wilderness—when only He was there—or when He talked only with the twelve or when:

[t]rembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. (Mark 16:8)

Until you question it, the Bible seems to make sense, and then it doesn’t. Christians, for two thousand years, you have allowed the Bible to underpin your entire religion. Read it, and if it doesn’t make sense, reject it and congratulate yourselves.

Religious Exclusivity

This article was inspired by the revelation to the world of the restored Notre Dame Cathedral in December last year. I watched little of the event, but I did experience a jolt of indignation when I saw the procession of bishops. They could have been wearing their usual extravagant vestments, but for this occasion they all wore a flashy modern uniform structurally based upon the conventional. The backs of their capes were decorated with a pattern of small crosses forming a crucifix and a large Chi-Rho symbol adorned their napes, on a sort of stylised hood. At the front, they had another huge crucifix surrounded by coloured flashes and their mitres bore yet another one.

The crucifix is one of the ghastliest of torture instruments, here used as flamboyant decoration. That is the way with Christianity, habitually displaying as trivial decoration the crucifix that (‘it is written’) killed their leader most horribly, a commonly used Roman instrument of torture. It appears hanging from the necks of priests, monks, and congregants, as fashion jewellery for men and women, and even as (search Google images) Christian tattoos, despite the warning in Leviticus:

Do not … put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:28)

The faithful will probably protest otherwise—that the crucifix is a sacred symbol of their salvation, or something—but I wonder how they would like it if I wore a badge showing a man impaled on a stake, entering his anus and emerging from his mouth, or another, broken and braided on a wheel, hoisted aloft on a pole, a pre-mangled, leisurely meal for carrion crows? If I did, it would be to express my disgust that people could be so cruel, definitely not as a vacuous convention or thoughtless fashion statement.

Back to the Notre Dame procession of bishops. As I said, instead of their usual embroidered and bejewelled vestments, the bishops all wore uniform liturgical garments created by Paris fashion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. No matter that the vestments were different from each bishop’s less modernistic day-to-day outfits, they still set the bishops far apart from the rest of the world—from an atheist’s viewpoint, undeservedly. The privileged status they assumed struck me when I witnessed one of the bishops—perhaps some sort of super bishop—break rank to offer Donald Trump (of all people) the special privilege of allowing him to fawn before him. Or was it the other way round? Yeeeugh!

I was never so under-impressed by a bishop’s attire than when we were treated to the sight of the then-newly enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury, wearing his mitre. Instead of cutting an imposing figure, as one might expect of an archbishop, he looked just plain wet, not somebody one would look to for wise leadership and decency (which, as it turned out, proved true). It beats me why people seek the opinions of such men. When they open their mouths, it becomes apparent that, even if they are otherwise intelligent people, the ecclesiastical space between their ears has been poorly allocated.

Bishops’ and other clergy robes create a façade, a camouflage for the mere human within who wields power over people and does so as if it is his or her special (God given) right. When I saw those bishops in Notre Dame, it reminded me of other priestly pretences of grandeur, such as when Latin Catholics process their Virgin Mary effigy or Greek Orthodox their relics and icons of the saints, surrounded by jostling crowds of the gullible faithful.

I recall Mr Taylor, the minister at my mother’s Congregational Church when I was a child, shouting Ian Paisley-wise from his pulpit, frightening us children, and Scottish Free Church ministers threatening the people with perpetual hellfire and damnation (even, so considerately, at weddings and funerals), ordinary people who look to the clergy for wisdom, care, and guidance. And what about those snake-handling, poison-quaffing American zealots (fortunately few and becoming fewer because of their faith)?

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. (Mark 16:17-18)

The clergy perform their rites as their rights, while the people, trained by them to revere them, their exclusive clothing, and the rituals they impose upon them, indulge in corporate worship, of God certainly, but with a degree of unquestioning reverence for the reverend person as well.

Reverend?

The term [Reverend] is an anglicisation of the Latin reverendus, the style originally used in Latin documents in medieval Europe. It is the gerundive or future passive participle of the verb revereri (“to respect; to revere”), meaning “[one who is] to be revered/must be respected”.

– Wikipedia

Reverend: worthy of reverence: revered

– Merriam-Webster

Reverend: worthy of adoration or reverence

– Vocabulary.com

Admittedly, I have cherry-picked my definitions. Most of them head, not for the above, but go straight for the derived meaning: the title adopted by a faith leader. Thus, a clergyperson is assumed to be worthy of adoration or reverence, an application we might wish to question, and quite vigorously at that.

People’s titles usually and deservedly reflect their achievements. I have one, Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil ≡ Ph.D), which I earned by years of study, performance, and achievement, en route gathering valid qualifications which did not warrant a special title, such as Higher National Certificate (HNC) and Master of Philosophy (M.Phil). The clergyperson’s title is simply applied to any and all who profess to be a priest or minister after learning how to broadcast untruths gleaned from a barmy, outmoded holy book. Reverend is not so much a title, but rather a demand for respect and obedience. I, a Dr by merit who has contributed significantly to ecological science, feel insulted.

Priests pretend they have truths, and the millions who are instructed to revere them—by tradition, habit, and fear—just lap it all up. The faithful extend their trust to popes, bishops, priests, vicars, pastors, preachers, and ministers who are, from the unbeliever’s viewpoint, mere men or women elevated to unwarranted high demagogical status, and in their implicit requirement for reverence, a poor match for the humility allegedly taught them by their God and His prophets.

That being said, I have been privileged to know a few vicars and ministers whose religious ministry comes second to their tireless, caring social work. They were worthy of respect, though I think reverence in the adoration sense would be taking it a bit too far, and anyway, they wouldn’t like that.

Lying for Jesus

Other than a few fundamentalist dissidents, scholars of theology, Christian or atheist, are agreed that the stories about Jesus were written by anonymous authors some thirty to seventy years or more after the events took place. Some churchgoers are still fooled by the assignation of names to the four gospels which seem to match those of disciples (Matthew and John) and associates (Mark and Luke) of Jesus. Some even think, without thinking, that they were all members of the twelve apostles. The clergy (assuming they are not under the same delusion, which I’m afraid many are) do little to disabuse their underinformed followers, those who confidently claim that the Bible contains all truth but are unable to respond meaningfully to questions about it.

Let us place ourselves in the position of the scribes who composed the gospels, consider what it could have been they were writing long after events took place and why. They might not even have been individuals; rather, serial coalitions of text originators and subsequent editors working over a period of around three hundred years before the first-known manuscript compilations of the Bible as we know it today were ‘published’—for instance, something like the surviving fourth-century, Greek-language Codex Vaticanus.

The anonymous gospel authors, named Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John for the publisher’s convenience, would not have had access to any contemporary event reports as we do, using the communications technologies we have today. Records could only have been made, if at all, by a tiny minority of the almost entirely illiterate population who might have attended Jesus events. The gospel writers, therefore, were reliant upon anecdote and tradition for the information upon which to craft their narratives about long past events. Written material, if any, would have been copied from earlier scribes, also writing remotely from the events. We can see this in the books of Matthew and Luke, who partly plagiarised the earlier book of the gospel writer Mark, sometimes verbatim. What might have been Mark’s sources, other than hearsay?

The gospel stories were just the beginning. Next, editors driven to create a narrative that would—successfully as it happened—underpin a new religion, will have worked on the original texts until they told the story they needed. We should acknowledge the not dissimilar human conduct which creates cults and conspiracy theories today.

There is no reason to conclude that the sayings, deeds, and life of Jesus as presented in the Bible, written by editors with a specific purpose, copied multiple times and translated to English from the Greek via Latin, can be any more than the most contrived of historical fiction. War and Peace, Wolf Hall, and The Name of the Rose are orders of magnitude more in accordance with reality, having all been informed by a wealth of credible, verifiable records such as the gospel writers never had.

How dare I assert that priests pretend they have truths which they impose upon those who revere them because, for instance, they are told to in the priest’s automatically assumed title and lofty aspect? The culprit is that holy book from which they extract their presumptuous ‘wisdom’. Much of what they teach is dependent upon the fulfilment in the New Testament of Old Testament passages, presumed prophetic, and also upon what Jesus is presumed to have been, said, and done. None of it can or should be relied upon for truth, yet the clergy habitually present it as such. They just read it out loud and then comment upon it at length in their sermons, adjusting their passage selections and interpretations to match their message of the day. Scientific or historical research presented in the same manner would fail peer review at the first hurdle.

Frankly, once you have recognised all that, it becomes quite creepy. But the clergy, raised above and apart from the faithful throng, are un-self-critically confident of what they tell the people. Simultaneously, the people are unquestioningly persuaded by what they have been told. They trust. They have faith.

Many of the clergy are either innately or by persuasion ignorant of the history of the scriptures upon which they preach, and they preach them as if they are exactly true, so that, as they have done these past two thousand years, fictional biblical influences self-maintain their circularity. If they do know the history of the Bible’s authorship as it is understood by most modern theologians, they preach as if they don’t.

Prophesy

Biblical prophecy fulfilment is a matter of unfettered overinterpretation of a chosen Old Testament passage post hoc so that it can be shoe-horned into a desired New Testament narrative. That is, the deliberate construction of New Testament stories to match those contrived interpretations of entirely unrelated and barely relevant Old Testament passages. The gospel writer known as Matthew actually confessed several times that that was precisely what he did, as did Luke and John, if less frequently. Preachers tend not to highlight this far-from-surreptitious text manipulation, preferring to preach the fulfilments literally. To my mind, that lies somewhere between innocently credulous and downright dishonest. The priesthood consists of both character extremes with a spectrum of intermediates.

All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). (Matthew 1:22, citing Isaiah 7:14)

[Jesus] said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” (Luke 24:44. About prophecy, so no Old Testament citation)

These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken,” and, as another scripture says, “They will look on the one they have pierced.” (John 19:36-37, citing Exodus 12:46; Numbers 9:12; Psalm 34:20 and Zechariah 12:10)

The John prophecy is the most contrived, and risibly so, because the first three prophetic verses simply mention unbroken bones (two of them from meat meals, the other a troubled righteous person) and the fourth ‘… me, the one they have pierced’. Pierced how? So, reference to unbroken bones and the word ‘pierced’ incontrovertibly predicted Jesus’s crucifixion? Don’t think about it, and it will be true.

While composing this section, I have just learnt that what we atheists rather stridently call ‘lying for Jesus’ is less disparagingly known to and practised by Christians. It is called Pious Fraud, in which lies that promote the salvation of the faithful are considered to be permissible lies, white lies.

Pious fraud is a term applied to describe fraudulent practices used to advance a religious cause or belief. This type of fraud may, by religious apologists, be explained as a case of the ends justify the means, in that if people are saved from eternal damnation, then it’s perfectly fine to tell a few fibs and perform some magic tricks. – RationalWiki

In his Epistle to the Romans, Paul excuses such behaviour, so lying for Jesus must be justifiable:

Someone might argue, “If my falsehood enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?” Why not say—as some slanderously claim that we say—“Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is just! (Romans 3:7-8)

This pious end justifies the means fraud is horribly dependent upon daft ideas such as people’s belief that they are all sinners, accompanied by fear of eternal hellfire and damnation. If those fears are without substance (of course, there is no such thing as Hell, so fear is unwarranted), then pious fraud is indeed the same as lying for Jesus and the pious (just like we, the ungodly, conveniently confirmed by Paul in his Epistle to the Romans) are ‘without excuse’. I enjoy mimicking the clergy, quote mining biblical passages isolated from their context, to enhance my own heathen compositions.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (Romans 1:18-20)

The last six-word phrase of Romans 1:18-20 is popular Christian ammunition, routinely quoted at us unbelievers to prove to us that we are wicked, because (it is alleged) we can see God’s wonderful creation all around us and actually know in our heart of hearts the evidence for God’s existence. ‘Therefore’, because—with a prod at the Bible—they have proved we do know God and, ‘therefore’, there is no such thing as an atheist, we are ‘without excuse’.

Lying for Jesus goes well beyond the falsification of prophecy and white lies to urge people to aspire to bogus salvation. The whole Jesus story—who He was, what He said, and what He did—is, demonstrably, and at best, historical fiction. It is told by the four gospel authors and reported by Paul. None of them was present or even contemporary, though many believe they were.

The gospels are presented by the clergy as if they are transcripts of real occurrences with the actual, quote-worthy words of Jesus. Without considering how the texts they quote cannot be true, they just read, believe, and teach what they shamelessly deliver as ‘truths’. But recording-transcription technology had yet to be invented, and clay tablets and papyrus scrolls or scraps were all they had for writing, while at least ninety-five per cent of people who might have witnessed the Jesus events would have been illiterate. They, including Jesus, will have spoken Aramaic but not written in any language, while the reports were transcribed by scholarly professionals, in Greek, long after the events.

The sources of information upon which the anonymous authors based their gospels were anecdote, hearsay, and tradition, all composed several to many decades after the events took place: Mark c. 66-70 CE, Matthew and Luke, part copied from Mark, c. 85–90 CE, and John c. 90-110 CE.

It is impossible that Jesus, as presented by the clergy reading the Bible to congregations, really said what it is written that He said, and that reports of his life and activities, many of which were miraculous, could ever have been true.

A miracle is a claimed event that is inexplicable by natural or scientific laws and accordingly gets attributed to some supernatural or praeternatural cause. – Wikipedia

If events can be explained only in terms of the supernatural (therefore, undetectable and impossible to confirm or falsify), then they are best left unbelieved until evidence is provided. People may believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, made water into wine, healed the sick with blessings, and rose from the dead, but they have no evidence (extraordinary or mundane) to explain those impossible acts and events. They gain their trust by the application of vacuous faith, a fallacious epistemological method they vigorously defend.

Faith

The Bible, the information source in which they invest their faith, is just a book and no more than a book. It contains words, stories, and claims, but not information that verifiably comports with or confirms the reality of its contents: i.e. evidence.

Protestations of faith confirming biblical stories, as in the minds of individuals unable to explain them, are routinely supported by a prod at Hebrews 11:1:

Faith in Action: Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. (Hebrews 11:1, New International Version)

Satisfied that the word ‘faith’ is defined there, they rest their case. Pressed specifically for evidence that faith is a viable option, the faithful deftly turn to the King James Version of the Bible: ‘There is the evidence that faith is a way to truth’, they say.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1, King James Version)

We disagree. This word ‘evidence’ and its alternatives are dependent upon translation, Hebrew to English via Greek or Latin. Faith, as understood by Christians, is self-deception, learnt from the clergy who themselves believe in it uncritically. They tell their congregations that faith (sensu Heb. 11:1) is a virtue, so that a bad idea becomes a universal truth, of sorts. Real truth is the opposite, but since the clergy are considered to be reverend, the people simply believe and comply. Matt Dillahunty discusses the idea critically while Mark Twain puts it neatly in a vernacular nutshell:

Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don’t have evidence. If you can come up with something that I believe that I don’t have evidence for, guess what I’ll do. I’ll stop believing it. That’s the nature of a rational mind. That is the goal. Faith is not a virtue. Faith is gullibility. It’s evidence that determines whether or not your perception of reality is reasonable and in conjunction with the world as it is. – Matt Dillahunty

Having faith is believing in something you just know ain’t true. – Mark Twain

If willing, we should all read the Bible and learn some basic theology. Many ex-Christians became atheists by doing just that. They were persuaded to deconvert by Bible study, critical thinking, and personal integrity. The Bible itself provides the confirmatory evidence that the clergy lie to the faithful and lie for Jesus, but since the habit has been ingrained in their culture for two thousand years, based on millennia of religious observance, we must, as the Bible tells us:

… forgive them; for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:34)

That was fun! Just as the clergy do, again I quote mined a biblical phrase to illustrate my intended meaning. I lifted a useful passage out of its context in order to make a completely unrelated point. Here is the full text:

And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots. (Luke 23:33-34, King James Version)