Reddit mentions of The Dishonest Church

Hey, thanks for briefly sharing your experiences. I would be interested in hearing more if you have the time. Do you align with a denomination of Christianity, or are you non-denominational? If you do consider yourself of a particular denomination, what one, and what are the primary reasons for the choice?

It sounds to me like you don't hold your beliefs (about Christianity) with certainty (correct me if I am wrong). To me this is a great thing to see, and in my particular experience more unexpected than not for a Christian. On this point, do you think that certainty is a bit too common in modern Christianity? I know Christianity isn't uniform and can't be generalized, but it is a common experience for me to see absolute certainty in Christianity, and I don't think it can be entirely explained by a selection bias on my part.

If you agree with me on this point, as a Christian how what do you think are the most effective methods for reducing certainty? Do theologians and scholars need to do more to make information available to congregations? Is it the responsibility of pastors etc to convey modern learnings and their implications on certainty?

This book I found to be an eye opener on the subject.

There is a lot of interesting writing out there about pastors who are pushing the envelope on humanism/consequentialism/secularism, naturalism, deism, biblical non-literalism, and other things that are so religiously liberal, they're practically atheism. The envelope is different in different places (a pastor can get a lot further in Seattle than in St Louis, a lot further in a United Church of Christ than in a Southern Baptist church), and different pastors feel more or less need to push it, but it's a very interesting dynamic. Every pastor learns in seminary that the Sunday-school understanding of God and the Bible and Jesus are wildly oversimplified, and the pastor must then decide how much of their deeper and more nuanced understanding to bring into their church. Saying these things will "rock the boat" and will make the pastor "sound like an atheist" to many of the church-goers. How does the pastor reconcile their narrow-mindedness with his duty and desire to make them honest and capable religious thinkers?

As an atheist, I try really hard to understand the religious mindset, so I got a whole lot out of reading "The Dishonest Church"; It's a book about this tense issue, written by a Christian pastor who laments the fact that most Christian church-goers are not very free-thinking and this causes good pastors to have to hide a lot of their relatively enlightened views. A more extreme version of this are pastors who have become atheists but who feel they cannot leave their jobs for a variety of reasons. That phenomenon is being studied by Daniel Dennett; He has a very interesting preliminary article here and a video about it here.

TL;DR: “Oh, you can’t go through seminary and come out believing in God!” (Quote from Dennett's paper by one of the pastors he interviewed).