I will be dealing with two rather wide-ranging questions in this week’s Readers Mailbag:  What is it like for me, a public agnostic/atheist, to give a talk to believers in a church?  And what did Jews believe about the afterlife in the time of Jesus?

 

QUESTION:

Dr. Ehrman, do churches hire you to lecture on Christianity knowing that you’re an atheist? Do you ever get tempted to say, “Let’s be honest here. I think all of your cherished religious beliefs are baloney, but I’ll humor you for the next couple of hours.” That’s how I feel when I tell someone that they can accept the Theory of Evolution and still believe in God, even though, deep down inside, I know that Evolution and God mix like oil and water, so I simply humor them.

 

RESPONSE:

Ah, right, this is a good question.  As it turns out, I do get asked to speak in churches on occasion.   Sometimes, of course, it is in order to have a debate with a conservative Christian apologist.  In those cases I am invited so that the people attending (good conservative Christians themselves) can watch me get trounced so that they can be assured that I don’t know what I’m talking about.  (!)   But other times I am simply asked to give talks, as was the case with the Coral Gables video that I posted yesterday.  How does that work, given the fact that I’m not a believer and I am being asked to speak to people in a church?

The first thing to stress: whenever I get an invitation, I respond by asking, “Are you *sure*?  You do know I’m an agnostic don’t you?”   Normally I get asked, though, by pastors who know exactly what I think and believe, who have read my books, who think that it would be good for their parishioners to hear me.  In fact, I not infrequently get asked to speak during a worship service (e.g. by giving a sermon).  I draw the line there.  I really don’t feel comfortable in the context of Christian worship any more, and I don’t think it is right for me as a non-believer to speak in worship contexts. So I simply will not do that.

But I’m happy to talk to members of a congregation in any other context (including adult Sunday School).   I’ve never ever felt like telling people that their beliefs are baloney.  That is mainly because …

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