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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