{"id":16357,"date":"2012-04-30T19:42:30","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T23:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/?p=16357"},"modified":"2012-04-30T19:42:30","modified_gmt":"2012-04-30T23:42:30","slug":"atheists-anonymous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/atheists-anonymous\/","title":{"rendered":"Atheists Anonymous"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHello, I\u2019m Jerry and I\u2019m an atheist.\u201d Nothing unusual about that, you might think \u2013 other than the fact that when Jerry drifted from Christianity to disbelieving in hell to universalism to God is our inner dialogue,<\/em> to atheism, <\/em>he was a Pentecostal minister.<\/p>\n

Since he wasn\u2019t an Anglican minister, this presented Jerry with a bit of a dilemma which, on hearing of his new-found lack of faith, his congregation helped him resolve by firing him.<\/p>\n

From there, he fell into the welcoming arms of The Clergy Project<\/a>, a \u201cconfidential online community for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs\u201d: TCP, the spiritual formulation, guaranteed to disinfect the bacteria of Faith, Hope and Charity from contaminated souls.<\/p>\n

Having come out,<\/em> Jerry has been photographed with Richard Dawkins and become executive director of Recovering from Religion<\/a>; that\u2019s about as transcendent as it gets for an atheist.<\/p>\n

A brief perusal of this clip<\/a> will confirm that, although Jerry has abandoned Pentecostalism, it hasn\u2019t entirely abandoned him: his intonation, gestures and stagecraft are all standard Pentecostal minister fare. I was expecting a \u201cpreach it, brother\u201d from the audience; Jerry needs to attend a few more Reason Rallies<\/a> to purge the remnants of what used to intoxicate him from his system.<\/p>\n

From here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In the span of just a few months, Jerry DeWitt went from a respected pastor with a vibrant congregation to an atheist without a job.<\/p>\n

DeWitt, 42, is the first \u201cgraduate\u201d of The Clergy Project, a program supported by several atheist organizations that assists pastors who have lost their faith to \u201ccome out\u201d as atheists to family, friends, congregations and communities.<\/p>\n

DeWitt, who lives in Southern Louisiana, went public last October when he posted a picture of himself with the prominent and polarizing atheist Richard Dawkins, snapped at a meeting of atheists and other \u201cfreethinkers\u201d in Houston.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHello, I\u2019m Jerry and I\u2019m an atheist.\u201d Nothing unusual about that, you might think \u2013 other than the fact that when Jerry drifted from Christianity to disbelieving in hell to universalism to God is our inner dialogue, to atheism, he … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":3,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[2049,933,2238],"class_list":["post-16357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","tag-atheism","tag-jerry-dewitt","tag-richard-dawkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}