Theologian

—Greta Christina

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Most believers (...) often assume that their religious leaders know the answers (...) But if religious authorities start acknowledging that they don't know, either? (...) that they have the exact same questions, and haven't found any good answers? (...) that they've just been making it up as they go along? If religious authorities begin to abandon the tacit agreement among themselves that these questions and doubts should be kept among themselves, and should not be shared with their followers? (...) the best answer they've found to these questions is, "God doesn't exist"?(...) And if they start doing this in significant numbers?

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Theologians appear so wise and Godly. Do theologians really know anything special we should respect?

Below are several opinions from people who think they don't.

Sigmund Freud

Roughly a century ago Sigmund Freud recognised that some people are atheists without admitting it. Freud wrote about Philosophers but we can see the same type of thinking among some theologians.

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Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstnatial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.

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Jerry Coyne

Jerry Coyne suspects theologians are deliberately obscure and make up what they teach.

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There seems to be no “knowledge” behind theology, and I haven’t learned anything—not even any clever philosophy. One gets the strong sense when reading theology (and granted, I am biased) that everyone is just making stuff up.

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Coyne has read theology but feels he has been reading “drivel about beliefs that have no basis in fact.” Coyne suspects theologians are deliberately obscure and baffling. He suggests asking theologians how they know reality corresponds to what they say and how they know they personally are closer to understanding reality than other theologians.

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I’m starting to realize that there is no sophisticated theology; there are merely evasions and fancy language to get around the problematic lack of evidence for God and the palpably immoral statements in scripture.

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Coyne feels theologians confuse ordinary people and compares theology to literary criticism of a work of fiction, the Bible.

Catherine Dunphy

Catherine Dunphy was a Theology student but before she graduated came to see Atheism made more sense than what she was studying.

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I remember how frustrated I would become in class, given that it didn't appear to me that my profs had any more authority than I did!... I came to realize that we were all complicit in making this stuff up as we go.

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Today Catherine Dunphy helps clergymen and clergywomen who stopped believing in God to find meaningful lives. That means changing careers so they don't have to work with religion they have become convinced doesn't make sense.

P Z Myers

P Z Myers claims that theology involves smart, elderly white guys rationalizing what they personally want to believe. Myers can see no difference in principle between the mutually contradictory theologies of different denominations and sects, (he gives the examples of Roman Catholic and Mormon theology) or even murderous cults. He also believes that answers to important questions have come from outside theology.

Reality about theologians

1. Some of what theologians write looks very much as if it's made up.
2. Other times theologians look as if they're trying to work out logical conclusions from those books of fairy tales known as the Old Testament and the New Testament.
3. Yet other times theologians are trying to develop traditional Christian beliefs in logical ways.
4. The Bible is often contradictory and illogical and Christian teachings generally are just as illogical. Therefore the work of theologians too often ends up an illogical mess.
5. All theologians are wasting their time on analysis of Bronze Age and Iron Age scribblings. That stuff that should interest only historians and anthropologists.
6. Many theologians are intelligent and very well qualified. It's really sad that they put so much effort into something so pointless.

There is a good and a a bad side to Christianity, see the category page

See also

• Relevance of theology