"I believe that the dark night of the soul is a common spiritual experience. I believe, too, that the answer is continued seeking and perseverance. It helps to know that others have endured a loss of faith."
Welcome to The Clergy Project
Are you a religious professional who no longer
believes in the supernatural?
Have you remained in vocational ministry,
secretly hiding away your non-belief?
Are you struggling over where to go from here
with your life and career?
- Maybe you’ve been out for some time, out of the ministry and maybe even publicly out as a non-believer…
- Maybe you’ve found that the challenges continue to come with your new life and you’re in need of some good community with people who understand the issues you face…
- Maybe you’d simply love to connect with other religious professionals who have likewise left belief behind…
“Faith is believing what you know ain't so.”
Mark Twain
If this is you, we invite you to join The Clergy Project!
The Clergy Project was launched in March 2011 to create a safe and secure Online Community of Forums composed entirely of religious leaders who no longer hold to supernatural beliefs. Many of our project participants have deep privacy concerns, and for that reason, we place your security among our top tier of priorities. Identify yourself with a pseudonym and an avatar image if you prefer. And our private-access website is held secure with air-tight features to make sure your anonymity is in the best of hands.
In our Online Community of Forums, participants come from a wide range of religious and cultural backgrounds, including Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, and more than thirty different segments of Christianity. Our participants reside in all fifty states in the USA and over forty different countries around the globe and come from varied perspectives of culture and lifestyle. Approximately one-fourth of Clergy Project participants are currently employed in their religious vocation with approximately three-fourths having transitioned out.
In The Clergy Project’s Online Community, forum discussion includes everything from practical concerns like finding a new career path and discerning when and how to come out as a non-believer to one’s spouse to more philosophical conversations centered on ethics and humanism. Services are also available to participants regarding career development and the opportunity for free counseling sessions offered through The Secular Therapist Project.
Through it all The Clergy Project exists to offer you support, community, and hope. Hope for a better day, for a next chapter far surpassing anything the previous could have offered. So welcome. Welcome to The Clergy Project.
Joining TCP’s Private Online Community
Becoming a TCP Participant
The Clergy Project’s mission is to maintain a safe and secure online gathering place for religious professionals (either currently and formerly employed) who no longer believe in the supernatural. We call this safe space our Online Community of Forums. Those who have gained access to this Online Community are referred to as Project Participants.
If you would like to join The Project and think you might qualify, we invite you to read further and begin the application and screening process. It’s great to have you here!
The Screening Process
The goal of screening potential Project Participants is to protect the anonymity of current participants while also providing an opportunity for others to be welcomed into our Community of Forums. Our screening process involves several stages, including disclosure of information regarding your history and a phone interview. We are committed to protecting your privacy. Our screeners will not disclose any information that you share.
Qualifications for Participation
1) Religious Professionals
Community Forum Participants are current or former religious professionals of any religious tradition, including all levels and varieties of vocational pastors, priests, monks, rabbis, imams, theologians, nuns, missionaries, etcetera. Lay leaders are not considered to be in a professional leadership capacity and therefore do not qualify for The Clergy Project.
We do realize that for some groups, however, even the most high-ranking positions of religious service are more informal compared to those of other traditions, and in such cases we look to the particular practices and structures of each for the definition of corresponding leadership roles.
2) Rejection of Belief in the Supernatural
Community Forum Participants are those who have actively rejected belief in a supernatural worldview and have accepted a naturalistic one in its place. We define a supernatural worldview as one accepting an order of existence that is beyond the visible observable universe, appearing to transcend the laws of nature or what can be explained by nature, accepted scientific understanding, or the application of the scientific method.
This is usually attributed to an invisible agent, especially of or relating to a god, demigod, spirit, ghosts, or devils. But it can refer to anything that is above or beyond what is part of the natural world and attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding.
A naturalistic worldview is explained well by Robert T. Carroll in the Skeptics Dictionary as “…one that has no supernatural or mystical element to it. The universe is all we can ever hope to know and there is no compelling reason to posit a supernatural world beyond and in addition to the natural world. The infusion of supernatural elements into human societies is itself a natural phenomenon that has a naturalistic origin and history. There may be elements or forces in nature that are not understood, but there is nothing that requires magical thinking or superstitious positing of transcendent beings to account for them.” [http://www.skepdic.com/naturalism.html]
Rejection of the supernatural has several implications. We do not believe in gods, angels, demons, ghosts, a sentient universe, psychic power, divination, mystical forces, or practices that emanate from belief in mystical forces such as chi, astrology, or feng shui, or using prayer, crystals, or magnets as a method of disease prevention. This is not intended to be comprehensive list. A TCP Community Forum Participant necessarily holds a naturalistic worldview as explained above.
Privacy
All information shared with The Clergy Project is confidential. Privacy is a crucial component of participation in the Online Community of Forums. Even within the Community itself, all information such as one’s real name, photographic image, or geographical location are only made available to other Participants according to each individual’s preference as reflected in their own personal profile composition. As such, pseudonyms and avatars are encouraged and often used. As a Project Participant, you are in full control of how you present yourself to the remainder of the Online Community.
Application
If you are a current or former religious professionals who no longer believes in the supernatural and is interested in joining this Online Community of Forums otherwise known as The Clergy Project, please submit an application form. http://clergyproject.org/208-2/
Not a Current or Former Religious Professional? Or Not Fully Rejecting Belief in the Supernatural?
No problem! And thank you for checking us out! Due to the sensitive nature of The Project, we must limit participation as outlined above. But thankfully, there are lots of other groups you might feel comfortable joining. You can see a list of some of them here in our Secular Resource Center. We also invite you to visit and interact with The Clergy Project’s public Facebook page.
"Probably no one of us has the True Religion. But all of us together - if we are allowed to be free - are discovering ways of conversing about the great mysteries. The pretense to know all the answers to the deepest mysteries is, of course, the grossest fraud. And any people who declare a Jihad, a holy war on unbelievers - those who do not share their believers' pretended omniscience - are enemies of thinking men and woman and of civilization. I see religion as only a way of asking unanswerable questions, of sharing the joy of a community of quest, and solacing one another in our ignorance."
19 comments:
What Dennis does not get is that if he really wants to save people from religion he should save people from the destructive war-mongering religions: Judaism and Islam. He belongs on another site. By bashing Christianity he is just bashing one of the better religions out there. He should be trying to convert Jews and Muslims to Jesus, or atheism, whatever makes the world a better place.
Looks to me like the site is run by the same sad cases that control everything else. The last thing a former cult member needs is another kick in the brain from a bunch of goofy progressives lacking intellectual rigor.
It's dumb to reject all supernatural phenomenon and to think that one's own limited experiences--and those of like-minded skeptics--can explain everything.
To say that science will explain everything, even what is has not explained yet, is an extrapolation, which means it is, well uh, not scientific!
Well, Dennis has found his home on that project.
Trusting strangers with ones personal details is unwise. If nothing else, such sites can be hacked. There's also a history of online organisations being Trojan horses, ie, they ain't who they claim to be. It has happened.
I hope your putting this up will be helpful to some. I never was formally in the ministry although my work in answering mail was considered ministerial so I likely wouldn't have qualified even if it had been available back there in the mid-seventies. Transition into a new career was not an easy route but I survived and prospered for several years.
I don’t think anyone expected this to be a one-size fits all solution, or a silver bullet. It’s a help group or support group that certain ones who fit certain profiles will find beneficial. One important aspect of the recovery process is to keep searching until you find help that addresses your specific issues, help to which you can relate, and with which you can feel both challenged and comfortable. People are all different, with different personalities, different genetic makeups, different experiences, skill sets, and needs. That’s why the “one true” anything is a misnomer and a myth. “All these” churches or anything else exist because they help different people in different ways. That’s not confusion. It is a product of design, to serve a wide variety of needs.
BB
Hi, just wanted to mention, I enjoyed this blog post. It was helpful.
Keep on posting!
I am surprised by the ignorance displayed in 8:17's post.
To make a blanket statement that Judaism and Islam are war-mongering religions, and that Christianity is not, is to display a shocking lack of knowledge of history. Judaism hasn't been a war-mongering religion since the days of the Old Testament, though there are strident voices on its right wing who would happily deprive non-Jews of their land and their rights. Sufi Islam includes some of the most lofty and benign spiritual principles known to any of the Abrahamic religions. Christianity, by contrast, is a religion that countenanced Crusades and slavery, that burned women as "witches" when they had done nothing more than upset a man, and that frankly has as much blood on its hands as Islam. I'm not sure that there is any religion entirely free of bloodshed, as even the Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam have been involved in some pretty grisly killing. Atheism, of course, has Mao and Stalin on record as maniacs as bloodthirsty as any Pope in history.
What 8:17 doesn't get is that violence is inseparable from the human condition, and can't be blamed on one religion or another.
They should be honest. Honest with themselves.
If you carn't be truthful with yourself then how on earth can you spiritually lead others to be better themselves?
Living a lie is what Hollywood superstars are made of.
Anonymous said...
What Dennis does not get is that if he really wants to save people from religion he should save people from the destructive war-mongering religions: Judaism and Islam. He belongs on another site. By bashing Christianity he is just bashing one of the better religions out there.
The posting is for that rare person who may see it here needing help, encouragement and some compassionate understanding during the process of losing faith for whatever personal reasons and experiences they may have had. Hopping from Splinter to Splinter and sliver to sliver is not the only path or awakening from a particular religious experience that results. Finding "one of the better religions" is also not an interest for some. The concept of "one of the better religions out there" escapes me. That sounds to me like "Hansel and Gretel is one of the better fairy tales out there."
l have belonged the Clergy Project almost since its inception in 2011. But I was still in messy transitions at the time, with all the associated and predictable emotions, mistakes and confusion. I now have returned to it having passed through those times successfully and with more understanding, compassion and helpful perspectives for those to whom the site is designed for. I understood when posting it, it would only be of interest to a very few if any in actual ongoing yet conflicted ministry. It is a common phenomenon in all denominations. I have spoken plainly with any number of pastors and priests who understand the difference between organizational speak and what they personally have come, over time, to recognize about any number of Biblical or Scientific realities. Or as many have admitted to me, "I know that is so but the church can't handle that." They also wanted to stay in ministry believing they might be a source of growth and maturity in the minds of parishioners. A concept not possible in the Church of God world of splits, splinters and slivers.
When I told John Spong, author of Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism and Episcopal Bishop how much I appreciated his book and used the understanding gained from it to better explain the problems with the Gospels, about which it was written he said:
"Thank you Dennis, That's nice... You won't survive ministry" Only prophecy in my life that came true.
I understand what people are going through very well. Here's something I put on Facebook last night. It ties in somewhat.
"I was perusing the latest AARP magazine and a thought occurred to me: if I could magically go back and talk to 18-year-old or 21-year-old me about the mistakes I was making, would I listen to me?
I could certainly present some solid facts I've come to realize in the interim, but I was so cocksure of myself at the time, it's a tossup as to whether my fanaticism could have been penetrated. I beat these keys daily trying to get across facts I now understand both here on Facebook and on a blog I frequent. It's a release and satisfying fulfillment for me, but I often wonder how many minds I actually get anything across to.
I again fall back on that old German saying "So soon oldt, undt so late schmart." That's pretty much life in a nutshell. I still make an occasional dumb mistake.
Cant wait for this to be on "Shark Tank" for investment , seed money and franchising!
Quote from regular Shark, "Mr. Wonderful"... "Its dog crap, way too easy to have a knock off, not patentable , and overvalued... IM OUT"
Yeah, you have to wonder how many religious professionals making Big Six-Figure Salaries are faking it [TKACH?]
I believe that Dennis’ intentions are sincere and compassionate. Thank you Dennis for caring and sharing. An admirer
7.43 PM
In that case, I have a land and house package for sale on Mars. It's going real cheap.
Anon at 10:56, I detected a note of sarcasm in your comment. Are you one of those scoffers people keep complaining about?
Retired Prof
Guilty, guilty, guilty. Yes Prof, I scoff at those who whitewash and/or refuse to see the Pharisees in front of them, when the body of evidence is plain.
This is another example of a church culture that is partial to evil. People who complain of being mistreated are attacked with all manner of accusations, including that Satan is influencing them. A minister favorite is the claim that offences are "real or imagined." This is murderous 'gas lighting' ie, making people question their own perceptions and sanity.
"If your brother sins against you, rebuke him." This means perceiving and acknowledging the evil done, and acknowledging the evil motive, if obvious. There is non of this 'oh let's pretend that evil doesn't exist cause Gods laws are harsh and unjust.'
“making people question their own perceptions and sanity”
Hmm. Interesting. On one hand, we should all be periodically assessing ourselves, and taking introspective inventory. Sanity check; reality check. On the other hand, when an ACOG minister attempts to spawn such introspection, he is generally trying to bring you around to his point of view, presenting that as sanity. In most cases, he is indulging in church-corporate gas-lighting, which is self serving, and in no way indicative of sanity.
Years ago, I offended a good friend. He and his wife came over, he had brought a case of beer, and asked if I wanted to get drunk with him. I told him that I was sorry, I’d have a couple beers with him, but did not believe in preplanning to get drunk. They abruptly left. I wasn’t a Christian at that time, but I do believe this experience informs the topic at hand. If you know that someone is going to lead you or your loved ones down a bad path, you’ve got to cut them off before harm or instability are introduced into your life. Secular law holds each of us responsible if we’re unknowingly in the car when the driver or other passenger decides to commit a crime. That’s the underlying principle of the scriptures, although Armstrongism always took it into the minutiae of their gnosticsm.
BB
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