A Letter to My Pastor

Dear Pastor Gary,

When I tell my religious friends about the Tierrasanta Seventh-day Adventist Church, they are, at best, skeptical about my description of your views and approaches to leading service. I told them that my pastor does not believe in Satan or Hell, accepts the Bible as the work of men, does not take the Bible literally, believes in evolution, and his sermons are brief and humorous. Some of them even visited the church to either marvel at or confirm these assertions.

I have been attending Tierrasanta for over four years, and I wish to express my admiration for your open-mindedness that is so rare in religious circles. Your enlightened views are precisely what kept me coming to Tierrasanta. I view your message as being parallel to that of Thomas Paine, who writes in The Age of Reason, "I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." I agree with much of Jesus' word and what you profess in your sermons; but I also agree with Douglas Adams when he asked, "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Those fairies being the 28 fundamental beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventist Church as well as any form of dogmatic faith in general.

You are a follower of Christ—you promote love and kindness towards those around us, read Bible scholars, and accept scientific evidence. You tell us the Lord wants us to use Reason as our guide. "Come now, let us reason together," says the Lord in Isaiah 1:18. But with so many of your views being based on Reason, I frankly can not fathom that you are a pastor or a Christian. I stand by Benjamin Franklin, who said, "The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason." By professing faith you contradict your message. Remaining a pastor—regardless of the message—is engendering the acceptance of religious dogma worldwide. In addition to going against the advance of the Enlightenment, identifying oneself as a Christian—or with any other system of beliefs—ostracizes those identifying with other or no beliefs.

I really think that you retain the position of a pastor so as to have the trust of the congregation to remove in them the sense of guilt and fear that their religion instills in them. You tell us, “Don’t worry if you are saved for it is the Father's great pleasure to let you into the Kingdom,” and in the words of St. Paul in Romans 13:8, "He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law." As you said, the Bible is summarized in the aforementioned verses. You remind me of somebody claiming to be a psychic, who knows that he does not possess supernatural powers but justifies his deception to himself by believing that he does good through satisfying certain human desires, such as interacting with a deceased loved one or knowing the future, etc. Whereas in fact, he is promoting a distorted view of the world—as a place where miracles that defy the laws of nature are possible—leading them further from reality. By remaining a pastor you promote delusions, even if you yourself don’t accept all of the 28 Fundamental Beliefs, etc.

The Bible was written and rewritten by men to the people of their time, hundreds of years ago. Why then don't you seize using the Bible as a guide to deny things that promote fear and guilt and simply admit that the Bible is not a reliable source of knowledge? People are capable of leading secular lives while adhering to "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man" (Thomas Jefferson, on the moral teachings of Jesus) without being caged by fear, believing in miracles, and inadvertently stifling social and scientific progresses while imposing on the rights of fellow human beings. Wasn't this the reason why Thomas Jefferson wrote The Jefferson Bible?

I honestly do not see what is holding you back from renouncing Christianity, if you are indeed a Christian, as you claim. Does retaining your career as a pastor and your public image really worth the price of misleading the credulous masses? As Carl Sagan, the great American astronomer, wrote, "It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it [as religion does] but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us." I understand the pressures that could prevent you from leaving the Church: the embarrassment of admitting the falsehood of a long-held belief, the feelings of betrayal from family and the congregation, among others. But this act of renunciation of faith would be of even greater courage in the face of these adversities—courage that our world so desperately needs in promoting Reason—and not superstition—as our guide.

Sincerely,

Daniel