Remember the Pastor Trying Out Atheism for a Year? He Just Got Fired by His Christian Employers. Let’s Help Him Out

I find this "experiment" intriguing, and it is stirring up a shit storm as Bell is already being apologetic in regards to his former employers; justifying their actions. You see what he will find at the end of the road, if he is honest with himself, there is no God, religion is cruel, and voicing those views will cause backlash as he will be seen as "not normal." People he thought that were his friends will disappear one-by-one; even his own family will step back from him. His apostasy will be viewed as "just too much to bear," or "you're being influenced by the debil." He will hear "I'll pray for," at least once a day if not more. The fact he has gone public, good luck getting a job, hiding who you really are sucks.

Bell is in for a long journey, what many forget and he will soon discover, religious belief (or non) is ingrained in us since birth. Doesn't matter if you are Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu or whatever, those views inform every decision, every thought, that we make/have whether we like it or not. In order for him to embrace non-belief he will need to examine every part of himself. He will not come out of this unscathed, to discover that the very foundation of your life was a myth, well it just hurts. And yes I'm speaking from personal experience.

Last week, I posted about Ryan J. Bell, an adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University and Fuller Theological Seminary and a former pastor of a Seventh-day Adventist church. Bell decided to run an experiment where he would live like an atheist for a year while documenting his journey.

I criticized the methodology — I don’t think you can even pretend to be an atheist simply by reading books by atheist authors and attending atheist gatherings when your religious beliefs are still somewhere in the back of your mind — but I still applauded the fact that he was exploring atheism and wanted to learn more about it.

Unfortunately, exploring faith with a critical eye, as Bell was attempting to do, was a little too much for his employers. Just days after he made his announcement, they fired him until he rededicates himself to Jesus:

Remember the Pastor Trying Out Atheism for a Year? He Just Got Fired by His Christian Employers. Let’s Help Him Out