After a Crisis of Faith, Finding a New Secular Mission
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/us/after-a-crisis-of-faith-finding-a-new-secular-mission.html?_r=0
Teresa MacBain is a former evangelical minister working with the Humanist Community Project at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: September 20, 2013
Nine days before Easter in 2012, the Rev. Teresa MacBain sent a letter to the congregants she had pastored for three years at a Methodist church in Tallahassee, Fla. For much of that time, she had preached the Gospel every Sunday, only to slip each Monday into tormented doubt.
Finally, she realized her faith crisis was over. She no longer believed in God. The daughter of a minister, the product of a divinity school, the enthusiastic evangelist doing the Lord’s will, she told her followers that she was resigning her pulpit.
Her first public comments, a few weeks later, sounded brash, as she told a convention of atheists that she would gladly burn in hell with them. Deeper inside, however, she felt more sorrow than triumph, more exile than liberation.
“After I stepped away from my ministry, I literally stepped off the cliff," Ms. MacBain, 45, recalled in a recent interview. “I didn’t know what life would be like without a church. I was depressed. I was out there in limbo all at once. There is no community. There is no social network. The majority of friendships are gone. There is no place I can go every week where I know people and they know me.”
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The support group for atheist clergy who are going through what she is going through. Dan Barker of the FFRF was one of the people who started it. Apparently, it's a good group. But it keeps its membership secret, as it should.
Heaven help us if we start outing atheists who aren't ready, willing, and able to come out of the closet. (Related to an interesting post by rug, earlier today.)
Apparently a common reason that religious people turn to non-belief is studying the Bible. Or, so they say. It would be interesting to study such a thing.
kind of person they are reaching out to.
The meme that people turn to atheism after reading the bible is tired and untrue, imo. I do think that many who are raised in a religious environment may ask questions and see contradictions as they learn more about their particular religion and this may lead them to recognize that they just don't believe.
But I continue to think that belief and lack of belief are pretty innate qualities that are highly individualized. For every person that has embraced a belief system or embraced non-belief, a think there are that many reasons why.
This is why I reject the notion that people should just walk away from their religious beliefs. To me it's like telling a GLBT person that they should just walk away from their sexual orientation.
But in the end my answer to that question doesn't mean that that it is congenital that I don't believe. I think it probably is congenital but there's no science to confirm or deny it. Therefore, I have to withhold any firm opinion either way. I have to say, I think it is, but I don't really know. I can convince myself that there are counter-examples, too.
This is why Dennett's idea to study these things may be an important one. It's one reason why I support him fairly strongly here.
Another aspect of the claim is that it tends to delve fairly deeply into the murky waters of evolutional psychology which is a controversial subject in its own right.
So, I have to just shrug in spite that I personally think it very well may be true.
It was about brain science in the justice system.
That's another dodgy thing, too. The brain is fucking complex and we have a long way to go before we understand how it all works, which is basically the conclusion they came to. (Sorry, Ray Kurzweil.) 
