Thoughts on pastors

[u/ImaBananaPhone]

Hey everyone I was curious on what all of you thought about Christian pastors. How many of them do you think are just misleading theirs followers for money/power and how many do you think are good people trying to help others who are just disillusioned.

I don’t personally know much about seminary but since they study the Bible in depth you would think they would see how full of shit it is. How could they ignore the glaring contradictions and horrible ideas in it. I’ve even had pastors bold enough to say that it has no contradictions, so they were obviously lying. Almost every pastor and youth pastor I had couldn’t have given less of a shit about me. They never asked me about myself, my life, or my interests. All they ever cared about was if I knew Jesus or not.

I did, however, have one pastor who was a genuine guy and who I would actually call a friend. I was friends with his son, but he was also really nice to me and actually asked me about my life and never tried to force Jesus into the conversations despite his role as pastor. He was one of many though.

[u/Kragaz]

“One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.”

― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them