Jerry DeWitt | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 17, 1969 |
| Occupation | Writer, public speaker |
| Genre | Nonfiction |
| Notable works | Hope After Faith |
| Spouse | Christy DeWitt |
| Children | Paul (Son) Brett (Stepson) Casey (Stepson) Maggie (Stepdaughter) Kayley (Stepdaughter) |
Jerry DeWitt (born September 17, 1969) is an American author and public speaker. [1] [2] He is a former pastor of two evangelical churches, who publicly deconverted to atheism in 2011. [3] [4]
DeWitt is a former pastor of two churches surrounding DeRidder, Louisiana, a town where two-thirds of the population report membership in a faith organization. [1] [5] [6] DeWitt first experienced doubts about his religious beliefs when he contemplated the idea of hell. [7] He later found himself unable to invoke God's help after a congregant asked him to pray for her injured brother. [1] He preached for the last time in April 2011. [1]
After becoming aware that he no longer held theistic beliefs, DeWitt joined the Clergy Project, a group which lends confidential support to preachers who no longer believe in God. The Clergy Project was founded by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Linda LaScola, former preacher Dan Barker and anonymous non-believing ministers, "Adam Mann" and "Chris." [8] DeWitt's outing as an atheist occurred in October 2011 after a photo circulated online of DeWitt and Dawkins, taken at a meeting of freethinkers. [7] DeWitt was the first member of the Clergy Project to drop anonymity and speak freely about his involvement in the project.[ citation needed ] After more information emerged on Dewitt's loss of faith, he was fired from his secular job, and his wife left him. [9]
DeWitt has written a book based on his career and experiences entitled Hope After Faith. [10] The 288-page autobiographical book was written by Dewitt and Ethan Brown, and published in 2013 by Da Capo Press.
The former fundamentalist minister hosted the first meeting of the Community Mission Chapel, which DeWitt calls a "Secular Service". In a story for the New York Times, DeWitt said, "Just because we value critical thinking and the scientific method, that doesn't mean we suddenly become disembodied and we can no longer benefit from our emotional lives." [11]
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is an American non-profit organization, which advocates for atheists, agnostics, and non-theists. Formed in 1976, FFRF promotes the separation of church and state, and challenges the legitimacy of many federal and state programs that are faith-based. It supports groups such as nonreligious students and clergy who want to leave their faith.
Lakewood Church is an evangelical non-denominational Christian megachurch located in Houston, Texas. It is one of the largest congregations in the United States, averaging about 52,000 attendees per week. The 16,800-seat Lakewood Church building, home to four English-language services and two Spanish-language services per week, is located at the former Compaq Center. Joel Osteen is the senior pastor of Lakewood Church with his wife, Victoria, who serves as co-pastor.
Thought for the Day is a daily scripted slot on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 offering "reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news", broadcast at around 7:45 each Monday to Saturday morning. Nowadays lasting 2 minutes and 45 seconds, it is a successor to the more substantial five-minute religious sequence Ten to Eight (1965–1970) and, before that, Lift Up Your Hearts, which was first broadcast five mornings a week on the BBC Home Service from December 1939, initially at 7:30, though soon moved to 7:47. The programme is broadcast by religious thinkers; often, these are Christian thinkers, but there have been numerous occasions where representatives of other faiths, including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism, have presented Thought for the Day.
The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a US nonprofit organization that works to mitigate belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal, as well as to fight the influence of religion in government.
The Root of All Evil?, later retitled The God Delusion, is a television documentary written and presented by Richard Dawkins in which he argues that humanity would be better off without religion or belief in God.
Daniel Edwin Barker is an American atheist activist and musician who served as an evangelical Christian preacher and composer for 19 years but left Christianity in 1984. He and his wife Annie Laurie Gaylor are the current co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He has written numerous articles for Freethought Today, an American freethought newspaper. He is the author of several books including Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist.
I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith Through an Atheist's Eyes is a non-fiction book by Hemant Mehta, an atheist and blogger, and podcaster, who describes his visits to a variety of Christian churches. These visits initially occurred as a result of an eBay auction Mehta created where he offered to visit the worship services of the winning bidder's choosing. The media later branded this auction as Mehta "selling his soul."
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is a division of Center for Inquiry (CFI) founded by British biologist Richard Dawkins in 2006 to promote scientific literacy and secularism.
Christian atheism is a form of Christianity that rejects theistic claims of Christianity, but draws its beliefs and practices from Jesus' life and/or teachings as recorded in the New Testament Gospels and other sources.
A Reader in a Christian Science church is a member of the congregation who has been elected to serve in one of two positions responsible for church services. Each week's sermon in Christian Science churches is outlined in the Christian Science Quarterly, prepared months in advance, and is the same in all Christian Science churches, worldwide. A lay church, the congregation elects readers from the congregation and the serve as readers for a period of time ; the sermons consist of passages from the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, are studied as lessons during the week and are read aloud to the congregation on the Sunday following.
Matthew Wade Dillahunty is an American atheist activist and former president of the Atheist Community of Austin, a position he had previously held from 2006 to 2013. Since 2005 Dillahunty has been host of the televised webcast The Atheist Experience. He formerly hosted the live Internet radio show Non-Prophets Radio and founded the counter-apologetics project Iron Chariots.
Atheist feminism is a branch of feminism that also advocates atheism. Atheist feminists hold that religion is a prominent source of female oppression and inequality, believing that the majority of the religions are sexist and oppressive towards women.
The term New Atheism was coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 to describe the positions promoted by some atheists of the twenty-first century. New Atheism advocates the view that superstition, religion and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated. Instead, they should be countered, criticized, challenged by rational argument, especially when they exert undue influence, such as in government, education, and politics.
The Clergy Project (TCP) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that provides peer support to current and former religious leaders who no longer have faith. The group's focus is to provide private online forums for its participants, and assistance through career transition grants, and subsidized psychotherapy sessions.
Recovering from Religion (RfR) is an international non-profit organization that helps people who have left, or are in the process of leaving religion, or are dealing with problems arising out of theistic doubt or non-belief. RfR provides support groups, telephone and chat helplines, an online peer support community, and online meetings for "people in their most urgent time of need". It is headquartered in Kansas City, Kansas.
Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer. Dawkins himself has stated that his political views are left-leaning. However, many of Dawkins's political statements have created controversy among left-wing and atheist communities.
The secular movement refers to a social and political trend in the United States, beginning in the early years of the 20th century, with the founding of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism in 1925 and the American Humanist Association in 1941, in which atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, freethinkers, and other nonreligious and nontheistic Americans have grown in both numbers and visibility. There has been a sharp increase in the number of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated, from under 10 percent in the 1990s to 20 percent in 2013. The trend is especially pronounced among young people, with about one in three Americans younger than 30 identifying as religiously unaffiliated, a figure that has nearly tripled since the 1990s.
Teresa MacBain is a former Methodist minister who came out as a nonbeliever in 2012, and returned to her faith in 2016.
The first Reason Rally was a public gathering for secularism and religious skepticism held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on March 24, 2012. The rally was sponsored by major atheistic and secular organizations of the United States and was regarded as a "Woodstock for atheists and skeptics". A second Reason Rally was held on June 4, 2016 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C..
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