Do you believe in God?

[Innula Zenovka]

I believe in the possibility that there is something (or several somethings) in the universe more powerful than us. Does that make them a god/gods? If humankind ever came in contact with a superior alien being, they might be worshipped. Would that make them a god?
The idea that there is something bringing order to the universe is appealing, but it's a big universe. Such an omnipotent force would be so far beyond our understanding that we couldn't exactly have conversations with it.
I know one thing, if there is a God, none of the world's religions have it right.

I don't think it's simply a question of power -- in polytheistic religions, after all, Destiny or the Fates (Norns, Grachae, Parcae, Sudenicy , depending on which country's myths we're talking about) are certainly the most powerful forces in the universe whom even the gods must obey, but they're not at all interested in worship and cannot be influenced by sacrifices, prayers or anything else. They are as indifferent to human or divine entreaties as is the law of gravity indifferent to whether it applies itself to apples falling on people's heads or to planets orbiting around suns.

My sometime father-in-law, a very devout and knowledgeable Brahmin (his father was a priest) once explained it to me thus: Brahman , the supreme lord of the universe, is infinite in his power and knowledge, exists outside the constraints of time and space as we understand them, and is thus completely incomprehensible to finite human minds and undescribable in finite human language.

In consequence, he said, humans can know and describe Brahman only very incompletely and indirectly, by contemplating aspects of the overall deity, the "godhead" as it's sometimes called, in the form of the innumerable Hindu gods and goddesses. Similarly, our finite language is insufficient to describe concepts that exist outside the dimensions of which we're aware, so we can form and articulate our insights only partially, by a range of artistic, musical and poetic media, since that's the only way we can begin to comprehend something so far outside our regular experience.

We see this in a completely non-religious context (or I do, anyway) when trying to make sense of attempts to explain quantum physics and suchlike -- ordinary language and everyday concepts work very well for things in our immediate experience, but start talking about something very very small or very very large and regular language, assumptions and concepts begin to fail, so any insights and arguments can be communicated only in the highly specialised language of mathematical equations.

So, are Shiva and Krishna gods? That's how they're conventionally regarded, certainly, but in another sense they're simply different aspects of the same thing, which is completely beyond human understanding.

 

[Ishina]

Whether Hitler was a Christian or not, he was certainly a theist. And the vast majority of the flesh workings of the Nazi machine were Christians. Among the worst Nazis were the Ustasa, who were fanatical Catholics and who would butcher people alive with rusty wood saws. There were also probably more Muslim Nazis than atheist Nazis.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Certainly that's the case with the Nazi top command; it's particularly apparent with the Holocaust, which developed from trying to encourage Jews to leave Germany by making life as unpleasant as possible for them, to deporting them and confining them to ghettos, to either murdering them (either locally in in death camps like Treblinka) or sending them to concentration camps as slave labourers, to sending them to combined camps that operated both as death camps or labour camps, as required.

This is a point that I've kept trying to make on other forums, with respect to complaints about certain modern-day comparisons that are off-topic for the thread. Nazi Germany didn't start with death camps, or even concentration camps. It literally started with nothing but "real Germans have either priority in or exclusive access to certain government programs and business initiatives".

 

[Clara D.]

I'm a hellenic polytheist, and since Zeus and the family aren't terribly subtle, a vase full of offerings exploding outward in the middle of the night when the cats are locked in the bedroom and there are no breezes or heat vents is what it takes to keep me out of trouble. Not terribly scientific or leninist but I'm certaintly a better and more mentally stable person then 2013 me as a result.

Why I don't do much "magic." Yes, you can get what you ask for. But the method of delivery can leave a lot to be desired.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

This is a point that I've kept trying to make on other forums, with respect to complaints about certain modern-day comparisons that are off-topic for the thread. Nazi Germany didn't start with death camps, or even concentration camps. It literally started with nothing but "real Germans have either priority in or exclusive access to certain government programs and business initiatives".

Irony.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Whether Hitler was a Christian or not, he was certainly a theist. And the vast majority of the flesh workings of the Nazi machine were Christians. Among the worst Nazis were the Ustasa, who were fanatical Catholics and who would butcher people alive with rusty wood saws. There were also probably more Muslim Nazis than atheist Nazis.

I dunno. You may well be more familiar with the detail of Hitler's writings on religion than am I (not at all difficult) but going by Timothy Snyder's account of Hitler's thoughts, as expressed in Mein Kampf, in his very well-reviewed Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Hitler's account of the world is of nihilistic struggle for survival between races, where the only law is that strong dominate and destroy the week.

He uses sometimes terminology familiar to Christians, but in a context and with a meaning completely divorced from any traditional doctrines:

Hitler’s worldview dismissed religious and secular traditions, and yet relied upon both. Though he was no original thinker, he supplied a certain resolution to a crisis of both thought and faith. Like many before him he sought to bring the two together. What he meant to engineer, however, was not an elevating synthesis that would rescue both soul and mind but a seductive collision that destroyed both. Hitler’s racial struggle was supposedly sanctioned by science, but he called its object “daily bread.” With these words, he was summoning one of the best-known Christian texts, while profoundly altering its meaning. “Give us this day,” ask those who recite the Lord’s Prayer, “our daily bread.” In the universe the prayer describes, there is a metaphysics, an order beyond this planet, notions of good that proceed from one sphere to another. Those saying the Lord’s Prayer ask that God “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” In Hitler’s “struggle for the riches of nature,” it was a sin not to seize everything possible, and a crime to allow others to survive. Mercy violated the order of things because it allowed the weak to propagate. Rejecting the biblical commandments, said Hitler, was what human beings must do. “If I can accept a divine commandment,” he wrote, “it’s this one: ‘Thou shalt preserve the species.’ ”

Hitler exploited images and tropes that were familiar to Christians: God, prayers, original sin, commandments, prophets, chosen people, messiahs—even the familiar Christian tripartite structure of time: first paradise, then exodus, and finally redemption. We live in filth, and we must strain to purify ourselves and the world so that we might return to paradise. To see paradise as the battle of the species rather than the concord of creation was to unite Christian longing with the apparent realism of biology. The war of all against all was not terrifying purposelessness, but instead the only purpose to be had in the universe. Nature’s bounty was for man, as in Genesis, but only for the men who follow nature’s law and fight for her. As in Genesis, so in My Struggle, nature was a resource for man: but not for all people, only for triumphant races. Eden was not a garden but a trench.

Knowledge of the body was not the problem, as in Genesis, but the solution. The triumphant should copulate: After murder, Hitler thought, the next human duty was sex and reproduction. In his scheme, the original sin that led to the fall of man was of the mind and soul, not of the body. For Hitler, our unhappy weakness was that we can think, realize that others belonging to other races can do the same, and thereby recognize them as fellow human beings. Humans left Hitler’s bloody paradise not because of carnal knowledge. Humans left paradise because of the knowledge of good and evil.

When paradise falls and humans are separated from nature, a character who is neither human nor natural, such as the serpent of Genesis, takes the blame. If humans were in fact nothing more than an element of nature, and nature was known by science to be a bloody struggle, something beyond nature must have corrupted the species. For Hitler the bringer of the knowledge of good and evil on the earth, the destroyer of Eden, was the Jew. It was the Jew who told humans that they were above other animals, and had the capacity to decide their future for themselves. It was the Jew who introduced the false distinction between politics and nature, between humanity and struggle. Hitler’s destiny, as he saw it, was to redeem the original sin of Jewish spirituality and restore the paradise of blood. Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission.

Hitler’s presentation of the Jewish threat revealed his particular amalgamation of religious and zoological ideas. If the Jew triumphs, Hitler wrote, “then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.” On the one hand, Hitler’s image of a universe without human beings accepted science’s verdict of an ancient planet on which humanity had evolved. After the Jewish victory, he wrote, “earth will once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago.” At the same time, as he made clear in the very same passage of My Struggle, this ancient earth of races and extermination was the Creation of God. “Therefore I believe myself to be acting according to the wishes of the Creator. Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.”

I'm prepared to be persuaded otherwise, but I think I'd need to see something from a serious historian of the period to understand what the counterargument is to Snyder's presentation.

Can you assist me here? The question isn't meant ironically; if you will point me to someone worth reading on the subject, I'll gladly and gratefully follow it up, but I need to know where to start.

 

[Ishina]

To be honest, it's been years since I've read any of this stuff. I never found Hitler especially interesting as an individual historical figure, not as interesting as Nazism broadly. I've skim-read some Nazi literature, mainly where it touches the subject of evolution and race biology (when I went through a phase of arguing with nationalists and other racist creatures) but it was always while pinching my nose and struggling against the fact that it's all so banal and surprisingly dumb.

Hitler's religious views were certainly complicated and not easily pitched in simple terms, and of course open to a lot of interpretation. It just seems to me that his own writing is rife with theistic anxiety and presuppositions, not merely written with theistic vocabulary and motifs. By my lights, it's too sky fairy and too accepting of theistic fundamentals to be atheist literature. The idea that he might have been faking only goes so far to distance theism from him, and certainly does not apply to all eras of his life and all morally relevant conduct.

There is plenty of quotable stuff ferociously critical of Christianity, and he apparently had a few issues with Jews, but he was also critical of atheism at various points. Of course, being anti-Christian does not mean you don't believe in gods, even a traditional Western monotheistic one. And nobody said he was consistent. People are not just one thing. Also let's not forget that he was a literal crazy fucking Nazi, and we're basically doing taxonomy of the worms in his head.

I'm also not sold on the idea that theism and nihilism are mutually exclusive. If you believe the universe has no morals, no meaning or no value as is, and needs something para-cosmic to create and bestow these things, then you've got nine toes and both hands inside nihilism. But that's another can of worms.

 

[Kara Spengler]

My first response will always be: "Which god?" cuz that fucks people up.

But after that, if I'm getting serious, I gotta go with Neil on dis one:



So what do you say?

Incoming flame war!

No, BTW.

 

[EmpressOfCommunism]

"Which god?" is great because it unites polytheists, pagans and atheists in annoying extreme fundies.

 

[Kara Spengler]

As someone with a physics degree, God is an unnecessary assumption. Maybe it exists, maybe not. But it isn't necessary to assume God to explain the world as we observe it. So why clutter up our thoughts with something we don't need? You could just as well ask if I believe in the Tooth Fairy or ghosts. I believe in relativity and quantum mechanics, because smartphones wouldn't worth without them. Quantum mechanics underlies how modern electronics works, and relativity is needed for GPS to work correctly. So if I observe smartphones working, then I *assume* those two physical theories are correct. What observation requires God to exist?

Back when I was about to start my physics degree I was going to my parents' church. Everyone there was oh so proud I was doing that, including the pastor.

Looking back, I have to wonder if they even knew what physics was.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Yes.

You'll probably want to stay inside during lightning storms.

One time before walking across a high-up long bridge it was threatening a storm and I jokingly cursed Thor. Partway through crossing it it started to rain and I though 'umm, maybe that was not the best idea'.

 

[Kara Spengler]

I'm never sure what "believe" means in this context, snce, to my mind, there's a big difference between, on the one hand, statements like "I believe in the Loch Ness Monster" or "I don't believe in ghosts," and, on the other, statements like "I believe in the free market" or "I believe in feminism."

The first kind is a statement about the factuality or otherwise of the proposition "Reports of the existence of a creature popularly known as the Loch Ness Monster are factually accurate."

The other, though, can't be similarly paraphrased, since it means something more like "this particular way of understanding the world and human society makes sense to me and seems to me to offer valuable insights into whole areas of life and behaviour."

When we talk about belief in a deity or deities, it seems to me that generally we're talking about the second kind of belief rather than the first, at least unless we're religious fundamentalists, so it's a question of whether the idea of a divine beings of whatever sort is one the feels right for you, in that it helps make sense of life in general and its meaning and purpose, if any.

Do I believe in God? No, not really. Once I did, but it faded over time, after my partner's death, and now if I believe in anything it's in something like H.P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, as a useful poetic symbol to consider when contemplating the chaos and entropy that govern so much of life, and in the Fates, as another useful symbol for the inexorable workings out of chains of consequences from actions and events, whether planned or entirely fortuitous.

That's what I think religion and belief are, really -- a form of shared conceptual and imaginative framework and set of symbols and cultural practices that help people consider and negotiate common human experiences and emotions.

Right, part of the problem is that definitions in words when you get into that spere of philosophy are so slippery you really need to have a meta-discussion first of what things mean. For example, I do not see 'morals' and 'ethics' as being synonyms .... yet many people do. I also distinguish between 'religion' (what you do and who you hang out with while doing it) and 'spirituality' (beliefs and the like, to also include non-belief).

 

[Innula Zenovka]

To be honest, it's been years since I've read any of this stuff. I never found Hitler especially interesting as an individual historical figure, not as interesting as Nazism broadly. I've skim-read some Nazi literature, mainly where it touches the subject of evolution and race biology (when I went through a phase of arguing with nationalists and other racist creatures) but it was always while pinching my nose and struggling against the fact that it's all so banal and surprisingly dumb.

Hitler's religious views were certainly complicated and not easily pitched in simple terms, and of course open to a lot of interpretation. It just seems to me that his own writing is rife with theistic anxiety and presuppositions, not merely written with theistic vocabulary and motifs. By my lights, it's too sky fairy and too accepting of theistic fundamentals to be atheist literature. The idea that he might have been faking only goes so far to distance theism from him, and certainly does not apply to all eras of his life and all morally relevant conduct.

There is plenty of quotable stuff ferociously critical of Christianity, and he apparently had a few issues with Jews, but he was also critical of atheism at various points. Of course, being anti-Christian does not mean you don't believe in gods, even a traditional Western monotheistic one. And nobody said he was consistent. People are not just one thing. Also let's not forget that he was a literal crazy fucking Nazi, and we're basically doing taxonomy of the worms in his head.

I'm also not sold on the idea that theism and nihilism are mutually exclusive. If you believe the universe has no morals, no meaning or no value as is, and needs something para-cosmic to create and bestow these things, then you've got nine toes and both hands inside nihilism. But that's another can of worms.

I'm particularly interested in the history of central and eastern Europe, and the western USSR, during the last century, so obviously the Nazi period and the Holocaust are a big part of that.

Certainly all the accounts I've read suggest that Hitler saw the world and history in terms of a blind struggle between different races for land and resources, which the winners deserve to win because, by defeating their racial enemies, they prove their superiority to them. If the enemies had been superior, then the victory would have been theirs.

I've certainly not gained an impression that Hitler thought God wanted Germany to annex the Sudetenland or invade Poland or the USSR. Hitler thought Hitler wanted to do it, in order, as he saw it, to ensure the victory of the Aryan race against their inferior Slavic and Jewish enemies. Are you aware of anything he wrote that suggests he thought God particularly disliked Poles and Russians (as opposed to Jews and Bolsheviks) in general and wanted Hitler to kill as many of them as possible?

I don't see that much depends on it, one way or the other. All I'm saying is that I think the first time I encountered the idea that Hitler was motivated by any sort of religious principle was in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, where he was trying to make some sort of polemical point rather than offer a serious historical account of anything, and I don't think it's an idea that's widely shared by historians of the period.

 

[Kara Spengler]

So Nazi Germany and WWII are religions as well these days?

Pretty much. In the same way the civil war is to southern US states that will not admit they rebelled and got an ass-kicking from the feds as a result.

 

[Clara D.]

I don't see that much depends on it, one way or the other. All I'm saying is that I think the first time I encountered the idea that Hitler was motivated by any sort of religious principle was in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, where he was trying to make some sort of polemical point rather than offer a serious historical account of anything, and I don't think it's an idea that's widely shared by historians of the period.

As far as I can tell, Hitler literally deified Germany. The Jews put their religion above Germany so had to go. Desertion was dealt with by hanging by the SS because it mean a troop had failed The Fatherland. Massive losses in battle were acceptable because it was more sacrifices to Germany. Concentration camps were meant to be work camps to force those that didn't want to work for Germany to do so anyways.

However, the Nazi party wasn't just Hitler, although it depended a lot on who Hitler felt like listening to that day. And there are definitely tones of occultism/paganism to the point where there's been some speculation whether the death camps were mass human sacrifices.

 

[Ishina]

I've certainly not gained an impression that Hitler thought God wanted Germany to annex the Sudetenland or invade Poland or the USSR. Hitler thought Hitler wanted to do it, in order, as he saw it, to ensure the victory of the Aryan race against their inferior Slavic and Jewish enemies. Are you aware of anything he wrote that suggests he thought God particularly disliked Poles and Russians (as opposed to Jews and Bolsheviks) in general and wanted Hitler to kill as many of them as possible?

No, and I'm skeptical that that's even a thing. I think most of those who claim God wanted or commanded them to do something do not sincerely believe it. If we found a way to isolate the minority who are sincere, I suspect their existence would map neatly with schizophrenia and other metal illnesses in the general population.

I mean, are we expected to believe God specifically told Bush to invade Iraq (or that Bush himself at least sincerely believes he heard such a command)? Absolutely not. It was clearly motivated by more worldly interests and political designs, extending far beyond one individual. But that doesn't mean his theism is forfeit, and in many other regards he's still very much a true believer. We don't have to square all of a person's actions with their religion in order for them to keep their religion. Obama is a Christian in church with his family and a Christian in the war room ordering drone strikes, and how much his religion informs or motivates his choices in either circumstance only he can know for sure.

I am of the mind that, for most religious people, their religion is not what causes them to act the way they do, but rather something they have and carry with them to pillage for ad hoc rationalisations for their actions, or to sooth the conscience after the fact, or to be pressed into the service of their wants and needs (or the denial of others' wants and needs) and lend them a veneer of moral justification and social acceptability. Religion is not a thing they think out from, but a thing applied in retrospect, or a thing wrestled with in the aftermath.

I believe that, when it boils down to it, one's particular god is not a god at all, but an avatar of one's own prejudices, preconceptions, biases, hates, fears, preferences. People are either raised to believe, or they are convinced to believe by appeals to the prejudices they were raised with or the prejudices they have adopted along the way. I've never heard a person's description of their god that wasn't a cringey and masturbatory exhibition of their own mental innards.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

As far as I can tell, Hitler literally deified Germany. The Jews put their religion above Germany so had to go. Desertion was dealt with by hanging by the SS because it mean a troop had failed The Fatherland. Massive losses in battle were acceptable because it was more sacrifices to Germany. Concentration camps were meant to be work camps to force those that didn't want to work for Germany to do so anyways.

Deified? I am unsure about that, but he wanted to breed a superior race of human beings, the Arian master race. The ideal was being slim, athletic, blonde hair, blue eyes and being tall, which is quite ironic when looking at how the top Nazis looked like. In order to achieve that he had a breeding program in action (Lebensborn) and wanted to purify the own race from bad influences. Which were, amongst others, handicapped people, gay people, Jehova's witnesses, jews... before the death camps started, handicapped people were killed in mercy killing programs.

When Hitler realized though that the loss of war was imminent, he wanted to destroy the Germans, because he thought that they've lost their right to survive due to others being stronger.

 

[Rose Karuna]

I find wonder in evolution and nature; sometimes it astounds me, makes or me happy or very sad but I'm always aware of it. For me, nature is omniscient. It's not a belief in God but it's more like a feeling that I have of Respect and Guardianship. I feel responsible for taking care of plants, animals [earth] and those humans who are less or not capable of taking care of themselves. I think I identify most as a "humanist". I think that "this is it", and that if we don't take care of our earth and people while were here, if we don't live the best life we can live, that we don't get a second chance.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

No, and I'm skeptical that that's even a thing. I think most of those who claim God wanted or commanded them to do something do not sincerely believe it. If we found a way to isolate the minority who are sincere, I suspect their existence would map neatly with schizophrenia and other metal illnesses in the general population.

I mean, are we expected to believe God specifically told Bush to invade Iraq (or that Bush himself at least sincerely believes he heard such a command)? Absolutely not. It was clearly motivated by more worldly interests and political designs, extending far beyond one individual. But that doesn't mean his theism is forfeit, and in many other regards he's still very much a true believer. We don't have to square all of a person's actions with their religion in order for them to keep their religion. Obama is a Christian in church with his family and a Christian in the war room ordering drone strikes, and how much his religion informs or motivates his choices in either circumstance only he can know for sure.

I am of the mind that, for most religious people, their religion is not what causes them to act the way they do, but rather something they have and carry with them to pillage for ad hoc rationalisations for their actions, or to sooth the conscience after the fact, or to be pressed into the service of their wants and needs (or the denial of others' wants and needs) and lend them a veneer of moral justification and social acceptability. Religion is not a thing they think out from, but a thing applied in retrospect, or a thing wrestled with in the aftermath.

I believe that, when it boils down to it, one's particular god is not a god at all, but an avatar of one's own prejudices, preconceptions, biases, hates, fears, preferences. People are either raised to believe, or they are convinced to believe by appeals to the prejudices they were raised with or the prejudices they have adopted along the way. I've never heard a person's description of their god that wasn't a cringey and masturbatory exhibition of their own mental innards.

I think we're maybe at cross purposes here.

I'm interested in politicians' religious beliefs only to the extent that they seem to affect that politicians' actions and policies.

So, for example, while Sadiq Khan's religion is certainly relevant to Donald Trump's hostility towards him, or the racist and Islamophobic campaign that Zac Goldsmith ran against him, it doesn't seem to me to affect his mayoral policies in general. However, the opposite is true of someone like Arlene Foster, whose religion is obviously very relevant to many the DUP's policies on social issues, though it's less clear it affects her views on how much financial support Northern Ireland should receive from Westminster.

In the case of Hitler, I don't see that his religious views, whatever they may have been, had much to do with his political views in general or his anti-semitism in particular. Rather, he seems to have seen politics and history in very materialist terms, as a constant struggle between races (not nations) for land and resources. Religion doesn't really seem to have entered into it, not even in self-interested attempts at post-hoc self-justification.

Hitler, it seems to me, at least when he was either making policy or writing about it, was guided not by what he thought God wanted him to do but by what he considered in the best interests of the Aryan race. So Jews were to be murdered not because they were Christ-killers or refused to accept the Christian faith or whatever (on the contrary, the fact someone was a practicing Catholic or Protestant didn't help him any if one of his parents was Jewish) but because they were the racial enemies of the Aryan race.

The only possible relevance Hitler's religious views it seems to me, is in the context of arguments about wars being caused, or not, by religion, but since I regard any discussion about the causes of wars that doesn't include some consideration of economics and the control of natural resources and trade routes is pretty simple minded and best left to people who are more interested in arguing about religion than in history.

Religion, to my mind, is a social and cultural activity that helps fill a variety of social and psychological needs for a lot of people, and provides a set of symbols and metaphors that some people find useful in contemplating and exploring the sort of questions about common feelings, fears and life experiences that are difficult to grasp using regular language. So do art, music, literature and plenty of other things too (see ETA below).

Far more interesting to me, ever since I discovered Nietzsche, is what happens when, after rejecting the idea of God, rather than following the Enlightenment's example of retaining broadly Christian values and assumptions about history and progress -- history moving in a predetermined direction towards some particular end -- you start to conduct the kind of radical transvaluation of all values that he suggests is entailed by the death of God. It's when you begin to do that you get to consider the really interesting questions, or the sort of questions I find interesting.

ETA: At the moment I'm reading The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt, and finding it fascinating. HIs analysis of a University of Virginia college football game as religious ritual is really illuminating. I was reading it this evening, having written this post, when I came to that chapter and it struck me as such a good illustration of what I meant about the social and psychological needs that are met by several apparently dissimilar activities that are, nevertheless, highly analogous when considered from a particular perspective.

 

[Zaida Gearbox]

As someone with a physics degree, God is an unnecessary assumption. Maybe it exists, maybe not. But it isn't necessary to assume God to explain the world as we observe it. So why clutter up our thoughts with something we don't need? You could just as well ask if I believe in the Tooth Fairy or ghosts. I believe in relativity and quantum mechanics, because smartphones wouldn't worth without them. Quantum mechanics underlies how modern electronics works, and relativity is needed for GPS to work correctly. So if I observe smartphones working, then I *assume* those two physical theories are correct. What observation requires God to exist?

Our former priest has a masters degree in applied physics. He was a teacher before he became a priest. He's still a priest - just not at our parish.