Your assessment, and I quote:

"www.clergyproject.org has hundreds and hundreds of atheists who state quite openly that they are/were pretending to be Christian pastors/priests."

This is what I replied to. I leave it to others to interpret your comprehension skills, even for comments you compose yourself.

You are just wilfully ignoring their claim that they once had a belief in their chosen god which was so compelling they became priests and preachers. On further consideration and personal experience, despite their immersion as spiritual leaders in their respective congregations, they come to their own conclusion that they are unable to believe in the tenets of their religion.

This is not faking or lying, your church might call it apostasy, and it frequently happens to typical members of the laity, like myself, who are not in the public eye or serving the needs of a congregation. We simply stop believing. And spare me the accusation that because I stopped believing I was never a beleiver in the first place. Yes the outcome in my case proves I was ultimately an atheist, but I sincerely did believe in my faith for many years. In a lot of cases that apostasy involves a great deal of deep pain and anxiety, attracting insults, discrimination, isolation and abandonment from intolerant believers.

I hope they don't mind me referring to them but I point to the problems Italianish, and Mikhael, like many others, here on AR, have had extricating themselves from their religions. Muslims are in favour of killing such people...seems your position is to just denigrate their character and tar them all as sexual deviants, found guilty by prejudiced speculation, and that's the problem with absolute objective moralistic law, it simply judges and executes claiming jurisdiction from this "No Higher Authority" that has no avenues for appeal.

I can make a watertight case against child sex abuse, the harbouring of child sexual abusers, domestic violence, homicide (and all the other -cides), intolerant treatment of apostates and even cruelty to animals, on the basis of reasoned humanist judgement. It is no less moral and sometimes more so than some theist applications.

In my country, secular legislated laws are objectively pronounced by a higher temporal legal authority, and legal prosecution relies on the consideration of each individual circumstance leading to considered subjective judgement and punishment. Its the sort of humanist practice exemplified by the story of Jesus who defended the woman taken in adultery by applying his subjective and compassionate judgement on the objective law of a "No Higher Authority".

edited