This is the forty-ninth installment in The Sounds of Fundamentalism series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a video clip that shows the crazy, cantankerous, or contradictory side of Evangelical Christianity, please send me an email with the name or link to the video. Please do not leave suggestions in the comment section. Let’s have some fun!
Today’s Sound of Fundamentalism is a video clip of a sermon by Maury Davis, pastor of Cornerstone Church, Nashville, Tennessee. Davis, by the way, served time in prison for murder. A 2009 Nashville Scene news report had this to say about Davis’ murderous past:
It must be hard to watch the man who murdered your mother 30 years ago sermonize about the godly life. Ron Liles watches him gesticulate and stroll across a stage, not from a pew, but on his computer screen in suburban Dallas, some 700 miles away from the church in Madison, Tenn., where the preacher tells this story of profound redemption.
It’s Liles’ story too, though he wishes to God it wasn’t.
He wants to tell Pastor Maury Davis that he’s a liar for bending the greatest truth in his life. To remind the mega-church pastor that the price of his spiritual rebirth, his professed salvation, was the blood of Liles’ 54-year-old mother, Jo Ella. That every good thing Davis has in this life is borne on the back of a grieving son, in whose home her blood was spilled.
Rev. Davis must know that each time he stands at the pulpit, before his flock at Cornerstone Church, there are those who still desire a full accounting for his mortal sin. How could he not?
From the path Davis set out on so many years ago, no one could ever have guessed that he’d end up here in Middle Tennessee. First he was the son of a well-to-do family in Irving, Texas. Then a convicted murderer.
Yet today he’s a high-profile pastor, known for his brash style and conservative theology, with a branded media ministry and a house worth nearly $1 million in a gated Goodlettsville neighborhood.
Contrast this life with Liles’. He was the only child of parents who struggled to stay afloat, losing his mother to a senseless murder remarkable only for its viciousness. Now he’s an unassuming pharmacist working the graveyard shift at a CVS in Texas, left to wear the garments of raw anger and heartbreak, which aren’t easily shed.
Pastor Davis says he’s been forgiven for his sins. Washed in the blood, you might say. After all, who can argue with God?
Yet in the eyes of the few who know the whole story, Davis wears an indelible stain, however faded before the eyes of his own congregation, for the violation of the most sacred law of God and man. And in this world, not even the blood of his Savior has been able to wash it clean.
I don’t know whether to feel sorry for the people who follow this guy or get pissed off at them. If an atheist wrongs someone, the atheist can’t ask some imaginary god for forgiveness and let that count as forgiveness from the person he harmed. Of course, I have no way of knowing if Davis is sincere or just performing an elaborate con.
I feel for Ron Liles, and I wonder if Maury Davis is finding cheap grace, and I have wondered whether Susan Atkins and Tex Watson did the same thing in order to avoid facing the horror of what they had done.
I compel you to understand that God means for you to go to my church to hear me speak and I will beat the shit out of you as God commands! What the fuck is wrong with these people reptiles? Compel means the switch or the belt because that was this man’s youthful experience and there is nobody in the church willing to deal with his harm as a youngster and to help him understand that what happened to him was wrong and his father was a fucking asshole to hurt him like that! There is a difference, a primary difference between strong and forceful persuasion and abuse and beating. Fucking Christianity is so innane and works perfectly for abused children who become preachers. Can you hear me, Maury?
Woww, unreal. No words. Except what a fucking douchebag. And if “God” is real, he can have slime like this and shove them up his ass
Yet another grand story that no one can prove or disprove. I’m not fond of preachers putting themselves into sermon, unless it’s a story about how they messed something up. Certainly no humility in that message.
This guy, Maury Davis, is no better than one of those terroristic “clerics” who run the two Syrian-Plain countries that are Iraq and Syria.
Maury Davis, please, for the love of God (if God is truly good), please deny Christ (just shout out in public the words “Jesus Be Accursed!” three times in a row with a host of more than fifty witnesses who have recording devices, to let all of human society acriss the world know that you are willingly turning your back on God), and then move to either Iraq or Syria and become a fanatical radical-muslim cleric!
That’s right: openly curse Jesus Christ in public and start “compelling” people to serve either Allah or Islamic extremists or both! That would be a step in the direction of honesty on your part, and you will probably have a lot of fun terrorizing innocent people (which you obviously like to do even though you should not do such things) before you are finally killed (by somebody whom you will have grievously harmed) and Hell finally claims you for the rest of eternity!
Or you can repent if your vile depravity masquerading as “Christianity” when actually you are no better that the likes of that Persian/Iranian psychopath known as the Ayetollah Ruholla Khomeini! But chances are that you, Mr. Davis, would never repent of your depravity because you are a totally dyed-in-the-wool ASSHOLE !!!!
This man stole $200 million of my money and company my life’s work! Lookup World Bible Society, New Life!
Call me, I have a plan.
Best Regards
Norvell Olive