In 2019, I wrote a post titled Abby Johnson is a Hypocrite When it Comes to Abortion. In the post I stated:
Let me conclude this post with one further observation about the “abortion is murder” position. If it is God who opens and closes the womb, and Jesus holds in his hand the keys to life and death, doesn’t this make the Christian God the greatest abortionist and murderer since Adam and Eve got off the Ark? Far more inseminated eggs/fetuses are miscarried than are aborted. Who is culpable for these miscarriages? Damn, theology is a bitch, isn’t it? God alone is to blame for miscarriages, thus he is the greatest abortionist of all time. And if this is true, shouldn’t God be arrested, charged with murder, and executed? Most Evangelical anti-abortionists are pro-death penalty. These immoral hypocrites believe serial killers, mass murderers, and abortion doctors should be executed. Fine, but shouldn’t God face the same punishment? Or are his “murders” somehow different from those committed by mere mortals? Perhaps it is time for God to be strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection. If abortion is murder, how can Evangelicals arrive at any other conclusion but this one?
Note the line “If it is God who opens and closes the womb, and Jesus holds in his hand the keys to life and death, doesn’t this make the Christian God the greatest abortionist and murderer since Adam and Eve got off the Ark?” Regular readers of this blog know that I am a snarky curmudgeon who loves making humorous, and at times bawdy, statements — especially when drawing attention to outlandish Evangelical beliefs and practices. My writing reflects my personality, and that includes my snarkiness. Most readers enjoy my humor and those who don’t quickly exit stage right, never to be heard from again. The same goes for my occasional use of curse words. It seems words such as shit, fuck, or asshole are morally offensive, but covering up sexual abuse scandals and lying to children about an allegedly virgin-born, miracle-working, crucified, resurrected from the dead, missing for 2,000 years God-Man named Hay-Zeus is not. Saying hell, goddammit, or dick measuring contest (“Dr.” David Tee’s latest objection to my writing, jealous that my metaphorical dick is bigger than his) is so offensive that it warrants stoning, but a book that advocates, encourages, or commands all sorts of morally offensive behaviors is not.
Today, I received a comment on the aforementioned Abby Johnson post from Jared Brown. Brown read all of one post on this site before launching into a deep-throated attack on my character, accusing me of not being a “true” pastor, of not knowing the Bible, having t-r-e-m-e-n-d-o-u-s-l-y bad theology, and having a complete lack of basic Biblical literacy, even less than a three-year-old:
People please consider this. In the author’s bio below the story they say he was a pastor for 25 years. He casts stones at God calling him a murderer and questions, rhetorically, “isn’t theology a B?” All while not only having tremendously bad theology, but also a complete lack of basic Biblical literacy at all. Not only do you not have to be a pastor for 25 years, but I know three year olds who know better than to say that it was Adam and Eve who got off of the ark. Please consider the source. A man who claims to have been a pastor for 25 years who doesn’t know one of the most basic Bible stories that you can read within 20 minutes of opening the Bible. Not only would no Christian get that story wrong-certainly no true pastor would- I have never met a non Christian, secular person who did not know about Noah’s ark.
Of course, regular readers, along with anyone with common sense and critical thinking skills know that me saying ” since Adam and Eve got off the Ark ” is just the Evangelical-pastor-turned-atheist Bruce Gerencser being snarky (and hopefully funny). I have made countless similar statements over the years. Jared Brown is the first person to go all literal on me, unable to distinguish between me being a smart ass and me making a factual error. Instead of responding to the content of my article, Brown chose to attack me personally. Best I can tell, Brown is a young man from Texas. While I don’t know for certain what flavor of ice cream he eats, I suspect he is likely an Evangelical (or a conservative Catholic). I hope Brown will reflect on his comment, repent, and apologize. By all means, respond to my writing. Challenge my assumptions, interpretations, or conclusions. I encourage such interactions. However, suggesting that I wasn’t a “real” pastor or that I don’t know anything about the Bible is nothing more than an attempt to smear my character and dismiss out of hand what I have to say. Instead of interacting with the “message,” Brown went after the “messenger.” Instead of asking whether what I said is true, Brown spent his time attacking my choice of underwear.
Just in case Brown missed my biography: I spent fifty years in the Christian church. I was an Evangelical pastor for twenty-five years, pastoring churches in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. I attended an Evangelical college and married a Baptist pastor’s daughter. We homeschooled our six children, except for the five years we operated a private Christian school in Southeast Ohio. Over the course of the twenty-five years I spent in the ministry, I devoted thousands and thousands of hours to reading and studying the Bible, including reading countless theological tomes and listening to hundreds of sermons on cassette tape. All told, I preached over 4,000 sermons. I think readers can safely assume that I know the Bible inside and out, that I know where Adam and Eve and Noah and the Flood fit in the chronology of the Bible. If, after reading this post, Brown still thinks I am a “fake” pastor or have the Bible knowledge of a three-year-old (who can’t read and only knows what he is told), I propose we have a
I am confident that I will win this contest. I don’t know everything about the Bible, but I am satisfied that I have a sound working knowledge of the Biblical text, especially from an Evangelical perspective.
Well, enough. I have another post I need to work on– Noah receiving the Ten Commandments from Jesus on Mount Everest. 🙂
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.
I’ve also wondered, regarding the anti-abortion church crowd and their theology: if life begins at conception, and if a fetus is a descendant of Adam, does God send a fetus straight to hell after an abortion? After all, the fetus carries a sin nature in its newly formed cells and therefore cannot be in the presence of God, no way no how, having never accepted Jesus as savior and therefore not having its sin nature washed away by the blood of the Lamb.
This Jared Brown is simply “pulling your chain”. He himself has little understanding of Nature or how it operates. But that’s not his area of expertise. The problem is not Nature or Science.
It is Christian evangelical indoctrination. You know it. I know it. He knows it. We all know it. These folk may be deaf and blind to scientific scrutiny but they are not stupid. They are just very heavily indoctrinated.
So lets stick to the Bible. He’s probably an American who absolutely disbelieves in Socialism. Even more so in Communism. Yet. It was not Karl Marx that came up with the original Communist philosophy. The oldest written words of how to live the life of a good Communist, does in fact come from the Bible.
This did not surprise me. What really surprised me was that Marx took the concept almost word from word from the Bible. As far as I know, the philosophy of global Communism had its origins in a small settlement going back some 2,000 years called Nazareth. At that time, this settlement had a population of 50. It was so small that apparently, it did not make it onto any Roman maps. It was considered a “fly-by-night” town. There one moment. Vanished the next.
The Communist philosophy was attributed to one or more apostles of Jesus. So it seems that Communism has great staying power wherever exploitation of people reigned supreme. And here it is again. Rising up. This time in the American southern bible belt among people who feel exploited and want a redistribution of wealth. You can understand why it had great staying power with the youth of the Roman Empire. At that time Communism was known under a different name …… “Christianity”.
This then makes one ponder why Marx so dissed religion. Is he an unashamed plagiarist ?!? Even more so, has Jared Brown never picked up a Bible ? Any 3 yr. old could see this. So. My question is : Who is this Jared Brown ?!? Why is he pretending to be a Biblical student ? Don’t Biblical students have to actually open and read the Bible ? Or did this guy get his Biblical degree from some Diploma mill ?!? Just asking …
Bruce, I’ve noticed a propensity for Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and assholes (but I repeat myself), to take obvious metaphors literally, to take many if not most statements on a denotative meaning, completely ignoring the connotative meaning. It’s like they forgot what was taught in English class. And almost all of them do this when they are fighting for their authoritarian leader or their brand of beliefs online, Christian or political. They seem to lack imagination but are happy to promote falsehoods if it gets them a desired outcome.
Mr Brown might just be a bit hard of thinking. There is A LOT of it going around these days.
Ot is easier to attack the messenger than it is to engage in ideas. Poor fellow may possibly not understand written Sarcasm or snark. Additionally, a lot of evangelicals and far right folks think in literal and binary terms where nuance is minimal or nonexistent.
This is in regard to whether you were ever a ” real” pastor. this going be in the first part snark and sarcasm. The second part will be in regards to a person who pastored a local church from 200O to late October of 2014 until he was forced to resign from the pastorate because of an adulterous affair of the pastor becoming known,. His sermons got progressively worse towards the end of his tenure there. In regards to your being a “real” pastor, while a pastor in Texas did you ever get in any gunfights in Texas like Baptist pastor J. Frank Norris did ( actually he shot and killed a man who didn’t have a gun on him but still got off scot-free). IF not you are not a ” real” pastor ( or at least not a real Texas pastor). During your 25 years as pastor , can you cite at least one instance of where you tried to convert someone to Jesus and after their final rejection of your pleas, said person wound up suffering a unexpected violent death. If you can’t bring up at least one believable ( or even unbelievable) instance you never were a ” real” pastor. Did you have any type of tape ministry where you either gave away for free or sold to people tapes of your sermons, If not you were not a ” real” pastor. This is now in regards to the man who ” pastored” a local church from 2000 t0 2014. This man hadn’t an easy life. His father died from leukemia when he was ten years old, he was a drug addict for fifteen years who had a baby girl who died a few months after she was born, and he had thought about killing himself until he ran down the aisle of Calvary Baptist church in Normal Illinois( a church that his brother attended) and got saved in early 1984. Sometime in the late 1990’s he supposedly felt a call to the ministry and he went to Maranatha Baptist Bible college in Wisconsin and he graduated from that institution in 2000. Soon afterward he became the pastor of the local American Baptist Churches -USA denomination. Three years later he took that church out of that denomination and it was now independent Baptist. That move and some other moves did not sit well with the retired ABC-USA pastor who pastored that church from 1969 to 1994. In late 2005 that church dropped the Baptist affiliation and became non-denominational. A couple of months before that happened the Maranatha Baptist Bible college graduate went to Calvary Baptist Church in Normal Illinois to do the evening service. Some of the things he said did not sound right to a visitor of that church. The visitor to Calvary Baptist Church in Normal Illinois knew that the church sold tapes of the sermons done at that church. The visitor asked the people who made copies of the sermons to make several copies of the sermon this particular person gave. A few weeks later the visitor loaned one taped sermon to the retired ABC-USA Pastor for him to listen to. After having listened to the tape the retired ABC-USA pastor made some comments. He noticed that the younger man had sometimes backtracked on statements he made during the sermon and one comment by the retired ABC-USA pastor stuck in the mind of the person who loaned him the tape. The retired ABC-USA pastor didn’t refer to the new pastor as not being a ” real” pastor, but he did regard the Maranatha Baptist Bible College as not being a trained pastor.