A few years ago, a former Jehovah’s Witness sent me an email detailing how he had found Biblical “truths” that he was certain that I have never seen before. He wants to “share” these truths with me. No thanks. Having been mined for over 2,000 years for the minutest of truths, the bible holds no more “new” truths. This man, once a card-carrying member of a Christian sect, supposedly reset his beliefs to zero and read the Bible in such a way that none of his past beliefs and biases played a part in his finding these “new” truths. Unless this man had a lobotomy or had his mind wiped in Men in Black fashion, I am quite sure he was unable to jettison past beliefs, biases, and hermeneutics. All of us are products of our environments, tribal influences, and pasts. While I am now an atheist, I know that my Evangelical past, to some degree, still informs my thinking about the Bible, religion, and morality. While I now have other tools at my disposal as I “think” about the world and my place in it, it would be less than honest for me to say that my mind is now free of everything that I was taught and experienced over the course of fifty years in the Christian church.
I am sure this man “thinks” his mind is a clean slate, but it’s not. The “new” truths that he thinks he has found are in a book written, collated, and ordered by men. From translations to verse numberings, the Bible is a monument to the works of men. It is evident that this man thinks the Bible is some sort of divine book. He says that his path to “truth” began with Proverbs 2:2-6:
So that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thine heart to understanding; Yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; Then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.
Saying that he is allowing GOD alone to teach him, this man is rereading the Bible. Shouldn’t he, first, determine if this God even exists? How about starting in Genesis 1-3 with its plurality of Gods? Regardless of how much mind-washing has been done, it is impossible to read the Bible and come to some sort of cohesive, unified “truth.” Christian sects have been trying to do so for two thousand years. Their work has resulted in the birth of thousands of Christian sects, each believing that their “truth” is THE truth.
Here’s an excerpt from this man’s email:
this may be a big god damn waste of time…but i feel compelled to reach out to you anyway.
i have similar background as you in that i spent a shitload of my lifetime wrapped up in an organized ‘christian’ religion where the mantra basically was, we’re right, everyone else is wrong. go out there and bring in those lost sheep to increase our numbers!
i was fully BRAINWASHED into their mode of thinking – and i was a ‘company man’ – staunch, exemplary and unmoving in its doctrines, so near their top ranking status of ELDER – my elderhood was imminent at any time.
but…then it happened…without going into all the gory details – my eyes were opened to the filth and corruption that made up this organization…full well knowing that if THIS organization had as much crap and outright debauchery contained within it, there is no fucking truth, there is no fucking right religion it’s all a fucking big load of stinking garbage in EVERY religion EVERYWHERE..
my wife and my kids walked away from it and anything else that smelled like IT or even slightly resembled IT. i was in IT as an adult for 22 years and i actually came to be within IT via my parent’s decision to do so – thought I bounced around doing everything BUT IT until i got married and started having kids.
the kicker is…there was something about the BOOK that I could not let go of. to me, it just seemed there was something WAY deeper than what any ‘christian’ religion had their wits of understanding around…and, it was surely EASY to see that no one religion was practicing what it truly said. because if one DID? well…for example, christ said unequivocally without exception – to: LOVE YOUR ENEMIES.
that bit right there? disqualifies EVERY FUCKING organized ‘CHRISTIAN’ religion out there. Every one of them. Period,
but – like I said – as I read it by myself or when I was in IT during a meeting (of course always seeing the way THEY would twist and take shit out of context to fit THEIR doctrine)…there was stuff that I could not just throw away.
i basically did a last-ditch ultimatum…and I did it to GOD, right to his FUCKING FACE…I said as I was in my office – sometime after the official denunciation and leaving of IT (Jehovah’s Witnesses by the way)…
i am going to start from scratch and read this one more time…one more time…and if i cannot get out of it anything that i can sink my life into? i am DONE. you WILL hate my guts. I WILL be a BAD nightmare and I will TRASH ANYTHING/EVERYTHING remotely resembling what is called ‘christian’…as to me IT WAS ALL BULLSHIT.
bible in hand..at my desk…with tears flowing from my eyes…I read Proverbs 2, honing in on verses 3 -6…
i said – i am starting from SCRATCH. I am coming into this book like i have never read it before. i will not take with me ANY of the doctrines/teachings/festerings of any religion i have leaned an ear to. i will do what it says…i will let GOD give me the understanding. I will NOT ask any pastor, preacher, commentary, book, scholar dipshit, fuckhead…i am going in ALONE…beliefs reset to…
ZERO.
I KNOW NOTHING.
well Bruce – in your website somewhere – I found this:
“Whatever you think God wants you to tell me, I have already heard it.”
I can fully guarantee – that what I have been shown – will line up with NOTHING you have ever heard. some of it is like hiding in plain sight – and upon going into the seeking of it as to hid treasure and found gold…well, that is what it is – i did have to do some work to pull things together
…
thing is Bruce…there is SO MUCH of it (and I mean NEW STUFF you will not have been exposed to)…I’ll have a hard time figuring where to start.
Here I am, six years later, still unconvinced. Maybe today will be the day a Christian brings new facts that will challenge my unbelief. So far, color me unimpressed.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen 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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Uh-huh. New truths.
I couldn’t resist the urge to engage a Rabidly Mormon relative who tried to evangelize me today. He made the mistake of telling me that us atheists really know that God exists. It’s a bad idea to tell that to this atheist. He decided to disengage after I replied. Yay!
The thing is, I don’t have much patience for holy books, be they Bronze Age, Iron Age, 7th century, 19th century, or modern. They all have untestable claims, testable claims that are false, and are full of restrictions that inhibit the full growth of the human spirit. I didn’t get a chance to tell my relative that, which is probably all to the good. He caught me at a cranky moment, and there’s something to be said for preserving peace in the family.
I wonder what it is about inner these workings of the brain, the thinking process of the man who reached out to you, or any other gungho religious fanatic for that mattrr that insists there is a supreme being? This man seems to think a deity’s truth is out there but somehow that powerful deity cannot convey it to us humans! He is no different than any other “church hopper”. He has not stopped to question intelligently the very existense of god. It is called reality.
Bruce, I’m wondering how many posts this guy read because i remember at least a few different posts where you mention that you have read the b-i-b-l-e™ cover to cover multiple times. im pretty sure he has nothing new to bring to the table except a pig with lipstick
Former JW: “I can fully guarantee – that what I have been shown . . .”
Wow. And God chose Former JW out of all who have come before, all who are now and all those yet to be, to reveal the “new stuff.” Amazing.
Former JW must think he’s the first one to come along and announce ‘Hey everyone/Bruce! I get it. But you know, I finally figured it out. Listen to this “new stuff” I found.’
Hi Bruce,
“new stuff”
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm????????
.
Why doesn’t this guy acknowledge that his “new” view(s) are subjective? He doesn’t have any independently verifiable evidence for his “god”. It would be interesting to know what he thinks the approximate date of the universe is.
If this person has any evidence for his view of the bible let him present it. I bet he can’t establish his position. But let us say that he could establish his view of the bible. How does he relate the bible’s statements about empirical reality to the evidence from science?
I be surprised if he replies to you. And if he does reply, I would “bet” that he isn’t able to justify his position.
Shalom,
John Arthur
i did have to do some work to pull things together
Awww, not NOW Sisyphus! I’m having a baloney sandwich!
. . . and for only $29.95, he will reveal his first set of “truths.” For an annual subscription to this “truthiness,” you will get a bonus of the inner workings of his mind.
Woww, this dude is a Christian along the vein of “Dr”. Gene Scott with all the non-stop cussing, lmao
I’m not offended by profanity, I use the f word as punctuation.
But if I were a Christian, trying to demonstrate my sincerity and conviction that I knew something important… trying to save someone, I think I’d leave the swearing out of my commentary.
Also. What the actual fuck?
To be fair to the guy he has come from a cult that twists the bible to fit their new doctrine and he is probably just excited to read it on its own terms without the watchtower telling him what to think.
I think he assumes that Bruce’s church organisations are like the JW’S but in reality they are less cult like so Bruce will have been exposed to a lot more views on the bibLe than this poor guy has.
Now, I’m always curious. Not that I would think that this guy has a “new” idea, just I would seriously wonder what idea he thought was new. I’d ask…but if it was totally mundane to those of us from more “regular” Christian denominations (aside from JW), I would probably be quite exasperated.
Then again, this person does make assumptions about Bruce. I can see why Bruce wouldn’t really have a bit of interest in this.
I did this same exact thing. I read the Bible again, claiming I was doing so without the lens of my former denomination. I was successful to some extent, and I did realize that the Bible did not line up with my old denomination. I was Church of Christ, and they claim to be 100% followers of the Bible, and the fact that they don’t match up to the Bible much at all is pretty well indisputable, so this was like a major revelation to me. Like what’s-his-nuts up there, I also believed I was making some fabulous new ground-breaking discovery, uncovering Biblical truths that nobody knew, and I couldn’t wait to tell people. It didn’t take me long to learn that there wasn’t anything particularly innovative about my new and improved approach to the Bible. I was simply now a progressive among progressives. It seems they had a word for me already: Episcopal. I had assumed that NOBODY had been affected so profoundly, because these discoveries were new for me.
I imagine that’s the case with your friend here. It’s all dazzlingly new to him, so he figures it must be so for everybody.
Drugs can really do a number on a biped and the JW dope is cut with hallucinogens, with meth and heroin, with a cocktail of brainwashing over many years! It brings on a state of woo that can make a man run off at the mouth with nonsensical guarantees, magic in his eyes. It is very sad that drugs are so popular, that the harm done in this life is so so traumatizing it can lead to dazzling, raving rant that is only cliché-on-fire, the same old same old repackaged and left under the proverbial Christmas tree.
Oh boy. This happens a lot. Someone always thinks they’ve discovered some brand new truth, had an epiphany, or been the only/first one to have a sacred revelation. It must come as such a huge shock to them to learn they’re not the first to learn this ‘shocking truth’.
A x-tian troll on an atheist blog told me he knew god and jesus were real cos he’d ‘walked with god for 40yrs.’ I replied that I was guessing he believed his own particular sect/group/church was the only right one. He replied immediately saying he didn’t go to church, there were too many false x-tians in churches. He didn’t respond to my next comment on Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood on how to derail a x-tian’s faith. This was to make him want to nit-pick every small item of doctrine so that he moved further and further away from his fellow-believers. He’d then become a church of one person – cos no one else had his purity of doctrine.
We may disagree on almost everything , but go on those Bengals , one game away from a Super Bowl trophy.
Thanks, Marfin. I may be dying, but Sunday was a wonderful day for the Gerencsers!
Isn’t it technically impossible to read something without bringing your own lens into it, at least to some degree? I am a Gen X white American college educated exvangelical white collar person born in the South who moved to the Northeast – so all these aspects affect how I view what I read and hear.
YES, YES, YES!
It’s also very difficult to spot our own biases. I suspect I know about 20% of my own, and that number might be inflated…and that’s after doing a LOT of work, dragging the damned things out from the back of my mind. Sigh. Humans.
What has been will be again
What has been done will be done again
There is nothing new under the sun.
Oh, wait…..