Earlier today, an Evangelical Christian named Richard left the following comment on the post titled Is it Possible to Reform the IFB Church Movement? Richard’s words are emboldened. All spelling and grammar are in the original.
Bruce, as a God fearing bible believing Christian in Michigan in the same areas you left… I want to thank you for your honesty and for being instructional to me.
Richard wants me and the readers of this blog to know that he is a God-fearing, Bible-believing Christian who lives near Pontiac, Michigan. Based on the buzz words he used, I think it is safe for me to conclude that he is a Fundamentalist.
You are an unabashed Apostate that has embraced his decision. I had left the Church and on was on the path of becoming an apostate myself when God intervened. One thing that always bothered me since then is WHY I was on the path of becoming an Apostate, and also how someone as yourself could become an apostate. You were an Enigma that contradicted my IFB upbringings of “Once Saved always saved”. It was the Bible and God’s word that showed me my error (or incomplete understanding)… 1John 2:19. and also Tares and Wheat describes your condition.
Richard recognizes that I am an unabashed apostate. Of course, I wear many other labels: agnostic atheist, humanist, socialist, pacifist, liberal, progressive, and circumcised Gentile. Richard, however, wants to focus on my apostasy; my denial of central claims of Christianity.
At one time, Richard considered people such as myself to be enigmas, people who didn’t fit in his narrow, defined theological box. However, God has since shown him the light, and now he’s arrived on this blog to set me straight.
Richard believes that I John 2:19 describes my life:
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.
The Message puts it this way:
They left us, but they were never really with us. If they had been, they would have stuck it out with us, loyal to the end. In leaving, they showed their true colors, showed they never did belong.
Wow, no Christian has never, never told me this before! OMG, I never was a Christian. Sigh. (Please see Why I Use the Word “Sigh.”) I have no idea how much of my writing Richard has read, but whatever he has read, he has concluded from it that I was never a Christian. Nothing in my story suggests that Richard is right, but why let facts get in the way of a strawman?
Your are (now) no more a mystery to me than is Judas who worked Directly with Jesus. If Judas could be an apostate, certainly someone as yourself who was fed a tainted perspective of Christianity from a dysfunctional family and controlling hypocritical “religious” leaders is possible! But both cases are the same… “They were never with us”.
Notice how Richard frames my life: I was fed a “tainted perspective of Christianity from a dysfunctional family and controlling, hypocritical religious leaders.” Richard provides no evidence for his claims. Using a nit comb, he found a few lice in my story and concluded that I am no different from Judas who betrayed Jesus. Instead of taking the time to comprehensively read my writing and interact with me personally, Richard has judged my life and found it wanting. Nothing I can say at this point will change his mind, so I won’t try, except to say, Richard, go fuck yourself.
You don’t offend me, you only prove God’s word to me to be true. You offer comfort to fellow apostates, but you also offer validation of God’s word to true believers, even if that is not your intent.
I am glad I can be of help. You also provide validation to me and the readers of this blog; that you are a judgmental asshole.
You might not know this, Richard, but many of my readers are Christians. Not your brand of Christian, but Christians nonetheless. I suppose you will consign them to the Lake of Fire too.
Bruce, consider this… If I am wrong and self deluded and you are right, I suffer no damage after I die. If I am self deceived, I still count the Peace I attribute to Jesus and Gods Grace as doing far more good in my life than what I was without it and pass onto oblivion in ignorant bliss. But If the Bible is right, if God is real, it is not the same for you. You will hear those terrible words.. “depart from me, I never knew. you” as you pass on into eternity in outer darkness where the only question left is, will you be a wailer or a gnasher…
Richard attempts to use Pascal’s Wager and miserably fails. Evidently, he wants me to pretend to be a Christian; to fake it until I make it. Richard provides no evidence for his claims, yet he just expects me to believe. Fine, I believe. Praise Jesus, I’m headed for Heaven when I die. Boy, that was easy.
Richard presupposes that his peculiar brand of Christianity is true; that it will be his God that will be on the throne of Heaven when he arrives someday. What if he is wrong? What if he gets to Heaven and finds Allah on the throne or Buddha? Better yet, what if he arrives in Heaven and finds out that atheism was the one true religion; believing in Jesus sends a person straight to Hell (also called Mar-a-Lago)?
As is common with Fundamentalists, Richard lacks curiosity. (Please see Curiosity, A Missing Evangelical Trait.) He fails to consider his own atheism or the fact that his being wrong could have real-world consequences. Richard thinks that living according to his interpretations of the Bible is preferable, even if God doesn’t exist. This is patently untrue. The Bible is inherently anti-human. Richard Dawkins was right when he described the Old Testament God this way:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
This is the God Richard wants me to worship.
The New Testament God is no better. One need only ponder God offering his son as a blood sacrifice for the behavior of others and the violence he will rain down upon the earth as recorded in the book of Revelation to see that this God is unworthy of worship too.
Richard, if you are reading this, you worship an evil God. Even if he was real, and he’s not, I wouldn’t worship him.
That brings me no Joy I don’t want that for you. I believe you were made in God’s image and loved by God so much that he Died for you before you denied him. I don’t want you to end up separated from God for eternity, but it’s not up to me. You can equally find both high profile apologetics that have made arguments defending the bible and also die hard Apostates breaking apart the bible to fit their narrative… But God is the ultimate author of our (your) faith.
And I know every argument. There’s nothing new under the sun, and that includes apologetical arguments. If Richard has read my writing, he knows that I reject the central claims of Christianity. I have weighed them in the balance and found them wanting. If zealots such as Richard want to win me back to Jesus, they are going to have to come up with better evidence and arguments. Until then, I cannot and will not believe. (Please see The Michael Mock Rule: It Just Doesn’t Make Sense.)
Richard says that God is the author of faith; that if I ever receive saving faith, it will come from God. Fine. Why, then, did Richard bother to comment on this site? Why did he bother to judge my life? Surely, God knows where I live. He knows my email address and cellphone number. God can give me faith any time he wants. It’s up to him, so I’m waiting. I won’t, however, hold my breath.
Bruce, I love you and I don’t want you to die in your sin.
No, you don’t love me. You don’t even know me. Stop with the syrupy, cheap Evangelical “love.” My love is reserved for my wife, my children, their spouses, my grandchildren, my friends, and the Cincinnati Reds and Cincinnati Bengals. I love good food, traveling, and writing. I even love many of the people who frequent this blog, including my editor. But you, Richard? I don’t know you. I know nothing about you. You may be a lovable person, but based on your comment above, you are not someone I am interested in loving. Instead, I pity you. You live in a closed-off world, a world walled off from all the wonderful atheists, humanists, pagans, Buddhists, Muslims, Unitarians, liberal Christians, and LGBTQ people, to name a few, in the world. All you see is up or down, in or out, saved or lost, Heaven or Hell. My world is much broader than that; a wild, woolly, wonderful — and yes, dangerous — world.
Let me give you a piece of advice, Richard; advice I have given to thousands and thousands of people over the years:
You have one life. There is no heaven or hell. There is no afterlife. You have one life, it’s yours, and what you do with it is what matters most. Love and forgive those who matter to you and ignore those who add nothing to your life. Life is too short to spend time trying to make nice with those who will never make nice with you. Determine who are the people in your life that matter and give your time and devotion to them. Live each and every day to its fullest. You never know when death might come calling. Don’t waste time trying to be a jack of all trades, master of none. Find one or two things you like to do and do them well. Too many people spend way too much time doing things they will never be good at.
Here’s the conclusion of the matter. It’s your life and you best get to living it. Someday, sooner than you think, it will be over. Don’t let your dying days be ones of regret over what might have been.
Be well, Richard.
Saved by Reason,
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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Richard, you say, ‘god intervened in my life.’ Well, he did the same for me in a wundrus way recently, or so my fundy friend told me. She asked if I’d had problems going through a UK airport. Media was reporting huge queues, four hour waits at baggage reclaim etc. But halleloonia, my bag was there ahead of me, the first one appearing on the carousel literally just as I got there – as it had been at my destination airport in Europe too!!!!! ‘Wow’, said fundy friend. ‘God was really with you those times.’ I don’t know about you, Richard, but I’d happily forego being immediately reunited with my suitcase of dirty washing if your supreme being would use his awesome power instead to feed the starving, stop natural disasters, intervene when children are being sexually abused and scarred for life etc etc instead of just watching these horrors. If he exists, Richard, he’s an unspeakably hideous, horrendous, grisly monster- as most of us here realised. Step out of your chains, Richard, your fundy darkness, it’s a wonderful life out here in the sunshine, unshackled from the absurdity of faith!
It seems like nearly every fundamentalist/evangelical that comes to your blog is smug and self-righteous. Bruce, hopefully once in a while some of these annoying people do actually check things out and change. I’d settle for them to stop being pretend victims and stop trying to force their fellow person to follow their belief structure.
BJW–Good point. One would expect humility from people who believe they were graced by someone or something greater than themselves. What we see instead is the exact opposite.
I wonder if this guy understands that if Jesus’s wish had been granted, and the Kingdom of God unveiled in Jerusalem in 30 CE, that 98% of humanity would have been condemned to Hell because they were nowhere near being anywhere they could have learned of Jesus’s message. All of the Chinese, Japanese, South Americans, Meso-Americans, Russians, Indians, would have been toast, literally.
They say “God is love” and apparently he loved us . . . fricasseed.
Richard: “You don’t offend me, you only prove God’s word to me to be true. You offer comfort to fellow apostates, but you also offer validation of God’s word to true believers, even if that is not your intent.”
Zoe: Well isn’t this special Richard. Thanks for stopping by and by the way, go and sin no more.
Bruce. Thank you for taking the time to respond.
To clarify, you are absolutely correct in that it would be 100% an offense to you, to God, to myself, to your audience, to presume any superiority whatsoever. And an even bigger offense to relish the thought of you spending eternity in a literal Hell the bible speaks of. It was not my intention to come off smug, or, judgmental. You lay out a descriptive detailed backstory of the pain your family, your upbringing, the abusers, the phonies, the hypocrites you endured in the Church and the pain of guilt you feel having been a part of that. It’s not a leap of judgment to see (by your own words) you have real reason to carry a grudge. In fact, it was some of your blogs (years ago) that got me to see the fallibility and control of (some) men who serve themselves more than God. I have no reason to believe you are not a better human being than me… a better humanist.. a better moral person. I have zero works to boast of!
I wish I had an answer on why God gave me saving faith and not you, I don’t. As I mentioned, the bible explains your Apostate condition and it was the Bible explaining it as nothing new under the sun. But I do know God answers the desperate prayer that seeks him. I can tell you I was certainly on your path. That is, seeking to fulfill myself, my lusts with Humanism, and of denying God’s very existence. Years of that only resulted in pain. And then, God interceded. Though I never had enmity towards God as you clearly do. Perhaps that is why God gave me Grace and saving faith?
The bible is very clear in it’s claims that God is Holy, Perfect, and Just. As such, I have no right to be in his presence because of our (my) nature to Sin against Him. But God is also merciful and loving. The obvious question is, how can those attributes all be true and satisfied? Jesus is how. He is the answer, the lynchpin that makes both be possible. It wasn’t until I put my faith In Jesus, in the work HE did and not my own work was I saved from the path of Apostasy. If God would not impose on your will, it would be arrogant of me to presume I could convince you against your own opinion.
“Though I never had enmity towards God as you clearly do.” In all the words you say, you betray that you don’t understand Bruce at all. To him, there is no god. God is a myth like Santa. Bruce cannot have enmity towards something that (to him) does not exist. How are you missing this? I’m not an atheist. But most of the atheists I have come across aren’t harboring ill will to someone/thing they believe is imaginary. Instead, they and the rest of us are opposed to your type trying to take over and insist we follow your rules.
Richard, you seem to assume that the way you experience life applies to everyone. You assume everyone walks the earth in guilt, carrying the weight of some evil just by virtue of birth. You believe that your path somehow applies to others, and if only they would follow your example they to could be just like you.
It doesn’t work that way.
I can create a similarly stirring testimony of my own salvation. But it would be the exact opposite of yours.
My testimony is being saved from the vile nature of christian faith, and finding freedom from the overwhelming guilt and self loathing forced on me by this allegedly caring deity. I have stepped out of the endless darkness of christianity into the light and freedom of life without Christ. I walk happier, feel lighter, and experience a happiness in the world that a manipulative religion could never achieve. Even when I face the worst the world has to offer,and there is a lot of god based evil, I still am better and still have a brighter future.
And Richard I see you on a similar path. I was where you are, lost on a self loathing faith but unable to escape or even comprehend it. You have no doubt been through many things, just like me, to put you there. Of course, I would never dare say my experiences match yours. Certainly you have faced so much in your life, far above my experiences. I only say we were on similar paths, and there is still hope for you to escape and find true freedom from Christ. You only need to take that first step.
End of testimony.
So, Richard, do you find any value or usefulness in my testimony to you? I doubt you do, because such an approach is presumptuous, filled with assumptions, and dismissive. Just like your mini sermon.
Sigh.
And people like me are the ones accused of indoctrinating people…wow. It makes no sense at all.
Richard, the Bible is full of contradictory descriptions of the god(s) described therein. Because of the Mesopotamian roots of Judaism (and by extension, Christianity), it’s not unreasonable to assume that there is no one “Holy, Perfect and Just” deity described therein.
Holy? No. What’s that even supposed to mean? It’s usually used in the context of “Don’t you dare criticize my god. Oh, and you couldn’t understand him anyway.”
Perfect? Nope. Perfect beings don’t regret creating humanity and then genocide them with a massive flood.
Just? Not. A. Fucking. Chance. If you believe that your god created a hell for the purpose of submitting sentient beings to eternal torment, you are worshipping a god of infinite evil and infinite injustice.
Suffice to say that I find Christianity to be grossly immoral and a blight upon humanity, and will not be rushing up to any altar calls in the foreseeable future.
(Oh, and pro tip, Richard: You might want to actually look up the definition of “Humanism.” Last time I read the Amsterdam Declaration I didn’t see the word “lusts” in there.)
Richard: “That is, seeking to fulfill myself, my lusts with Humanism, and of denying God’s very existence.”
Zoe: Lust for humanism? So in turn, are you presently practicing lusts with God?
Richard: “I wish I had an answer on why God gave me saving faith and not you, I don’t. ”
Zoe: Well you must be so very special Richard and Bruce and those of us who are lusting in our humanism must be the wort of the worst creatures alive on the planet, deserving of your Bible’s hell fire . . . forever and ever amen.
Better yet, what if he arrives in Heaven and finds out that … believing in Jesus sends a person straight to Hell (also called Mar-a-Lago)?
(slow clap)
Yeah, Richard? I’m a believer too. I make no secret of that. But I also don’t beat anyone over the head with my Bible, either.
A watershed moment in my journey of faith happened about a year and a half into my first “grownup” job. I worked as a loan collector for sub-prime lender. After a frustrating conversation with one customer, I hung up the phone and said “goddammit” to the phone. I was in a room with five coworkers who would have been right at home having a conversation with Samuel L. Jackson, and me saying “goddammit” shocked all five of them into silence before one very timidly said, “[W.W.] … are you okay?”
It was an eye-opening moment for me. I don’t have to have a Bible the size of God’s left foot on my desk or include Scripture quotes in 75-point type in the cover photo on my Facebook page to advertise my faith. The way I life my life is a sufficient, and if people want to respond to that, they will. If not, they won’t.
Richard, the only one around here questioning my faith is Derrick Thiessen, and that’s because, as Bruce did with you, I’ve presented the facts about him. He’s not refusing to challenge my comments because he’s channeling Jesus before the Sanhedrin. He’s refusing to challenge my comments because there’s nothing to challenge. Everything I’ve ascribed to him, he actually did. And no one is impressed by his lofty comments to the contrary.
Or yours.
Richard, I have to tell you, buddy, that those of us who were raised in evangelicalism have heard it all. Many of Bruce’s readers, myself included, spent thousands of hours listening to sermons, reading the Bible, reading devotionals, participating in prayer groups, etc. None of what you’re saying is new to us. Many of us were dyed-in-the-wool true-blue followers of the one and only evangelical Jesus Christ. Many of us here have been through the transformative journey to no longer believing in the tenets of evangelicalism, or in Christianity in general. You can tell your story all day long, but you won’t tell us anything that we haven’t heard before. If it works for you, good on you. But we aren’t interested in the sales pitch.