Recently, a local Evangelical man messaged me on Facebook. He wanted to share God’s “truth” with me, not knowing that I was a former college-trained Evangelical pastor. I suspect he thought I would be receptive to his “preaching,” but he quickly found out I was not a good target for evangelization. Once I engaged the man, asking him for evidence for his claims — i.e. there’s 2,000 fulfilled prophecies in the Bible, the Bible is the “living Word of God, the gospel is all love, and we are under grace, not the law — he quickly retreated to the safe confines of faith.
Let me share a few comments illustrating what I want to discuss next. My comments are blue, his gray, though I suspect you will have figured that out without me telling you. 🙂
This thirty-one-year-old man believes he is “called” to speak the good news to unbelievers. Now that he has done so, it’s up to the Holy Spirit to intercede. I can confidently say that his prayer failed and the Holy Ghost did not intercede. I’m still an unrepentant atheist. Evidently, these “called” evangelizers have a dial-up connection to Heaven, and the connection times out before God’s Telephone Company receives the call and connects it to J-e-s-u-s. Thousands of calls have been dialed over the years on my behalf, but no successful connections to Jesus have been made. One might conclude that the line has been cut, or it doesn’t exist.
What I want to focus on is this man’s refusal to engage anyone outside of his tribe. In his mind, anyone who disagrees with him is blind. Either that or he’s afraid of having his beliefs challenged or he’s afraid that he might be led down a path that his pastor told him leads to death and damnation.
In other comments I made, I tried to challenge his bald assertions, asking him for evidence for his claims or providing alternate interpretations for his pontifications — all without success.
As with most Evangelicals, this man believes the Bible is literally written by God, and is inerrant and infallible. These are faith claims for which there’s no evidence outside of the Bible itself. Sadly, what this shows is that faith robs believers of the ability to think skeptically and rationally. And as long as they stay within the safe confines of the house of faith, it is impossible to meaningfully interact them.
This man is a poster child for ignorant Evangelicals. Raised in Fundamentalist churches, taught to obey their pastors, and repeatedly told that whatever the Bible says is true, and whatever the “world” says is Satanic. Thoroughly indoctrinated and conditioned, by the time they reach adulthood, their path is set unless something happens that forces them to re-think their beliefs. Imagine a world where you only read books that reinforce your beliefs and are surrounded by people who agree with you. It’s a safe world, one where the wicked, evil world rarely, if ever, intrudes (unless their pastors are featured in the Black Collar Crimes Series). Believers can live their entire lives in such an environment, safe from questions, doubts, and intellectual challenges. This, in my opinion, is no way to live. And it for this reason I continue to share my story and critique Evangelical Christianity. I know from my own story that it is possible to escape the pernicious grip of Fundamentalism. And it all starts with niggling doubts and questions that go unanswered by the preachers of certainty. Will the man who messaged me one day break free from bondage? Maybe, but he could also end up forty years later just like Dr. David Tee and others like him — people whose minds have been ruined by decades of indoctrination and conditioning.
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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Eric: “I’m called to speak of the good news all I can do now is pray that the holy spirit intercedes….”
Me: I just love ‘drive-by evangelism’. /s
And the follow-up question for me is: What if the holy spirit chooses not to answer Eric’s prayer and doesn’t intercede? The result is that the New Testament becomes flimsy (flimsier?) on many levels. Well done, Eric.
But … but … but … Isaiah 55:11 says, “My word will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”
So do we have a problem here? The response to such failures is always, “Move along, move along, move along, folks. Nothing to see here.”
The only problem is, whatever the Bible says is soon contradicted by that same Bible.
Details…details. They don’t read it anyway so they’ll never find those contradictions. And I spent how many decades buying this male bovine fecal matter…sheesh.
Ah Bruce! (Sigh) Once a heretic always a heretic. Almost always anyway. Relapsed atheists do seem awfully scarce. That critical thinking habit, huh? Once you take a few puffs it’s hard to stop. Relapsed fundamentalist evangelicals on the other hand are common and indeed, quite a few seem to be lurking about this site.
“…faith robs believers of the ability to think skeptically and rationally” Amen to that Brother. Faith is the forever chemical of the human mind. It resists removal. Every challenge is answered by facile jargon which only reinfects them with smug certainty. Mavericks are disruptive to managing the herd.
I grew up hearing that same shit. Everything that doesn’t agree with their world view is ‘satanic’. I believed that, too. It’s embarrassing now, although since they started teaching that crap when I was a kid, I supposed I’m not to blame for being gullible. I loved his response to your offer of a single YouTube video. Amazing to be such a mental wimp and be afraid of viewing dissenting ideas. I feel sorry for Eric, as I do for all kids who are indoctrinated and never develop the emotional strength to question.
Just be glad you overcame it. Childhood indoctrination is highly effective and persistent. I saw it happen to my foster daughter in just a few weeks being fostered by an evangelical couple who admitted their motives for fostering kids was to give them their religion. That little girl is still indoctrinated 0 years later
Ami, yes! It seemed like everything was “satanic! Ugh. I remember being told from the pulpit, “don’t read that book”, or, “don’t watch that movie”. Etc. Well, I read those books and saw those movies. As far as I can tell, no evil side effects that I know of. Oh wait, I did become an atheist. So there is that. 🙂 LOL
Yep, he got ya, John. If only you’d listened. Tsk. 😀
I’m guessing groups of people have gotten together to pray for your soul, Bruce, and look where that’s gotten them, being as you have yet to turn from your heathen ways. I’ve long thought that the verse that says when two people are gathered that God will answer their collective prayer, is the most obvious verse to prove to critical thinkers that the bible is nonsense. The evidence that this verse is NOT true is infinite. Huh, I just looked it up and read an apologist’s take saying that the verse isn’t really talking about prayer, but something to do with church discipline? Suppose I were just someone who is reading the Bible on my own, why should I have to know the background of these things to know the mind of god? (Though this apologist might be wrong Bruce, you would certainly know more than me.) Seems a perfect god would have made everything easy for people to understand instead of turning every damn thing into a confusing mystery.
Sorry, this veered a bit off topic. On your main focus, it’s interesting how the evangelical types are terrified of introducing themselves or their children to information outside their little world, but the non-believers are quite happy to read through the bible or go to church services, like weddings and funerals for instance, and aren’t terrified they’ll learn something that’s going to change their worldview.
Evangelical Christianity absolutely promotes ignorance! The church, and associated Bible school, I attended back in the mid 90’s had many “warnings” about reading the wrong material. We were encouraged (told) to not read any Christian books outside of our particular flavor/cult. And certainly not any non-Christian books that contradicted the Bible. It would contaminate our faith and confuse us. We were often told that it was more important to learn how to pray than to get a college education. I do think it’s interesting how many graduates of this Bible school that I’ve run into over the years who went back to college or a trade school so they could get a job that paid a decent wage. I have to say, they were right. My faith did get contaminated! In an effort to strengthen my faith and silence my questions I started having, I re-doubled my Bible study. But also studied the history of the Bible and of the church. I read books by authors outside of my camp. Shocking! None of it was “non-Christian” material. All this educating myself eventually led me out of Christianity completely. It wasn’t until after I deconverted that I began to read books by skeptics and atheists and scientists, listening to podcasts, YouTube videos, etc.
Nope, evangelicals definitely don’t educated, informed members of their churches. I love what George Carlin said about the “owners” of this country. “They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that.”
He wasn’t specifically talking about religion, he was talking about government. But boy, doesn’t that fit nicely with Christianity and other religions?