
Recently, I received an email from an Evangelical preacher named Mike. What follows is my response to him.
I am so sorry you have lost your faith and pray that you can reconcile your unbelief with the truth of God’s word.
Why feel sorry for me? I left Christianity with my eyes wide open. All of us must come to terms with the notion of God and the teachings of the Bible (as interpreted by countless Christian sects). I have thoroughly and comprehensively weighed Christianity in the balance and found it wanting. Do you expect me to believe contrary to what I know is true? Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, the Bible says, and that’s what I have done. Do you have evidence that suggests that my conclusions about God, the Bible, and Christianity are wrong? If so, why didn’t you provide me with answers for the hope that lies within you, as the Bible commands you to do?
If you have empirical evidence for the existence of your peculiar deity, please provide it—not Bible verses, not personal testimony, but actual verifiable evidence. If not, all you have is your personal opinion, one rooted in faith and experience. While that may work for you, you can’t expect it to work for me. Personal revelation is, by nature, personal to the individual, so what Jesus has done for you is immaterial. Jesus allegedly does all sorts of things for believers that both of us would agree is either wrong or bat shit crazy. We shouldn’t take any believer’s word for “truth,” unless they can justify and prove their claims.
The scriptural truth is that God’s grace never leads to a “get out of jail(hell) free” license to sin. It is meant to bring about a desire to obey and live righteously out of love for Christ and what he has done for you. A desire to please the one who bought for YOU eternal life with the Father.
According to you. Scores of other Christians believe differently; that salvation is by grace through faith, and not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. These believers certainly desire to live Godly, holy lives, but they still sin. Are they unsaved if they sin again? How many sins does it take for a Christian to lose their faith? Most Christians I know want to live God-honoring lives, but they are, after all, human.
And there are some Christians, antinomians, to be exact, who think that the more they sin the more the grace of God abounds. How can any of us know which way is right? You would think, on such an important matter, that God would have been clear. That he wasn’t suggests that God doesn’t care one way or the other or the Bible is a human book, and not the Word of God.
It doesn’t mean total sinless perfection in this life. We continue to battle the flesh as long as we are alive in these corruptible bodies. Sanctification means we should no longer be comfortable living in sin and have a desire to rid ourselves of the sins that have held us hostage in the past.
The Bible commands Christians to be sinless; to be perfect, even as their Father in Heaven is perfect. The battle you speak of is made up. I understand your theology, but I see no evidence for the notion that humans have souls/spirits. We are fleshly, material beings. The notion of “sin” is a religious construct, one used to elicit fear of judgment, death, and Hell. Isn’t it amazing that religion conjures up the idea of sin and then sells the fearful the antidote — salvation in Jesus Christ?
I am not a sinner. On any given day, I do good and bad things. Most of what I do is neither good or bad — it just is. I made spaghetti for dinner tonight. Pretty good stuff. There was no moral quality to my work. I cooked dinner because I told my partner I would do so. I enjoy cooking, so making dinner was not a burden — though washing dishes was no fun. When a behavior of mine rises to the occasion of being “bad” — that which causes harm to others — I do my best to admit culpability and make restitution. No God, no prayers, just making things right with the person I harmed. I find this preferable to the notion that when I act badly towards my partner, family, or neighbor, I am actually “sinning” against God. Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) evangelist John R. Rice once said that Christians should keep their sin lists short; that believers should confess their transgressions as soon as they are committed — pray without ceasing. And that’s exactly what I do — sans God. So far, today, I have not caused harm to someone else, so I have no “sins” to confess. Can you say the same for yourself, or do you continue to sin in thought, word, and deed — sins of commission and omission?
Are you suggesting that I am, in some way, in bondage to “sin?” Do tell. I am sure you are having a hard time understanding why people like me don’t need your God, Jesus, Bible, or Christianity. We are fine just the way we are. I have a good life, a wonderful life, in fact. Yes, I have a lot of health problems and live with debilitating chronic pain. I suffer every day. That said, life is still good. I have been married for forty-six years. We are blessed to have six children and their spouses, sixteen grandchildren, and four cats. We have a comfortable home and a nice car. Life has certainly been challenging for us, but, on balance, we are grateful to have the life we do. I can’t think of any way our life would be better with God outside of not burning in Hell after we die (a claim we don’t believe is true.)
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 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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Mike: “I am so sorry you have lost your faith and pray that you can reconcile your unbelief with the truth of God’s word.”
Zoe: How often do you pray Mike? Is there a limit to your prayers for Bruce? Every day? Every night? Day & night? At your meals, at work. Five minutes at a time? Every single moment/second of every day? While driving your car? What if time is up for you and you die but didn’t pray for Bruce that day AND you intended too but you were distracted with your own sin of disobedience that day? What then? What if you lost your chance? What then? As you cross into His presence and face your judgement, do you lose a jewel, a crown or some sort of level of heaven? What if Bruce dies and doesn’t reconcile and you prayed your heart out beyond anyone’s expectation including God’s. Then what? Did God not hear your prayers? Did you sin in your approach? Did you miss the boat?
A get-out-of-heck-free card? That has an appeal to it. Oh! Right! That’s what confession and pennance is about. Six Hail Marys and six Our Fathers and a good Act of Contrition and be on your way and sin no more. Sin list wiped clean and start over.
With words, definition is crucial and defining sin is whatever the leader and/or the orthodoxy of the cult/sect/ says it is. Yes, the “tower of Babel” is a metaphor, there being no way humans can build a physical tower to Heaven. By the way, will someone please enlighten me at what altitude Heaven exists? Anyone presuming to define sin can tell us the flight level where Heaven is located. Perhaps altitude, like sin, is subject to religious interpretation. An interpretation of the metaphorical Tower of Babel is that if humanity can’t communicate, they can’t cooperate to build a stairway to Heaven. Until Christians get together and speak the same language and agree about the definition of words crucial to their beliefs, like sin, Heaven, Hell, etc, then they will continue “Babeling” at each other in disparate tongues. Until humans understand and cohere with each other, Heaven, Valhallah, whatever it may be, remains out of their reach.
“ That’s what confession and pennance is about. Six Hail Marys and six Our Fathers and a good Act of Contrition and be on your way and sin no more. Sin list wiped clean and start over.”
Wow, that must have been quite a list of mortal sins, DutchGuy!
Doesn’t everyone know that Heaven is on the ISS orbit, and the astronauts stop by for a good meal when they pass close enough? Jesus undoubtedly lays out an impressive spread. /snark
Right. Reconcile it with the truth of God’s word that says, “Love me or I’ll burn you for a million-trillion years.”
A trillion years. So some of God’s chroniclers say. Ho hum. Some say purgatory is an interrim place you can make up for all the sinful crap you did. Interpretation is everything. I’d interpret Hell as what so many folks go through at the hands of other humans. The Jews in Nazi Germany like Palestinians in Palestine already experienced Hell so I’d advocate for them having earned a pass from Hell and a welcome in Heaven. Rigid Christians might say say Jews and Muslims don’t know Jesus so tough luck but no free pass for them.
World peace is my concept of Heaven. Unfotunately, world peace conflicts with human nature. Heaven, or anything resembling a perfect world, is incompatible with humanity and forever remains an ideal fantasy. What’s a Heaven for if not an ideal always just out of reach?
Robert Browning: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/ Or what’s heaven for?
It would be one thing if Christianity taught people to aspire to sinlessness. (As I understand, it would be a bit like the Buddhist goal of aspiring to become Buddha, i.e., the enlightened one.) But telling people they must lead a sinless life sort of undermines (at least for me) the notion that we need salvation.
A supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity allegedly created the universe complete with all its laws and rules. Then he allegedly put newly created human creatures in close proximity to a tree whose fruit he told them not to eat or else they would die. Now, these newly minted humans had never encountered death and had no idea what death means. They have no concept of obedience or disobedience. They do what any newly minted sentient creature would do and eat the fruit. The omni diety gets Big Mad and sentences them to a life of suffering followed by death, but then he would give them a flame-resistant forever-body to go through eternal conscious physical torture. For eating a fruit. For lacking understanding of obedience and disobedience. Without any instructions on actions and consequences. But wait! Omni diety has a plan! He’ll impregnate a teenager with himself/his son who will grow up, teach a few years, then be killed by empire authorities. Himself/his son will rose from the dead. And for the low cost of $39.99 – just kidding – by saying the right prayer, you too can get Fire Insurance and live eternally in Omni diety’s eternal resort where you can worship Omni diety 24/7 without ceasing!
How stupid does that sound?
Dear Evangelical Preacher Mike,
I’m an atheist, sometimes a secular humanist, who believes that living ethically, with integrity, is the surest way to a happy life. Doing unto others as I and most others would have done unto us, going out of my way to be kind and generous, paying kindnesses forward, and so on, don’t create happiness in me because of the success of my own works. Rather, I understand the connectedness of our species, and creating happiness in others makes me happy for them, the purest kind of happiness there is. Ethics requires that my actions not harm anyone’s wellbeing, or at least that I harm the wellbeing of the fewest possible, even if ethical action causes unhappiness in others. It’s a tightrope. Most of us dedicated to walking it, gradually do so more and more successfully, though even the most successful slip occasionally. We are human. Wise humans learn from mistakes and keep growing.
Humans who choose to stop learning and growing, die. Their bodies might still be animated, but they are walking corpses. Many forms of religion seem to celebrate a lack of learning and growing, a lack of curiosity, opposing a desire to understand more than what practitioners already know. Others only accept learning within tight parameters that keep practitioners’ focus severely limited. We once-religious non-believers understand why: given enough curiosity, allowed to ask enough questions, more and more believers come to understand that most theologies have holes large enough to drive a planet through.
OC, as they say. ‘You win the internet for today. What a wonderful encapsulation of the bible. I will share it with a friend I’m going out to lunch with today. We’re both ex-fundies and met again by a coincidence three years ago and are supporting one another. She told me that her wonderful fundy parents did nothing to prevent or report her brother raping her from a very young age. Most churches round here are weak and don’t do much ‘outreach,’, but one put a NT though her door at xmas and then a 2nd one came – god must have thought she needed more than one!! It triggered her, as they came from an equally corrupt church she knows of. She lives in an upstairs apartment, but sent me a pic of her catharsis, she took an old saucepan into the front yard of the building and set the NTs on fire in it! (I would do the same, if one came to my house.) What you wrote I know will be a real comfort, a validation – and a good laugh – for us both today! Thanks
Matilda, I’m sorry your friend went through all that. I hope my sarcastic summary of the gospel causes your friend to smile!
Lots of corrupt churches out there, and they’re the ones who drive people to become atheists. Either that, or just not going to church anymore.