The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
Scott Haught, a former assistant pastor at Midland Baptist Church in Midland, Michigan, and a deacon at Coleman’s Grace Baptist Church in Coleman, Michigan, was recently convicted of ne count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct relationship; four counts of second-degree CSC with a person under 13; and four counts of second-degree CSC relationship. His victims were his daughters.
A former leader at Midland Baptist Church and Coleman’s Grace Baptist Church, Scott Haught, 54, was sentenced to serve up to 25 years in prison for sexually abusing two of his daughters.
A jury found Haught, 54, of Saginaw, guilty of nine felony criminal sexual conduct charges after a two-and-a-half-day trial in March. He was sentenced Thursday, June 5 in Midland County’s 42nd Circuit Court.
Haught was convicted of one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct relationship; four counts of second-degree CSC with a person under 13; and four counts of second-degree CSC relationship. He will serve 11 years to 25 years in prison for the first-degree charge and was sentenced to 4-15 years in prison for the additional charges. He will serve both sentences concurrently.
Under state law, Circuit Court Judge Stephen Carras could have sentenced Haught to life in prison for the first-degree CSC charge.
Midland County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Atea Duso, who tried the case, said Haught had the opportunity to plead guilty to two second-degree CSC charges and serve four years in prison, with the remaining charges dismissed.
Haught opted to go to trial and rejected the plea offer on Feb. 27.
Haught has been in the Midland County Jail since his July 16, 2024 arrest by Michigan State Police. Why he appeared in a wheelchair for trial and sentencing was not addressed by the court. He will get credit for 324 days served on his sentence, will be required to register as a sex offender upon his release and will spend the rest of his life on electronic monitoring.
According to a 2006 Daily News story, Haught served as deacon of Coleman’s Grace Baptist Church, where he directed its summer Bible school. According to trial testimony, he also served as associate pastor at Midland Baptist Church until 2021.
Scott Haught led two lives: A public one as a leader in his church and a private one in which he used religion to control and abuse the women in his home.
Fifteen friends, family and even some of his fellow Midland County Jail inmates wrote letters of support and praise for Haught that were shared with Midland County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Carras before sentencing.
“They see you as a man of God who would never do the things that you have been convicted of doing. They cannot reconcile (your crimes) with what they know of you,” Carras said to Haught as he appeared before him in a wheelchair Thursday, June 5 during sentencing. “The reason why is because they weren’t here and didn’t see and hear the evidence that was presented to the court.”
A jury found Haught, 54, of Saginaw, guilty of nine felony criminal sexual conduct charges after a two-and-a-half-day trial in March. On Thursday, he was sentenced to 11 to 25 years in prison.
During the trial, jurors heard testimony from family members recounting how Haught, a former associate pastor at Midland Baptist Church and deacon at Coleman’s Grace Baptist Church, used his “religious authority” to gain control over his ex-wife and daughters.
Two victims testified that Haught ordered them to nap with him in his bed, which created the opportunity for him to sexually abuse them.
“The evidence showed us that in the home, you eroded your wife’s moral authority with your daughters to destroy her self confidence so that she would not stand up (against you),” Carras said. “All with the purpose of separating them from their mother – so that they would not look to her as a person for guidance and a person of authority.
….
Members of Midland Baptist Church, including Pastor Jim Payne, listened as Midland County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Atea Duso described how Haught used his background in theology to assert his dominance over the family.
“He controlled and manipulated his family and used his religion to justify that – ‘This is my house and these are my rules and this (sexual abuse) is what you should expect,'” Duso told the court. “He took advantage of these girls and robbed them of the innocence and freedom that they should have had as children.”
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“You molested your daughters. The evidence shows that you treated those girls like possessions,” Carras said. “By all accounts, it looks like you had a strong moral compass. [huh?] You did a lot of good things for other people. But somewhere along the line, you forgot to police yourself. Your compass strayed and allowed you to do the things you did to your daughters over all those (10) years.”
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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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The Bible records two accounts of what is called the Apostle Paul’s Damascas Road experience.
Acts 9:1-8 says:
And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem. And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.
In Acts 22:1-9, the Bible tells the same story — almost:
Men, brethren, and fathers, hear ye my defence which I make now unto you. (And when they heard that he spake in the Hebrew tongue to them, they kept the more silence: and he saith,) I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God, as ye all are this day. And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women. As also the high priest doth bear me witness, and all the estate of the elders: from whom also I received letters unto the brethren, and went to Damascus, to bring them which were there bound unto Jerusalem, for to be punished. And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me. And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And I answered, Who art thou, Lord? And he said unto me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest. And they that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me.
While the stories are similar, they are not identical. In Acts 9:1-8. the men travelling with Paul heard a voice, but didn’t see the speaker (Jesus), but in Acts 22:1-9, these men saw the “light,” but didn’t hear the voice Jesus.
Which is it? For Evangelicals who believe the Bible, in its entirety, is inerrant and infallilble, these two verses bring these claims falling to the ground,
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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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Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. (I John 2:15)
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. (Colossians 2:8)
The Bible is clear: Christians are not to love the world (as a philosophical system), nor are they to love the things of the world. Christians are duty-bound to oppose the philosophies of the world (how the world thinks and reasons). Take the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church movement. The IFB church movement came into existence during the battle against modernism (liberalism) in the twentieth century. I came of age during the heyday of the IFB church movement. Many of the largest churches in the United States were IFB congregations. The 1960s-1980s brought explosive attendance growth. Today, the IFB church movement is a shell of what it once was. That said, there are still thousands of IFB churches in the United States, numbering in the millions attendance-wise. Bus ministries used to bring primarily children to church were once popular, but not so today. What remains the same is the IFB’s opposition to the “world.”
While it can be argued that Jesus (and later Paul) called on his followers to be counter-cultural, IFB churches tend to be anti-culture. Instead of learning to be sojourners in a strange land, IFB pastors teach church members to withdraw from the culture. I taught and believed for many years that Christians should avoid interaction with the world. Outside of buying necessities such as groceries and gas from “worldly” businesses, I believed Christians should seek out businesses that support or are friendly to their beliefs and practices. I eventually learned that this was impossible to do. As an Evangelical pastor (I left the IFB church movement in the 80s), I took a different approach. Instead of being anti-culture, I believed Christians should engage and influence our culture. This meant getting “worldly” for Jesus. Or as the one preacher who raced dirt track cars on Sunday evenings in the summer said, “Christians need to get dirty for Jesus.” (Both positions, by the way, are supported by Scripture.)
Most IFB churches and pastors are anti-culture. Instead of engaging culture, they withdrew, building a separate world for church members. That’s why the IFB church movement pushes private Christian education and homeschooling. Children are sheltered from the world. After graduation, many IFB children attend IFB (or other Fundamentalist) colleges. This means that many IFB children are in their 20s before they enter the “world” and have to fend for themselves. Many young IFB women graduate from high school, but don’t go on to attend college. They have been told their entire lives that God wants them to marry (preferably a preacher, missionary, or youth pastor), bear (lots of) children, keep the home by doing all the domestic work, and meet the every want/need of their husband — especially sexually. But, Bruce, didn’t your wife go to college? She did, but her reason for going to college was oh-so typical IFB: she went to Midwestern Baptist College to find and marry a preacher boy. Why? Because Polly believed God had called her to be a preacher’s wife. This is not surprising since she repeatedly heard growing up that “There’s no greater calling in life than to be a preacher’s wife.” (Boys heard similar claims. “There’s no greater calling, boys, than to be a preacher. You could become president, but that would be a step down from being a God-called preacher.”)
IFB Pastor Bob Gray preaching against Elvis, 1956. Gray would later be accused of sexual misconduct. Gray allegedly was a serial child molester for 50 years.
Many cradle IFB church members make it to the grave 60, 70, or 80 years later without being soiled from contact with the “world.” While people are free to live their lives as they wish, for many IFB congregants, they don’t know any other world but the IFB one.
For those of us raised in IFB churches, we heard countless sermons on the evils of the “world.” In particular, our pastors railed against rock music, calling it evil, immoral, and Satanic. What did teens and young adults do in such settings? Some of them, such as the Pollys and Bruces of the world, toed the line. Others tried to play by the rules, but failed. (And let me be clear, Polly and I were not pure as driven snow. We broke numerous dating rules in college that forbade any physical contact with the opposite sex.) And then, some youthful members ignored the preaching against the “world” and engaged in all the same behaviors as their counterparts in the “world.” What this led to, of course, was a lot of fear, guilt, and sneaking around.
IFB preachers know that that many church teens and young adults are NOT practicing what they preach from the pulpit. Pastors know that if they go to the church parking lot and turn on the radio in every car, that many of them would be tuned to “worldly” stations. So, IFB preachers turn to other approaches to the rock menance.
Some IFB preachers bring in alleged experts on the evils of rock music to teach churches about why it is a sin to listen to rock. The first such expert I heard was Bob Larson in 1971. Yes, THAT Bob Larson. Later, I heard David Benoit. Both men allegedly exposed the Satanic evil that was behind the music. Attendees were introduced to issues such as backmasking and syncopated beat. Congregants were called on to get rid of their rock records, either by putting them on the church altar or casting them in a fire.
Other IFB preachers encourage church parents to remove the radios from the cars of their children so they can’t listen to “worldly” music. One pastor I knew replaced the radios with cassette players. His children only listened to music he gave them. This, of course, did not keep his children from listening to the AC/DC or Beatles cassette tapes hidden underneath their seats. Teens gonna do, what teens gonna do, right?
Towards the end of my minsterial career, there was a shift in some IFB churches over rock music. Realizing their sermons were not having the desired effect and prohibition was a failure, some pastors and churches decided that what church youth needed was ALTERNATIVES to the world’s music. Young people were introduced to CCM (contemporary Christian music) music. Before long, many IFB churches were using drums and guitars in worship. (Many IFB churches objected to the CCM infiltration. Their services today are not much different from what they were sixty years ago.) What IFB preachers failed to see is that, YES, church youth would happily start listening to CCM, but they wouldn’t stop listening to the world’s music. All they did was add the CCM to their listening queue. (I managed a Christian bookstore in the late 80s. The store had a comparison chart on the wall that compared CCM bands to “worldly” bands. Like Simon and Garfunkel? You will like the Christian band, Small Town Poets.)
One unresolved issue for IFB preachers is that there is no singular definition for the word “world.” Go to an IFB preacher’s meeting and you will hear discussions about whether this or that is worldly. No two preachers or churches had the same list of worldly behaviors. While all IFB churches opposed rock music, others allow pop and country music. This debate over music reveals that churches are hopelessly divided over music. This suggests that rules/laws/standards about music are of human origin, governed by the theological interpretations and feelings of the men behind pulpits.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Faith Baptist Church, Primros Georgia, members street preaching, calling on sodomites to repent
I listen to several atheist call-in shows that try to get Christians to call in and defend the existence of God. How can anyone prove God’s existence? Some Christians will appeal to the Bible as justification for their God belief. However, the Bible is a book of claims, and not evidence for the existence of the Christian deity. When attempts to appeal to the Bible fail — as they almost always do — Christians will often appeal to personal testimonies as evidence for God’s existence. However, much like the Bible, personal testimonies provide no evidence for the existence of God. Personal testimonies are subjective, providing no empirical evidence for God’s existence. It’s fine for an individual believer to appeal to the Bible or personal testimony. However, Bible verses and testimonies provide no evidence to anyone other than the individual Christian.
How can anyone possibly know the Christian God is real based on Bible verses or personal experiences? They can’t. The individual believer may find their interpretations of the Bible and personal experiences sufficient to justify their belief in God, but these “proofs” for the believer fall flat to non-Christians.
If you want to win atheists to Christ, it will take more than prooftexts and personal testimonies. These claims rarely, if ever, convince atheists of the existence of God or any of the other supernatural claims Evangelicals are fond of making.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Really? Christian fundamentalism stopped them from listening to sinful rock and roll? Granted, the attitude when rock first came out was very rigid against that type of music, and in some cases, it was very warranted because the music was not the best.
But was it Christian fundamentalism that robbed anyone of listening to the music? It was played everywhere, so just about every child and teenager at the time could hear it whenever they wanted.
So it is highly doubtful that Christian fundamentalism was the reason. It may have been the personal beliefs of the people at the time that stopped them from playing this music. It could be that those beliefs were a bit misguided, not that classic rock was great music and people were missing out, but that they did not have a solid foundation in the truth to truly evaluate the music.
In other words, I am a liar — a false allegation this disgraced preacher has hurled my way many times. This preacher wrongly thinks that there is a difference between “Christian Fundamentalism” and the “personal beliefs” of the people at the time that stopped them from playing this music.” It is theological and social beliefs that drive Christian Fundamentalism. Objection to secular music was common, and rock music in particular was the subject of frequent criticism and attack from the pulpit.
While I listened to secular music on the AM radio in my car, and heard it when attending junior high dances, outside of that, my life was inundated with Christian music, at church and home. I only owned a handful of records, but all of them were Christian. Why would I not have obeyed what my pastors were teaching? The same goes for my partner, Polly. Both of us primarily listened to Southern gospel music and mixed-group Christian music. Sure, we knew the lyrics of a few secular songs, but our minds’ catalog of music was overwhelmingly Christian. We were, in every way, true blue, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) Christians. Maybe the preacher quoted above wasn’t a committed follower of Jesus as a Christian. If so, that’s his problem, not mine.
You see, I actually believed and trusted my pastors. I never doubted that they were telling me the truth. So, if they said rock music was evil and listening to it was sinful, I believed them. When evangelists such as Bob Larson and David Benoit decried the evils of rock and roll, I believed them. When youth camp speakers brought the wrath of God down on rock music, I believed them. Dare I not trust and obey — for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus — these men of God? Over the years, I heard scores of sermons condemning “worldly” music, and I believed every word. This approach bled into other areas of our lives. Polly and I were virgins on our wedding day. Why? We heard numerous sermons about the evil of premarital sex. Rarely did a week go by without a teacher or a pastor mentioning the importance of chastity. Many of our churchmates listened to secular music and gave in to their sexual desires. Was rock music to blame? Our pastors said it was; that rock music stirred the passions, leading to fornication.
For good or ill, Polly and I believed and practiced what we heard from the pulpit. How could it have been otherwise? Were you a devoted Christian as a teen and young adult? Did you practice what your pastors preached? Please share your experiences in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
As a devout Evangelical Christian for almost fifty years, I never doubted or questioned the Bible. How could I? The Bible was God’s Word — inspired, inerrant, and infallible. To question the Bible was to question God himself. Certainly, I came across passages of Scripture that didn’t make sense to me or seemed to contradict other passages of Scripture, but I never doubted the teachings of the Bible. I believed God would make these verses clear to me in time, and if he didn’t, I would still trust him, believing, by faith, that all things would be made known, if not on Earth, in Heaven.
As an Evangelical-preacher-turned-atheist, I am free to read and question the Bible at will. No more faithing-it or trusting that God would make all things known to me. As a result, the Bible reads very differently for me than it did when I was a hellfire-and-brimstone, old-fashioned, sin-hating, Holy Ghost-filled Baptist preacher.
In Genesis 2, we find God giving a command to Adam and Eve:
And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Genesis 3 adds:
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked;
….
And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
God planted a tree in the Garden of Eden whose fruit would give a person the knowledge of good and evil if he ate the proverbial apple. Strangely, Eve knew that eating the fruit would make her wise. How did she know this? There was another tree in the garden, the Tree of Life. Eating from this tree would give the eater eternal life.
God told Mr. and Mrs. Adam that the day they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they would die. This did not stop the first humans from plucking a shiny red apple from the tree. Both Adam and Eve ate the fruit. Did they immediately die? No, they lived for hundreds of years afterward. God lied to them when he said, “For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Further, who was the LORD talking to when he said, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” While we cannot be certain who the LORD was speaking to, it is likely some sort of heavenly beings or gods. The LORD feared Adam and Eve would become eternal gods if they gained access to the Tree of Life, so he placed Cherubims and a flaming sword at the entrance of the Garden of Eden, forever barring humans access to the Tree of Life.
If God is sovereign and knows the end from the beginning, he knew beforehand everything Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (who is never called the Devil or Satan) would do. Why create the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Why tempt Adam and Eve when you knew they would fail? According to Evangelicals, everything bad, sinful, and evil flows from the moment Adam and Eve ate the apple. Wouldn’t it have been better to put the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the equivalent of Fort Knox, safe and secure from human access? Instead, God put fresh-baked cookies on the kitchen counter, thinking they would be safe from children seeing and eating them. As any grandparent knows, cookies are kryptonite for children (and adults too). Want to keep your grandkids out of the cookies? Put them away where they can’t find them. Why didn’t God do the same for Adam and Eve and the whole human race?
These are the sorts of issues you must wrestle with if you are a Bible literalist. If, on the other hand, you think Genesis 1-3 is a fictional story, poetry, or metaphors, the aforementioned story makes perfect sense as the author attempts to explain why the world is the way it is. It is literalists who are forced to come up with all sorts of insane interpretations to justify their reading of the text.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
My partner and I were teenagers in the 1970s — the heyday of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church movement. Many of the largest churches in the United States were IFB congregations and numerical church growth across the movement was normal and expected. Exciting times, to say the least. People looking for certainty were drawn to IFB churches and their rules. Having been born into and schooled in the IFB church movement, Polly and I were obedient church members. Our morals, ethics, and worldview were shaped by what we heard from our pastors and Sunday school teachers, and later, at Midwestern Baptist College, our professors. While we, at times, chaffed against the rules, conditioning and indoctrination taught us that obedience to the rules was expected by God, and disobedience brought chastisement, punishment, and, at times, death. As a result, we didn’t experience many of the things — good and bad — that “normal” teens did in the 70s.
Take music. We were taught that “worldly” music was sinful; that listening to it would corrupt our minds and lead us to commit all sorts of sinful behaviors — mostly sexual, in nature. Rock music, in particular, was demonized. IFB churches would have preachers such as Bob Larson and David Benoit hold revival services focused on rock music and its influence on teens. These services were used to scare the hell out of teenagers, warning them that listening to rock music would corrupt them and lead to hellfire and brimstone. As a result, we rarely listened to rock music. Oh, we had AM radios in our cars, but the records (and later cassette tapes, 8-track tapes, and CDs) we owned were, without exception, southern gospel or choral music.
After marriage and having children, our approach to music “liberalized.” We added contemporary Christian music and Christian rock to the mix, but still no secular music. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that we started listening to “safe” secular music. Over time, our tastes and desires changed, but it was not until we deconverted in 2008 that we stopped regularly listening to Christian music. I will still occasionally listen to Christian music, but Polly has no interest in revisiting our music pasts.
Think of all the awesome music we missed out on from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. The good news is that post-Jesus we are free to listen to all sorts of secular music. I tell people that, in many ways, Polly and I are living our youthful years for the first time. Free from the IFB church’s oppressive rules, we are free to indulge in the Devil’s music — without guilt or fear.
In recent years, we have started attending secular concerts. Lots of fun, for the both of us. That said, we tend to be the oldest, or some of the oldest, people in attendance. Last Friday, we attended a concert in Fort Wayne by The Fray. We had an awesome time. Packed house, numbering 2,100 in attendance. We were surrounded by people ages 20-40. One thought I had during the concert was that the concert was a lot like a church or revival service. The excitement and raw emotions were palatable, and song after song spoke to our “hearts.” The difference, of course, was that there were no threats of judgment of Hell, no offering plates, no altar calls — just fellowship with people from diverse backgrounds and beliefs.
The opening act was a new band called Verygently. We laughed through their song, Jesus Girl, as only former IFB church members could do.
[Verse 1] Got the preacher up front and I’m chilling in back And I’m bored as hell In a collared shirt that I got from the Gap With the shoes as well It’s been a few years and I feel real weird here Free sip of wine ’cause they don’t sell beer here Talking in tongues, I was just about to run Then well, well, well
[Chorus] I saw Jesus girl A tall glass of holy water Swear she had a halo on her Jesus girl With her cross necklace and braids Holy shit, I think I’m saved I still don’t believe in God But I’ll give everything I’ve got To Jesus girl
[Verse 2] Now I’m back every Sunday thinking ’bout one day Asking her out Still chilling in the back, but I’m learning how to act Like I’m into it now I might get baptized just so she’ll see me Bible verse tat, John 3:16 me Sending up a prayer if you’re really up there I’d love to get down
Chorus] With Jesus girl A tall glass of holy water Swear she had a halo on her Jesus girl With her cross necklace and braids Holy shit, I think I’m saved I still don’t believe in God But I’ll give everything I’ve got To Jesus girl
[Outro] Yeah, my whole life turned around I was lost until I found Jesus girl
Compare this song to a Christian song also titled Jesus Girl.
She’s just fifteen, but she acts older, much older, And she won’t listen to what all the kids told her, when they told her, She knows what they want, but she knows what she needs, and it’s not the same, She won’t give in, you see.
She’s a Jesus girl, oh yeah, (oh yeah, oh yeah) Well, she’s a J-J-Jesus girl, (oh yeah, oh yeah) And she’s a Jesus girl.
She knows what’s right and what’s wrong, she knows what’s wrong, She reads her Bible and she’s strong, she’s so strong, She’s telling all her friends that there’s a better way, No more broken hearts, no lonely nights or days.
And she’s a Jesus girl, yeah, yeah, (oh yeah, oh yeah) Well, she’s a J-J-J-Jesus girl, (oh yeah, oh yeah) Well, she’s a Jesus girl.
She jumps and shouts for Jesus, she loves Jesus, She keeps her eyes on Jesus, on her Jesus, And when she jumps and shouts, her eyes are on the Lord, Well, she’s a Christian, yeah, but she’s never bored.
And she’s a Jesus girl, oh yeah, (oh yeah, oh yeah) Well, she’s a J-J-Jesus girl, (oh yeah, oh yeah) She’s a Jesus girl.
Polly and I plan to continue listening to the Devil’s music. How about you? Did your music tastes and experiences change post-Jesus (or post-Evangelical if you are still a believer)? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
If humans have free will, that means it is possible, even likely that they will behave in ways contrary to the will of God. This means that humans can thwart the will of the triune God.
Let the cognitive dissonance and circular argumentation begin.
Let’s consult the infallible, inerrant Word of God.
And it came to pass, that when Jesus had finished these parables, he departed thence. And when he was come into his own country, he taught them in their synagogue, insomuch that they were astonished, and said, Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things? And they were offended in him. But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house. And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief. (Matthew 13:53-58)
Here we find Jesus healing people and working other miracles (mighty works). Jesus wanted to help everyone, but he couldn’t. Why? Because of unbelief. This means, then, that humans can, by refusing to believe or have faith, thwart the will of God.
Conclusion: God does not have free will.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Dr. David Tee, whose real name is Derrick Thomas Thiessen, shares with his readers how to reach sinners, unbelievers, and atheists for Jesus. What follows are quotes from his recent posts. These should give Christians and unbelievers alike a snapshot of how he interacts with and responds to unbelievers.
Maybe he’s not interested in evangelizing sinners as much as he is being right. This doesn’t surprise me. Christian Fundamentalists like to talk about winning souls for Christ, but it seems to me that what they really care about is being absolutely right.
Let me know you think in the comment section.
Dr. David Tee, In His Own Words
Unbelievers like taking common and legitimate aspects of writing and distorting them into something they are not.
BG at the end of his post gets upset that we have ‘impugned’ his character. Yet, he should not do it to God if he doesn’t want to have it done to him.
Another misunderstanding and misrepresentation of God and his actions.
Another wholesale misrepresentation and a personal attack thrown in.
Another misrepresentation and distortion. BG generalizes the commands to make his point, which undermines his credibility and ruins his honesty. He is not being honest even after being told the correct explanation about God’s commands.
The unbelieving moral standard is inferior and allows for sin and corruption to flourish.
The unbeliever is not in any position to judge God and His commands. Their idea of morality is worse than what they accuse God of being. Their definitions of the acts commanded are just as subjective and fluid as their moral code. The unbelievers’ moral code is not infallible nor omnipresent like God’s.
Not one of those accusations thrown against God is true.
At this point, we stop responding and addressing the falsehoods and misrepresentations written by BG. At the end he makes this claim that he has not murdered or raped so he must be a good man and we are impugning his character. Our response to that silly claim is HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!
He does it to himself by purposefully lying, misrepresenting the facts, the Bible, God, etc., distorting the topics, and being dishonest in his points. We are not impugning his character but pointing out where he is wrong. Which we are allowed to do.
The only way to continue these types of discussions is if the unbeliever is honest, has an open mind, and will listen to your facts honestly and sincerely. Close-minded people like BG and MM only hear what they want to hear, then look for ways to misrepresent what was said.
Speaking of MM, he wrote a response to our mind your own business and his only point was– ‘I will write on any topic I want to’– such a stubborn, close-minded individual who does not get the fact that what he has to say means nothing because he is not qualified to speak on many topics.
They do not use all the facts, just the ones that support their deceptive point of view. They are not honest.
it is not the Christian who is ignorant, but the unbeliever who does not do very good research and only cherry picks the information they will use in their faulty attacks on God, the Bible and Christians.
When believers say things, it is often the case that unbelievers will ‘fact-check’ them. Then when the fact check turns up different information, they label Christians as liars.
This is another lie, as using corporal punishment is not beating a child or a student. But BG will not agree with that as he seeks to paint a false picture of us and what we believe. We could say that Bg does not care about innocent teachers or that teachers are being assaulted in the classrooms just by using his logic, but we won’t.
BG should know better than to lie about us, especially when he was not there nor knows anything about the topic he writes.
What a crock!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. This discovery only says that despite their claims to be rational and logical, scientists are great fairy tale writers.. They spin a good yarn that deceives millions of people, and that is wrong.
The scientists are not getting to the truth at all, but making everything up as they go.
But unbelievers like to think they get to dictate who will do what and do it according to their views. They forget there are others in the world who have the same rights and do not want them infringed upon.
This is another headline we came across, and we know the author [Bruce Gerencser] likes to word his headlines in a way that distorts what is going on.
The unbelievers’ solutions have been to remove God, prayer, specific punishments, and other similar aspects of school life and replaced them with ideas that do not work.
This is another ridiculous thing to say, as the unbeliever takes them out of context and misapplies them to whatever troubling thought they have on their minds. The unbeliever writing those words has no concept of what human flourishing means as he wants sin and corruption to abound at the expense of those doing what is right and moral.
But the unbelieving writer [Bruce Gerencser] of those quoted words does not care if he writes the truth or not. He just wants to justify his departure from God. He also wants to misdirect people’s attention away from what the unbelieving world is doing.
Anything that the writer accuses God of doing, his side of the world is doing with less than holy and pure motives, and on a far grander scale. He and other unbelievers are in no position to accuse God of anything.
Unbelievers do not make distinctions between true and false preachers/teachers. They lump everyone into one category, then continue to make false accusations against all Christians.
Only in the minds of unbelievers and atheists is this done. They always need something to fuel their hatred of Christ, even by exploiting the nonsense spoken by false teachers.
Unbelievers and atheists will go to any length to justify their decision to reject the offer of salvation, even by extrapolating false claims made by false teachers to others not guilty of doing such a thing.
If they [unbelievers] were honest, they would separate the true from the false teachers and be more open-minded to the former while closed to the latter. But rarely are unbelievers and atheists honest when it comes to Christ, Christians, and those who pose as Christians.
These comments can be labelled as ‘they will never learn’, ‘they will never listen’, ‘they will complain no matter what’, and by they we mean unbelievers and atheists. We like to distinguish between the two even though they are all categorized under the unbelievers label.
Ignoring is the best option because unbelievers and atheists rarely accept the truth as the answer.
Unbelievers continue to deny God the right to punish people and animals for their disobedience, even though they do the same thing as parents or supervisors, etc. They will punish people for violating their rules or the rules of a company, which affects the loved ones and animals of those punished.
The unbeliever and atheist fail to see the entire side to these issues they complain about. They only want to have their desired results, even though it leaves sin and crime sin place. In their complaints, there is no option to punish those who disobey or commit crimes. The sinner is free to act as they will without fear of physically paying for their crimes.
Also, the unbeliever and atheist will attack and punish those who are living by the rules, making them nothing but toothless hypocrites. They will do exactly what they complain about and act the same as God acts. Only the target is different.
The unbelievers go after those who disagree with/disobey their views and rules and condemn themselves by the very complaints they make against God. Their complaints hold no water and do not lead anyone to a better way or paradise.
Leave it to unbelievers to get the opposition to trans ideology and practice wrong, and then twist it into something it is not. This is what MM [Ben Berwick] has done with his recent post.
No religious right individual or organization are attacking trans people. They are trying to relieve them of the delusions that enslaves the latter. There is no right for fake women to invade real women spaces. There is no right to call themselves women when they are not.
The only small minded bigots we find are trans people. You can see their bigotry any day of the week as it is recorded endlessly in the different news cycles as well as other media outlets.
He [Ben Berwick] deludes himself, as do many others, into thinking he is right when all he is doing is helping erase the lines of right and wrong, and what is defined as sin. He leads people to sin and that is wrong.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Recently, Dr. David Tee, whose real name is Derrick Thomas Thiessen, responded to my post Should Christians ALWAYS Obey God? I suspected one of my Fundamentalist critics would respond, and Thiessen was the first one to respond. What follows is my response. All spelling, grammar, and punctuation in the original. Thiessen’s response is in bold font.
There are many factors that play into our not taking a break. Right now, we have had a rainstorm and are still waiting for a project to be sent our way. So we need something to do. The question in the title is not ours. It comes from BG’s website, and it reflects the attitude of MM and his question: would we kill him if God commanded us to?
Thiessen, as he is wont to do, drags my friend Ben Berwick into the debate. While Ben and I agree on this issue, I will leave it to him to defend himself. Is it fair to ask questions about whether an Evangelical Christian would kill someone if God commanded him to? Absolutely. It is, after all, in the Bible. God repeatedly commanded his chosen people, the Israelites, to commit violence and murder against individuals and people groups. If Thiessen has a problem with our observations and conclusions, his real problem is with God, not BG and MM (as he likes to call Ben and me).
Both are ridiculous questions because the answer to the title question is yes, and the answer to the annoying second question is that God does not give that command anymore.
Wait a minute, I thought the Bible says that Jesus (who is God) is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is a deity that doesn’t change his mind, though other passages of Scripture say he does. On what basis do we conclude that God doesn’t expect his followers to obey everything he commands them to do? Is Thiessen saying God changed his mind; that he figured out bloodshed, violence, and murder are not effective ways to get your point across — especially when innocent people get caught up in the carnage — including women, children, babies, and fetuses?
I asked in my post:
If God commands a Christian to do something, should he obey? How does a Christian determine that it is God commanding him to do something? What if God’s command runs contrary to the Christian’s personal moral code? Should the Christian obey, anyway?
The answer to the first question is, yes, he should, as the Bible teaches us that to obey is better than sacrifice. The second question is a bit more difficult to answer, as confirming God’s command takes several steps.
Thiessen’s position is that Christians should, without exception, obey God’s commands. Never mind the fact that he doesn’t practice this himself, He’s more of a “do as I say, not as I do follower of Jesus.
The first step is to confirm that the command is in line with God’s word
Thiessen believes the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God. He believes every word of the Bible is straight from the mouth of God. Thus, in his mind, if God commands it, obey!
The second step would be to confirm that God is sending that command.The Bible tells us to test the spirits, and we should test that command to make sure God is giving it.
How could someone possibly know it is God commanding him to do something? How does a Christian determine whether it is God, Satan, or self telling him to do something? As far as I am aware, there’s no empirical test that can be used to confirm it is God giving a believer a command. As far as I know, all that Evangelicals have to go on are their feelings. How do Evangelicals know God is speaking to them? They allegedly feel it in their heart of hearts.
Third, the nature of the command must be analyzed to make sure the Christian is not being commanded to violate God’s other commands, laws, and instructions. Murder and rape etc., are certainly not commands coming from God.
And here is the crux of the issue. The Bible does indeed make moral claims. However, the Bible also records not only God, but his followers, ignoring and violating these moral claims. What’s up with that? Surely Thiessen is aware that God commanded the Israelites to murder and rape those he determined were his enemies. If Thiessen wants to debate me on this issue, I’m game.
Fourth, one must be careful not to confuse the commands given in the OT as commands to be followed today. For example, God commanded certain activities to be done as punishment for the other people’s sins. Those commands are very people and era specific and are not in force today.
Does Thiessen really believe that every act of violence God commanded Israel to do is moral? What did the innocents murdered and raped by the Israelites — as commanded by God — do that deserved such punishment?
Thiessen wants us to believe that God went to anger management classes, and now he behaves differently. However, the book of Revelation reveals a God who is still very much a vicious monster. Richard Dawkins was right when he said:
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.
As far as we know, God does not command anyone to kill others as punishment for their sins in the modern age. Those types of commands come from evil, and we know they come from evil because they violate God’s laws, instructions, and so on.
If these commands “come from evil,” logically God and the Israelites committed evil acts. I conclude, then, that the God portrayed in the Bible is evil.
Thiessen has no evidence for this claim. We humans cannot know God’s mind, the Bible says, yet Thiessen thinks he can discern and know the mind of God.
Then, we have NT instructions to guide us in how we obey God. Galatians 5 tells us:
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
Thiessen might want to meditate on these verses and change his ways. My interactions with Thiessen suggest that he doesn’t think these verses apply to him.
We are also told in Romans to obey the laws of the land and murder, rape, pedophilia, etc., are against the law of the land and a Christian cannot disobey those laws. As you see by the quoted verse above, we are instructed to live according to the Spirit, which does not have any evil or evil doing in it.
Evil is evil, right? So if certain behaviors today are evil, those same actions were evil in the Old Testament too. Thiessen cannot have it both ways.
As for the question, if God commands something against a Christian’s personal moral code, would that person obey God? First, a Christian should not have a moral code that contradicts God’s or his instructions. etc.
But, every Christian does. No two Christians have the same moral code, and that incudes Evangelicals who claim that the Bible is their rulebook.
Second, it is better to obey than sacrifice, so the Christian must always obey God, as long as it is God giving the instructions. Disobedience is sin and wrong. Third, we do not go by the unbelieving world’s standards for commands or obedience . . .
Again, how can an Evangelical Christian infallibly know that it is God commanding them to do something? They can’t.
….
I wrote:
Does genocide, child sacrifice, and slavery promote the well-being of others and human flourishing? Of course not. Yet, when God commands such things, all of a sudden, Christians lose all sense of what’s best for themselves and others.
This is another ridiculous thing to say, as the unbeliever takes them out of context and misapplies them to whatever troubling thought they have on their minds. The unbeliever writing those words has no concept of what human flourishing means as he wants sin and corruption to abound at the expense of those doing what is right and moral.
Contrary to Thiessen’s assertion, I know exactly what human flourishing means and what we can do to make our world a better place to live. Again, I am more than happy to debate him on this issue.
I find it funny coming from a man with a sordid past that he says “sin and corruption to abound at the expense of those doing what is right and moral.”
I wrote:
The good news is that most Christians do not obey God. As cafeteria Christians, they pick and choose which commands to obey. That’s why they oppose genocide, child sacrifice, and slavery.
That is not good news but bad news. Christians are not free to pick and choose what they will obey. As Jesus said, ‘Why do you call me Lord yet do not do the things I say’. People need to look at what Jesus says honestly and implement his instructions correctly.
All Christians, including Thiessen, pick and choose the commands they want to obey. If someone obeyed every command, teaching, and precept in the Bible, you know what would happen? He would be arrested and thrown in prison.
At no time does Jesus teach to own slaves, commit genocide or do child sacrifice. Those activities are practiced by the unbelieving world as the sinful world aborts innocent children, keeps sex slaves, and kills people just because they do not like them.
Thiessen forgets the fact that Jesus is God. I have challenged him on this point before. I have concluded that he is heterodox on the nature of Jesus and the Trinity.
Everything that God commanded in the Old Testament, was also commanded by Jesus, the second person of the Trinity. Thus, Jesus commanded the Israelites to murder, rape, and commit genocide. To say otherwise is to deny the divinity and nature of Jesus.
We can point you to Hamas, Boko Haram, and other examples that show it is not the Christians that is doing this. Abortion is the biggest genocide taking place,e yet the unbelieving world practices it without guilt or shame.
The Christians are the ones trying to stop these things. But the unbelieving writer of those quoted words does not care if he writes the truth or not. He just wants to justify his departure from God. He also wants to misdirect people’s attention away from what the unbelieving world is doing.
Thiessen does what he always does: he attacks my motives and says I am a liar. I will leave it to readers to decide if I am a truth teller.
Anything that the writer accuses God of doing, his side of the world is doing with less than holy and pure motives, and on a far grander scale. He and other unbelievers are in no position to accuse God of anything.
It is best that he refrain from speaking, as his world is far worse than anything God has done.
Is this the best argument Thiessen can offer? God and his followers may have commited sinful, evil acts, but Bruce and his fellow atheists do worst things. Really? Whom have I murdered or raped? What immoral, evil acts have I committed. No, Thiessen objects to the fact that I speak my mind about Evangelical Christianity and people agree with me. His only response is to attack my character and lie — both of which, if the Bible is to be believed, means Thiessen is not a Christian.
What say ye readers? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
