A regular reader of this blog — a former Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church member and preacher, who trained for the ministry at Clarence Sexton’s The Crown College — sent me the following response from his pastor:
Dear Harry (not his real name),
Thanks for answering the first part of my letter. I realize that you were about 17 when you allowed the devil to have you question God’s Word and that you doubt God’s Word and even deny His Word. Proverbs 23:7 says as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
Harry, I know you know enough about God’s Word that nothing I say to you will convince you if the Holy Spirit Of God doesn’t make God real to you, I can’t. I do not know if you and Louise have ever been saved. I know that a person has to be convicted of the sin of unbelief before they can be saved. It is not an emotional feeling. It is conviction of the sin of unbelief.
Time will tell because you will experience God’s chastisement if you are saved. I fear what it might take for God to get your attention. If you don’t experience God’s chastisement then you will know that you were never saved to begin with according to God’s Word.
You really don’t see the seriousness of sin. It put My Savior on the cross of Calvary for my sin. There will be no one in hell for telling a lie or stealing. If anyone goes to hell it will be because of the sin of unbelief.
Your children have to hear the truth before they can believe the truth. So then faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Please give them a chance to hear God’s Word like you had. If you and your wife don’t want to come to church, will you give your children a chance by allowing them to come to master club and watch God work in their tender hearts.
Harry, I encourage you to do all the research on Jesus you can find and see if he is a liar, lunatic, or He is who He says He is. Your whole family’s destiny depends on who Jesus is and what you do with Him.
I am here for you if you need me. Remember God loves you.Thanks for taking time to read this.
Your Friend,
Pastor God’s Man
Those of you who have left the IFB church movement are quite familiar with the tactics and approach used by Harry’s pastor. This passive-aggressive approach is used any time an IFB church member thinks about leaving the church or has doubt about the teachings of the church and pastor.
The pastor appeals to their relationship, and even goes so far as to tell Harry he is still his friend. He reminds him that God loves him and that he, the pastor, is there for him if he needs him. All well and good, right? If this is all the pastor had said, few of us would have found fault with his words. But, like the true IFB pastor he is . . . with the carrot comes a big stick.
The pastor tells Harry:
He is influenced by the Devil
He doubts his salvation
That God will chastise him IF he is a really is a Christian
Everyone in Hell is there because of unbelief
He is ignorant, having failed to do all the research on Jesus (I thought the Bible was all we needed?)
And then he plays the children card. He appeals to Harry on the familial level. After all, their eternal destiny depends on them coming to this pastor’s church. What he fails to realize and understand is that as a person raised in the IFB church, Harry would most certainly want to keep his children away from the pernicious IFB church movement and its teachings and practices. If he is breaking free, why would he want to expose his children to these things?
I hope this post illustrates for readers the challenges people face when they decide to walk away from the IFB church. By leaving, they are cutting themselves off from everything they have ever known. This young family man is to be commended for being willing to walk away. It took great courage to do so. May there be many more just like him.
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.
Evangelical zealots are known for bugging, harassing, and irritating people with their Bible-quoting, preaching, and all-around Bible masturbation in public. Believing they are commanded by God to go into all the world and bug the Hell out of people, Evangelicals couldn’t care less what you think about their efforts. Sinners need to hear the gospel, Evangelicals say. Death is certain and Hell is hot, souls must be rescued from eternal torture at the hands of the thrice-holy God in the Lake of Fire. What sinners think or want doesn’t matter. Evangelicals are God’s door-to-door salesmen, peddling the old-fashioned gospel. Always on the prowl looking for marks, Evangelicals go out into the highways and hedges demanding people listen to their JESUS SAVES sales pitch. Few of us will make it through this life without having at least one Evangelical trying to “save” us. Most of us will suffer through such ill-behavior numerous times, often by Evangelical pastors, evangelists, family members, and friends. No matter how often we object to Evangelicals not respecting our wishes and invading our personal space, soulwinners are determined to get us to pray the sinner’s prayer so they can put another notch on the gospel six-shooter. Don’t like it? Tough shit. What you think doesn’t matter.
The other day I ran into an atheist who hated it when Christians reasoned from, referred to, or quoted their “dumb holy book around her” because she believes it’s a work of fictitious nonsense that has no relevance.
My first thought was, well duh, of course atheists don’t like dumb holy books, why would they?
But is it a reasonable to have any expectation that a Christian should be willing to even temporarily set aside his or her dumb holy book?
Further, should a Christian ever consider not reasoning from, referring to, or quoting the Bible even as an act of good will, congeniality, or in the interest of political correctness?
NO! and NO!
First, setting aside the Bible because it offends the sensibilities of someone who is dead in sin is profoundly absurd. Their feelings about the Bible are theirs and not our concern. They hate it? So what.
These, of course, are the words of a bully, the words of a man who has no regard for personal boundaries. And Evangelicals wonder why they are one of the most hated sects in America. Only in the Evangelical world do people think it is okay to bully complete strangers. In fact, Evangelical colleges and churches teach pastors and congregants how to effectively bully people for Hey-Zeus. As a student at Midwestern Baptist College, I had to take evangelism classes EVERY semester. Not only that, I had to practice my skills twice a week on unsuspecting people.
So how do we respond to the Hatts of the world?
First, we can politely listen, all the while thinking we would like to cut their tongues out with a rusty, dull knife.
Second, we can stop their unwanted advances, and walk away.
Third, we can engage them, knowing that we likely know far more about the Bible than they do.
Fourth, we badger them in kind, giving them a taste of their own medicine. I do this with street preachers. I will stand near where they are screaming and start preaching the atheist gospel. Lots of fun, at least for me. 🙂
Fifth, we can tell them that they can take their Bibles and shove them up their asses or utter other words that are sure to turn their virgin ears red.
Remember, the Hatts of the world have no regard for us, not really. Oh, they say they love us and only want what’s best for us. But, the fact remains is that we are just a means to an end — new church members, increased offerings, and more worker bees for their churches. As those of us who were once devoted followers of Jesus before we deconverted learned, once you are no longer part of their club all the love, kindness, and acceptance disappear. We quickly learned that some of the nastiest, most hateful, mean-spirited people in America are Evangelical zealots. I have receipts if anyone dares to challenge my assertion.
I rarely have to deal with Evangelical evangelizers these days. I am the Village Atheist. Most local Evangelicals know who I am, know my backstory. I’ve watched evangelizers going door to door in our town, only to have them skip our home. Why is that? 🙂 Man, I might enjoy a bit of hand-to-hand combat on my front porch. Alas, I’ve been written off, one who is an apostate and a reprobate.
Most of my interaction with evangelizers comes through this blog. I have had thousands of interactions with Evangelicals determined to “save” me, “correct” me, show me the error of my way, or deconstruct my life. Years ago, I was more inclined to engage such people, treating our interactions as a blood sport. These days, I am more inclined to tell evangelizers to fuck off. Do they? Of course not. As sure as the sun comes up in the morning, one or more Evangelical zealots will send me an email or comment on my blog, saying that they speak for God, that what they have to say will bring me back to Hey-Zeus. Fifteen years in, I remain an unrepentant atheist. If you are keeping score, it’s Bruce- 2,666 and God- 0. Hey, today might be the day when James Hatt or one of his fellow evangelizers finally scores, and I return to faith once delivered to the saints. With Gawd, all things are possible, right? 🙂
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.
Sophomore class, Midwestern Baptist College, Pontiac, Michigan 1976. Polly is in the first row, the first person on the left. Bruce is in the third row, the eighth person from the left
In the early 1960s, my dad packed up our family and meager belongings and moved us from Bryan, Ohio to San Diego, California. Looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Dad hoped to find prosperity. What he found instead was Jesus. The Gerencser family was always religious, attending the Lutheran Church and Episcopalian Church in Bryan. However, upon arriving in California, we started attending a large Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) congregation, Scott Memorial Baptist Church in El Cajon (now Shadow Mountain Community Church). Pastored by Tim LaHaye, who would later author the Left Behind series with Jerry Jenkins and the Act of Marriage, Scott Memorial was the genesis for what would happen in my life for the next forty-five years. Both of my parents made public professions of faith and were baptized, as was I at the age of five. From this time forward until my parents divorced in 1972, the Gerencser family was in church every time the doors were open.
Dad never found the pot of gold he was looking for, and after three years in California, we returned to Bryan. For a while, we attended Eastland Baptist Church, affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1965, we started attending First Baptist Church, an IFB congregation pastored by Jack Bennett. Over the next few years, we moved to Farmer, Deshler, and Harrod, and then in 1970, we moved to Findlay. At each of these stops, my parents joined what they described as “Bible-believing” churches.
After a short stint at Calvary Baptist Church in Findlay, our family began attending Trinity Baptist Church, an IFB congregation affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship (BBF). Trinity was pastored by Gene Millioni. Ron John was the assistant pastor and Bruce Turner was the youth pastor. All of these men, especially Bruce Turner, would make a deep, lasting imprint on my life. (Please see Dear Bruce Turner.)
In 1972, my parents divorced. This ended my parents’ and siblings’ church attendance. I, on the other hand, continued to attend church every time the doors were open, including revivals, conferences, Bible school, and other sundry services. Throw in youth meetings, youth outings, church basketball, bus ministry, and visitation, and it is clear that my life revolved around church. As my home life disintegrated, the church became a place of safety and security for me. I rarely spent any time at home. Dad had married a nineteen-year-old girl — four years older than I. We did not get along, to say the least.
In the fall of 1972, Evangelist Al Lacy came to Trinity to hold a revival service. One night, as I sat in the meeting with my friends, I felt deep conviction over my sins while the evangelist preached. I tried to push aside the Holy Spirit’s work in my heart, but when the evangelist gave the invitation, I knew that I needed to go forward. I knew that I was a wretched sinner in need of salvation. (Romans 3) I knew that I was headed for Hell and that Jesus, the resurrected son of God, was the only person who could save me from my sin. I knelt at the altar and asked Jesus to forgive me of my sin and save me. I put my faith and trust in Jesus, that he alone was my Lord and Savior. (That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. Romans 10:9-11)
I got up from the altar a changed person. I had no doubt that I was a new creation, old things had passed away, and all things had become new. (Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)
The next Sunday, I was baptized, and several weeks later I stood before the church and declared that I believed God was calling me to preach.
Bruce, age eighteen
In March 1973, Dad informed us that we were moving to Tucson, Arizona. After arriving in Tucson, I sought out an IFB church to attend, the Tucson Baptist Temple, pastored by Lewis Johnson. I quickly immersed myself in the life of the church, working on a bus route, going on teen visitation, and winning souls to Christ. Four months later, I hopped a Greyhound bus and returned to my mom’s home in Bryan. After spending June and July in Bryan, I talked to Bruce Turner about moving to Findlay so I could attend Trinity again. Bruce found me a family to live with, Bob and Bonnie Bolander. That lasted for three months before Bob informed me that I would have to move. I would later learn that he thought I was getting too friendly with his wife. In retrospect, I may have been, but as a young, naïve, virgin boy I was clueless about such things. Bruce found me a new home with Gladys Canterberry, a matronly divorcée in the church. I became a ward of the court so I could get Medicaid insurance and Gladys could receive a monthly check for keeping me. I lived with Gladys until the end of May 1974. Two weeks before school was out, I moved back to my mom’s home.
After returning home to Bryan, I learned that Findlay High School was refusing me credit for eleventh grade. Why? I failed to take my final exams. Never mind the fact that I never missed a day of school. Never mind the fact that I had good, albeit not spectacular, grades. Never mind the fact that I got out of school every day at noon so I could work the lunch shift at Bill Knapp’s as a busboy (and I often worked the dinner shift too, 25-30 hours a week). I was so livid over this, that I dropped out of school and started working at a Marathon gas station pump gas and fixing cars. During this time, I called First Baptist Church in Bryan my church home.
In October 1974, Mom was admitted for her second stint at the Toledo State Mental Hospital. After two months of living on my own with my sixteen-year-old brother and fourteen-year-old sister, Dad came from Arizona and moved us to Sierra Vista where he now lived. While in Sierra Vista, I attended Sierra Vista Baptist Church — a Conservative Baptist congregation. I immersed myself in the life of the church, working in the bus ministry, teaching Sunday school, and attending church three times a week. While attending Sierra Vista Baptist, I met a young woman named Anita Farr. I was quickly smitten with Anita and we had a torrid love affair until she returned to college in Phoenix in the fall of 1975. (Please see 1975: Anita, My First Love.) In a fit of jealousy, I broke up with Anita, and a week later I was sitting in Bryan, Ohio.
The car I took to college in August 1976
I spent the next year living with my mom and working as the dairy manager for Foodland. First Baptist was once again my church home, and in the spring of 1976, I decided that it was time for me to act on my calling to the ministry. I planned to attend Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta, Canada. Unable to raise the necessary funds to enroll at Prairie Bible, I looked for a Fundamentalist college closer to home to attend. My IFB grandparents, John and Ann Tieken (please see Dear Ann and John), suggested that I check out Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan — not far from where they lived and John owned and operated an aircraft engine repair shop. In the summer of 1976, I drove two and a half hours north to Pontiac to visit Midwestern. I quickly determined that Midwestern was the place for me. Cheap tuition, not too far from home. The only negative was the proximity of my hateful, judgmental, abusive Jesus-loving grandparents.
In August 1976, I packed up my meager belongings in my car and moved to Midwestern. I moved into the dormitory, thus beginning my journey towards becoming an IFB pastor. What happened during my three years at Midwestern will hopefully make for interesting reading, providing a careful inside look at Midwestern Baptist College, its founder Dr. Tom Malone, Emmanuel Baptist Church, meeting my wife, Polly, the daughter of a Midwestern graduate and an IFB preacher, and how my time at Midwestern deeply shaped the first half of my ministerial career.
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.
I saw these flags near Fort Wayne, Indiana. I wonder how many people driving by will notice the Christian flag flying above the American flag?
Dear Neighbor,
I live two houses down from you, the red house with blue shutters and white trim. Though we have never met, I want to “share” a few things with you that will hopefully make us closer as neighbors. I really want to have a personal relationship with you, your wife, and those two darling kids I see playing in your yard, but there are some things you need to understand first.
I am a born-again Christian. This means that I have trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior. In humble obedience to the call of Jesus, after I was saved I was scripturally baptized by immersion. Through my baptism, I told the world (well, I really only told the two hundred Christians who were there that day) that I am a follower of Jesus. I am a member of EXCITE® Church. We meet every Sunday at 11 A.M. over at Secular Nation High School. We are really a Southern Baptist church, but we don’t use the word Baptist in our name because non-Christians have negative opinions of Baptists.
I am a church deacon, and my wife, Betty Lou is part of the worship team. Both of us also help with EXCITE® for Kids, a program meant to coerce little children into making salvation decisions. Our pastor told us that the younger a person is saved the more likely it is they will stay in church once they become an adult. We take him at his word and do all we can to make sure every child says the sinner’s prayer and asks Jesus into their heart before the age of ten.
Betty Lou and I, along with everyone in our church, believe that the Holy Christian Bible is a supernatural book inspired by God. There are no mistakes, errors, or contradictions in the Bible. Our pastor told us that the Bible is different from any other book ever written. God wrote the Bible, humans wrote every other book. It’s important you understand and believe this. If you don’t, the rest of my letter won’t make any sense to you.
The Bible says that every person must accept Jesus as their personal savior. If they do so they will go to Heaven when they die, and if they don’t they will go to Hell. Every human must make a choice to accept or reject Jesus Christ. So, I ask you dear neighbor, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?
I don’t know what your religious beliefs are. Are you a born-again Christian? You need to understand that there is one true God and religion — my God and my religion. And I don’t really have a religion like Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists, and Atheists do. I have a relationship. Me and Jesus are tight. We’re brothers, yet he is also my father. It’s complicated and I really don’t understand it, but it is in the Bible and if it’s in the Bible that means it is 100% God-certified true.
If you are not a born-again Christian then I hope you will fall on your knees right now and pray the following prayer:
Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior. In Your Name. Amen.
Did you pray this prayer? Did you really, really, really, really, really mean it?
If so, congratulations!! You are now a born-again Christian and will go to Heaven when you die. Isn’t that awesome?
Now that we have that out of the way, you need to know some other things that will help you as a new Christian:
Be baptized by immersion as soon as possible (hint, hint at EXCITE® Church)
Join a Bible believing, Bible preaching church (hint, hint EXCITE® Church) and attend services every time the doors are open
Start reading the Bible every day (start with the book of John)
Pray every day — morning, noon, and night, and every time you eat (except when eating ice cream at Dairy Queen)
I probably shouldn’t be telling you this next one since Pastor Billy Bob likes to spring it on new members, but I just know you’ll be excited about this, so I thought I’d tell you. Jesus gave his all so you could be saved and the least you can do is give back to him a portion of your income as proof that you really, really love Jesus. Now, Jesus really doesn’t need this money, but our church and pastor do, so when you come to EXCITE® Church on Sunday, please drop at least 10% of your gross income into the offering plate. I promise if you do this God will open up the windows of Heaven and pour you out a blessing. And if you want an even bigger blessing, give more money. Pastor Billy Bob likes to say, you can’t out-give God!
I should probably also tell you that true Christians, also known as the people who are members of EXCITE® Church, love what God loves and hate what God hates. At EXCITE® Church, Pastor Billy lets us know every Sunday who is on the Official Hate List. Currently, the Top Ten spots on the hate list are held by:
Joe Biden
Barack Hussein Obama
LGBTQ people
Abortionists
Socialism
Atheists
Hollywood, except when they make a movie starring Kirk Cameron or Stephen Baldwin
Aliens — the brown-skinned kind
Demoncrats (Did ya catch that DEMON-crats? Ha! Ha!)
Those who engage in any form of sex except monogamous heterosexual intercourse between a man and woman who are married to each other
If by some small chance you decided to NOT pray the sinner’s prayer, then I need to tell you that you are the enemy of God and are headed for Hell. If you refuse this wonderful offer of salvation and die, then God will have no recourse but to equip you with a fireproof body and torture you in Hell for all eternity. Surely, you don’t want to spend eternity being burned by fire and having worms infest your body?
And if you don’t pray the sinner’s prayer and become an awesome Christian just like me, then we can’t be friends and our children can’t play with each other. The Bible commands us to avoid people like you, lest you rub off on us and we commit sin. I really want to be friends with you and your family, but you must become a Christian first. If you don’t, then I will have to shun and look down on you like I do Atheists, Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Liberal Protestants, Humanists, Secularists, Democrats and . . . well everyone who doesn’t believe as I do.
Perhaps you drove by my house the other day and saw my flag pole, you know the one with the American flag and Christian flag. Now, I know that no flag should fly above the Stars and Stripes, but since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Sodomites can legally be married, I thought it important to remind everyone about who this Country REALLY belongs to.
I hope you prayed the sinner’s prayer. I just know that you want your sins forgiven and you want a home in Heaven where you can spend eternity with people who think just like me. Would that be awesome? No one in their right mind would refuse such an awesome soul-saving, sin-forgiving deal, right?
Saved by the precious blood of Jesus,
Archie S. Sanctimonious
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.
Originally written in 2010, slightly edited and corrected
From your earliest recollection, you remember the CHURCH.
You remember the preacher, the piano player, the deacons, and your Sunday School teacher.
You remember the youth group and all the fun activities.
You remember getting saved and baptized.
You remember being in church every time the doors were open.
You remember everything in your life revolving around the church.
You remember daily praying and reading your Bible.
You remember the missionaries and the stories they told about heathens in faraway lands.
You remember revival meetings and getting right with God.
You remember . . .
Most of all, you remember the people.
You thought to yourself, my church family loves me almost as much as God does.
You remember hearing sermons about God’s love and the love Christians have for one another.
Church family, like blood family, loves you no matter what.
But then IT happened.
You know, IT.
You got older. You grew up. With adult eyes, you began to see the church, God, Jesus, and the Bible differently.
You had questions, questions no one had answers for.
Perhaps you began to see that your church family wasn’t perfect.
Perhaps the things that Mom and Dad whispered about in the bedroom became known to you.
Perhaps you found out that things were not as they seemed.
Uncertainty and doubt crept in.
Perhaps you decided to try the world for a while. Lots of church kids do, you told yourself.
Perhaps you came to the place where you no longer believed what you had believed your entire life.
And so you left.
You had an IT moment, that moment in time when things change forever.
You thought, surely Mom and Dad will still love me.
You thought, surely Sissy and Bubby and Granny will still love me.
And above all, you thought your church family would love you no matter what.
But, they didn’t.
For all their talk of love, their love was conditioned on being one of them, believing the right things, and living a certain way.
Once you left, the love stopped, and in its place came judgment and condemnation.
They are praying for you.
They plead with you to return to Jesus and the church.
They question whether you ever really knew Jesus as your savior.
They say they still love you, but deep down you know they don’t.
You know their love for you requires you to be like them.
And you can’t be like them anymore . . .
Such loss.
The church is still where it’s always been.
The same families are there, loving Jesus and speaking of their great love for others.
But you are forgotten.
A sheep gone astray.
Every once in a while, someone asks your Mom and Dad how you are doing.
They sigh and perhaps tears well up in their eyes . . .
Oh, how they wish you would come home,
To be a family sitting together in the church again.
You can’t go back.
You no longer believe.
All that you really want now is their love and respect.
You want them to love you just-as-you-are.
Can they do this?
Will they do this?
Or is Jesus more important than you?
Does the church come first?
Are chapters and verses more important than flesh and blood?
You want to be told that they still love you.
You want to be held and told it is going to be all right.
But here you sit tonight . . .
Alone . . .
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.
Evangelical Christian apologist William Lane Craig writes, in response to a question about doubt (link no longer active);
Be on guard for Satan’s deceptions. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in a spiritual warfare and that there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Which leads me to ask: why are you reading those infidel websites anyway, when you know how destructive they are to your faith? These sites are literally pornographic (evil writing) and so ought in general to be shunned. Sure, somebody has to read them and refute them; but why does it have to be you? Let somebody else, who can handle it, do it. Remember: Doubt is not just a matter of academic debate or disinterested intellectual discussion; it involves a battle for your very soul, and if Satan can use doubt to immobilize you or destroy you, then he will.
I firmly believe, and I think the Bizarro-testimonies of those who have lost their faith and apostatized bears out, that moral and spiritual lapses are the principal cause for failure to persevere rather than intellectual doubts. But intellectual doubts become a convenient and self-flattering excuse for spiritual failure because we thereby portray ourselves as such intelligent persons rather than as moral and spiritual failures. I think that the key to victorious Christian living is not to have all your questions answered — which is probably impossible in a finite lifetime — but to learn to live successfully with unanswered questions. The key is to prevent unanswered questions from becoming destructive doubts. I believe that can be done by keeping in mind the proper ground of our knowledge of Christianity’s truth and by cultivating the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
First, Craig describes infidel websites like mine as:
A tool of Satan used to destroy the souls of Christians
Pornographic (evil writing)
Something that, in general, should be shunned
Craig readily admits that websites like mine can cause Christians to doubt their faith. While I have no interest in converting any Christian to atheism, I do think the tenets of Christianity and the teachings of the Bible should be carefully and fully investigated. If my writing causes a Christian to question and have doubts . . . good!
If Christianity is worth believing it will withstand any questions or doubts a believer might have. If Christianity is what it claims to be, then websites like this one will do little to no harm. Of course, I think that Christianity is NOT what it claims to be, and that is one of the reasons people are leaving the faith in droves.
Second, Craig attempts to dismiss people like me by calling our testimony of loss of faith a Bizarro-testimony (not to be believed). Craig contends we lost our faith, not for intellectual reasons, but because of spiritual or moral failure. He believes former Christians use intellectual doubts as a cover for moral or spiritual failure. In doing this, Craig moves the focus from Christianity and the Bible to the individual. According to Craig, I am no longer a Christian because of some moral lapse or spiritual deficiency in my life.
I will leave it to Detectives for Jesus to ferret out my moral or spiritual failures. I doubt they will find much to hang me by, but I will readily admit that I, like every other Christian and pastor, had moral and spiritual failures. After all, since I STILL had a sin nature, moral and spiritual failure was sure to happen, right? That said, I have no affairs lurking in my closet, just in case someone thinks moral failure = screwing a church member.
Craig lives in a world of willing, deliberate delusion. He refuses to accept the fact that many of us, especially those of us who were once pastors, left the ministry and the Christian faith for intellectual reasons. I have written many times about this subject. The primary reason I left Christianity was that I no longer believed the Bible was the Word of God. I no longer believed the Bible was “truth.” I no longer believed that the central character of the Bible, Jesus, was who the Bible says he was (and I use the word “was” because I don’t believe Jesus “is”). (Please see the WHY page for information on why I left Christianity.)
I didn’t have a moral or spiritual collapse that led to me leaving Christianity. Instead, I decided to investigate again the claims of Christianity and its divine Holy Book. Conclusion? I weighed Christianity and the Bible in the balance and found them wanting. (Daniel 5:27)
At the end of the day, it really is all about the Bible.
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.
I found the following graphic today on The Christian Post website. I transformed the graphic to accurately reflect how Evangelicals view the world. 🙂
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.
Life without God is empty. Eventually life without God comes to a very lonely and unfulfilled end – after you die. But life with God – after you die and are raised to life again – goes on forever, in indescribable joy!
The gist of this person’s comment is this . . . Atheists live empty lives that will come to a lonely, unfulfilled end.
I have given up trying to educate Christians concerning their ignorance about atheists. I have come to the conclusion that they simply do not want to know the truth.
Christians need to think that their lives matter above all others, that their worship and devotion to God will result in a divine payoff in the sweet by and by. They need to think that going to church on Sunday matters, that giving 10% of their income to the church matters, and that doing all the things the Christians do matters. To admit that atheists can have fulfilling lives that matter is to say that a person can have a good life without God. Christians will have none of that. No! No! No! GOD makes life worthwhile. GOD gives life purpose and meaning.
Here’s what I know. People are people, regardless of what they think about God. Purpose and fulfillment are not dependent on God. There are atheists who live unfulfilled, meaningless lives, but there are plenty of Christians who do the same. In fact, since Christianity is one of the largest world religions, I suspect there are far more Christians than atheists living unfulfilled, meaningless lives.
Atheists are often more focused on the present than Christians — especially Evangelicals. Christians tend to focus on the hereafter. Living and enjoying life is offloaded to eternal life beyond the grave. The present life is to be endured, with the result being that God gives Christians indescribable love, joy, and peace that goes on forever. Atheists, on the other hand, only have this life. They only have one opportunity to live life and live it well. Atheists are highly motivated to make what they can of this life, to enjoy this life, and to make the future a better place for their progeny.
Most Christians can’t accept how atheists view the world. They are too invested in their interpretation of the Bible, their worship of God, and the mansion that awaits them after they die, to admit that atheists can have a life that is, in every way, as happy as theirs.
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.
I enjoyed Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. A lot.
I saw it in the theatre twice. I have seen it many times on cable television.
A friend once took up, as a hobby, teasing me about inconsistencies in the production.
In a flashback, Butch the fighter has childhood eyes of different color than he has as an adult. After a shooting, Butch only partially wipes his fingerprints from a gun. He encounters a cab driver who has a license bearing a name the spelling of which does not fit what it should be for an immigrant from her home country.
The list goes on.
Jimmie is a brief reluctant host to a couple of friends who happen to be killers. His wall clock seems to stay at the same time from scene to scene. “Lightning fast action” my friend observed.
A microphone can be seen hanging briefly in reflection at the upper right corner of a window.
That sort of thing.
While it lasted, I had fun participating in my friend’s game. I would present him with explanations.
My own eyes changed color a few years ago. No idea why, but I had to ask for a change in my driver’s license. It happens.
Someone involved in a shooting might indeed fail to be completely diligent in removing evidence. Understandable.
Some bureaucracy misspelled a name? Or someone has a name that runs counter to prevailing culture? My name is “Burr” for God’s sake. Try that for unusual parental inspiration.
A stopped clock? Look at our kitchen. I’ve been telling my loved one for months I’ll replace the battery. I’ll get to it soon, I promise.
The movie microphone reflected in the window still has me stumped. Can’t think of an explanation. So I told him: Every home should have one. He didn’t buy it. When I think of something better, I’ll give him a call.
The bullets stopped me cold, though. Guy steps out with a hand gun and blazes away at two central characters. But at least two of the bullets are suddenly seen in the wall behind them before the guy fires a single shot. First the wall is unmarred, then there are bullet holes, then there are gunshots.
I thought about that movie incident after reading an account by former pastor and current atheist Bruce Gerencser. Bible reading Christians occasionally claim to know more than does he about why he made that transition from faith to atheism.
Bruce responds, reasonably, that he accepts at face value the stories of Christians about their own journey toward faith. He asks for similar respect in return.
All I ask is that Christians do the same, regardless of whether they can square my storyline with their peculiar theology. It’s my story, and who better to tell it than I?
Frequent correspondent Ryan adds his voice, quoting a critic:
“It is the Bible, not I, who says that you do not believe because you do not want to believe. It is because I have studied the Bible and found it to be a reliable predictor of human behavior that I tend to accept its explanation rather than your protestation.”
Who better to tell my story than I? Apparently, any stranger armed with a Bible.
Little irritates me more than people who claim to know what I think or feel or do better than I do after only a few minutes of conversation or after labeling me, especially if they think that a religious text qualifies them to do so.
As I see it, Ryan speaks wisdom.
I can empathize to the extent that I have roughly parallel experiences within my own extended family. One has, by unspoken mutual agreement, avoided contact for a number of years. It seems I am not a real Christian because I do not hate the requisite groups. And I do not realize the actual reason I only pretend to follow Jesus, while refusing to join in God’s hate for Obama, Hillary, and gays.
Another family member, a skeptic, is at the other end of the spectrum. She knows, better than do I, why I submit to my own insecurities, following sheep-like into Christian belief. Her diagnosis: It is mostly because of my inability to venture into independent thought. I notice her slowing her words way down as she gently describes to me the obvious emotional deficiency that limits my mental range.
Okay, I admit all that has the ability to irritate. I respond in what I hope is gentle sarcasm. I flatter myself, believing that I know my inward thoughts more than anyone else could. And I enjoy living in the illusion that I am capable of rationality.
My friend J. Myste teaches me that a little gentle mocking is not injurious to mental health. He once complimented me on my staggering intellect, which was evident in the mental gymnastics I showed in defending an absurd religion. He once added this:
However, I think you really believe that God has visited my heart. You could be right. Perhaps God is influencing me. Perhaps the exorcism is not yet complete.
The Bible experience to which Ryan was subjected is not that uncommon. I once watched in awe as a visitor searched frantically through his Bible for a verse he knew would settle an argument. The argument was about whether scripture is infallible.
Circular logic sometimes seems to find its orbit around me. My friends help me out occasionally, in discovering it in my own reasoning.
One zombie story from long, long ago still occasionally makes the rounds. A religious man describes to a friend how very impressed he is with a new acquaintance. The new fellow actually talks with God. The friend is curious.
“Talks with God? How do you know that?” “He said so himself!” “But maybe he lied!” “Would a man who talks with God lie?”
Unusual logic does not always flow in only one direction.
In my college days, a psych professor explained why religious beliefs are inherently absurd. Everything in the universe, including him and me, is merely an evolved combination of matter and energy. I remember suggesting that there is still wonder in our ability to analyze. If we are merely collections of matter and energy, then our universe of matter and energy is itself examined by a small number of its own collections of matter and energy. And that is a matter of wonder. There is a transcendence in consciousness.
He was dismissive. Consciousness, he said, is an illusion.
I regarded that with hidden amusement. I thought to myself, if consciousness is an illusion, who is around to be fooled?
I later discovered that he was presenting what had already become an aggressive argument when discussions of science and philosophy intersect. That aggressiveness sometimes approached antagonism. There was no room in a scientific worldview for consciousness.
Everything is composed of matter and energy. The only conclusion is that there is no such thing as consciousness.
I eventually happened upon Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest who was also a renowned paleontologist. I was amused at what I saw as an exercise in intellectual jujitsu. Teilhard agreed with a materialistic worldview. Everything is indeed composed of matter and energy. The only possible conclusion was that all matter and energy possess a sort of proto-consciousness that becomes something more as organisms evolve into complexity.
The late David Foster Wallace, in a famous commencement address, illustrated how the committed perspectives of two individuals could compel radically different conclusions. At first, I thought he was making fun of atheism. But with a little thought, I changed my mind:
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer.
And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing.
“Just last month I got caught away from camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’”
And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.”
The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”
The atheist is right, from his perspective. The prayer for a winning lotto ticket may seem to be answered, but there had to have been several million unanswered prayers as well. Statistics are on his side.
My desperate prayers that our young Marine might return safely from the battle zones of Afghanistan prove only that most combat heroes come back unharmed. We don’t know how many prayers were answered only with tragedy, death, and grief.
Does prayer cast us into a sort of Schrödinger parallel timeline? How can we know what, if anything but chance, guided those Eskimos to us?
In some religious argument, I have the advantage of having no compelling case to make. I can provide what many Christians call witness to my own belief. But it does not come from a Paul-of-Tarsus-like epiphany. In fact, I experience faith as more a weakness of imagination.
I can grasp the intellectual argument made by materialists. I can envision the amazing constructs that carbon atoms can achieve when the right series of chance cosmic occurrences combine with a lucky lightning strike and a few billion years of evolution. I can see in my mind some series of combinations of matter and energy that make up my desk, my computer, me, my loved one, our children, and others whom I love.
That love represents a problem, at least for me.
I do not have the capacity to sustain that materialistic grasp in my daily life, or in the experiences that matter most to me. Am I really a group of atoms and energy swirls that loves other similarly configured groups? It is possible, but I cannot sustain that view. I measure some ethical value by my level of care for what Jesus tells me is the least of these. I care about justice and injustice. It matters to me what policies our government follows and who lives, who dies, who is provided for as a result.
In my life, there have been a few individuals I have most admired. In my best moments, I have been able to act in ways I believe might have earned their approval. At least I enjoy thinking that. They were able to maintain a materialistic worldview that supported a level of love, ethics, and meaning that I can only have aspired to follow.
But I have trouble reconciling my cares, my loves, my character, my consciousness, with a purely materialistic view.
There is nothing in my internal experience that I would expect others to find compelling, unless there exists some chance encounter with someone who finds a fit. I would guess internal evidence is often compelling only to the one doing the experiencing.
As a Christian, I do share a communal vulnerability. Our faith is historically based, at least in part. Our belief comes from our view of history.
I am not concerned with the truth or falsehood of the Virgin Birth or the astrologers traveling from points east. The census that required a trip to Bethlehem may be fictional. I enjoy the water-to-wine story and the raising of Lazarus, but neither is central to my faith. I’m okay with Jesus walking on water, or knowing which stone to step on, or surfing on a piece of driftwood, or simply standing on shore.
I do love the idea that God would come to earth as human, experiencing more temptation, pain, and struggle than most of humanity. So my faith would be shattered if it was proven to me that Jesus died running in panic from Gethsemane with a Roman spear in his back.
But even that twisting of the universe might reinforce what I already know: that the specifics of my religious faith are constructs that make a deeper truth comprehensible to me.
That may be why I enjoyed Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. It has to do with those bullets.
One of the gunmen in the path of those shots quickly decides that he ought to have been killed, that he is at the center of a miracle.
On the surface it seems absurd. He is, after all, in the business of terrifying, then killing, helpless victims. He seems to enjoy the evil he generates. He has fun destroying others. But then comes that moment of new clarity. God had come into his life.
His friend, the other gunman, disagrees.
“I just been sitting here thinking.” “About what?” “About the miracle we just witnessed.” “The miracle you witnessed. I witnessed a freak occurrence.”
The gunman explains: It doesn’t matter.
I mean, it could be that God stopped the bullets, or He changed Coke to Pepsi, or He found my … car keys. Whether or not what we experienced was an According-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of God.
In the silence of the night, I can often close my eyes, look inward, and feel a presence not my own. Perhaps it is only a phantom reflection of myself, or maybe a form of prayer. It is possible that I sense only the breath and the pulse and the touch of life.
Only.
It could be that I experience the consciousness that my psychology professor called an illusion. I’m okay with the universe in which I dwell turning out to be the accidental matrix made up of molecules.
It still is my home.
In friendly argument with a friend, I mimicked traditional religious posture. After all, it seems to be the way of the world.
“We can agree to disagree,” I told him. “You worship God in your way. I’ll worship him in His.”
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.
Satan is not just trying to silence the next generation. He is seeking to wipe it out, declaring an all-out war on our children. They are being slaughtered in the womb. They are being kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. They are being raped and abused and neglected and used. They are being brainwashed by their teachers and bullied by their peers. They are lost and lonely, depressed and suicidal. They cut themselves and kill themselves. Their innocence is being robbed, and their security is being stolen.
….
So to every demonic spirit who is dead set on destroying our children, we say, “Take your hands off our kids! They belong to us, not to you, and you will not destroy their lives. We declare this together in Jesus’ name!” Then, in the sight of God, pledge yourself afresh to be the guardians of your children. Your words must be backed by your actions.
We must not downplay the urgency of the hour. The matter is grave, and we cannot underestimate the intensity of the battle. We must be tenacious in God if we are to win the war for our children.
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.
