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Category: Evangelicalism

The Sounds of Fundamentalism: Racism, Bigotry, and Hatred by Phil Kidd

phil kidd

This is the third installment in The Sounds of Fundamentalism series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a video clip that shows the crazy, cantankerous, or contradictory side of Evangelical Christianity, please send me an email with the name or link to the video. Please do not leave suggestions in the comment section.  Let’s have some fun!

Today’s Sound of Fundamentalism is a clip taken from a sermon preached by Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Evangelist Phil Kidd.

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Bruce Gerencser Gets Saved — Again!

jesus saves

God’s bloodhound — the Holy Ghost — tracked me down and led me to the Jesus Daily website. Upon arriving at the site, I noticed a red button…

bruce gets saved

My fingers began to twitch as I pondered clicking the ACCEPT JESUS NOW button. What would all my atheist friends think if got saved?  As I wrestled with these weighty matters, the Holy Ghost grabbed my left hand, put it on my Kensington trackball mouse, and moved the cursor to the red button. I then heard a voice that said, Bruce, choose this day whom ye will serve!  I replied, Jesus? It is 2016. Why are you still speaking with first century King James language? Jesus responded,  Dammit, Bruce. I have other souls to save. Click the button or I will send you straight to hell.

Fearing that I would be soon fitted with a human body specially suited for eternal punishment in hell, I clicked the button.

bruce gets saved

After clicking the button, I was taken to a written salvation prayer on the Jesus Daily Facebook page. Having made the first step — clicking the salvation button — the Holy Ghost came upon me like too much Taco Bell. Doubled over by conviction, I prayed the prayer. And just like that, according to the Jesus Daily website — the money printing machine owned by Dr. Aaron Tabor, a Baptist preacher’s son — I was gloriously and wonderfully S-A-V-E-D. Woo Hoo!

To show that I had just accepted Jesus as my savior, I typed the word AMEN in the comments. This act of faith sealed the deal. By typing the word AMEN on this Christian Facebook page. I was telling the world that I am now a Christian!

bruce gets saved

I love the salvation Tabor is selling. No baptism, no church attendance, no Bible reading, and no tithing. I am sure the evangelizing Doc would love for me to click on a few of the numerous ads that litter the Jesus Daily site, but I don’t want to cheapen my salvation by feeding Tabor’s love for filthy lucre. Doesn’t he know that Jesus was socialist?

Notes

You can find out more about Dr. Aaron Tabor here and here.

Tabor has a plan for reaching the world for Jesus through the use of social media:

saving the world through social media

Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

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Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Sacrilegious Humor: Evolution, Creationism, Christians, and Jews by Lewis Black

This is the twenty-seventh installment in the Sacrilegious Humor series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a comedy bit that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please email me the name of the bit or a link to it.

Today’s bit is Evolution, Creationism, Christians, and Jews by Lewis Black.

Warning, many of the comedy bits in this series will contain profanity. You have been warned.

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The Sounds of Fundamentalism: Kill All the Gays by Pastor Charles Worley

pastor-charles-worley

This is the second installment in The Sounds of Fundamentalism series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a video clip that shows the crazy, cantankerous, or contradictory side of Evangelical Christianity, please send me an email with the name or link to the video. Please do not leave suggestions in the comment section.  Let’s have some fun!

Today’s Sound of Fundamentalism is a clip taken from a sermon preached by Charles Worley, pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina. Providence Road Baptist is a “Fundamental, Independent Missionary Baptist church that believes in the power of the Gospel to save and secure the sinner.”

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The Sounds of Fundamentalism: Flight F-I-N-A-L

Today, I am starting a new series, The Sounds of Fundamentalism. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a video clip that shows the crazy, cantankerous, or contradictory side of Evangelical Christianity, please send me an email with the name or link to the video. Please do not leave suggestions in the comment section.  Let’s have some fun!

Today’s Sound of Fundamentalism is a clip taken from the Flight F-I-N-A-L record, a popular evangelistic tool from the 1970s. Produced by Church of the Nazarene evangelist Forrest McCullough.

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Pictures of  Flight F-I-N-A-L album cover

flight final
flight final 2

Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Connect with me on social media:

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Songs of Sacrilege: What Would Scooby Do? by Eddie Scott

This is the ninety-ninth installment in the Songs of Sacrilege series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a song that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please send me an email.

Today’s Song of Sacrilege is What Would Scooby Do? by Eddie Scott.

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Lyrics

These are pretty swell times
Or it seems so to me
For science in books on the web and TV
Yes the lover of reason just has to say “WOW”!
There’s a whole lot of really good stuff out there now

You’ve got Hawking and Dawkins
Bill Nye’s a big deal
We’ve had Cosmos with Carl
And Cosmos with Neil
But there’s one voice of reason
Who always comes through

I am speaking of course
Of the great Scooby Doo

When life presents a mystery
And you can’t make sense of the clues
Before you proclaim that something spooky’s to blame
Just try asking “What would Scooby do?”

Remember that cool caper when a wicked evil ape
Or maybe some demented crazed orangutan
Was haunting all the actors on a movie set
The fact was he scared everyone away
That seemed to be his evil plan

Scooby and his friends
Did they give in to the hysteria?
Of course not
They just calmly started searching the whole area

They carried out their task
They ripped away the monkey’s mask
There was no ape at all
Just stunt man Carl was their man

When everyone seems baffled
By a strange occurrence or two
You’ll soon understand
An explanation’s at hand

If you try asking “What would Scooby do?”

Another time this ghoul was making everyone feel foolish
With his blood red cape and piercing yellow eyes
Scaring workers on a scaffold, the authorities were baffled
Why was a monster hanging out up there on their high-rise?

Everyone was scared and seemed to want to disappear
Scooby and his friends said “Something fishy’s happening here”

They set out undercover
Sure enough, they soon discovered
What others called a ghoul
Was just a robber in disguise

When people seem bewildered
By a ghost, a wraith or a ghoul
It could be a fluke
It doesn’t have to be spooks

Just try asking “What would Scooby do?”

When life presents a mystery
And you can’t make sense of the clues
Before you proclaim that something spooky’s to blame
Just try asking “What would Scooby?”
“What would good old Scooby?”
“Tell me what would Scooby do?”

So when things seem bizarre
And you’re at your wits’ ends
Be like old Scooby Doo
And his Skeptical friends

For they know it is clear
What Occam ’s razor commands
Don’t accept goofy claims
If something simpler’s at hand

When life presents a mystery
And you can’t make sense of the clues
Before you proclaim that something spooky’s to blame
Just try asking “What would Scooby?”
“Tell me what would Scooby?”
“What would good old Scooby do?”

Songs of Sacrilege: Why I Don’t Believe in God by Everclear

This is the ninety-eighth installment in the Songs of Sacrilege series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a song that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please send me an email.

Today’s Song of Sacrilege is Why I Don’t Believe in God by Everclear.

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Lyrics

I heard the truth about you
And it really doesn’t read at all
Like the whipping stick you raised me with
A scared woman in a private hell
Hushed voice like electric bell
Strange talk about Edgar Cayce and the long lame walk of the dark 70’s
I heard the truth about you
Yeah you
Mama they woke me up
I was deep in an idiot sleep
I was just eight years old
Heard big words with a horrible sound
Why’d they have to call my school
Tell me my mother had a nervous breakdown
I wish I believed like you do
Yeah you
In the myth of a merciful god
In the myth of a heaven and hell
I hear the voices you hear sometimes
Sometimes it gets so much I feel like letting go
Sometimes it gets so goddamn hard I feel like letting it all go
Letting it all go
I ran away, went looking for you
Back to Culver City and the old neighborhood
Need to know if you were really gone
Need to know if you were gone for good
I ran through the projects at night
Hide in the dark from my friends in the light
Hide from my brother-in-law
Hide from the things he’d say
Said you weren’t losing your mind
He said you just needed a rest
He said you’d be coming home soon
He said the doctors there would know what’s best
Said that maybe I could go live with them for a while
I know the truth about you
I know the truth
Mama they woke me up
I was just eight years old
Sometimes it gets so hard I feel like letting it go
Letting it all go

Songs of Sacrilege: What if No One’s Watching by Ani DiFranco

This is the ninety-seventh installment in the Songs of Sacrilege series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a song that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please send me an email.

Today’s Song of Sacrilege is What if No One’s Watching by Ani DiFranco.

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Lyrics

If my life were a movie
there would be a sunset
and the camera would pan away
but the sky is just a little sister
tagging along behind the buildings
trying to imitate their grey
the little boys are breaking bottles
along the sidewalk
the big boys, too
the girls are hanging out at the candy store
pumping quarters into the phone
’cause they don’t want to go home

and I think,
what if no one’s watching
what it when we’re dead, we’re just dead
what if it’s just us down here
what if god ain’t looking down
what if he’s looking up instead

if my life were a movie
I would light a cigarette
and the smoke would curl around my face
everything I do would be interesting
I’d play the good guy
in every scene
but I always feel I have to
take a stand
and there’s always someone on hand
to hate me for standing there
I always feel I have to open my mouth
and every time I do
I offend someone
somewhere

but what
what if no one’s watching
what if when we’re dead, we’re just dead
what if there’s no time to lose
what if there’s things we gotta do
things that need to be said

you know I can’t apologize
for everything I know
I mean you don’t have to agree with me
but once you get me going
you better just let me go
we have to be able to criticize
what we love
say what we have to say
’cause if you’re not trying to make something better
as far as I can tell
you’re just in the way

I mean what
what if no one’s watching
what if when we’re dead
we’re just dead
what if it’s just us down here
what if god is just an idea
someone put in your head

I mean what
what if no one’s watching
what if no one’s watching…

Sacrilegious Humor: Christians by Moshe Kasher

This is the twenty-sixth installment in the Sacrilegious Humor series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a comedy bit that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please email me the name of the bit or a link to it.

Today’s bit is Christians by Moshe Kasher.

Warning, many of the comedy bits in this series will contain profanity. You have been warned.

Video Link

Book Review: Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lauren Drain

banished lauren drain

I recently finished reading, Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church. The book is written by Lauren Drain (along with Lisa Pulitzer) a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. The book is 295 pages long and is published by Grand Central Publishing.

Lauren Drain spent her teenage years as a member of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. The Drain family moved to Topeka to join the church in 2001 and they remain members to this day. In 2007, Lauren was kicked out of the church. For a time she continued to live in Topeka. She is a nurse and now lives in Connecticut with her fiancé.

I wanted to like this book, I really did. Anyone who can escape the clutches of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church is to be commended. Throughout the book, it is evident that Lauren was mistreated and abused, and it is a wonder that she escaped with any sense of self-worth. The church and her family did their best to destroy her mentally and emotionally, yet she came through it, and she deserves a lot of praise for what she has done with her life post-Westboro.

Banished reads like a teenage girl’s diary. Page after page detail Drain’s angst over boys, make-up, dating, marriage, and the fear of going to hell. Drain spends significant time repeatedly detailing how she craved the approval of the Phelpses and how she went about trying to gain their approval. Sadly, the book became quite redundant and I found myself speed reading.

Banished does offer a first-person account of how the Phelps clan lives. However, Drain has very little negative to say about the Phelpses or the church. As one reviewer on Amazon noted, it seemed that Drain, if she could, would go back to Westboro. I doubt this is actually the case, but Drain spends little time critiquing the vile behavior and beliefs of the Westboro church family. I don’t want to be harsh in my judgment because I have not walked in her shoes, and since her family is still members of Westboro, I can easily understand her hesitation to be severely critical of the Westboro church family.

Drain was not kicked out of Westboro because of her beliefs. She still believes in the Christian God, albeit a different version of the Christian God — a kinder, gentler, loving God – than that of the Westboro Church. She still reads and studies the Bible and has come to see that there are many different ways to interpret the Bible.

In telling her story, whether intentionally or not, Drain shows that the Phelps family and the Westboro Baptist Church is made up of vile, nasty, vindictive people, who, due to their doctrinal beliefs, have lost the capacity to love anyone other than their own (and even then, their love is conditioned on obedience to what the church beliefs and the edicts of the pastor).

Drain reveals that the Phelps family has a few secrets of its own, such as the fact that two of Fred Phelps’ daughters became pregnant outside of wedlock. I am sure this was especially galling to Drain, since the reason she was banished is because she desired to have a relationship with a boy who was not a member of the church. That’s right — her big sin was being a normal, heterosexual teenage girl.

And this is the crux of the story. It is the story of an American teenage girl who wanted to be like other teenage girls. She wanted to have a boyfriend. She wanted to feel loved. She had wistful thoughts about getting married some day. (The only available boys in the church to marry were grandsons of Fred Phelps.) Her parents, the Phelpses, and the Westboro Baptist Church robbed her of her youth. They used and abused her and then threw her away like a piece of trash. (To this day she has no contact with her parents.)

I wish Lauren Drain well. She deserves a good life, a life with those who will love her for who she is. I hope that someday her family will be delivered from Phelps’ cult and that her relationship with them can be restored. I can only imagine the pain she must suffer from being completely cut off from her parents and siblings.

Drain gives the impression that the Westboro Baptist Church in an aberration and that most Christian churches and people are not like the Phelpses and Westboro. Unfortunately, my extensive involvement in Evangelicalism tells me this is not the case.

Westboro uses the threat of church discipline to control its members. I know of many Calvinistic Baptist churches that do the same. When I was co-pastor of Community Baptist Church in Elmendorf, Texas, I saw church discipline routinely used to keep people in line. People who refused to obey were excommunicated. When I decided to leave the church and return to Ohio, I was excommunicated because I did not ask the church’s permission to leave. To this day, the church considers me a publican and heathen.

Drain reveals that Fred Phelps is the domineering, controlling man everyone thinks he is (as is his daughter Shirley, who rules the church with her father). As the pastor of the church, he rules the church with a rod of iron. His word is the law. Is such behavior by a pastor an aberration? Maybe in some sects, but in the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church and in many other Evangelical sects, extreme pastoral authority and control is the norm.

Westboro Baptist Church is a cult. Drain refuses to say this in the book, but any cursory reading of Banished will clearly show that the Westboro Baptist Church is a cult and Fred Phelps is a cult leader. The same cult markers found in the Westboro Baptist Church can be found in countless Evangelical churches. If anything, Banished should be read by every church member in the IFB church movement. If they are able to set their cognitive dissonance aside, IFB church members should have no trouble seeing themselves in the book. As I have often said, there is little difference between many Evangelical churches and pastors on the one hand and Westboro Baptist Church and Fred Phelps on the other. The difference is one of appearance rather than substance. There is nothing in the beliefs of Fred Phelps and Westboro that can’t be found in Calvinistic churches in the IFB church movement, in the Reformed Baptist movement, the Founder’s Group in the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Sovereign Grace Baptist movement. Theologically, there is little difference between Fred Phelps and Al Martin or Al Mohler.

While I cannot give Banished a 4 star rating for the reasons mentioned above, I do think people investigating the Westboro Baptist Church or Evangelical cultism in general will find the book helpful.

You can purchase the book here.

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Bruce Gerencser