I regularly write letters to the editor of the Defiance Crescent-News. I am one of a handful of liberal/secularist/humanist/atheist letter writers who challenge and rebut the never-ending stream of right-wing drivel that daily appears on the Crescent-News editorial page. Local Christians will often respond to my letters. Five men in particular: Daniel Gray, John Wilson, Larry Tonjes, Randall Peabody, and Richard Mastin have repeatedly over the years responded to my letters. You can read the various responses to my letters here.
I recently wrote a letter to the editor concerning Evangelical support of Donald Trump. You can read my letter here. You can read previous letters to the editor here. In today’s Crescent-News, Daniel Gray responded to my latest letter, Gray, along with Richard Mastin, have gone out of their way to spread lies about me and besmirch my character — all in the name of Jesus, of course. Here is Gray’s response:
It seems Bruce Gerencser is completely ignoring the fact that the person who would be the First Husband has been accused of sexual assault and rape by no less than six women. You want that in the White House?
I find it very amazing that Gerencser would believe any of these women. The latest one is coming forward because Trump refused to loan her money for her failing food business in California, and this is a way to get back at him. The first one claimed to have been groped on a Braniff airline on a 707. Problem is there were no 707s at that time, only 727s, and the arm rest in first class is bolted and cannot be moved. Not to mention that $500,000 was deposited into her account after making the claim and it came from a high ranking Clinton campaign officer. Let’s not forget the $8 million worth of furnishings that Clinton had to return when the Secret Service caught her taking them from the White House.
Let’s not forget that she has used racial slurs against minorities or the Bimbo eruptions and her violation of the federal Anti-nepotism Act of 1968 when she tried to take over health care. The emails that show she is the one that ordered the stand-down of the rescue team for Benghazi and the 600 plus times she ignored ambassador Stevens when he begged for help. Or the simple fact that pay-to-play has been found in the recent Podesta emails.
What’s worse is that Hillary has told Goldman Sachs that her dream is to have a hemisphere-wide NAFTA from Chile to Canada. That would cut the union’s throats and yet they still want to endorse her. Say goodbye to GM and JM.
Isn’t it just strange that Gerencser, and his ilk want the government out of the bedroom, but then turn right around and demand that the government says who can and can’t get married? You can’t have it both ways, either they are not in the bedroom or they are. Mr. Gerencser’s letter is so full of half truths and myths that it would be better to be placed in the fantasy section of the public library.
People should vote for who they want, but just remember you may get what you asked for and there is no way to return it.
The atheist has been unleashed on the world as part of a planned attack on all religions of faith. The specific targets of the atheists are: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. When the man of sin shows up, he will destroy the atheists along with everyone else that does not accept his “pure luciferian” religion.
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To illustrate how ridiculous the atheist argument is, consider this: Take any complex organism, or machine, or anything else in the world that has hundreds (if not thousands of parts) and shake them around in a box for thousands of years, and see what you get when you open the box. Somehow humans “evolved?” Well, great theory, but how? Who set the rules for that evolution? Who designed it all? The entire universe screams at the top of its lungs “RANDOM DOES’NT [sic] WORK HERE.”
Can you imagine how long an engineer would last at any company if they suggested the best way to create something new was to throw all kinds of pieces and parts in a box and shake them around for a long time? That is utterly, completely ridiculous, and its also the argument the atheist uses for the existence of everything we see.”
Atheist “it all “just happened, we don’t know how”
Christian: “oh, so your faith is in “I don’t know.”
Atheist “correct, “I don’t know” explains more than an intelligent designer.”
Christian “ummm, sorry, but I don’t know, explains nothing.”
The atheist worships math and science. Great! So who set the laws that govern math and science? Math and science are based on order, so who set the order? Oh yea, I remember, the order came from “i don’t know.”
The universe that we live in is the evidence that our God exists. All creation is evidence that he exists. The incredible complexity, order, and grandeur of creation is the evidence, but the atheist says that “I don’t know” makes more sense than a creator.
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All creation is evidence for the existence of our God. Atheism explains nothing, so how exactly is that worldview helpful to mankind? The atheist is a spiritually bankrupt person, running around telling other people that somehow they have a superior spiritual view from those of us who believe in a Creator? We have answers for the creation, they have “I don’t know,” which is superior?
The atheist has no “deathblow” arguments for Christianity, which is why they have to setup never ending debates and monologues, write hundreds of books, etc etc etc. If they had some kind of “magic bullet” argument why don’t they just use it and be done with it? Since they have no “magic bullet” they go on, and on, and on, debating, writing, and rehashing the same arguments over and over again.
Here’s another vexing question for the atheist: What happens after you die? Now, can you guess what their answer is to that question? Try hard to guess now…. I DON’T KNOW!….there it is…again…the atheist answer for everything. For people who debate ad nauseum [sic], claiming the wisdom and brilliance of mankind over God, surely they have a better answer to the most important questions in life than “I don’t know?”
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The atheist has much, much, MUCH more faith than any member of Islam, Judaism or Christianity, and their faith is in “I don’t know.” We will see here very soon how far “I don’t know” carries these men, as their world turns upside down on them, chews them up and spits them out. They will cry out to “I don’t know” for help when their hearts are failing them for fear, and “I don’t know” will watch their destruction passively with a grin on its face.
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If the atheists were honestly inquiring in their hearts to determine if our God was real, they would find him. But they ask only to answer their own questions with their predetermined agendas, and their self satisfaction in giving canned answers that other men provided for them. The bible says if we seek him with all of our heart, we will find him. For men who call science and math their gods, I am amazed at how far they ride “I don’t know” when it comes to God.
The atheist’s faith in “I don’t know” is something to be marveled at. Time will soon tell who the wise and the foolish among us are. grace and peace
Years ago, I attended First Baptist Church, an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) in Bryan,Ohio. Recently, the church asked members to write letters to people, inviting them to church and subtly reminding recipients that their lives are worthless without Jesus and hell awaits if they do not purchase fire insurance.
One of my sons, a practicing Catholic, received one such letter. Here’s what the handwritten letter had to say:
We would like to invite you and your family to First Baptist. Sunday School is @ 9:30. Worship @ 10:30.
More importantly, we invite you to know Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, if you don’t already.
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
Matthew 16:26
Based on the return name and address on the envelope, I know the letter writer. Why did this person choose to write my son? Does First Baptist really think that this is an effective way to reach people with the gospel?
Perhaps it is time for me to do some writing of my own about my experiences at First Baptist. Several years ago, I attended a funeral at First Baptist. You can read my thoughts about the funeral here. I feel a s-e-r-i-e-s coming on….
I am always amused when theologically educated Evangelicals attempt to defend Biblical inerrancy. Michael Kruger, President and Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary, recently posted a three-minute video that purports to answer the question, Does the Bible Have Mistakes? Strangely, the blog post Kruger wrote for the video is titled, Does the Bible Make Mistakes? I thought, isn’t the Bible an inanimate object — black ink on paper? Does Kruger believe the Bible itself is an animate object? I know there are Christians who believe that the Bible has mystical, supernatural power, but Kruger, as a Fundamentalist Reformed Christian, surely knows that, according to orthodox Christian doctrine, it is the Holy Spirit that empowers (gives life to) the Biblical text. Not that I believe such a notion is true. I am just stating what Christians have historically believed about the Bible. (I have had countless Evangelicals tell me that now I am an atheist, it is impossible for me to understand the Bible.) [The title has since been changed, As Van noted in the comments, Kruger’s post is now inerrant.]
Kruger begins the video by asserting that the Bible is the Word of God and whatever it affirms is true. According to Kruger, there are no errors, contradictions, or mistakes in the Bible. Yet, he turns right around and says that readers of the Bible must use various literary skills to “properly” understand the text. Once these skills are put to use, the errors, contradictions, and mistakes fall away. In other words, when confronted with obvious mistakes, crack open the approved theology books and all the discrepancies will be explained away.
If someone uninitiated in Evangelical beliefs read the Bible, would they naturally conclude that the Bible is without error; that its teaching are consistent, coherent, and infallible? Of course not. Kruger is right when he mentions that many people who say the Bible has errors haven’t really studied the text. But others have. Former pastors who are now unbelievers certainly have studied the Bible from dedication to concordance. Over the course of 50 years in the Christian church and 25 years in the pastorate, I spent tens of thousands of hours reading and studying the Bible. I read scores of Evangelical (Calvinistic) theological books. Before beginning my studies I would pray and ask God to give me eyes to see and ears to hear the truth. (Many Evangelicals think that the knowledge I gained while studying the Bible magically disappeared when I deconverted.)
What kept me from “seeing” textual errors, mistakes, and contradictions was my presuppositional commitment to the Bible being without error — the Words of God. Since God was perfect, it was impossible for the Bible to be errant. It was only when I set aside my theology-driven presuppositions that I was able to see the Biblical text for what it is — a fallible collection of contradictory texts written by men.
Kruger is an educated man, so I suspect he lives with a good bit of cognitive dissonance. Surely at some level he knows inerrancy is a façade used to portray the Bible as some sort of God-inspired, God-written, supernatural text. Once inside the house of textual criticism, inerrancy is nowhere to be found, a circus mirror meant to entertain and deceive the faithful. Of course, Kruger has a vested interest in maintaining the inerrancy illusion. He’s in the business of training men for the ministry. If these preachers-to-be were told the truth about the Bible, why their home churches would gather up pitchforks and combustible materials and burn Reformed Theological Seminary to the ground, using Kruger as a quick-start fire log.
Thanks to authors such as Bart Ehrman, it is now impossible to intellectually defend Biblical inerrancy. While in many ways, Ehrman doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been known for centuries, his books put complex textual issues in a format laypeople can understand. (You can purchase his books through Bruce’s Little Bookstore of Atheism and Humanism.)
The best antidote for inerrancy is reading Bart Ehrman. It is intellectually impossible for anyone to read several of his books and still believe that the Bible is inerrant. Remember, most Evangelical theologians agree with Ehrman on the evidence. What they disagree with is his conclusions. Sadly, many educated Evangelicals — pastors, theologians, professors — refuse to accept what is clear for all to see: that the Bible is a fallible collection of contradictory texts written by men. In many ways, these defenders of inerrancy are similar to atheist pastors, people who have invested their lives in promoting and defending Evangelicalism. Admitting that what they teach is untrue would quickly and viciously destroy their livelihood. When men have spent their lives pastoring churches or teaching seminary classes, how will they earn a living if they suddenly lose their job? So, Evangelical and atheist pastors alike continue to promote the inerrancy myth, hoping to run out the clock before they are exposed. For some of them, the personal and ethical costs are too high, so they out themselves, causing tremendous heartache and loss.
I was fifty years old when I walked away from Christianity. I can only imagine how difficult it might have been if I had been some sort of high-profile Evangelical who spent his life publicizing far and wide the Christian myth. In my case, I never made a lot of money from pastoring churches, so it was much easier for me to walk away. I had no retirement plan or 401(k) to worry about. I could make just as much money flipping hamburgers as I did preaching. Such is not the case for many pastors, so I understand why some educated Evangelicals continue to preach what they know is not true.
There will always be some educated Evangelicals who refuse to see the facts about the nature of the Biblical text. Regardless of what the evidence says, these defenders of the faith plan to die with their boots on and hands clutched to the inspired, inerrant Holy Bible. All the books to the contrary will not move them. A Fundamentalist worldview forces pastors and professors to believe and preach only what can neatly fit within the Evangelical box. Please see The Danger of Being in a Box and Why it Makes Sense When You are in it and What I Found When I Left the Box.) This is why countless educated Evangelicals believe the earth is 6,021 years old, that Adam and Eve, Moses, and Noah were real people, and the fantastical stories found in the Bible are really, really, really true. Virgins have babies, dead people come back to life, and sick people are miraculously healed through spoken words. While some of these Evangelicals will see the light (after all, I did), most of them will go to their graves certain in their beliefs. Until they are willing to consider the possibility of being wrong, there really is no hope for them.
After watching the video, please share your thoughts in the comment section. Did Kruger adequately defend inerrancy and give plausible explanations for the mistakes, errors, and contradictions to be interpreted so as to maintain Biblical inerrancy?
This is the one hundred and thirtieth 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 video clip of Pam Stenzel trying to scare the sex out of a group of teenagers.
We’ve heard it preached our entire Christian lives, “You are a new creation! Old things have passed away and all things have become new!” But do we really understand what this means?
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Recently God gave me a vision of what happens to us at salvation and it radically altered the way I see myself. I saw the moment God encountered Mary in Luke 1:31-35 telling her she would bear the Christ Child. I saw the person of the Holy Spirit overshadow her. I saw Mary’s DNA and the Holy Spirit’s DNA. I saw them intertwine and become one, creating Jesus in her womb, fully God and fully man.
Then the vision shifted to me. I saw myself at salvation. I saw the Holy Spirit overshadow me and fill me. My body became the temple of the Holy Spirit. I also saw my spirit man’s DNA and the Holy Spirit’s DNA. I saw them intertwine and become one.
I saw the Holy Spirit wrap around my human spirit like two DNA strands coming together as one, just like when the DNA from a father and mother mix together to form a new baby. It looked like the Double Helix. As the Holy Spirit wrapped around my human spirit, they fused together, becoming one and forming a brand new creation. This fusion of Holy Spirit and my human spirit formed Christ in me!
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When you receive Christ as your Savior and the Holy Spirit takes up residence inside of you, He actually fuses Himself together with your spirit. You become one with God! You have His divine nature inside of you. You are a brand new creation, with new desires and a new life. Your core identity is completely transformed. Christ’s very nature and identity is now completely formed in your spirit. It’s a glorious transformation! This is why you are holy, righteous and clean!
I have so much more to teach you on this amazing subject. I have just put together a teaching series called Divine DNA—New Creation Reality. I think it’s one of the most important teachings I have ever done. Having divine DNA in your spirit has so many effects on your life as you become transformed in your spirit, soul and body.
Perhaps I should have been prepared for the fact that answers to my many-religions questions were not forthcoming in the Bible. It was, to say the least, disheartening. Instead, I turned to the theology of the faith itself, particularly the book of Hebrews. Hebrews explains how the death of Christ is wed to the Old Testament covenants that involved ritual animal sacrifice. The Jewish people sacrificed animals to appease the wrath of God brought upon them by their sins; Christ was a perfect sacrifice that allowed the old covenant to be discarded and a new one, based on faith, was forged.
Except, none of this made any sense to me at all. Why did God want ritual animal sacrifice in the first place? What does that have to do with forgiveness? Perhaps, I thought, God wanted people to make a sacrifice — farm animals, in those days, were precious resources. But that explanation evaporates with Christ, since he took the sacrifice upon himself. What was so special about the “blood of Christ”? What did that have to do with God’s willingness to forgive people? And why did God spend centuries on ineffectual covenants in the first place? How does an omnipotent deity “sacrifice” anything at all — Jesus could have, conceivably, poofed himself right back into existence or simply refused to die in the first place. Generally when we mortals talk about “sacrifice”, it means something quite different. We don’t get to come back a few days later and float into the clouds.
Worse, Christianity holds that Christ is God. How can God sacrifice himself to himself to fulfill his own covenant? A covenant whose terms were, as far as I could tell, completely arbitrary! Adding insult to injury is the fact that modern Christianity (generally) holds that humans are “fallen”, and born into sin. Even those few who reject Original Sin still accept the Biblical decree that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”. In other words, the system is rigged. You’re a sinner, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. But God can save you, as long as you assent to the belief that he created a convoluted system of arbitrary covenants and “sacrificed” himself to himself to appease himself of the terms he created so he could forgive you for being what you had no choice to be — a flawed human being. I should point out that it’s utterly irrelevant whether someone believes it’s all literal, as in the “penal substitution theory of atonement”, or they believe it’s either all or in part metaphorical. Either way, it doesn’t make an iota of sense.
Confused and frustrated, I sought out some church leaders to discuss these matters. One chaplain, in particular, was particularly patient with me as I probed for answers about the blood of Christ, ritual sacrifice, and atonement. But he couldn’t offer anything more than trite platitudes about having faith, that there are some thing we just don’t understand. Maybe that was good enough for him, but I couldn’t assent to beliefs that were, on their face, ridiculous. Frankly, I didn’t think it was too much to ask that a logically coherent explanation of basic Christian theology was forthcoming. These aren’t tertiary issues of theology, after all — they’re the fundamentals of what Christianity is in the first place.
This is the one hundred and twenty-ninth 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 video clip of Kenneth Copeland telling Christians why they MUST vote for Donald Trump. This video clearly shows that Copeland is endorsing Trump. In doing so, Copeland is in violation of Federal law. The IRS should, but won’t, strip Copeland’s “ministry” of its tax exempt status.
Many people who are outside of the Evangelical/Mormon/Conservative Catholic bubble, are perplexed by continued Christian support of Donald Trump. Trump is a vulgar man who makes jokes about sexually assaulting women. Trump is a narcissistic, misogynistic psychopath whose life is barren of anything normally associated with people of faith. Yet, millions of Christians plan on voting for him come election day. Why is that? One word, abortion! It’s not that Trump is prof-life. He’s not, and I suspect if investigative reporters dig far enough into Trump’s life they will likely find a trail of abortions. But, Christians are c-o-n-v-i-n-c-e-d that Trump will make it harder for women to have abortions, and maybe, just maybe, he will appoint conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who will vote to overturn Row v. Wade.
The following photographs were shot a few miles from my home. I do not know who these people are, but based on the signs in their yard, they are one issue voters.
Rural Northwest Ohio resident Zane Zeedyk wants to make sure that everyone votes for Donald Trump. Zeedyk did the same for Mitt Romney in 2012. Zeedyk believes God has given him a mission to preach the good news of the Republican gospel. In an October 10, 2012 Times Bulletin article, Zeedyk stated:
I get frustrated and feel the need to do something I feel that God has given me this opportunity as I still have the energy to get up here and do this. I am willing to travel to any community, to anyone who needs me.
In Zeedyk’s mind, President Obama has spent the last eight years destroying America, and only the pussy grabbing psychopath Donald Trump can make America great again. As things stand now, Zeedyk is going to be quite disappointed come November 9th.
In many places, Zeedyk would be considered a fanatic, a nut job. Not here in rural Northwest Ohio. Zeedyk is a respected farmer, active in many political and social activities. Oh, and he loves Jesus too.
I regularly write letters to the editor of the Defiance Crescent-News. I am one of a handful of liberal/secularist/humanist/atheist letter writers who challenge and rebut the never-ending stream of right-wing drivel that daily appears on the Crescent-News editorial page. Local Christians will often respond to my letters. Five men in particular: Daniel Gray, John Wilson, Larry Tonjes, Randall Peabody, and Richard Mastin have repeatedly over the years responded to my letters. You can read the various responses to my letters here.
The atheist has been unleashed on the world as part of a planned attack on all religions of faith. The specific targets of the atheists are: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. When the man of sin shows up, he will destroy the atheists along with everyone else that does not accept his “pure luciferian” religion.
