I’m not sure I agree with this. There are times that someone’s conscience is so misguided that it would be wrong to follow it. For example, suppose the wife is pregnant with a disabled child and believes it is mercy to abort. Her conscience is telling her it is wrong to let the child have a difficult life. Yet her conscience is wrong. Very wrong. The husband would be right to tell her not to kill their child.
I think the husband is given authority to lead the family precisely to avoid the tyranny of the wife’s conscience. We can all get various ideas in our heads about what we should do, and we might even have a strong belief that this is the right thing. But if the wife goes by what she thinks is right all the time, how is her husband to lead her when they disagree? Essentially, any time they disagree, she can invoke conscience and, magically, she gets her way. God gave the husband authority over her conscience on purpose to avoid this problem.
Of course, I fully agree that in the vast majority of cases, when the wife has a conscientious objection, the husband should listen and take this into consideration. That’s wise leadership. If the husband commands his wife against her conscience, he will bear the blame if there is any sin. God will hold him responsible. So it’s a very serious matter. But I would definitely not say he should never require the wife to go against her conscience. God made the husband, not the wife’s conscience, the leader of the home.
When I told Polly about Alexander’s post, she became angry, said nothing, and flipped me off. Message received. 🙂 Harold speaks of the ” tyranny of the wife’s conscience,” yet fails to mention the tyranny of the husband’s conscience.” Why is that?
No matter what MM [Ben Berwick] or JD [Jill Dennison] says, gun violence is a spiritual problem and the only thing in this world that can have a spiritual problem are humans. [This preacher remains too lazy to type out people’s names.]
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Laws have nothing to do with gun violence. It is the people who make the decisions that have everything to do with gun violence. BUT MM and JD continue to target the wrong issues and source of the problem.
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Anti-gun advocates are not God and their will is not to be obeyed. They need to learn that they are not in charge and that freedom applies in all directions.
As Christians, we need to bring the truth to the issue and call out those who are more like dictators than human beings living in a republic or a democracy. MM & JD as well as other anti-gun enthusiasts are just wrong in their attitude and campaigns.
They are not Christians and they do not bring any Christian argument to their point of view. It is all personal preference and nothing else. They are committing a greater sin as they falsely accuse honest gun owners of committing crimes they had not even thought of doing.
— TEWSNBN, A Blog I Read So You Don’t Have To, We Call Them Distorters, February 1, 2022
What provoked this unnamed Evangelical preacher’s tirade?
For readers unaware of my position on gun control, I support strict, restrictive firearm laws. I plan to flesh out my views in an upcoming post. I’m sure my post will be a “bang” to those who errantly believe the Second Amendment grants them the unrestricted right to own firearms or those who say that “guns don’t kill people, people do. Stay tuned.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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The stated goal [of COVID-19 vaccinations] is to depopulate the planet and the ones that are left, either make them chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs that can be manipulated externally by 5G, by magnets, by all sorts of things. I got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House committee in Columbus, [Ohio]. Well, guess what? It’s all true.
The whole issue of quantum entanglement and what the shots do in terms of the frequencies and the electronic frequencies that come inside of your body and hook you up to the ‘Internet of Things,’ the quantum entanglement that happens immediately after you’re injected. You get hooked up to what they’re trying to develop. It’s called the hive mind, and they want all of us there as a node and as an electronic avatar that is an exact replica of us except it’s an electronic replica, it’s not our God given body that we were born with. And all of that will be running through the metaverse that they’re talking about. All of these things are real, Stew. All of them. And it’s happening right now. It’s not some science fiction thing happening out in the future; it’s happening right now in real time.
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.
Long before there was evangelicalism, before there was even such a thing as Christianity, there was good news.
As the earliest Jesus followers wrestled with exactly what it meant that this prophet from Nazareth had been crucified and resurrected, what was clear was that his life meant good news for the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the oppressed.
People like themselves who lived and died under the merciless rule of the Caesars.
That good news wasn’t just an ethereal hope for life after death. It was good news for life here and now on earth as it is in heaven.
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For one thing, and this is a very important thing to remember, evangelicalism is not Christianity. That is not to say evangelicals aren’t Christians. Rather, Christianity is not exhausted by the tradition and beliefs of evangelicalism, as much as many evangelicals might want to believe otherwise.
Christianity existed long before there was a stream called evangelicalism, and it will continue long after that stream has dried out.
Even now there are many who are sounding the alarm that the stream has nearly run dry. This, of course, comes as no surprise to anyone on the outside looking in who can see clearly that white American evangelicalism hasn’t simply wedded itself to the empire, it has all but replaced Jesus with Trump and Trumpism in all the ways that ultimately matter.
Which is why evangelicalism isn’t dying. It’s already dead.
Which is why evangelicalism isn’t dying. It’s already dead.
Sure, there are still plenty of evangelical churches meeting on Sundays and that will continue to meet for years to come. Some will even welcome new members, although those members almost certainly will be transfers from other churches or lost sheep returning to the fold.
Why?
Because there is no one outside the church, no one who grew up away from Sunday school and the fear of hell, who has any interest in what the church has to say anymore. And who could blame them?
Evangelicalism as a tradition started out as so many things do, with noble intentions. There was good news to be shared — that death wasn’t the final word and life here could be lived like life in the kingdom of God.
Now contrast that with the “news” folks outside evangelicalism hear coming from American evangelicalism regardless of whether or not Trump’s name is ever invoked:
People who love the wrong gender are going to hell.
People who love God the wrong way are going to hell.
People with the wrong gender are going to hell.
People who don’t believe the right list of doctrines are going to hell.
Women who dare to speak in church are going to hell.
Anyone who questions the Bible is going to hell.
Anyone who brings up racism is a troublemaker and should be silenced.
Anyone who is so desperate they flee their home for the chance at a better life in another country is a criminal, rapist, murderer or drug dealer.
Anyone who follows a different faith is a potential terrorist and is doomed to hell.
Anyone who is poor has only themselves to blame and should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps instead of relying on others for help.
Medical care is only for those who can afford it.
The planet is ours to destroy.
The list goes on and on and on. How, exactly, is any of that good news?
Why, exactly, would you want to join a group of people who believe such things?
Now, if you identify as evangelical you may be shouting: “That’s not me! I don’t believe any of that!” or “Not my church! That’s not our message!” But here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter. You may be an exception, but your defiant cries long ago were drowned out by a multitude of other voices.
Whatever good news there may still be clinging on to life behind the baptistry or in the fellowship hall of a faithful local church has long ago been drowned out by the chorus of bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and hate that has come to define evangelism in America in the eyes of those outside the church.
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For those on the outside looking in, there is no good news coming from the church. They have no interest in joining what, to them, appears and often is a cult of arrogant and bigoted people who want to silence women, ignore the climate, pretend like racism doesn’t exist and damn everyone to hell who doesn’t agree with them.
There is nothing good about that news.
Which is why evangelicalism isn’t dying. It’s already dead.
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.
Men: cut the man bun. Lop it off. Time to look like a man. No one wants to say this in an androgynous age, but in obedience to God, do it. No perfect length, but cut that hair down your back. And hand that Scrunchie back to your little sister. Look manly. God’s glory is in it!
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Paul: long hair is a ‘disgrace’ for a man (1 Cor. 11:14). Do people still read, believe, and apply the Bible?
Here’s a link to an excellent article by Rick Pidock on Strachan’s misuse of 1 Corinthians 11:14 (though I would have used this verse exactly as Strachan did back in my Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) days).
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.
In response to a woman’s Facebook post about items being stolen from her home, Mark Guy, pastor of Independent Community Church in Millry, Alabama, said:
Need to go back to the old days and start hanging again, crime will stop when they see people rot off rope in every town.
Community outrage was swift, forcing the good pastor to “apologize.” Here’s his apology (which is no longer available on Facebook):
It has been blown way out of proportion. I was watching a western at the time of the post. In the old days they hung people for stealing. I read her post and made the comment, had not one thing to do with race. Might not should have but I did.
In other words, John Wayne made him do it. 🙂
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.
Secular science does not know what objective truth is because it has already taken a side. It is on the side of evil once they rejected God and his son. All of their work is done from a biased viewpoint. God has said that there are only 2 sides and if you are not on his, you are on evil’s side.
They [non-Christian scientists] are also very easily misled as well. Sure they can see more of the universe with the new Webb telescope but without the right starting point, they are lost and do not know what they are looking at.
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Evolutionary and Big bang theories do not help because those are false concepts and cannot be verified. In other words, without the true clues [the Bible], the scientist is free to make up whatever they want about what they see, even when it is clearly wrong.
Observation is useless without that correct starting information. They will learn nothing but how beautiful the universe is and how complex it is. The scientists cannot see into the past for it is gone and they cannot see into the future for it has not arrived.
They are just fooling themselves and continually proving they do not know what they are talking about.
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The scientific method is not making these discoveries and it is not human curiosity. Science is no better at fighting diseases than it was 5,000 years ago. Death will happen and sometimes that death happens at the hands of the scientific professional.
Oh, and medical science does not depend on the evolutionary theory. it depends solely on fully formed chemicals and cells, etc. interacting with each other. It is what God did that medical science owes its gratitude.
Try putting unfully formed molecules together and see what happens. You can’t because they do not exist. What that means is that scientists are not doing evolutionary experiments. They are doing experiments using God’s fully formed creative designs.
Not one scientific experiment has followed true evolutionary claims. They are all based on God’s work.
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If you do science God’s way, you will see a vast difference in the results. You won’t see a lot of wasted time and wasted money spent on fruitless pursuits that have no hope of ever being true.
— Fake Dr. David Tee, TheologyArchaeology: A Site For The Glory of Ignorance, They Never Have a Response, January 2, 2022
The many rewritings of what is accepted by scientists lead to confusion which is also wrong. Who can say what is scientifically true when scientists keep changing what they consider to be true every decade or every few years?
The best guide we can give you is that if it disagrees with the Bible, then it is wrong. God is never wrong and scientists do not know more than he does. This leads us into the answer to the topic question above.
Can all those scientists be wrong? Of course, they can. What the unbelieving world does not accept is that there is an ultimate right, and ultimate wrong and that truth never changes.
They also do not accept the fact that as unbelievers, they are deceived and blinded by evil. It does not matter how many scientists you stack up on one side of the argument against the Bible, the Bible is never wrong.
The scientists will always be wrong, including those Christian ones who say that the Bible is in error or made errors. It also does not matter how many degrees they have collectively behind their names or collective years ‘doing science.
I believe homosexual promiscuity is “worse than” heterosexual promiscuity. I say this for a number of reasons.
First, an argument could be made that Scripture treats homosexuality more seriously. In the Old Testament, this lifestyle, represented by the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, faced stern judgment by God. That divine displeasure was carried into the New Testament when the apostle Paul designated homosexuality as particularly vile behavior in Romans 1.
Second, while it is sinful for a guy and a girl to engage in extramarital sexual intercourse, their behavior fits within the parameters of “normal” sex—something that cannot be said of sodomy and the like. In fact, Paul uses such terms as “degrading,” “unnatural” and “indecent” when he discusses it in Romans 1.
Third, homosexual behavior affects a person’s perception of himself, causing him to identify himself more closely with an immoral lifestyle than the godly behavior expected of a believer. The homosexual movement has spawned an entire community and culture within our nation—complete with its own Christian denominations.
The final reason I believe that homosexual sin is worse is more of a sense than something easily articulated. In my years of ministering in the realm of sexual addiction, it has been clear to me that homosexual activity brings about emotional suffering and a spiritual corruption that runs very deeply. It doesn’t take much to see how deeply gays have been scarred as a result of the course their lives have taken.
So in light of all of that, I repeat: homosexual promiscuity is “worse than” heterosexual promiscuity.
As you approach the New Year and you are having doubts about Jesus, God, and the Bible, there is good news. There is far too much physical evidence for the reality of the Trinity and the Bible for there to be any other answer than they are real and the Bible is true. [No evidence is provided for these claims or any of the other claims that follow.]
In spite of the empty claims made by the atheist [Bruce Gerencser], Jesus is who he says he is, God is who he says he is and the Holy Spirit is as real as they are. The Bible is also written by God through humans and there were no elites writing scriptures to manipulate or control anyone.
We have spent over 20 years researching and documenting this topic [creationism] and there is no possible way that God does not exist or did not create everything we see.
— “Dr.” David Tee, Theologyarcheology: A Site for the Glory of God, What if It is All a Lie? December 31, 2021
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.
