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Sacrilegious Humor: Alan Cumming on Jesus, Kindness, and Trans People

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This is the latest 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 video is of Alan Cumming guest hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Video Link

Transcript:

Jesus Christ.

And talking of Jesus . . .

Even as an atheist, I’m a big fan of Jesus. I really am. What’s not to like? A tall, gorgeous man with great abs and flowing hair getting his feet washed by prostitutes. And encouraging people to love their neighbors while slaying in a loose kaftan. And Jesus was an immigrant, by the way. Let’s not forget . . .

Jesus would have loved trans people. He changed water into wine; is that not itself an act of transition? And you know how I know Jesus would love trans people? Because he loved people. He loved all people. So, of course, he would love trans people and all queer people. I mean, Jesus was followed around at all times by 12 single hot guys, all of them also sporting kaftans. You do the math. Jesus loved the gays, America. Deal with it.

The only thing our current president has in common with Jesus is that they both owe their career to their dads.

Seriously, just think to imagine what it must feel like to be trans person in America today. Our government has legislated that trans people do not exist. It is trying to erase them completely. Imagine having to stockpile your essential lifesaving medicine because your president might cut off access to it for no other reason than it makes him look strong to his base. If the government is going to declare a whole group of people shouldn’t exist, why can’t it be truly a dangerous group of people like those who take off their socks and shoes on airplanes and then go into the bathroom? Why can’t it be people who use leaf blowers at unearthly hours in the morning? Why can’t it be unkind people? Which brings us back to Jesus. Yes, of course. Jesus just wants all of us to be kind. So, for once, America, I beg you, let’s all really try to give kindness a go. Like my little mom says, “It doesn’t cost anything to be kind.” And I guarantee you any situation you find yourself in will go better with a little kindness.

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

After Death, Will We Finally Know the Truth?

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calvin afterlife

Evangelicals believe there is life after death. Every person who has ever lived will end up in either Heaven or Hell. Where you end up is determined by faith. Those who put their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior go to Heaven when they die. Everyone else goes to Hell and will be tortured forever for their rejection of Jesus.

Setting aside the fact that people do not go to Heaven or Hell after they die (no one does until the general resurrection at the end of time), most Evangelicals have extra-Biblical beliefs about the afterlife. For example, how many sermons have you heard where a preacher told you Nana or Grandpa is in Heaven, free from pain, suffering, and heartache? You are told your dead loved ones are having a wonderful time in Heaven, running, singing, and worshipping God. Life is marvelous, better than anything experienced in life before the grave. Most people will never experience this, but, bless God, Evangelicals will. Why? They are members of the right religion. They worship the right God. Their guidebook for life is the Bible, even if they rarely read it. By faith, they believe every word in the Bible is straight from the mind of God. This supernatural book says there’s an afterlife. The men who preach from this supernatural book say there’s an afterlife. Countless authors have written books about Heaven and what awaits the followers of Jesus after they die.

What Evangelicals NEVER provide is evidence for the existence of an afterlife, Heaven, or Hell. Not one shred of evidence is presented for these claims. Either you believe in life after death or you don’t. Either you believe Heaven and Hell are real places or you don’t. Either you believe that your landing spot in the afterlife is determined by believing the right things, or you don’t. All of these claims ultimately appeal to faith for justification. Any Evangelicals who tell you they died, went to Heaven or Hell, and came back to life on Earth are lying. Unless they provide a feature-length video of their time in the afterlife, their claims are not to be believed. Just because someone says something happened to them doesn’t mean their story is true. The same goes for the Bible. The Bible is a book of claims. Just because it says something doesn’t mean it’s true.

People wrongly think I am an anti-theist. I am not. I do, however, expect and demand sufficient evidence for religious claims. If you want me to believe your claims, you will have to do more than quote Bible verses or tell me to just faith-it.

I know that I will someday die, likely sooner than later. I am a sixty-eight-year-old man in poor health. My body tells me that my time on Earth is short. How I die remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: I will die. Rare is the person, especially in the sunset years of life, who doesn’t think about death from time to time. In the quiet of late nights, I will hear our clock ticking, reminding me of my frail mortality. Eventually, I fitfully fall asleep, hoping I will awake the next day. And I do, but one day the last noise I hear in this life could be the click-click- cl of our clock. And that will be it. Then what?

Since there is no evidence for an afterlife, I have no reason to believe that I will live on after death outside of whatever nutrients my ashes return to the dirt. When I die, that means the end of the only Bruce Gerencser on Earth. Yes, I am that special. 🙂 Do I fear death? No, not as far as it being the end of life. I know death awaits all of us, and since I am not immune to what afflicts us one and all, I’m confident that the way of all men will one day come calling for me. I do, however, at times, fear what may happen to me before I die; the pain, suffering, and loss that may come my way before my demise.

Most Evangelicals believe that after they get to Heaven, they will be given a resurrected body, one perfect in every way, including the brain/mind. Having a new brain/mind, Evangelicals think that they will know countless things they didn’t know on Earth, and they will NOT know many of the things/people they knew before death. You might think, as an atheist, “Who cares?” And I agree, except for this one point: Evangelicals are willing to offload knowing things to the afterlife. Who hasn’t engaged an Evangelical about this or that belief, only to have the believer dismiss your claims out of hand, saying, “One day, I will know everything in Heaven. Praise Jesus!” Sadly, Evangelicals won’t know everything. Knowledge and understanding are gained only in this life. Once dead, all learning stops. Better to have lived life seeking knowledge and passing that knowledge on to others than to make oneself deliberately ignorant, hoping that an invisible deity will one day fill you in on what you missed in this life.

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Trump Dump: Another Troubling Sign of Trump’s Mental Decline

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donald trump dump truck

He’s [Jerome Powell] a terrible, he’s a terrible fed chair. I’m surprised he was appointed, I was surprised frankly that Biden put him in and extended him.

— President Donald Trump, as reported by The New Republic

Jerome Powell was appointed by Trump during his first term — not Joe Biden.

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Bruce, Have You Considered You Might be Demon Possessed?

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demon of stupidity

Shannon Davis, an Evangelical podcaster who goes by the moniker Omegaman, left the following comment on Bruce, What Do You Think of the Marjoe Gortner Story?:

Bruce, did you ever stop to consider you needed deliverance from demons? Hell is Real as is the Lake of Fire. At one point in your ministry did you realize you were operating in doubt and unbelief?

Surely Davis knows I am an atheist, and as such, I don’t believe in the existence of the Christian God. Further, I don’t believe in the existence of Satan, demons, spirits, angels, or anything supernatural, for that matter. I live in a material world, one best explained by reason and science. Granted, there is much we don’t know about Earth and the universe, so I can’t say with one-hundred percent certainty that the supernatural does not exist. That said, all I have touched, viewed, and understood is material, and not supernatural. If you object to my claim, please provide empirical evidence for the supernatural. Not personal testimonies or anecdotal stories; actual empirical evidence. If you cannot provide evidence to rebut my claim, then it stands until you do.

Am I demon possessed? Of course not, silly boy. There’s no devil/demon/spirit to possess me. Any possessed behavior is one hundred percent Bruce Gerencser. This is true for all of us. No Flip Wilson saying, “The Devil Made Me Do It.” Mental issues or brain abnormalities can and do cause “possessed” behavior and other irrational deportment, as can the overuse of drugs and alcohol, to name a few of the substances that can cause people to seem “possessed.” No exorcist, preacher, or Bible needed to understand this. Science and common sense give us everything we need to understand “possession.”

Besides, what in my behavior suggests to Davis that I am demon possessed? I am a well-adjusted sixty-eight-year-old man — my medical chart says so — with a plethora of health problems, including depression. I am, by all accounts, “normal” (however one might define “normal”). Maybe the mere fact that I am an outspoken atheist and a Cincinnati Bengals fan is enough to give me the “Possessed by Demons” label. Of course, no evidence will ever be provided to justify such claims. No, the Davises of the Christian world just know what they know cuz they had a warm fuzzy feeling in their “hearts” that tells them they are right.

Davis goes on to assert, again, without evidence, that Heaven and Hell are real. How can he possibly know this? Has he physically gone to Heaven and Hell and shot a feature-length video that shows the world the wonders of Heaven and horrors of Hell? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. Of course not. The existence of Heaven and Hell are claims, for which Christians have yet to provide persuasive evidence.

Now to Davis’ question, “At one point in your ministry did you realize you were operating in doubt and unbelief?” Davis makes a false assumption: that there was a point in my ministerial career when I realized I was operating in doubt and unbelief. There wasn’t. My doubts and questions came after I pastored my last church in 2003. There were five years between my last pastorate and my deconversion in 2008. It was during these five years that I reinvestigated the central claims of Christianity and concluded they were false. It was Me and Jesus until the end.

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Is Jesus Found Anywhere in the Old Testament?

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blue eyed jesus

Is Jesus found anywhere in the Old Testament? No. Jesus is not mentioned directly one time in the first thirty-nine books of the Bible. Evangelicals will point to Old Testament prophecies that allegedly reference Jesus. However, when these prophecies are read contextually without appealing to univocality, you will find that Jesus is not talked about in the Old Testament.

Bible scholar Dr. Dan McClellan has this to say about the subject:

If you were raised in an Evangelical church, you likely heard that Jesus is found in the pages of every book of the Bible; that Jesus’ blood is a scarlet thread that runs from Genesis 1:1 through Revelation 22:21. This sounds right to people who have never read the Bible, but if you carefully read the Old Testament prophecies attributed to Jesus, you will find out Jesus is nowhere to be found — and that includes Isaiah 53 and Isaiah 14, when read in context.

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Trump Dump: Donald Trump Spins a Whopper About the Epstein File

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donald trump dump truck

They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more?

They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands.

Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!

The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 — That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more. One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

— President Donald Trump, as reported by Raw Story

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Trump Dump: Words from Our Misogynist-in-Chief About Women Marrying Men for Their Money

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donald trump dump truck

 [Speaking about women who marry men for their money] People, so rich, so beautiful, so nice to look at, will be totally busted. And let’s see how long your wife stays with you … she’ll stay with you for about three weeks, and she’ll say, ‘Darling, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take it anymore, darling, I’m leaving you.’

I said to one guy — he’s a very, very unattractive man — but he’s smart and he’s rich, and I said, ‘You better hope we get this thing passed because your wife will be gone within about two minutes.’ He said, ‘You’re right.’ The crowd erupted in laughter.

— President Donald Trump at a Faith Luncheon, as reported by Huffington Post

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Quote of the Day: Wise Words About a Well-Lived Life From Marcus Aurelius

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marcus aurelius

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

— Marcus Aurelius

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Trump Dump: Trump Lies About the Epstein File

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donald trump dump truck

I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats. It’s been run by the Democrats for four years, you had Christopher Wray and these characters and [James] Comey before him, and it’s a bad group. It started, actually, look at the Steele dossier that turned out to be a total hoax. The 51 agents, the intelligence, so-called intelligence agents. It was a hoax. It’s all been a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats and some stupid Republicans, and foolish Republicans fall into the net. And, so, they try and do the Democrats’ work. The Democrats are good for nothing other than these hoaxes.

No, no, I call it the Epstein hoax. Takes a lot of time and effort. Instead of talking about the great achievements, we’ve had a great gentleman yesterday, as you know, went on CNBC and he made the statement that Trump may go down as the greatest [surely he meant worst] president of all time and the United States. And, instead of talking about the things we’ve achieved, we’ve had tremendous achievements, they’re wasting their time with a guy who obviously has some very serious problems, who died 3 or 4 years ago.

— President Donald Trump, as reported by Raw Story

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.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.