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Tag: Charles Darwin

Christians Say the Darnedest Things: There’s No Such Thing as Millions of Years

Bruce Gerencser 6 Comments

According to Discover magazine, “Charles Darwin, the naturalist best known for his theories of natural selection, described evolution “as ‘descent with modification.’” That means humans descended from common (and now extinct) ape ancestors that lived millions of years ago, a process also referred to as “common descent.” While we share our ancestry with these animals, along the way, over millions of years, we all changed. “[We] each adapted to our own environments or specific circumstances or niches,” says Cofran. It’s believed that this human divergence from the chimpanzee lineage of apes happened between 9.3 and 6.5 million years ago.”

There are so many errors and lies in that paragraph! [So says a man with a Bible College education] If the Bible is a correct record of history – and it most certainly IS – then there is no such thing as millions of years.  There is no such thing as ‘descent with modification’ because God made each species unique, and reproduction was always “after his kind.”

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Now, we have an omniscient God.  Darwin’s beliefs didn’t surprise God.  So, why would God go ahead and create an animal with such similarities to man, knowing that man was going to create such a blasphemous, heretical doctrine that would lead millions astray through the years?

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Man was presented with a choice:  Worship and serve God or worship and serve His creation.  Believe what the Bible says or believe the foolish inventions and imaginations of man.  We learn a lot about those who will follow the pseudo-science.  God says that they are fools with their foolish hearts darkened.  They are not wise.  They are fools.  And God gave them up because of this.

— John MacFarlane, Pastor of First Baptist Church, Bryan, Ohio, Let’s Go Ape, December 14, 2024

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 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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Christians Say the Darnedest Things: Darwin and Abortion to Blame for Mass Shootings

Bruce Gerencser 5 Comments
load of horse shit

What follows is a load of horseshit from Joseph Mattera, an “internationally known author, consultant, and theologian whose mission is to influence leaders who influence culture. He is the founding pastor of Resurrection Church and leads several organizations, including The U.S. Coalition of Apostolic Leaders and Christ Covenant Coalition” . . . and a consummate shoveler of horseshit (and bullshit.) 🙂

At the writing of this article, there has been another horrific mass shooting, this time in Buffalo, New York. I am convinced that one of the primary reasons for this deluge of mass shootings over the past decade is the generational desensitization of human life in general, especially with the legalization of abortion.

After all, if a nation can legalize shedding the blood of the most innocent and vulnerable among us, this can subconsciously segue to the shedding of the blood of post-birth, fully formed adult humans. A nation’s conscience and boundaries are established by what it allows through its laws and ethics.

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According to a news report I saw on television, the shooter was allegedly a white supremacist who’d had a conversation with a black man the day before the shooting in the same parking lot of the supermarket where the shooting occurred. They had spoken about race. The black man interviewed said he had told the young man “there is only one race.”

In response, the young white man said, “there are many races.” This belief that there are many races goes along with the evolutionary perspective of Charles Darwin, who wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), which purported that some species of humanity evolved more than others.

Future white supremacists like Adolf Hitler and abortion advocate/Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger utilized this evolutionary theory of various races to justify discrimination against others. While Sanger attempted to use abortion as a legal way to exterminate the so-called “negro race,” Hitler utilized gas chambers to preserve his view of a pure breed of humanity.

Biblically speaking, since all humans are made in the image of God, there is only one human race (Acts 17:26); therefore, the biblical position of the Imago Dei (image of God) is the most significant ideological position to hold against racism and all forms of human degradation, including abortion.

Regarding abortion, one of the seven sins God abhors is the shedding of innocent blood, because the (human) life is in the blood (Prov. 6:17; Lev. 17:14). Consequently, throughout church history Christ-followers have always fought for and advocated for the sacredness of human life, including humanity in its “pre-birth” and “post-birth” stages of development.

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Hence, the equation goes like this: A culture with less regard for innocent unborn babies can equal less respect for all other humans. This results in more post-birth racism, crime, murder, rape and sexual harassment. Therefore, this erosion of societal mores makes it easier for people to objectify one another for their ends (like a mother terminating her pregnancy for economic reasons or to avoid embarrassment).

— Joseph Mattera, Charisma News, Racism, Abortion and the Implications of the ‘Sanctity of Human Life’, May 20, 2022

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 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.

Christians Say the Darnedest Things: Atheism is Dying Says Catholic Zealot Shane Schaetzel

Bruce Gerencser 8 Comments

shane schaetzel

Want to read a primer on “Bad Christian Arguments Against Atheism?” Just read Catholic Zealot Shane Schaetzel’s post titled, There is a God. Here’s an excerpt of Schaetzel’s “brilliant” prose.

The defining religion of the 20th century was Atheism. I say “was” because even though the number of Atheists continues to grow in Western civilisation, the idea itself is obsolete. While the mantra of the 20th century was “God is dead,” the mantra of the 21st century will be “Atheism is dead” and that will be painfully obvious within a few decades. Before its end, the 21st century will become the most religious century in modern history.

The Atheism of the 20th century was defined by the ideas of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in the 19th century. From these two men, the Marx-Darwinian ideology would spawn the systematic murder of over 100,000,000 people in the 20th century under Communism and Nazism. (And that’s not even counting the wars spawned by these ideologies, which amounted to over a hundred million more.) The bloodiest century in the history of the world was given to us by institutionalised Atheism. No other century can compare, and if we add up all the casualties and holocausts caused by religions throughout the history of the world, they don’t hold a candle to the bloodbath given to us by Marx-Darwinian Atheism.

Atheists have been with us since the dawn of time. There is really nothing new about the idea of Atheism. What made the 20th century different, however, was the militant nature of the Marx-Darwinian brand. You see, prior to the 20th century, Atheists were usually just considered the typical village idiot. Every village had one, just like every village had a town drunk. Often they were the same person. However, in the 19th century, with the publication of just a few widely popular books, Karl Marx was able to give Atheism a systematic social-political worldview, backed by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin. This gave Atheism an appearance of social-political-scientific legitimacy. In other words, Marx and Darwin made it intellectually fashionable to be an Atheist. I say the “appearance” of social-political-scientific legitimacy because as science, politics and sociology would later discover, it’s just an illusion. The end result was the worst bloodbath in the history of the world, lasting a whole century, coupled with the complete destruction of Western Civilisation (Christendom) and the apparent ascendancy of Islam as a major world religion. For the first time in a thousand years, we are now looking at the real prospect of Europe becoming a new Islamic stronghold, all thanks to the century-long progression of Marx-Darwinian Atheism.

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While mainstream society continues to follow the obsolete 19th-century scientific basis of Marx-Darwinian Atheism, it’s just a matter of time before mainstream society eventually catches up with 20th-century science. When that happens, and it’s already starting, Atheism will be put back on track to becoming the rare and comical ideology of the village idiot. Just give it a hundred years. By the dawn of the 22nd century, the world will be more religious than anything we’ve seen in centuries.

— Shane Schaetzel, Complete Christianity, There is a God,  May 1, 2018

A Late Night Existential Experience with An Asian Beetle

Bruce Gerencser 5 Comments

asian beetlerepost, revised.

It’s late. I can’t sleep, so I’m laying in bed reading the latest issue of Astronomy Magazine. I need a drink of water, so I lean over to grab the water glass on the nightstand, and there, swimming in the water of my glass, is an Asian Beetle. (Harmonia axyridis) Those of us who live in the Midwest know all about Asian beetles. We have a contract out on the biologist who introduced this non-native invasive insect to our land. Every winter they do their best to survive until spring so they can reproduce. They hide in the nooks and crannies of, well, everything. Some people have such an infestation in their homes that they spend all winter killing them. Anyone who has ever done this knows the wonderful smell Asian beetles give off when flicked, smacked, or sucked up with a vacuum. They are very hard to kill, and even insecticides are often no match for their determination to live.

So when I found this Asian Beetle swimming for its dear life in my water glass my first thought was, Good riddance. Die!  I even tried to help the beetle die. Next to the water glass was a cardboard box which I recently emptied of its contents, a new prescription of Flonase. I took the rectangular box and pushed down on top of the Asian Beetle, hoping it would drown. I did this several times, but the beetle refused to die. And then  I stopped…

I began to admire the Asian Beetle’s fight to survive; its desire to make it to spring so it could procreate. For a moment I pondered the wonders of Evolution and Darwin’s theories, all in full display in the water glass on my nightstand. Then in a moment of irrationality, I put the Flonase box back in the water in such a way that the Asian Beetle could climb out of the water. In a few moments he did. I continued to watch him as he climbed higher and higher to get away from the water. The struggle to survive was evident.

Come tomorrow, I suspect I will continue my murderous rampage against Asian beetles. But, for a moment, in the stillness of the night, a water glass and an Asian Beetle spoke deeply to me and reminded me of the common existence I have with all living things.

The Charles Darwin Day Resolution

Bruce Gerencser 4 Comments

 

darwin day

The American Humanist Association reports:

Today United States Representative Jim Himes (CT-4) introduced U.S. House Resolution 67, also known as the Darwin Day Resolution, which would recognize Charles Darwin’s birthday, February 12, as a national day to celebrate science, education and humanity.

“Charles Darwin’s discoveries gave humankind a new, revolutionary way of thinking about the natural world and our place in it. His insatiable quest for knowledge and decades of meticulous observation and analysis opened new pathways for advancements in biology, medicine, genetics and ecology,” said Rep. Himes. “Without Darwin’s contributions to science, philosophy and reason, our understanding of the world’s complexity and grandeur would be significantly diminished.”

This is the fourth year that the Darwin Day Resolution has been introduced. For the past two years, it was introduced by former U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (NJ-12) and was also introduced by former U.S. Rep. Pete Stark (CA-13) in 2011.

The American Humanist Association worked closely with Rep. Himes, his staff and other members of Congress to introduce this resolution. The resolution is co-sponsored by Representatives Matthew Alton Cartwright (PA-17), Stephen Cohen (TN-09), Rosa DeLauro (CT-03), Bill Foster (IL-11), Mike Honda (CA-17), Zoe Lofgren (CA-19), Alan S. Lowenthal (CA-47), Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC), Mark Pocan (WI-02), Adam Schiff (CA-28), Louise Slaughter (NY-25), Adam Smith (WA-09), and Jackie Speier (CA-14).

“With climate change deniers and others with anti-science views threatening our planet, there is an urgent need for our politicians to openly voice their support for scientists and science education,” said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association. “We are grateful to Rep. Himes and the resolution’s co-sponsors for their recognition of Charles Darwin’s contributions to science and humanity.”

HOUSE RESOLUTION 67

Expressing support for designation of February 12, 2015, as ‘‘Darwin Day’’ and recognizing the importance of science in the betterment of humanity.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
FEBRUARY 2, 2015

Mr. HIMES (for himself, Mr. SCHIFF, Mr. POCAN, Ms. DELAURO, Ms.SLAUGHTER, Mr. HONDA, Mr. COHEN, Mr. FOSTER, Ms. LOFGREN, Ms.NORTON, Mr. CARTWRIGHT, and Mr. SMITH of Washington) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology

RESOLUTION

Expressing support for designation of February 12, 2015, as ‘‘Darwin Day’’ and recognizing the importance of science in the betterment of humanity.

Whereas Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by the mechanism of natural selection, together with the monumental amount of scientific evidence he compiled to support it, provides humanity with a logical and intellectually compelling explanation for the diversity of life on Earth;

Whereas the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is further strongly supported by the modern understanding of the science of genetics;

Whereas it has been the human curiosity and ingenuity exemplified by Darwin that has promoted new scientific discoveries that have helped humanity solve many problems and improve living conditions;

Whereas the advancement of science must be protected from those unconcerned with the adverse impacts of global warming and climate change;

Whereas the teaching of creationism in some public schools compromises the scientific and academic integrity of the United States education systems;

Whereas Charles Darwin is a worthy symbol of scientific advancement on which to focus and around which to build a global celebration of science and humanity intended to promote a common bond among all of Earth’s peoples;

and

Whereas February 12, 2015, is the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin in 1809 and would be an appropriate date to designate as ‘‘Darwin Day’’: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(1) supports the designation of ‘‘Darwin Day’’;
(2) recognizes Charles Darwin as a worthy symbol on which to celebrate the achievements of reason, science, and the advancement of human knowledge.

While this resolution stands no chance of passing, it is encouraging to know that there are Representatives that have a good understanding of the natural world and the importance of science.

See International Darwin Day website for more information.