The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
David Pugh, pastor of First Assembly of God in Phillipsburg, Kansas has been charged with child sex crimes ranging from “indecent liberties with a child to sexual exploitation of a child.”
A former Phillipsburg pastor is charged with child sex crimes.
Pastor David Pugh resigned from Phillipsburg’s First Assembly of God Church in May.
Prosecutors say the crimes for which he’s accused happened between November 2016 and March 2017. These charges range from indecent liberties with a child to sexual exploitation of a child.
We do not know if Pugh’s position as pastor had anything to do with what prosecutors say happened. Police arrested Pugh earlier this month. He has since bonded out of jail.
On Wednesday, Eyewitness News did get a hold of Pugh briefly over the phone. Pugh said he did not want to comment at this time
Another day and yet another reminder of Evangelicals and their fear of female mammary glands. Today’s story comes from cool, hip, loaded-with-cash Steven Furtick and his monument to Evangelical excess, Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. Last Sunday, a woman who has been attending Elevation Church since 2015 was discreetly breastfeeding her baby when a church volunteer asked her to leave the auditorium and go to the designated — exposed breasts allowed — baby feeding area.
The Charlotte Observer reports:
A group of mothers who breastfeed plan to stage a “Nurse-In” during Sunday worship at Charlotte’s Elevation Church this month to show support for a South Carolina woman who said she was asked to leave the church’s sanctuary because she was breastfeeding her baby.
Last Sunday, Amanda Zilliken of Lancaster, S.C., sent out a Facebook post saying, “I just got kicked out of church for breastfeeding with a cover on and directed to the bathroom. … Shame on you elevation.”
Her Facebook post, which also featured a photo of the bathroom at Elevation’s Ballantyne campus, has since been shared by more than 1,500 people.
On Wednesday, Zilliken, a 29-year-old stay-at-home mom, told the Observer that she “definitely” plans to participate in the “Nurse-In.” But it’s up in the air whether she’ll decide to continue as a regular at Elevation, a church she’d driven an hour to attend most Sundays since 2015.
As much as I love hearing the word of God from Pastor Steven (Furtick) … I’m not sure at this time if I’ll feel comfortable going back because of the way this was handled,” she said. “If anything difficult arises (at Elevation), they try to hush it up.”
Elevation Church said in a statement: “We do not have a policy that nursing mothers can’t be in the sanctuary. A volunteer had a conversation and felt both parties arrived at the same conclusion to exit mutually. We are sorry that this in any way offended anyone. We welcome everyone and anyone to attend Elevation church.”
Elevation, one of the fastest growing churches in the country, draws more than 20,000 worshipers to its nine Charlotte-area sites every weekend. Furtick, who launched the Southern Baptist church with wife Holly and seven other couples in 2006, speaks most Sundays in person at the Ballantyne campus. At the other sites, he’s on screen.
Zilliken said she did last Sunday what she’s always done since the birth of her youngest child, Idamae, who’s now 4 months old and breastfeeding. Zilliken said she dropped off her two other children – ages 5 and 4 – at the church’s eKidz child-care area. Then she went to the church auditorium’s second floor, headed for the last row and took the seat nearest the door. From there, she thought, she could quickly exit in case Idamae caused any disturbance during the service.
As she’s done many times before, Zilliken said, she then waited until Furtick’s sermon to begin breastfeeding “so she’s quiet.”
That’s when a volunteer approached her, Zilliken said, turned on a flashlight in the dark auditorium and asked that Zilliken follow her to the “mother’s area.”
“It embarrassed me, and drew people’s attention,” said Zilliken, who was led to a restroom to finish her 20-minutes of breastfeeding. “To take me to the mother’s restroom was totally unacceptable, humiliating – and illegal.”
The volunteer returned to the restroom to inform her she could go back to her seat “when you’re done,” Zilliken said.
But Zilliken said she was so upset by then, crying and angry, that she left after sharing her feelings with other staff members at Elevation. She said they were “unsympathetic” even though they agreed the volunteer should not have pulled her out of the service.
“I drive an hour to this church … and I missed the whole sermon,” she said. Zilliken cited laws that allow women to breastfeed in public and said she saw no one in the church complain about her quietly feeding her baby, with a cover, in the dark.
And yet, Zilliken said, the volunteer told her, “Honey, you have to understand that my job as a volunteer is to make sure everyone is comfortable, not just you.”
Elevation added in its statement: “We have several designated areas for nursing moms at Ballantyne specifically – one private to allow pumping and it’s close to the auditorium for convenience and the other in the actual baby area with a TV to allow mothers to still be part of the worship experience.”
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What drives this irrational fear of female breasts? Notice what the volunteer told the offending woman, “Honey, you have to understand that my job as a volunteer is to make sure everyone is comfortable, not just you.” There ya have it. Someone in the church might be offended by seeing her breast — a supposedly God-given gland used to feed precious little Christian babies — and if it is a man, he might not be able to contain his sexual urges. Once again, a woman is punished because some men are unable to keep their minds on the sermon.
Don’t think for a moment that this volunteer was acting on her own. It is clear, at least to me, that nursing mothers who attend Elevation Church are expected to feed their babies in rooms other than the auditorium. Steven Furtick would have had to sign off on such a rule, so the blame, in the end, rests with him. Furtick needs to make a clear, unambiguous statement that states women are free to nurse their children in the auditorium during church services. And those who are “offended?” Grow Up, and start acting like adults.
David Volmer, pastor of ACTS Christian Church in Perth, Australia, pleaded guilty in 2015 to various sex crimes perpetrated against a 13-year-old girl.
In an August 10, 2015 story, Daniel Piotrowski, a reporter for the Daily Mail, wrote:
A teenage girl allegedly abused by a shocking paedophile ring of eight men including her own father was drugged with amyl nitrate and raped by an evangelical preacher.
David Volmer, 41, a married father of two and the South African-born pastor of the ACTS Christian Church in Perth, pleaded guilty to 12 charges relating to the 13-year-old girl’s abuse last month.
Among the offences were three counts each of sexually penetrating a child, indecently dealing with a child under 13 and indecently dealing with a child aged over 13 and under 16.
Court documents obtained by Daily Mail Australia show Mr Volmer also pleaded guilty to three counts of administering amyl nitrate – a ‘stupefying vapour’ – with intent to sexually penetrate and indecently deal with the girl.
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The drug amyl nitrate is sometimes used a sex aid as it relaxes involuntary muscles, according to an Australian Drug Foundation fact sheet.
WA Police announced last month that seven other men, including the unnamed father, had been arrested as part of the ring, who face 503 charges in total.
Daily Mail Australia has also obtained a copy of a semi-autobiographical book Mr Volmer published in 2012, titled The God Standard: Breaking Through The Ordinary.
In the book, Mr Volmer doles out spiritual advice and reflects upon his own spiritual ‘journey’ and an ’emptiness… burning in the depths of my heart’.
He was candid about his marriage difficulties on his path to accepting his ‘God Standard’ and how his relationship with his wife, who he said he viewed at one point as a ‘Christian extremist’, in fact led him to God.
‘The standards she adopted from God meant that I would not be able to listen to the latest music because of its sexual references or its raunchy music videos.
‘Her standard (the God Standard) meant the men’s magazines I had with the semi-naked women on the cover would need to go.
‘It was clear to me that she had taken things way too far and was what I would label a “Christian extremist.
‘Our marriage went through severe difficulty, but my wife continued to pray for me for over five years.’
Mr Volmer said God used his wife as a ‘conduit’ to ‘open my eyes’ and he was terrified she was right – and feared Satan was ‘using’ his thoughts.
‘The void inside me grew bigger each day, and I continued to lash out at my wife.
‘Pride had grabbed such a hold on my life that I could not get myself to confess that what she had was better than what I had.
‘Even worse was that I was terrified of the consequences if she was right! To admit that she was right would mean to admit that I was on my way to hell.
‘Satan used that thought to keep me captured in fear, but the Holy Spirit continued to draw me closer and closer each day.’
In one passage, Mr Volmer also lamented that ‘in a world where sexual immorality has become a way of life through meaningless sexual encounters, homosexuality, and much more, the word of God has been completely abandoned.’
A court has heard horrific details of how a ‘deviant’ Christian pastor and father-of-two drugged and rubbed his genitals on a teenage girl as she laid naked, blindfolded and in tears on a bed – as her father is alleged to have watched on.
David Volmer, 41, from Perth’s northern suburbs, was sentenced to 10-and-a-half years prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to 12 offences against a minor including sexual penetration of a child, and stupefying with intent to commit an indictable offence.
In a statement of facts read by the prosecution and not disputed by Volmer, the West Australian District Court heard the pastor’s crimes against the girl – who was aged 12 and 13 at the time – occurred after the victim’s father replied to an advertisement Volmer put on Craiglist promoting his ‘sexual massage services’.
The prosecution said Volmer first met the father and his daughter at a park in Perth’s north in February of March 2014.
In admissions to police, Volmer said as soon as he saw the victim he knew in his heart she was younger than 16, despite the father’s assurances to the contrary.
The court heard days later, Volmer booked a hotel room in the Perth CBD, which both the victim and her father attended.
Volmer and the girl stripped naked and he indecently dealt and assaulted her, rubbing his naked body and genitals against her, according to the prosecution.
When the victim started to cry, Volmer stopped what he was doing and the girl was chastised by her father, the court heard.
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n February 2015, Volmer contacted the father again using the messaging app Kik, the court heard.
He came to the father’s home and fondled the victim as she lay blindfolded to the bed in the home’s master bedroom, before progressing to further sex acts.
Weeks later, he attended the home again, with her father sitting in the corner with a blindfold on. He twice sexually penetrated the girl, the court heard.
On all three occasions, Volmer drugged the girl with amyl nitrate, a drug commonly used as a sex aid which he obtained from a sex shop.
The victim told child protection officers in April 2015 the substance, which she was made to sniff out of a brown bottle, left her feeling ‘woozy and lightheaded’.
After the last incident, Volmer felt guilty and told the victim’s father they should hand themselves in to police, the court heard.
The prosecution said the victim’s father told Volmer he was ‘making a fuss about nothing’.
The priest, then a pastor at the ACTS Christian Church in Carramar and chief executive of Prison Fellowship Western Australia, broke off all contact.
He made full admissions to the offences when he was interviewed by police on June 18 and pleaded guilty to all charges shortly afterwards.
Defence counsel Nick Scerri said Volmer had tried to find the words to say sorry, but felt they were ’empty and powerless’ and could not undo what he did.
‘He wants to say it (sorry) over and over again, shout it from the rooftops,’ he told reporters outside court.
Mr Scerri said Volmer accepted the consequences and hoped the community would forgive him one day.
Judge Herron said it must have been a ‘frustrating and distressing’ experience for the ‘vulnerable and defenceless’ girl.
He added that the ‘degrading and humiliating’ acts were committed for Volmer’s own sexual gratification.
Nikolay Kalka, a Pentecostal pastor, is on trial for sexually assaulting a girl in a swimming pool.
Cory Shaffer, a reporter for Cleveland.com, reports:
75-year-old Ukrainian-born pastor testified Tuesday that he did not grope a 10-year-old girl and hold her head under water at the Middleburg Heights Recreation Center pool.
Nikolay Kalka, of Parma Heights, carried his oxygen mask and tank to the stand and told jurors through a translator that the girl and her friend splashed him, so he grabbed her and held her head beneath the stream of a gushing fountain for nearly a full minute to teach the pair a lesson.
“I was doing it out of love because I wanted to show them what it was like to splash at people,” Kalka said through the translator.
He did not, he insisted, grope the girl.
“It couldn’t have even come to my mind to do such a thing,” he said. “I live my life a certain way. I’ve been a pastor.”
Prosecutors on Tuesday presented their entire case against Kalka, who faces more than a decade in prison if he is convicted of gross sexual imposition and kidnapping charges that say he touched the girl with a sexual motivation.
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The girl and her friend, who each have turned 11 since the March 11 incident, testified that Kalka grabbed and squeezed the girl’s breast and vagina as she struggled to free herself from his grasp.
Grainy surveillance video of the incident showed the encounter, and that the friend grabbed the girl’s arm and tried to pull her free as Kalka continued to hold onto her.
“I was feeling really uncomfortable and unsafe, and really scared,” the girl told jurors after she broke down in tears earlier on the stand.
Kalka’s version of the story — that he had been fed up with the girls splashing him and his denial that he ever touched the girl’s vagina and breast — seemed to contradict his lawyer’s theory in opening statements.
Marein told jurors Tuesday morning that Kalka “probably did” touch the girl’s private parts. The video, which Marein said “speaks for itself,” clearly shows Kalka grabbing the girl and her struggling to get away. But Marein painted the encounter as “horseplay.”
“Could it have happened? Of course it could have,” Marein said. “Am I hear to say that she is a liar? No. I’m here to suggest to you that this was done without any sexual purpose whatsoever, that this was blown incredibly out of proportion and that this is completely inconsistent with the life that this man has led.”
Kalka, a Pentecostal pastor in his home country, came to the U.S. in 1990 to escape religious persecution under the Communist regime of the Soviet Union. He formed a small neighborhood church after settling in Cleveland.
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But Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Jennifer Driscoll repeatedly pointed to the video, which showed that the girls swam up to him and splashed him in the pool’s whirlpool section. He splashed them back.
The girls later approached Kalka near a fountain in the kiddie pool and start splashing him again. The lifeguard on duty that day, Nathaniel French, testified that the girls looked happy and he thought they were horsing around with Kalka, who he thought may have been their grandfather.
Then Kalka grabbed the girl.
He forced her head under the stream of the fountain. He held her there for nearly a minute. The friend, after failing to rip the girl free, went to summon French.
Kafka let the girl go, walked into the pool’s steam room and sauna, then to the locker room before a police officer at the rec center arrested him.
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Driscoll hammered Kalka on cross-examination. She asked if he felt her trying to get away.
“Yes, I could tell she was trying to get away, but I wanted her to get wet from the fountain,” Kalka said through the translator.
Driscoll, in a raised voice, asked if he would approve of a strange man grabbing his grandchild and holding them underwater against their will. When Kalka said he treated the girls as his own grandchildren, Driscoll asked if he ever held his own children against their will and groped them.
“Children when they see me, they just run to me,” a clearly flustered Kalka said.
Driscoll pointed out the girls were trying to run from him, not to him.
“No, they weren’t running away from me,” he replied. “I love them, they love me. And the little ones just run all over me and I have to listen to what they want.”
A Ukranian-born pastor who faced a potential life sentence for groping a 10-year-old girl at the Middleburg Heights Recreation Center pool this summer was instead sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday.
Dozens of 75-year-old Nikolay Kalka’s friends and family wailed after Judge Kathleen Ann Sutula sent the ailing man to prison for five years, and exchanged words with the judge over the sobs of Kalka’s wife and children.
“Twelve jurors found him guilty, not this court,” Sutula replied. “Watch the video. God saw.”
Kalka faced a potential mandatory life sentence with his first shot at parole in 10 years after a jury found him guilty last month of kidnapping the child with sexual motivation at the pool on May 11.
But Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley’s office asked Judge Kathleen Ann Sutula to sentence him instead on two counts of gross sexual imposition, which carried a maximum of five years in prison each.
Sutula ran the counts concurrent to one another, “only out of mercy, not because I don’t think you deserve the full 10 years,” she said.
Kalka will also have to register as a sex offender every six months for the next 25 years.
David Thorne, youth pastor at Goodyear Baptist Church in Picayune, Mississippi, pleaded guilty Monday to “one count of sexual battery and one count of touching a child for lustful purposes.”
The Sun Herald reports:
A former pastor at a Pearl River County church is facing jail time after pleading guilty to two sex crime charges in Hancock County.
The Sea Coast Echo reports that David Matthew Thorne, 35, of Picayune, on Monday pleaded guilty in Hancock County Circuit Court to one count of sexual battery and one count of touching a child for lustful purposes. He will be sentenced Sept. 25.
Thorne was arrested in March 2016 for molesting a 15-year-old girl in a church van while he was the youth pastor at Goodyear Baptist Church in Picayune.
He was also arrested on a charge of sexual battery, his third sex crime charge, in Pearl River County less than 24 hours after his arrest in Hancock County. The alleged crimes came under investigation after the child’s parents notified law enforcement officials.
Hancock County sheriff’s Chief Investigator Glenn Grannan told the Sun Herald the child was first abused Jan. 31, 2016, in Hancock County.
Thorne was relieved of his duties at Goodyear Baptist Church after his arrest.
I am a regular reader of the Charisma News website. I read this site, not because I want to, but because it is required reading for the writing I do for this blog. Every day, I skim through or read hundreds of blog posts and news articles posted to Evangelical websites. If I find something that I think might provide fodder for a future blog post, I forward a link to the article to my email inbox. I could, if I wanted to, focus solely on Charisma News. The amount of Jesus/right-wing bullshit they generate each day is astounding.
Charisma loves to feature the so-called prophetic utterances of Charismatic pastors, prophets, and evangelists. In a June 29, 2017 article, Charisma featured a prophecy by John Mark Pool, a man who believes he has been called to “Teaching, Training and Activating the Body of Christ in the Apostolic/Prophetic Five-fold Ministries for the release of the Saints to do the work of the ministry.” Here’s what Poole, under the influence of the Holy G-h-o-s-t, had to say:
Our nation of America is being shaken! When the enemy’s hand is revealed, the righteous right hand of God will demonstrate His lifting up a standard against evil for His bride. This is dealt with in very visible ways such as recent special elections won for the conservative platform, chaos in Europe and fake news finding nothing in their continual witch hunts in plans to destroy God’s choice for our current president, Donald Trump. What will remain is a shaking that multiplies our country with God’s fruitfulness. Remember, the enemy is now in exposure for God’s closure!
Our nation was birthed to be one nation under God where, in our new land, we could be free to worship God in His kingdom without tyrannical oppression of an earthly king. The enemy has tried everything to take us under a false kingdom of darkness, to overpower us and take our nation out of its destiny. Yet, it has only exposed the deep state of darkness and is being drained, exposed and removed!
God is now answering many thousands of appeals to heaven. We are definitely going to see darkness get darker and are being set up for the intense light of God’s glory to outshine evil. God will now close the door of the enemy’s attempt at overthrowing our founding roots to be a Christian nation! We are now partnering with the King of kings together to advance God’s kingdom in a fresh wind of fire for a new desire!
I heard the Lord say, “The law of God will again override the plans of the enemy!
On the same day, CHARISMA also featured a prophecy by Johnny Enlow:
I believe we are about to see the shift that I said would happen around July 4th (our patriotic songs time) and you will see it much harder for the fowl birds of the “dirty birds” media to sack President Trump. They gave it their all in the first half of the year, but they are now beginning to get “gassed” because of the relentless moving forward of Trump and his administration.
Expect this July 4th shift to be significant even though the enemy will keep attempting against their “swamp being drained.” However, the swamp is going to be drained like an unplugged cesspool. There is still a lot of arguing because all haven’t clearly seen the players at the bottom of the swamp. Some crooks are hiding under other crooks, but even that is not going to work for very long.
It is a monumental overhaul that God has called for at this time and “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Trump is simultaneously a lead instrument for the overhaul [and] also symbolic of the drastic overhaul coming to everything as we accelerate into reformation days. It is a time of aggressive change towards advanced kingdom purposes. God is on your side only if you are on His side. He loves you unconditionally, even if you are not on His side, but things are not going to go well for you if you stay on your side. It is time to shift to His side.
Recently, I had a dream — dare I say a prophecy — that I want to share with readers. I am uncertain as to what this dream means. I will leave readers to hear the words of Bruce Almighty (my prophet name) and interpret them accordingly. After all, my dreams are every bit as prophetic as Pool’s and Enlow’s and a hell of a lot more entertaining.
I fell into a deep sleep after hours of wrestling with Satan’s emissary — pain.
My mind was taken back to the days when my wife and I were young. Several of our children were in cloth diapers. We visited First Baptist Church in Bryan, Ohio. They were meeting in multi-purpose building. As we walked into the room, we passed by my uncle, Paul Daugherty. He nodded and kept walking. As we neared our seats, Polly turned to me and gave me a soiled diaper she had put in a bread bag. I took the diaper and put in my suit coat pocket.
A short time later, just before the service started, I stuck my hand in my coat pocket only to find that the bread bag had not been tied and now I had baby poop all over my fingers.
I got up and quickly made my way to the bathroom. As I was washing my hands, in walked the twin brothers, Mark and Luke Gray who were serial killers on the TV show The Following.
My editor wondered if younger readers might not know what the graphic is. For those of you raised on Pampers, those are cloth diapers. If there’s a Heaven above, then my wife, Polly, will certainly gain entrance. Six children, and cloth diapers for every one of them. We had a diaper service for all of two months with our first son. (Again, for younger readers, a diaper service was a company that picked up your dirty diapers, washed and dried them, and then returned them to your home.) After cancelling the diaper service, Polly spent the next fourteen years washing cloth diapers. Surely, if anyone is a saint, she is.
This is the one hundred and forty-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.
Nothing is wrong here so I’m climbing up the walls
Trying to kill this silence with gun blasts and alcohol
I’ve been laughing, I’ve been crying, I’ve been living, I’ve been dying
They say tell the truth, they’re lying, Hallelu
Chorus:
Hallelu, Hallelu, praise the lord and pass the ammunition too
They say Jesus is coming, he must be walking, he sure ain’t running
Who can blame him, look how we done him, Hallelu
What will it take to have this place on bended knee
You run to the forest, you can bet I’ll burn the trees
I will poison the water ’cause it’s only getting hotter
And we came for sons and daughters
Hallelu
Chorus
Trials and tribulations, that’s just bread and wine
Getting my hands dirty, that does not take off the shine
On this farm to get your filling, there’s got to be a little killing
So I am ready and I’m willing, Hallelu
Chorus
If you’re waiting on salvation you’ll need candles and libations
Train ain’t coming in the station, Hallelu
They say Jesus is coming, he must be walking, he sure ain’t running
Who can blame him, look how we done him, Hallelu
What do you think of Ouija boards? They even have pink ones to appeal to little girls. Should I let my child have one?
These alphabet boards use a planchette, which is a smaller piece on casters which moves by spirit power, pointing out letters and making words.
This is an occult, demonic practice. It is real, wicked, harmful and an abomination which should be avoided at all costs. “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD; and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.” (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) “Neither give place to the devil.” (Ephesians 4:27)
When I first moved to Roanoke in 1976, I preached against such occult practices one Sunday night. A lady from our church went home and threw her Ouija board out in the trash. When she went back in the house, it was back on her kitchen table. She burned it.
Another young Christian girl (not from our church) went to a slumber party where the girls urged her to ask their Ouija board a question. She refused. Finally, after their continued pleas, she asked the board where it got its power. It slowly spelled out S a t a n and then crashed to the floor, breaking in pieces.
Over on his blog site, Biblical Musing, Don Camp is trying to justify why God appears to condone slavery. It’s not the first time Don has tried to defend the indefensible; he’s recently been arguing much the same thing on Debunking Christianity.
The fact the Old Testament appears to endorse the keeping of other human beings as slaves is a problem for Christians. It’s a problem compounded by the fact that Jesus in Luke 12.47-48 and the imposter-Paul, in Ephesians 6.5, both support the practice. How can it be that God approves, or at least raises no objection to it? Wouldn’t an omniscient, all-loving God have outlawed slavery, as he outlaws so much else, in one of his innumerable laws and commandments?
Instead, he provides instructions about how to keep and look after slaves; what to do, for example, when you flog one to within an inch of his life so that he later dies (Exodus 21.20-21) or when you deliberately blind your slave – she’s your property after all – or rape her (Exodus 21.26; Numbers 31.17-18).
Don’s answer is that, despite God involving himself in the minutiae of slave treatment, he knew it would be a waste of time telling his people slavery was wrong. Why? Because he took the trouble to tell them lying and stealing were wrong and yet they ignored him. So, hey, why should he bother telling them about slavery? They’d just ignore that too.
But the point is – disregarding the fact that not everyone steals and lies – ‘God’ did issue laws prohibiting stealing and lying (and eating shellfish, and wearing garments of mixed fabric). It seems it was important to him to tell his pet-tribe that these were wrong, even though he must have known many of their number, and many more subsequently, would ignore him.
What can we conclude from this? Only this: that God didn’t feel the same way about slavery as he did about lying and stealing, which is why he didn’t bother making even the same token effort for slavery.
Or, and much more likely: the tribes who wrote the laws didn’t think slavery was wrong. In fact, they thought it quite useful to have slaves. Given this utility, they were unlikely to have devised laws prohibiting their ownership. The enslaved themselves no doubt thought differently, but then they didn’t get to write the rules.
We don’t find a commandment prohibiting slavery in the bible because those who wrote it liked having slaves. For this reason too, we find all those inhumane instructions about keeping slaves and what should happen if you maim or kill them.
Of course God didn’t write these laws. People did. And they wrote them according to their understanding of what was moral, fair and legitimate within their own primitive milieu. Thus it was that slavery got a free pass.
It is very common for sodomites and their supporters to make the most offensive and fallacious claims regarding God’s view of sodomy. It is in keeping with the character of this dreadful wickedness that the community associated with it does not fear to claim God’s endorsement of their vile lifestyle. Nothing can be more provocative in the eyes of God than this blatant misrepresentation of Him and His Holy Word. Mrs Elaine Somers claims that, in her view, she can say of her older sodomite son, “God made him, he is God’s son”. She went further and said: “I, too, could take verses from the Old Testament regarding homosexuality, but the Jesus I know, and my mother knew, teaches me that they are precious in his sight and you cannot take that from me.” She went on to say of Mr Wells: “You do not know the true meaning of Christian love. I hope someday you will.” She is quite wrong in a number of important matters.
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Men and women whose lives are dominated and controlled by sin, as the sodomites most definitely are, cannot claim that they are children of God! The Christian is someone in whom God is working out His purpose as it stated by Paul the apostle. “Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen,” Hebrews 13:20-21. The sodomite lives in complete defiance of God’s stated will. In utter contravention of His holy law. There is a total absence of that “working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight” in the unrepentant sodomite. This poor woman is utterly deceived regarded her sons’ eternal state. Tragically, her error is endorsed and supported by the leaders of the mainline churches worldwide! What a dreadful day of retribution awaits both the deceivers and their victims, the deceived.
