Every year or two, I ask readers to submit questions they want me to answer. That time has arrived once again. Any question. Any subject. Please leave your questions in the comment section or send them to me via email. I will try to answer them in the order received.
I look forward to reading and answering your questions.
Every year or two, I ask readers to submit questions they want me to answer. That time has arrived once again. Any question. Any subject. Please leave your questions in the comment section or send them to me via email. I will try to answer them in the order received.
I look forward to reading and answering your questions.
Jerry asked:
What was your view on the Israel vs Palestine situation when you were a Christian?
Determining my view on Israel and Palestine depends on where I was at a particular moment in my theological journey. I started the ministry as a premillennial, pretribulational dispensationalist. Israel was God’s chosen people, and all the land prescribed in the Bible belonged to them, and nations who bless or curse Israel will be blessed or cursed by God.
In the late 1980s, I left the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) and embraced Evangelical Calvinism. My eschatology changed to amillennialism and posttribulationalism. No longer a dispensationalist, I viewed the New Testament church as God’s chosen people. I saw a continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament. While I believed God had a plan for Israel, they, as a people, at this present time, have been set aside. This allowed me to view Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in a different light.
Today, I view the state of Israel — not Jews individually — as a violent bully propped up by the United States. Israel has turned Gaza into an open-air prison, depriving Palestinians of basic civil rights. I view their illegal settlements in the West Bank similarly. And I think it can be argued that the land “given” to Israel in 1948 was, in fact, violently appropriated from indigenous Palestinian people
The solution to the intractable war between Israel and the Palestinians is straightforward: the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. Further, ALL the illegal Israeli settlements must be dismantled and the land returned to its rightful owners. Of course, these things will never happen as long as Benjamin Netanyahu and other right-wing Israelis are running the show. No amount of pressure from the United States will stop Israel from turning Gaza into a compact version of Syria. It will take decades for Palestinians to recover and rebuild. Their schools, hospitals, and infrastructure have been destroyed.
Rebuilding homes in Gaza destroyed during Israel’s seven-month military offensive could take until 2040 in the most optimistic scenario, with total reconstruction across the territory costing as much as $40bn (£32bn), according to United Nations experts.
An assessment, which is to be published by the UN Development Programme as part of a push to raise funds for early planning for the rehabilitation of Gaza, has also found that the conflict may reduce levels of health, education, and wealth in the territory to those of 1980, wiping out 44 years of development.
Expectations of a breakthrough in ceasefire talks in Cairo between Israel and Hamas have cooled in recent days, and many observers believe the conflict is likely to continue, if at varying degrees of intensity, for many months or even longer.
More than 34,500, mostly women and children have died since Israel launched its offensive, according to health authorities in Gaza, after Hamas attacked Israel in October and killed about 1,200 people. The militant Islamist organisation, which took power in Gaza in 2007, also seized 250 hostages.
More than 79,000 homes in Gaza have been “completely destroyed” in the conflict, with another 370,000 damaged, the new assessment found.
“Even under optimistic scenarios for the pace of physical reconstruction, the scale of destruction in Gaza has been such that, simply from the narrow perspective of moving in building materials, it would still take until 2040 and probably longer to restore the housing units destroyed since the start of the war,” the researchers concluded.
In addition, schools, health facilities, roads, sewers, water pipes and all other critical infrastructure have all suffered massive damage.
….
“The scale of the destruction is huge and unprecedented. This is a mission that the global community has not dealt with since the second world war,” al-Dardari said.
The latest assessment found that, with the high number of casualties and the big destruction of health facilities in Gaza, life expectancy had already been reduced by a minimum of four or five years and was likely to be reduced by seven, if the war continued into its ninth month. Researchers also found that real GDP per capita in the territory could be reduced to its lowest level since the mid-1990s.
More than 37m tonnes of debris needs to be cleared in Gaza to permit reconstruction. The mountains of rubble are full of unexploded ordnance that leads to “more than 10 explosions every week”, with more deaths and loss of limbs, Gaza’s Civil Defence agency said on Thursday.
It is doubtful that a two-state solution will be achieved in the short term. Until Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is turned out of office and the United States stops funding Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians, no change is forthcoming. It is far more likely a regional or world war will break out than that a sovereign Palestinian state will be established. Netanyahu is hell-bent on destroying Gaza, and nothing the feckless Biden Administration says will stop him. President Biden is more concerned about reelection than he is about protecting innocent Palestinians.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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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Recently, a Christian man named Baptist Joshua, watched my video Better Late Than Never on YouTube.
If you have not watched this video, you can do so here:
Afterward, Baptist sent me a polite email that I thought I would respond to in a post. I suspect more than a few readers will find my response interesting and, hopefully, illuminating.
Baptist first shared his experiences with Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) churches. Some of his experiences were similar to mine, though I want to make clear that I left the IFB church movement years before I left the ministry and later deconverted. I stopped self-identifying as IFB after the Jack Hyles scandal (Please see The Legacy of IFB Pastor Jack Hyles) and my adoption of Calvinistic soteriology.
What I want to focus on is Baptist’s second paragraph:
But my main point of contact was that you stated that you, one day, realized that the Bible is not infallible. Why did you come to believe that? I maintain that the Bible (K.J.V. for English readers) is fine and has no errors or contradictions, and I have spent decades answering questions on this topic. I study the Bible and a lot of ancient history. Most of the supposed errors/contradictions believed by people comes down to ignorance of ancient customs. I would like to know what it was for you, where you came to believe it was not perfect.
Evangelicals generally believe the sixty-six books of the Protestant Christian Bible are inspired, inerrant, and infallible. Inspiration is a faith claim, for which no argument for or against can be made. Either you believe, by faith, the Bible is inspired, or you don’t. I don’t. Inerrancy and infallibility, on the other hand, are empirical claims which can be tested, proved, or disproved. For much of my Christian life, I believed that the Bible was inspired, inerrant, and infallible. In the early 2000s, I stopped using the King James Bible, opting instead to read and preach from the New American Standard Bible (NASB) and English Standard Version (ESV). Devotionally, I started reading The Message. By this point, I had concluded that the Bible was faithful and reliable, but not inerrant and infallible. I never doubted that the Bible was the Word of God, but I came to see and understand the deep, fallible imprint human authors made on the original manuscripts (which do not exist).
The King James Bible was first released in 1611. The KJV was primarily a revision and update of the Bishops’ Bible. Translators primarily used Erasmus’ Greek text (Textus Receptus) for translating the New Testament, and the Masoretic text for the Old, along with the Greek Septuagint, and the Latin Vulgate.
In 1769, the KJV was updated, modernizing the English and fixing scores of errors and mistakes. Wikipedia states:
By the mid-18th century the wide variation in the various modernized printed texts of the Authorized Version, combined with the notorious accumulation of misprints, had reached the proportion of a scandal, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge both sought to produce an updated standard text. First of the two was the Cambridge edition of 1760, the culmination of 20 years’ work by Francis Sawyer Parris, who died in May of that year. This 1760 edition was reprinted without change in 1762 and in John Baskerville’s fine folio edition of 1763.
This was effectively superseded by the 1769 Oxford edition, edited by Benjamin Blayney, though with comparatively few changes from Parris’s edition; but which became the Oxford standard text, and is reproduced almost unchanged in most current printings. Parris and Blayney sought consistently to remove those elements of the 1611 and subsequent editions that they believed were due to the vagaries of printers, while incorporating most of the revised readings of the Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638, and each also introducing a few improved readings of their own.
They undertook the mammoth task of standardizing the wide variation in punctuation and spelling of the original, making many thousands of minor changes to the text. In addition, Blayney and Parris thoroughly revised and greatly extended the italicization of “supplied” words not found in the original languages by cross-checking against the presumed source texts. Blayney seems to have worked from the 1550 Stephanus edition of the Textus Receptus, rather than the later editions of Theodore Beza that the translators of the 1611 New Testament had favoured; accordingly the current Oxford standard text alters around a dozen italicizations where Beza and Stephanus differ. Like the 1611 edition, the 1769 Oxford edition included the Apocrypha, although Blayney tended to remove cross-references to the Books of the Apocrypha from the margins of their Old and New Testaments wherever these had been provided by the original translators. It also includes both prefaces from the 1611 edition. Altogether, the standardization of spelling and punctuation caused Blayney’s 1769 text to differ from the 1611 text in around 24,000 places.
The 1611 and 1769 texts of the first three verses from I Corinthians 13 are given below.
[1611] 1. Though I speake with the tongues of men & of Angels, and haue not charity, I am become as sounding brasse or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I haue the gift of prophesie, and vnderstand all mysteries and all knowledge: and though I haue all faith, so that I could remooue mountaines, and haue no charitie, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestowe all my goods to feede the poore, and though I giue my body to bee burned, and haue not charitie, it profiteth me nothing.
[1769] 1. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
There are a number of superficial edits in these three verses: 11 changes of spelling, 16 changes of typesetting (including the changed conventions for the use of u and v), three changes of punctuation, and one variant text—where “not charity” is substituted for “no charity” in verse two, in the belief that the original reading was a misprint.
Most people who use the KJV use the 1769 revision. The 1611 version is unreadable for most modern readers. Once I understood the changes and corrections that had been made in the 1769 revision, I could no longer say with a straight face that the KJV was inerrant and infallible. I came to the same conclusion about ALL English translations of the Bible. It is impossible to conclude that the KJV or any other Bible translation is without error. Since the original manuscripts no longer exist, the same can be said about the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. This is the position taken by virtually all non-Evangelical Bible scholars. One can still hold on to the Bible being inspired by God, but inerrancy and infallibility cannot be rationally sustained. The data is overwhelming: both manuscripts and translations have scores of errors, mistakes, and contradictions. Dr. Bart Ehrman says there are over 40,000 differences in the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. Granted, most of these differences are minor, but when you believe the Bible is inerrant, it only takes one error to bring inerrancy tumbling down.
Baptist, as all Evangelical apologists do, likely has explanations for every error, mistake, and contradiction in the Bible. That’s why I don’t get into long, drawn-out debates over Bible errancy and fallibility. Evangelicals always have answers, but are they good answers? Keep in mind, for Evangelicals, the data don’t come first. Before they even read the text, Evangelicals are guided by several presuppositions: the Bible is God’s word; the Bible is inerrant; the Bible is infallible. When confronted with obvious errors, Evangelicals must, according to their presuppositions, find ways to make the text fit in the inerrant/infallible box.
As a pastor, I had a 1,000-plus-page book that addressed all the alleged errors and contradictions in the Bible. When I came across verses that seemed contradictory, I would consult this book. Most of the time, I was satisfied with the explanation, but other times I found the book’s explanations weak, incoherent, or absurd. In these instances, I put aside intellectual inquiry and appealed to faith. I told myself, “The Bible is the perfect Word of God.” Any apparent error or mistake was due to my lack of understanding, and, in time, God would make things clear to me. And if he didn’t, I would still trust him, believing the Bible was without error.
After I left the ministry twenty years ago, I began investigating the central claims of Christianity, including the claim that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. I concluded that these claims could not be rationally, intellectually sustained. I found Dr. Bart Ehrman’s books on the nature and history of the Biblical text to be helpful in this regard. Bishop John Shelby Spong was another author I found helpful. When people want to debate me on Bible inerrancy or infallibility, the first thing I do is ask them if they have read Ehrman’s books. If not, I usually say, “Read a couple of his books, and then we will talk.”
If someone is unwilling to read Dr. Ehrman’s books, I encourage them to watch the videos produced by Bible scholar, Dr. Dan McClellan. I watch Dan’s videos almost every day, always learning something new. I wish I had been exposed to men such as Bart and Dan in my younger years as an Evangelical preacher. I suspect I would have caused a lot less harm to the people I pastored.
I appreciate Baptist’s questions. I hope I have adequately answered them.
Saved by Reason,
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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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By Abby Zimet, used with permission from Common Dreams
As the dystopian movie Civil War sets records depicting the “colorful horrors of the American future” on its current trajectory, we saw the same mindless, time-honored rancor play out at “Ole Miss being Ole Miss,” where a pack of rabid, jeering, shit-for-brains frat bros with white-supremely punchable faces set upon a black female student protesting genocide in Gaza. On foul display: That “Southern Heritage we’re always Jim Crowing about,” and, without change, the next generation of GOP goons and bigots.
Robert Reich recently posted a message of hope to his students, graduating at a “tremulous” time in a world beset by racism, genocide, climate change, culture wars, rising authoritarianism. Like many of us, Reich also entered adulthood at a bitter time, in 1968, amidst war, assassinations, cities burning. “I ask my students to hold on,” he writes. “To use their lives and careers to make America better. To try to heal the world.” It’s a tough ask in a fractious time, now grimly depicted in Alex Garland’s Civil War about a nihilistic America “at war with itself.” What one critic calls “a cautionary tale about America’s inevitable self-destruction,” it offers a harrowing look at “the horrors that lie ahead for a great country on the rocks – and what America has done to itself already,” with its “motiveless carnage,” tarnished ideals, president “who has raped the U.S. Constitution,” and beleaguered free press, including “an aging survivor of what’s left of the New York Times,” “trying to record what they witness in the line of fire (as) the rest of us die.” Its bleak message: “If things continue in the (current) political direction, no one will be safe from annihilation in the next decade.”
In real life, America’s political landscape takes it down a notch or so, but still leans dark. A GOP-controlled House big on “pointless gestures and posturing” just plumbed new McCarthyist depths by passing a bill that conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, “an insult (to) historical memory erasing decades of Jewish anti-Zionist politics”; its crypto-fascist “leader” Mike Johnson plans hearings on anti-genocide college protests to “look at the root causes funded by, I don’t know, George Soros or overseas entities.” A corrupt, far-right judicial system now includes in its plutocratic ranks not just Alito, Thomas et al but Trump fangirl Aileen ‘What Classified Documents?’ Cannon, who claims her newly exposed omission of fat-cat-funded vacations was “completely inadvertent.” Thanks to such chicanery – and despite efforts to protect election integrity and its stewards – a new survey shows over half of all election officials fear for their safety, from harassment to assault, and for their ability to do their jobs without political meddling. And the “petty little shit-stain” who so helped shred our democratic norms is still free (for now), and jabbering.
Of course, the “whining train-wreck” now seething through his sordid criminal trial – as Stormy Daniels say she was “ashamed” of their (ewww) sexual encounter – still pursues his rampage back to power. Last weekend, free from the legal strictures he gripes keep him from campaigning, he again fled to his tacky golf club to beg rich people for more money to keep him out of jail; with no low, he even scrounged for $9,000 in gag order fines. At a $40,000-a-plate bash, he groused about taking selfies with small donors who don’t deserve them, called Biden “the Gestapo” and Jack Smith “a fucking asshole,” deemed 40% of Americans moochers who “get welfare to vote and then they cheat,” and paraded his trashy VP hopefuls like a motel pageant of Miss Florida also-rans: Doug Burgum – “He’s a very rich man”; Kristi Noem, now urging Biden’s dog Commander be added to the kill list – “Somebody that I love”; Byron Donalds – “Somebody who’s created something very special, donors worth millions of dollars…I like diversity. Diversité, as you would say.” And sniveling lapdog Tim Scott, in limbo with no word from on high even as he faithfully declines six times to say he’ll accept the 2024 election results.
Sigh. With such civic and moral mentors, thus do we get the savage, racist, redneck frat boys at Ole Miss who somehow never learned – so much for teach your children well – it is not acceptable, when witnessing a group of righteous fellow students acting in conscience to protest the slaughter of many thousands of innocents in Gaza, to single out a black woman and leer, jeer, boo, screech, give her multiple fingers, jump up and down making grotesque faces and grunting monkey noises, clutch their crotches, throw food and cups of water, chant “We Want Trump!” “Fuck Joe Biden!” and shriek, “Who’s your daddy?,” “Take a shower,” “Lizzo, Lizzo!”, “Fuck you fat-ass!” “Your nose is huge!” “Shave your legs!” “Fuck you fat bitch!” and “Lock her up!” The woman, identified as graduate student Jaylin Smith, kept filming as the idiot yahoos, safely surrounded by hundreds of barbarian peers, some in stars-and-stripes overalls, feverishly bounced around her. Reports said they outnumbered by about 10-to-1 the roughly 30, diverse students with UMiss for Palestine, who calmly carried Palestinian flags and signs: “Free Palestine,” “Stop the Genocide” and “U.S. Bombs Take Palestine Lives.”
Many of the yokels – one sage: “A thousand faces of ‘peaked in high school’…The end product of a failed state” – reportedly had no idea what the protest was about. Said one, “I don’t know what they’re doing here. I just want them gone.” See the ever-prescient William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” For many, the ugly spectacle summoned “the ghosts of UM’s past” at a school nicknamed for a plantation term, that long called its sports teams the Rebels and its mascot Colonel Reb, still has only 11% black students in a state nearly 40% black, and remains famous for the 1962 riots that followed the admission, a full eight years after Brown v. Board of Education banning segregation, of 29-year-old veteran James Meredith, the school’s first African-American student, whose arrival on the Oxford campus was accompanied by 1,400 US Marshalls and federal troops and who later said of the experience, “I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One.” In 1964, Nina Simone released her searing song, Mississippi Goddamn: “Hound dogs on my trail/school children sittin’ in jail/thinkin’ every day’s gonna be my last/I don’t belong here, I don’t belong there.”
After video of the douchebag behavior toward a lone black woman by a horde of hooting good ole boys was met with outrage, UM Chancellor Glenn Boyce faintly acknowledged the school’s “challenging” history, noting, “Incidents like this can set us back.” Citing “offensive and inappropriate” statements and “actions that conveyed hostility and racist overtones,” Boyce said the school would “investigate” the conduct of at least one student and “determine whether more cases are warranted.” “Behaviors and comments that demean people because of their race or ethnicity…undermine the values that are fundamental to a civil and safe society,” he said in a statement. “People who say horrible things to people because of who they are will not find shelter or comfort on this campus.” Still, it remains to be seen if so-called adults who likewise say horrible things – like Mississippi’s Gov. Tate Reeves, who posted video with, “Warms my heart,” and Georgia Rep. and “racist POS” Mike Collins, who captioned the repulsive scene “Ole Miss taking care of business” – will also be held accountable. (His Congressional office number is 202-225-4101. Just sayin’.)
A ghastly piece of work who’s suggested murdering migrants by throwing them Pinochet-style from helicopters and introduced a bill to ban federal “zealots” from removing Greg Abbott’s deadly razor buoys from the Rio Grande, Collins later backtracked, slightly. He bombastically noted there “seems to be some potentially inappropriate behavior that none of us should seek to glorify” and suggested if someone “is found” to be a racist POS “they should be punished (and) will hopefully seek forgiveness” before doubling back down on “pro-Hamas, anti-American, Antifa anarchists” who “run roughshod” over nice rebels “there to learn and enjoy college.” Meanwhile, UM’s NAACP chapter swiftly condemned counter-protesters’ “reprehensible actions,” identified the monkey asshole as James “JP” Staples from Phi Delta Theta, and called for his expulsion along with that of Connor Moore and Rouse Davis Boyce from Kappa Alpha Order as the “primary perpetrators.” The next day, Phi Delta Theta removed Staples for behavior that was “offensive, outside the bounds of this discourse, and contradictory to our values.” The school has yet to take any further action.
But Toby Morton has. A writer for South Park and MadTV, Morton is also the “immature and irresponsible” creator of a series of Fascist Websites paying tribute, thanks to idiotically unregistered domain names, to the vile likes of Greg Abbott – “People die on his watch” – Elise Stefanik – “Let’s keep it white” – DeFascist 24 – “I’ve always strived to promote a safe and welcoming space for every white nationalist in Florida and beyond” – and Tennessee’s Cameron Sexton: “You racist? I got your back.” Now, he has a campaign website for J.P. Staples – “Racially driven experience in hate” – starting with a Hitler quote, “The first million was the hardest.” “I’ve been carrying this burden for far too long, and I can’t hold it in any longer,” it reads. “I hate so much it consumes me…I hate the way black people look at me, the way they talk, the way they exist…Here I am, confessing my deepest, darkest secret. I’m a scared little bitch. I fear those who are superior to me. I fear people will see who I truly am – a piece of shit. Thankfully, I represent many Americans and how we think.” And there are testimonials! Kristi Noem: “Does he have a dog?” MTG: “Welcome to the GOP.”
Staples has scrubbed his social media accounts, forgetting the Internet is forever, but sleuths were quickly on it. From a Texas MAGA family whose father is a repeat DWI offender, “Monkey Boy” evidently “hates all races but his own.” His posts are both racist and anti-Semitic, raging at “cock-sucking Jews” who after a week removed from streaming a movie he wanted to watch and idly wondering “if Jews use the term ‘baby in the oven'” for someone pregnant. Observers mused on his future job prospects: Hero good ole boy a la Kyle Rittenhouse, or landscaping assistant, Trump advisor, guy “asking people if they want fries with their order for the rest of his life?” Many see him as “a sterling (result) of spectacularly bad parenting – mini-racists pop out.” “You’re looking at the next generation of racists,” said one, who included girlfriends “cheering (them) on – the Klan rode up to the meeting, but the wives sewed the capes and hoods.” They deem him “the true face of Mississippi,” of “the Republican Party and how they behave when nobody’s looking” – or even when we are – and of the ghosts of America’s racist past: Still and all, “They walk among us.”
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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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You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.
By Marilou Johanek, used with permission from Ohio Capital Journal
It was plain what Ohio voters approved last November with Issue 1. An overwhelming majority of Ohioans voted for a reset on abortion rights after relentless government assault on reproductive freedoms under the state’s patriarchal theocratic rule.
The consensus of 57% of the electorate was to enshrine the fundamental right to abortion in the Ohio Constitution.
Issue 1 also explicitly barred the state from directly or indirectly burdening, prohibiting, penalizing or interfering with access to abortion, and discriminating against abortion patients and providers.
It’s right there in the ballot language of the constitutional amendment voters said “yes” to last November. But now, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who issued a legal analysis that largely stood against Issue 1 before it was approved by voters, argues Ohioans didn’t vote for what they did.
For months Yost has been doing his level best to legally obstruct implementation of the newly amended state constitution by maintaining the legitimacy of burdensome and discriminatory pre-Issue 1 abortion restrictions that clearly violate the letter of the law post-Issue 1.
He slow walks every single constitutional challenge to every single Republican statute still on the books that interferes with abortion access by erecting unnecessary government barriers between a woman and her right to an abortion.
Yost had the gall to contend that Ohio voters didn’t pass Issue 1 to block unnecessary government-mandated delays before patients are allowed to obtain abortions, or to eliminate government-mandated information (that is at least irrelevant and at worst distressing) prior to receiving care.
Yes. They. Did.
Yost cannot pick and choose, a la carte, which provision of the voter-mandated abortion rights amendment applies to unconstitutional restrictions that remain in the Ohio Revised Code.
But that’s what he’s trying to do in courtroom arguments to keep burdensome and discriminatory state abortion restrictions in force indefinitely, including the 24-hour waiting period for abortion patients – a medically unwarranted government mandate not applicable to any other medical procedure – plus separate, in-person visits for patients to be schooled in required anti-choice material designed to discourage abortions.
Yost and his fellow Republican theocrats like to intimate that childlike Ohioans who voted for Issue 1 didn’t fully understand what they were doing. The naïve majority who cast their ballots in favor of the amendment simply failed to grasp what it meant to the common sense abortion regulations Republican men had imposed on Ohio women.
Court filings by Yost’s office suggest gullible citizens thought a vote for Issue 1 would just give women the same abortion rights they had under Roe v. Wade. Never mind what the language added to the Ohio Constitution (and read by Issue 1 voters) actually said.
Yost analyzed that text at length last year before the November election in a disingenuous critique ripped by a former Ohio AG and AG candidate as “a biased hit piece that is intended to confuse voters and weaken support for the amendment.”
Yost concluded that all state abortion laws, such as the 24-hour waiting period and state mandated “informed consent” provisions, would likely be erased if the amendment passed. They “would certainly be challenged under Issue 1” and subject to the “exclusive scrutiny test” of the court as to whether or not they “burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against” the right to abortion, reasoned Yost.
The problem is, countered his peers, “no such standard of review exists in law – Yost has created it out of whole cloth to support his arguments.”
Yost was, wrote Marc Dann and Jeff Crossman, “deliberately misleading” with “hyperbolic claims and scare tactics.”
He was also revealing his fealty to partisan extremism over the public interest of truth-telling.
Today, Yost crafts his own textual interpretation of the changes Ohioans mandated in state abortion law and audaciously assumes what voters were thinking when they enshrined the right “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” in their constitution. It is obvious he does not respect the will of the people or acknowledge their sovereignty in self-governance.
Yost, ever the media hound, wants to attract attention as a courtroom combatant for the hard right. To that end, he will fight constitutionally protected abortion rights in Ohio with protracted litigation and frivolous appeals to subvert implementation of the law with whatever legal tool he has to keep Ohio women subjugated as second-class citizens.
Yost is fixated on generating headlines and getting on TV. So he pursues partisan lawsuits with other Republican AGs to exploit MAGA wedge issues, especially concerning transgender equality, and files a slew of Trump-loving, regulatory-hating amicus briefs to the Supreme Court.
Ohio’s chief law enforcement officer waves off Trump’s 88 felony counts in four jurisdictions for charges ranging from “pervasive and destabilizing lies” about election fraud to illegally hoarding classified documents and falsifying business records in a hush money coverup to win the 2016 election. Yost appears guided by selective application of the law when it comes to the accused felon and presumptive presidential nominee of his party.
But Ohio’s AG is misguided if he thinks Ohioans are willing to concede that same selectivity when it comes to their hard-won constitutional right to reproductive freedom. They know what they voted for and so does Yost.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
Connect with me on social media:
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.
Every year or two, I ask readers to submit questions they want me to answer. That time has arrived once again. Any question. Any subject. Please leave your questions in the comment section or send them to me via email. I will try to answer them in the order received.
I look forward to reading and answering your questions.
Merle asked:
What are the benefits and downsides to being an atheist?
Atheism is the lack of belief in the existence of God. An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in God. Technically, I am an agnostic atheist. I cannot know for certain whether a deity of some sort exists, so I am agnostic on the God question. However, when it comes to the extant Gods — especially the Abrahamic Gods — I am convinced that these deities do not exist, thus I am an atheist. It is possible someday a God might make itself known to me, but until then, I remain an atheist.
We live in a society dominated by religion in general and Christianity in particular. I can’t think of one benefit I gained when declaring my atheism. Benefits accrued when I left Evangelicalism, regardless of whether I embraced atheism. I was no longer bound by the authority of the Bible and the church. I no longer had to play by the rules or believe certain things. I was free to believe and do what I wanted. So the most important thing gained by deconverting was FREEDOM! I can now “sin” to my heart’s content. I can cavort with prostitutes, smoke crack, get drunk, rob banks, and commit murder — if I want to. I choose not to. I am no longer bound by religious creeds, rules, and standards. I no longer need them to guide my life. No need for religious texts or religious authorities determining for me what these texts mean. I am a rational human being, capable of deciding for myself how I want to live. I have never felt freer than I do today, and my partner, Polly, can say the same. We do what we want, when we want, with nary a thought about what God thinks or the Bible says. It is a great way to live. Of course, I will burn in Hell if I am wrong about the God question. 🙂
Now to the negatives of being an atheist. If you are a private or secret atheist, you will likely face few, if any, problems. It is when you publicly declare your lack of belief that problems can and do arise. Atheists are roundly considered in an unflattering light as people who lack moral and ethical values; people who have secret desires to commit sexual sin; and people who are child molesters or pedophiles. Stupidly, many Christians believe that moral and ethical values require religion. This is absurd. I can’t think of one value that can’t be formulated without religion — not one. I don’t need the Christian God, the Christian Bible, or the Christian church to know how to live morally and ethically.
As an atheist, I have faced discrimination. I am an outspoken atheist, the village atheist who regularly writes letters to the editor of the local newspaper about Evangelicalism, Trump, MAGA, liberal/progressive politics, abortion, LGBTQ issues, handicapped parking, and degenerates who kill cats for sports. I am a well-rounded letter writer. These letters have resulted in personal attacks from locals on social media or in response letters to the paper. Polly and our children have been accosted at work and the local community college by people demanding they defend something I wrote. Too cowardly to confront me directly — I’m easy to find and contact — they go after my family instead. Last year, a local high school teacher gave one of my granddaughters a hard time over one of my letters. I told her to tell this bully that I would gladly publicly debate him or address his class, answering any questions students might have. There have been several times when business owners made it clear they weren’t interested in doing business with me. I have also lost out on job opportunities; more than qualified — I mean, really, really qualified — yet not receiving an interview.
I consider the aforementioned things to be the price of admission. If I am going to be an out and proud atheist and humanist, there are costs involved I must be willing to pay. (Please see Count the Cost Before You Say “I am an Atheist.”)
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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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Every year or two, I ask readers to submit questions they want me to answer. That time has arrived once again. Any question. Any subject. Please leave your questions in the comment section or send them to me via email. I will try to answer them in the order received.
I look forward to reading and answering your questions.
Charles asked:
Did your former congregations and Christian friends completely ostracize you after you deconverted?
The short answer is yes. However, the ostracization began before I deconverted. The last Sunday in November 2008 marks the day when I finally admitted I was no longer a Christian and stopped attending church. Before that, I still professed faith in Jesus, albeit a questioning, doubting faith. I started blogging in 2006. As I publicly worked through my questions and doubts, my colleagues in the ministry and former congregants took notice, voicing their concerns over my leftward slide into liberalism and unbelief. Some of these people broke with me, saying they could no longer support a man who held heretical beliefs. In their minds I was backslidden, or, God forbid, a false Christian; someone who never knew Jesus as his Lord and Savior. Most of my friends and acquaintances still considered me a friend or colleague, but they distanced themselves from me, praying I would repent, but ready to chuck me in the trash bin if I did not.
After publicly declaring I was no longer a Christian, I sent out a letter titled Dear Family, Friends, and Former Parishioners to several hundred people. I knew that there were a lot of rumors circulating about me, so I thought, through this letter, I would let everyone know where I was in life. Surely, my family, friends, and former parishioners would want to know, right? I wanted, most of all, for them to “understand.” I quickly learned no one was interested in understanding anything. I received emails, letters, and phone calls from people outraged over my decision to deconvert. Nobody said, “I understand” or “I wish you well.” Instead, I was told I was mentally ill (by my best friend) and/or demon-possessed ( by a woman I’ve known for 50 years). Others told me I was out of the will of God, backslidden, or other terms Evangelicals use to describe people who don’t play by the rules or believe the right things. All of them, to the person, immediately cut me off. Some of my preacher friends preached sermons about me, using me as a cautionary tale of what happens when someone rejects the one true Evangelical faith. Sixteen years later, not one friend remains. My partner, Polly, and I have had to completely start over, building friendships with people who have likeminded beliefs.
I don’t blame people for breaking fellowship with me. I came to understand that my faith-based relationships were conditioned on fidelity to certain beliefs and practices. Once I rejected these beliefs, the bond that held us together was broken. What surprised me was how ugly and nasty people were towards me — decidedly unChristian. They could have told me they were disappointed without burning our relationships to the ground. Sadly, Evangelicals are well-known for how badly they treat people who leave the in group. Only one person — the woman I had known for 50 years — ever apologized for the way they treated me. Everyone else, stood by their hateful, judgmental, disrespectful words, poignant reminders of the rot that is at the core of Evangelical Christianity.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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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I asked my partner, Polly, and our six adult children, to make a list of the maxims and sayings I have used and repeated over the years.
Enjoy!
I can’t never did anything
I work on information.
Not bad for a white guy.
You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Do it right the first time.
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.
Use the right tool for the job.
Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
Who had it last?
You got it out, you put it away.
No blood, no foul.
Are you bleeding? Stop crying.
Pay attention.
Be aware of your surroundings.
Did you get the biggest possible screwdriver?
Hold the light! [when helping Dad work on cars]
What would Jesus do?
Jasnathjai-whatever your name is.
Go wait in the car. I’ll be right out. [two hours later]
I’ll be right back.
Outside. Now!
Keep your hands [or feet] to yourself.
This too shall pass.
Put the lime in the coconut.
Ask your mom.
Time to lean, time to clean.
When will dinner be ready?
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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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President Joe Biden thinks giving Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel billions of dollars in direct military aid is a “good day for peace.” His statement is irrational. U.S. military aid is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in the past year, and millions of deaths since the inception of our nation. Many of these deaths were children and civilians.
Colorado coach Deion “Prime Time” Sanders is a bully. His treatment of Colorado’s football players shows he has no regard or respect for them as men.
Social Security is not broken, contrary to what Congress tells us. Congress owes the Social Security Administration the 2.7 trillion dollars it “borrowed” from the fund. Repay this first before saying the fund is insolvent.
According to Evangelical megachurch pastor and grizzled culture war general John MacArthur, there’s no such thing as mental illness, especially PTSD. Someone should sue MacArthur for not only being an asshole, but practicing medicine without a license.
President Joe Biden supports “peaceful protest.” Evidently, “peaceful” means doing what you are told or we will send in the police to arrest you. Biden is clueless when it comes to war, peace, civil disobedience, and nonviolent resistance.
Atheists, agnostics, and nones overwhelmingly support Joe Biden. Why, then, does the president and the Democratic Party pretend we don’t exist?
Kristi Noem shot and killed her fourteen-month-old puppy. She also killed a goat that she deemed unworthy of continued life. Noem is a bad person, yet she is being considered for vice president on the Republican ticket. The Republican Party lacks a moral and ethical foundation. Trump is their God, and whatever he says is law.
Evangelicals think Taylor Swift’s latest album is Satanic and anti-Christian. Good job, Taylor! Anyone that pisses off Evangelicals is good by me.
Childhood immunization should be required before students enter school. No religious exemptions, and that includes students in private religious schools.
God did not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah due to homosexuality. It’s in the Bible. Look it up.
Bonus: Churches should be required to run annual state and federal background checks on all clerics. staff, and volunteers. Churches that refuse to do so should lose their liability insurance coverage.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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 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.
Jose Lozano, pastor of Zion Assembly Church of God in Hesperia, California, stands accused of sexually molesting his foster children. Zion Assembly — Hesperia is affiliated with Zion Assembly Church of God International, headquartered in Cleveland, Tennessee. Zion Assembly rents its meeting space from Sovereign Way Christian Church.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
A Hesperia pastor is in police custody following an investigation into allegations he sexually abused two minors under his care as a foster parent.
Jose Manuel Lozano is awaiting trial at the High Desert Detention Center in Adelanto, where he is being held in lieu of $5-million bail. Investigators described his alleged victims as girls ages 16 and 10.
The 54-year-old Hesperia resident led bilingual services for a predominately Latino and Spanish-speaking congregation at Zion Assembly Church of God Hesperia, an affiliate of Zion Assembly Church of God International, headquartered in Tennessee. A representative from the latter said in an interview that the organization condemns Lozano’s “ungodliness” and that he was removed from office March 15, when the allegations came to light. He was arrested last week.
….
Zion Assembly Church of God Hesperia is holding services in Lozano’s absence with interim pastor Henry Rodriguez in his place. Rodriguez did not respond to The Times’ request for comment, and the church’s Instagram and Facebook pages have been taken down.
Since 2018, Lozano’s congregation had been renting space from Sovereign Way Christian Church, according to that church’s pastor, Stephen Feinstein. He said he knew Zion Assembly Church of God Hesperia as a good tenant that communicated well. The news “came as such a shock,” he said.
He said the Sovereign Way Christian Church campus has security cameras in nearly every room, but law enforcement hasn’t asked for any video.
“Sexual abuse is a problem in every institutional setting,” Feinstein said.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
Connect with me on social media:
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.
Every year or two, I ask readers to submit questions they want me to answer. That time has arrived once again. Any question. Any subject. Please leave your questions in the comment section or send them to me via email. I will try to answer them in the order received.
I look forward to reading and answering your questions.
A reader asked:
Bruce, is incest always wrong?
Ask people if sex between family members is wrong, and most people will say yes. Typically, this is a gut response to a difficult question. Sex between family members seems “icky” so it must be, right? The Bible says incest is a sin, so it must be, right? Lost on Christians is the fact that, according to the Bible, incest played a central role in the propagation of the human race. Adam and Eve had three sons, Cain, Abel, and Seth. These men all had children. Who did they have sex with? Either their mother, Eve, or their sisters (who are not mentioned in the Biblical text). So, if incest is wrong/immoral/sinful, why was it permissible in the book of Genesis? Good luck with this one, Evangelicals.
I oppose incest for scientific reasons; that sex (and pregnancy) between closely related people can and does lead to birth defects. The Amish have a problem with birth defects because they almost always marry within their group. Healthy population groups require outside DNA. Some Jewish sects have a similar problem.
If two closely related people want to marry and have sex without having children, I have no reason to say no. I may find such a thing icky, but I can’t think of one rational, scientific reason to object. My mother married her first cousin, Robert Slayman. Mom couldn’t have children, so she was free to marry him. Icky? Maybe, but ickiness is no reason to forbid such relationships.
The same thing can be said for adult step-children marrying each other. Icky? Perhaps, but there’s no scientific (or moral) reason for objecting to such marriages. We all agree that biologically connected parents, children, grandparents, aunts, and uncles should not marry each other. What about cousins?
A 2018 Popular Science article says:
The paper, published in the journal [by Paul Erlich]Science, looks at genetic data from millions of online genealogy profiles. Among other things, the researchers were able to determine at what point in history marrying cousins went out of vogue, and the average degree of relation between married couples today. And hey, since we’re on the subject: Is it wrong to marry your cousin (for a survival perspective)?
While it’s taboo today, cousins used to get hitched all the time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, was his fifth cousin once removed; she didn’t even have to change her name. And scientific geniuses like Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin married their cousins, too. For much of human history, these unions weren’t considered bad or gross. Oftentimes, there weren’t many better options.
From 1650 to 1850, a given person was, on average, fourth cousins with their spouse, according to Erlich’s data. “Many people may have married their first cousin and many people married someone not at all related to them,” he says. But within a century, that had changed. By 1950, married couples were, on average, more like seventh cousins, according to Erlich.
One common sense explanation for this shift is that when transportation methods improved, bachelors and bachelorettes had access to potential partners they had once been denied by geography. This makes sense, given that before 1950, most people stayed in place and ended up marrying someone who lived with in a six-mile radius of where they were born.
Other factors could be at play, however. Erlich says that, according to his data, many continued to marry their cousins even after the Industrial Revolution dramatically improved mobility. While proximity may be one key to romance, it seems consolidating money or power played an important part in family marriages, too. Erlich believes it was changing social norms—and the advent of this cousin marriage taboo—that finally pushed people to look beyond their village and their family. Other factors, including the increasing autonomy of women and shrinking family sizes (which left fewer cousins to marry) could also have been involved.
Whatever the underlying cause, by the end of the Civil War, many states moved to outlaw cousin marriages. Today, 24 states ban marriage between first cousins, while 20 states allow it. The others allow first cousins to couple up, but only under certain circumstances. (“Certain circumstances” include: only if both are over 50, or 55, or 65, depending on the state; only if one or both are permanently infertile; and only if the couple has received genetic counseling.) And, of course, even in states where it is legal, the practice is taboo.
First cousins share 12.5 percent of their DNA. (Siblings, as well as parents and kids, share about 50 percent.) Any child that results from a first cousin union is, therefore, going to have a pretty substantial portion of similar-looking genes. And that can pose a problem.
In biology, genetic diversity is all the rage. If something goes wrong with the genetic material provided to you by your mom, you’re more likely to shake it off if your dad’s genetic material is very different. If dad’s left you hanging when it comes to susceptibility to a certain disease, a mom from a radically different gene pool could confer the protection you require. If mom and dad are genetically similar, however, both versions of a gene are likely to shut down at the same time. It’s estimated that 4 to 7 percent of children born from first-cousin marriages have birth defects, compared to 3 to 4 percent for children born from distantly related marriages.
That’s not nothing, but it’s also not the end of the world—or the family tree. The real issue would arise if the next generation of kids also married their first cousins. Their offspring will have even more DNA in common—and an even greater chance for birth defects.
Ultimately, marrying your first cousin carries some risk. But the odds of healthy offspring dramatically improve with each new distance of relation. Second cousins share only 6.25 percent of their genes and third cousins share just over 3 percent. Seventh cousins—the average distance between modern American spouses—have no meaningful genetic relation at all.
Today, you’d be hard pressed to find an advocate of cousin marriages, and there are of course good reasons for that. But looking at Erlich’s family tree, it’s not an “ew” factor one feels, but an “aw” factor. The genetic data, branching off this way and that, reveals just how closely related we all already are. “[All] of us are something like 10th to 12th cousins of each other,” Erlich says softly. “When you think about wars and violence all over the world, it’s all within the family.”
In 1975, a psychology textbook said one out of a million births were due to incest. Thanks to DNA testing, a recent study revealed that this number is actually one out of seven thousand.
The permissibility of incest is a good example of an issue that humanists and other non-Christians must wrestle with when determining morality, Ickiness is never a reason to forbid something. I can’t wait to read the headlines on Evangelical blogs that say, “Atheist Bruce Gerencser Approves of Incest.” 🙂
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
Connect with me on social media:
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.
