I’d be interested to know, of those of you who are no longer Christians, what led you to become one in the first place.
There are thousands of websites and books that argue philosophically for the validity of Christianity, presenting their evidence for the resurrection and generally taking an intellectual approach to promoting the faith.
I’d be very surprised if this ‘evidence’, which is poor at best, and Christians’ philosophical arguments lead anyone to Jesus/God/faith.
My own experience is that conversion is an emotional experience. As a teen I listened to speaker after speaker at the YMCA I attended tell me how their sins had been forgiven and how getting to know Jesus had given them a great sense of peace and purpose. I originally went along to the Y, as we called it, to meet friends, play table–tennis and drink coffee while listening to the jukebox. I had no idea I was a sinner, nor that I needed forgiven, but I liked the enthusiasm – they said it was ‘joy’ – that the speakers conveyed. I thought too I could maybe do with a sense of purpose though I was, as a fifteen-year-old, quite happy drifting along relatively aimlessly.
The persistent drip feed of what Jesus could do for me (and others) was persuasive. It sowed the seed, as the Christian cliché has it. It took a lively young American evangelist from Arthur Blessitt Ministries to convict me. Jesus had turned his life around and he was on his way to Heaven. Denying Jesus, he said, was to crucify him all over again. So I prayed the sinner’s prayer and gave my life to Jesus too.
Nowhere in any of this was there anything philosophical; no ’proof’ of the resurrection; no explanation of how the Bible was the Word of God. All the talks were appeals to emotion: how I could feel forgiven, how I could know love, joy, and peace, how I could live forever after I died, up there with God in Heaven.
All the rationalisation came later, like it always does. Psychologists tell us that the intuitive part of the brain makes decisions ahead of the rational part, which seeks to catch up afterwards, supplying the reasons why the decision we’ve made is a good one. We’ve all done it when we’ve bought that item we don’t really need and have justified it all the way home. Religious conversion follows this pattern.
The thinking mind only becomes involved afterward, hence ‘post hoc rationalisation’. We then become complicit in our own indoctrination: Bible study (both group and individual), listening to sermons, learning from more mature Christians, worship (all those song and hymn lyrics reinforcing the mumbo jumbo), reading Christian books, immersing ourselves in the complexities of the religion. This is how it’s always been. As Paul puts in 1 Corinthians 3:2, we move from milk to meat as we delve further into ‘the mysteries of Christ’. Or, more accurately, we become more deeply indoctrinated.
But all of this comes later. The emotional experience is first, as it was for Paul, C S. Lewis (who described it as being ‘surprised by joy’), George W. Bush, and millions of other converts. In my Christian days, I personally ‘led people to the Lord’ by ‘sharing my testimony’ (I’ve still got the jargon!) and can assure you, those involved felt the Holy Spirit with a profound intensity. Only kidding. They became pretty emotional.
I know of no one who became a Christian by assessing the evidence for the resurrection, reading Paul’s theobabble, or analysing the central claims of Christianity. I suppose there might be some who, like Lee Strobel, insist they ‘came to faith’ this way. But faith and rational analysis are incompatible. When the writer of Hebrews (11:1) says: ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,’ he is oblivious to the fact that there isn’t any ‘evidence’ of unseen spiritual ‘things’. There are only our own feelings and emotional confirmation bias.
So that’s how it was for me. How was it for you?
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.
Over the years, we [I] have written more than enough articles proving that the theory of evolution is not true.
….
Evolution is what anyone decides it to be and then changes the physical evidence to fit their particular version.
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The Bible has the theory of evolution beat no matter how you look at this issue.
Geoff Toscano, a long-time reader of this blog and a personal friend replied:
Oh brother, I’ve wasted at least 5 minutes of my life reading Tee’s article! Just when I thought the fool couldn’t get any more stupid, he proves me wrong, once again! The irony is that he accuses evolutionary scientists of creating fairy stories along the lines of Hansel and Gretel, when it’s actually a book of fairy tales that he seeks to defend.
He misses the most basic understanding of why evolution must be true, and that is its explanatory power. Take away all the evidence we have in terms of DNA, the fossil record, variation, adaptation, and so on, and still we have the explanatory power. Evolution provides an explanation of features we observe in every life form that special creation cannot begin to approach. It explains biodiversity, vestiges and atavisms, bad design (if god designed humans then he did a terrible job!), and especially the manner in which life forms seem strangely to conform to their varying environments. An educated person cannot deny evolution: they are mutually exclusive.
Thiessen refuses to comment on this blog, choosing instead to “answer” comments on his site. Of course, Thiessen refuses to let people comment on his blog, nor does he have a contact page. You can, however, email Thiessen at kinship29@yahoo.com.
Titled Responding to Comments 4, Theissen “answered” five comments from this site. He had this to say to Geoff:
The person missing the point is the quoted commentator. Explanatory power means absolutely nothing. There is nothing to support the ‘explanatory power’. If you remove the made-up evidence, then the explanation makes no sense.
Also, explanatory power is not exclusive to evolution. Any alternative can have the same explanations credited to it. In fact, creation has the exact same explanatory power with one exception. Creation has all the evidence supporting it.
Like the late George Carlin, the commentator is judging God from only seeing humans and creation from the results of the fall and corruption that entered in at Adam’s sin. he did not and cannot see humans and creation as God created it.
God did a perfect job, but sin and corruption ruined what he did. The quoted commentator should blame evil not God. He also says that creatures adapt to different environments.
We have yet to see humans adapt to living underwater and fish to living out of water. Those are different environments. Moving to a different place on the dry surface of the Earth is not moving to a different environment.
It is simply moving to different weather patterns and temperatures. Nothing needs to change for adaptation to take place in that situation. Also, we have not seen one person adapt to the environment on the moon or in space. They still need protective gear to live.
This fact proves evolution false.
Geoff sent me a response to Thiessen that follows below. Geoff responds to Thiessen’s reply to him and several other commenters.
David Tee’s first comment makes no sense. I pointed out the explanatory power of evolution, and he countered with “There is nothing to support the ‘explanatory power’. If you remove the made-up evidence, then the explanation makes no sense.” He either didn’t read my comment properly or he didn’t understand it. Explanatory power IS the evidence so his reference to other evidence for evolution being made up is irrelevant. For example, the laryngeal nerve is explained perfectly by evolution, but makes no sense in his creation beliefs. That is the evidence, end of story.
As for his nonsense about humans adapting to living under water, he gets to be equally silly. Animals adapt to their environment, humans included. Life originated in the sea, then slowly started to move out of it onto dry land many millions of years, perhaps billions, of years ago. Animals that emerged evolved until they were able to live on the land without recourse to water. This explains why humans still have vestiges of gills (tail bones also, I might add). He’s also ridiculous in saying that different parts of dry land on Earth do not represent different environments. Really? Arctic versus the Sahara Desert? They aren’t just different weather patterns or temperatures, they require adaptation in a way almost as great as leaving the sea.
His point about not adapting to living in space or on the moon? (Ignoring that we’ve been able to access space for only a very few decades, whilst evolution requires thousands of years to make significant differences on the scale required). He really knows nothing about evolution. In fact, this comment is perhaps the most stupid I have ever seen from a creationist! It’s precisely because we haven’t adapted to such hostile conditions that we are unable to live in them! Should we be forced through circumstances one day to live on the moon then our bodies would adapt to the conditions, especially the gravity, but it’s unlikely we would ever be able to adapt to the lack of oxygen, which is essential for human existence, indeed all life (there are apparently tiny multi cells that exist without oxygen in parts of the ocean, but these aren’t relevant to Tee’s point). Plus, of course, we’d need water. There are technical ways of producing these but then we’d be adapting the environment to us. We can do this because we’ve evolved to be able to do it!
He says there are thousands of Christian biologists who reject evolution. False, there are almost none. Stephen Meyer of Discovery Institute is the only seemingly qualified scientist who makes the claim and he’s not a biologist. Michael Behe, who really formalised Intelligent Design, has since retreated and I think has either reverted to accepting evolution or at least gone very quiet. The thing is there are always outliers. People who are anti-vaxxers, or moon landing deniers, flat earthers, and many others can appear to be carrying some kind of qualification to lend them credibility. Even so, they remain outliers. They aren’t taken seriously by the scientific community, not because the scientific community is conspiring against them, but because the scientific community exists only because it is historically the only method whereby humanity progresses. Science works (and I define science widely in this regard, to include all methods of reasoning), where faith does not. Faith recently murdered a small child in Australia, a child who had every right to depend on her parents and other guardians for protection, but who was betrayed because her protectors thought the power of God was greater than the power of medicine.
Tee claims that unbelievers seek to exclude God from their work. Ignoring the fact that a very large proportion of scientists are themselves religious believers (though it is a much lower proportion than that found in other areas of life) the fact is that science excludes nothing, not even God. The point is that good science leads where it leads. Isaac Newton was a great scientist, but he was also a fervent believer. When he constructed his theory of gravity it was hailed as, rightly, one of the great scientific achievements of all time. Even so, he knew there was a small error for which he couldn’t account, so he attributed this to God keeping ultimate control of his creation. He was wrong because he didn’t know, and at the time couldn’t possibly have known, of relativity, something Einstein demonstrated centuries later. So God figured in the thinking of one of the greatest scientists of all time, but unfortunately God proved not to be the answer. If God is ever the answer, then science will discover this, it won’t be through faith.
On top of this, many attempts have been made by science to ‘find God’. There have been four peer-reviewed studies that have attempted to establish whether prayer is of any benefit in assisting ill patients to recover. Three indicated it provided no benefit greater than chance, whilst one suggested there may even be negative benefit. Indeed, every aspect of supernatural claim has been carefully investigated by science. Miracle claims, so-called paranormal events, weeping statues, hauntings, exorcisms, NDEs, etc., all have been studied and no evidence of anything other than perfectly natural explanations has ever been found.
Matt Ridley’s main claim to fame is that he was chairman of the bank that initiated the financial collapse in the UK in 2007 (a full year before Lehman Brothers failed) and had to give evidence to a Parliamentary Committee that wanted to know where he was whilst all this happened. He admitted that he didn’t really involve himself, rather it was his name that was important to the bank (he is actually Sir Matt Ridley, and part of a wealthy landowning family). He’s written some good science books aimed at children, but he’s verging on denialism in much of what he writes. His religious beliefs, however, are irrelevant to his science writing.
It is easy to conclude that Tee is simply delusional (which he undoubtedly is) but it’s much more than that, and I think he has to be regarded as an outright liar. He keeps insisting that there’s no evidence for evolution. He’s simply wrong. Evolution is supported by more evidence than any other branch of science. It is now such a vast subject that it has to be subdivided for study purposes. No serious scientist in the world denies it, and certainly no biologists, whether religious believers or not. He insists the bible is true, in the face of all the evidence that proves it is not, other than in minor, trivial, ways. Most believers, and certainly most religions, have come to terms with the realisation that evolution is a stark fact.
Tee yet again demonstrates the impossibility of his ever having obtained a legitimate doctorate. I’ll go further and allege that he’s never passed any formal academic examination in his life. It’s significant that he chooses to limit his reply to the comfort of his website, protected from comments, and certainly not daring to risk direct interaction on Bruce’s forum.
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.
When most people describe volcanic eruptions, the type that is most often depicted is that of what geologists call a Vesuvian-type eruption, named after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE that destroyed the region of Pompeii. This type of eruption is also commonly called a Plinian-type eruption as it was described in great detail by Pliny the Younger in two letters to his uncle.
Pliny described a dark cloud rising rapidly upward from Mount Vesuvius and being lit up by flames and large flashes of lightning. He then described thick, hot cinders and ash raining back down near the mountain, while further away the ash spread out resulting in a lurid darkness spread over the region. Strong earthquakes were also described.
Pliny’s wonderfully complete description of this type of eruption earned him the honor of having all subsequent eruptions of this type bear his name. Some geologists prefer to name geologic events after a type location however, which is why some refer to this type as a Vesuvian eruption.
But was Pliny the first to fully describe such an eruption, or does a more ancient author deserve this honor? Science has a long history of memorializing the first, and yet in this instance, the first has been overlooked. The eruption of Mount Sinai in 1459 BCE, give or take a few years, was fully described by Moses. Therefore, this type of eruption should, by convention, be called a Mosaic- or Sinaian-type eruption.
Pliny’s description is considered to be a first because it contains certain criteria, all of which are also found in the description by Moses. These are:
1) a rapidly rising, hot cloud of ash and other volcanic material
2) lightning caused by static electric charges as the material is ejected upwards
3) flames or burning material known today as lava
4) thick darkness covering the surrounding region as the ash settles
5) strong earthquakes
“…the mountain burned with fire to the midst of heaven, with darkness, cloud, and thick darkness.” Deuteronomy 4:11
“…there were thundering and lightnings… Its smoking ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.” Exodus 19:16,18
The necessary criteria appears to be only lacking a description of ash. However, the Hebrew word used here for darkness, is the same Hebrew word used to describe the plague of darkness that settled on Egypt just a couple of months before. That darkness was described as a “darkness which may even be felt” (Exodus 10:21) indicating the presence of particles in the air causing the darkness—in other words, ash.
One potential point of controversy in renaming this type of eruption after Sinai might be that the exact location of the mountain has been lost to history and is only known to be somewhere in Arabia’s rift region where such eruptions have been documented. Not knowing the exact location should not be a problem as scientific convention still honors the first description even when the type is lost. There are many examples in biology where the type specimen of a new specie has been lost.
Another argument for its rejection would be that acceptance of the historicity of this event is limited to the realm of believers in Judeo-Christian religions. However, outside of the Bible, the Quran also portrays this event as historical.
“We made the mountain tower high above them at their pledge…” An Nisa 4:154
“…when his Lord revealed Himself to the mountain, He made it crumble…” Al Araf 7:143
Not only does the Quran affirm the historicity of the account, but just like the Torah, it marvels at the ability of the Creator to manifest Himself within such awesome displays of power within His creation. Will the skeptics also one day marvel when the whole earth is bathed in a thick and gloomy volcanic darkness? A future day is described by two later authors who use the same Hebrew word for darkness that Moses used (Joel 2:2 and Zephaniah 1:15). In Revelation, John also describes a future plague of darkness that is painful (Revelation 16:10). Could these prophecies be hinting at a future time of significant volcanic activity? Maybe then fellow geologists will accept calling these Sinaian-type eruptions.
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.
Is it ever reasonable for non-believers to comment on Christian blog sites? I know Bruce compares it with turning up at a church service and arguing with the preacher, and a recent comment on Debunking Christianity described it as ‘bad manners’. But are there circumstances where it’s reasonable to do it?
Can I suggest a couple of scenarios where it might be? I should declare first that I rarely comment on Christian sites – I have a life to live, after all – and have, I’d guess, done so no more than a dozen times in the past three or four years. This hasn’t been to promote atheism, but to counter the ignorance and intolerance of some Evangelical sites.
So here are my thoughts on when it’s okay to stray over to the dark side and engage with its denizens. First, is when True Believers arrive on my site and tell me, usually in no uncertain terms, where I’m wrong. This is often for the same few reasons that are directed at Bruce: I don’t know the Bible well enough; I misinterpret it; I don’t know Jesus the way they do; I was never really a Christian. Having batted these ad hominems around for a while, some commenters decide there’s nothing for it but to recommend posts of their own. They provide links to their blogs that will set me and my reader straight. Now and then (but not always) I’ll take a look at and, if appropriate, comment on what they’ve written. After all, they have specifically invited me round to their place; I haven’t gate-crashed, they wanted me to visit so they could enlighten me. I have, as a result, the right to reply, to let them know they haven’t. I don’t, as a rule, argue theology or push any particular ideology, but I have been moved to point out that the Bible is open to multiple interpretations and theirs (or, I suspect, their minister’s) involves a considerable degree of cherry-picking to make it compatible with their orthodoxy. Of course, they have the right, and the means, not to publish my comment if it upsets them too much.
Second, Facebook’s algorithm – and that of other social media sites presumably — is fond of finding extreme Christian sites to add my much-neglected page. Invariably I delete these and tell the algorithm I want to see fewer posts of this sort. It complies for a short while before it decides I really do need to know that Jesus is my friend or that I’m headed straight to hell. (Honestly, you write a few articles that mention Jesus and God and the entire Internet thinks you want to become an Evangelical.) Now and then, and rather more frequently than I’d prefer, the nuttier sites that pop up announce that atheists have no basis for morality and are shaking their collective fist at God who’s feeling mighty wrathful about it. Alternatively, these sites find the need to headline the scourge of homosexuality, which likewise is bringing the Western world, and more specifically America, to the verge of destruction. Now I happen to be both an atheist and a homosexual (I don’t have any trouble with this word despite its use by some as a slur). I feel that, as sites disparaging either atheists, gays, or both have intruded on my FB page, it is again perfectly appropriate for me to respond, which, every few years, I do. Prejudiced, ill-informed, hateful opinions about me and my kind, be they atheist or gay, need to be challenged. These bloggers’ claims that their anti-atheist, anti-LGBT rhetoric is a ‘ministry’ or a demonstration of love are disingenuous. They are nothing of the sort.
So I suggest to these bloggers that they are wrong. I like, also, to remind them that their Saviour commands them to love their neighbours as themselves and to love and pray for their enemies, to which they invariably reply, ‘even the devil can quote scripture’. I have been known to point out too that Jesus expects them to feed the hungry, help the needy, and care for those less fortunate and that sitting at a computer for hours at a time, trashing non-believers and ‘sodomites’ (I do object to that one) isn’t what he had in mind.
Am I wasting my time? Almost certainly, but I can’t stand by as ‘loving’ Christians judge me, and others like me, as fit only for hell – and sometimes for more worrying, tangible fates in the real world.
Commenting on Christian blogs is not always for the faint-hearted, nor is it something I’d advocate. Many don’t even allow comments, so certain are they that they’re right. Occasionally, however – a couple of times a year – I feel compelled to counter the attacks on others.
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.
David Tee/Derrick Thomas Thiessen is the tall man in the back
Derrick Thiessen (who sometimes uses the pseudonym Dr. David Tee) is a retired preacher, English teacher, and currently works as a freelance writer. He has several graduate degrees in theology, archaeology and history and has authored several books.
As a believer, we desire to win as many people to Christ as possible. Our specific ministry has been to bring Christians past square one to spiritual maturity. We have accomplished that through our two websites and books.
We have also sought to help pastors, missionaries, and Christian workers through the same avenue. Christians of all levels must be fed the proper spiritual food. They need to strengthen their faith and have the right information to defend what they believe.
Those actions are not a waste of time. But is it a waste of time and energy to prepare data, verifiable and credible physical evidence, and other historical, astronomical, and scientific information and present it to most unbelievers, atheists, and former Christians?
Why go to all that work and trouble when you know that those people groups will do what Dr. Phillip Davies did when he was presented with the evidence proving ancient Israel was as the Bible said?
All he did was close his eyes, shake his head, and repeat over and over that ‘it did not happen’. Are there any members of those people groups who are open-minded and who will take an honest look at what has been gathered and presented?
It is our experience that very few members of those people groups will be that way. Also, we have learned that even if believers discover the real ark used during Noah’s flood unbelievers will find something to criticize and justify their decision to reject it as physical evidence for the flood.
So what is the point in Christians meeting the demand of unbelievers to present evidence when they will only receive a cold reception and blind dismissal?
We understand that unbelievers are afraid of seeing the Bible proven true. If they were not afraid or if the atheists were right and there is no God, they would have no trouble honestly examining the evidence.
One example of this fear is a comment made in a Patterns of Evidence video posted to YouTube. The scholar providing the upcoming response hit the nail on the head, and we do this from memory when he said that unbelieving scholars and archaeologists do not want to prove the Exodus true.
He said ‘If they do, then they have to confront the reality of the Bible and make wholesale changes to their lives and bodies of work.’ Regular unbelievers can have peace that they are not the only ones who are afraid of seeing the Bible proven true.
This is one reason why they make so many unrealistic demands. One militant atheist we have known for a long time once told us to ‘go and dig’ when we talked about the evidence for Noah’s flood.
The problem with that is we cannot dig every square inch of the earth to uncover all the evidence he wants to see. Even if we present that evidence he is incapable or unwilling to accept it and convert.
There are two problems with providing evidence for Noah’s flood. The first is that a myriad of researchers have uncovered verifiable physical evidence for it. Graham Hancock has been one of those researchers as have Drs. Charles Hapgood, Ryan, Pittman, and Rehwenkle to name a few.
Their failure to recognize this evidence stems from problem number two. The majority of researchers and other folks do not know what evidence for a global flood would look like.
There has been only one and that event is difficult to excavate due to the construction, wars, natural disasters, and other events that change the nature of the evidence or remove it from existence.
When Sir Leonard Woolley declared he had found the flood layer in UR, the mainstream archaeologists at that time said he was wrong because the layer was not uniform. But does the flood layer have to be uniform to be evidence of the flood?
An honest person, taking into account all the variables that would change the design of the flood layer, would say no. A person who is not honest would close their mind and say yes.
The failure to accept the mitigating factors surrounding the discovery of evidence means that the person or persons hearing the evidence will not listen and waste the presenter’s time.
It is not that there is a lack of credible and verifiable physical evidence for the majority of biblical events. The internet is full of both Christian and secular websites that present this evidence and they are all easily accessed.
The key to all of this is the one word scientists, atheists, and other unbelievers hate. God created the equation to prove that he exists and his word is true. That word is faith. The Bible tells us that by faith we please God.
Thus God is not going to provide all the physical evidence anyone wants to see or demands. God is not going to destroy what pleases him. This means that we will only get enough physical evidence to strengthen our faith, not ruin it.
This is why there is no scientific evidence for the creation of the world. Creation was a one-time supernatural act that was not enacted using any scientific method.
The way science is constructed, it is impossible for that research field to analyze creation. It will not produce any evidence for that act. Science can study the results of creation and see that God’s word is true but that is as far as science can go.
Those who demand scientific evidence are merely using that demand to hide from the truth. Those who make unrealistic demands do so for the same reason. They do not want the Bible to be true for they would have to deal with the information like the archaeologists and other scholars mentioned earlier would have to do.
God uses faith to help divide the sheep from the goats. His equation tells him who believes him and who does not. Faith is merely believing God and the physical evidence is nothing but a supporting cast member.
So the question is, are you an honest, open-minded unbeliever or are you one of those dishonest, closed-minded ones that will not even give the evidence a fair hearing?
If you are the latter, don’t waste Christians’ time. Just stop making unrealistic demands for evidence that you will never listen to. If you want evidence then you should be prepared to give it a fair hearing and careful consideration.
Note: Thiessen refuses to comment on this site, nor does he allow comments on his main blog. Derrick said in his email to me:
Same instructions apply. It does not need your editor/assistant’s help. I will take the heat for any mistakes alleged or otherwise. I will also read all comments and respond on my own website if the need to respond is there.
Thank you for publishing it as is.
The only thing changed on Thiessen’s post was the title. It originally said, “Is It a Waste of Time” without proper punctuation. His chosen title was unspecific and ambiguous. I changed it to reflect its content. The body of the post was unchanged. I also shortened the bio and provided proper links.
BG opened his website to submit guest posts. He made the offer that anyone can send one in so we did. We asked God first to help us write what needed to be written and told him to publish it as is without his assistant doing any editing.
We shall see if that instruction is met and if he publishes our entry. We kept a copy to compare if and when it sees the light of day.
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.
I am always interested in having people write guest posts for this site. If you are interested in writing a guest post, please use the contact form to email me. You can choose any subject. If you are a Christian, you can even write a post about how wrong I am about God, Christianity, and the Bible.
Have a story to tell about your life as a Christian and subsequent deconversion? Testimonies are always welcome. I have found that readers really appreciate and enjoy reading posts about the journey of others away from Evangelicalism. Perhaps you are someone who has left Evangelicalism, but still believes in the existence of a deity/energy/higher power. Your story is welcome too.
If you worried about grammar or spelling, don’t be. Carolyn, my ever-watchful friend and editor, edits every guest post before it is published. If she can turn my writing into coherent prose, trust me, she can do the same for yours.
Anonymous posts are okay, as are articles previously posted elsewhere. If you have written something for your own blog and would like to post it here, please send it to me.
If you have previously written a guest post, I am more than happy to publish another one from you. Some readers have become regular contributors. It’s important for readers to hear from other writers from time to time.
Several readers have emailed me in the past about writing guest posts. I am w-a-i-t-i-n-g. 🙂 Seriously, if you have something you would like to say, I am more than happy to post it here. The ball is in your court.
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.
Recently my girlfriend and I watched an episode of “48 Hours” (transcript) about a California bus kidnapping in July 1976. The crime was as heinous as it was short-sighted. It involved three young men making a plan to abduct a bus full of kids and their driver. The men then put the abductees in a vehicle that had been previously buried underground. The children were able to dig themselves out and facilitate their own rescue after twenty-eight hours. Suffice it to say the trauma of such an abduction would leave emotional scars. Many of the children turned to drugs and alcohol in an attempt to deal with the trauma. Interestingly (and the reason for the article) one of the children (Larry Park, after abusing drugs in his 20s and 30s) turned to religion. He eventually became a pastor and met with the men who had done the kidnapping. In this he found relief.
So the question for me (and now for you) is this: if religion can give someone such deliverance, could it be that religion (whether true or not) could be a net positive? If fostering a delusion has a benefit, does it matter that the basis of the delusion is a lie? If placebos make you feel better, why not take them? I’d be curious how others feel about this, because considering the circumstances, it seems maybe he picked the lesser of two evils . . . (and maybe not evil at all?)
What say ye?
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.
If you’ve seen parts of the first Republican Presidential debate, you likely noticed the brash young neophyte (and obnoxious) Vivek Ramaswamy. Not only is he a practicing Hindu, he’s also the highest caste in the Hindu religious system. So I found it interesting when he makes a list of “truths” (many of which are not or are nuanced to the point of not being a “truth”), the first being “God is real.” This does have a strategic value to him. He can stave off questions about his, let’s face it, alien religion and does so because his audience isn’t thinking about sacred cows and the non-person Hindu god Brahman. By doing this he can cauterize the political wound his religion will no doubt have on the evangelical base of the GOP. Americans are so unacquainted with Hinduism that at least for now he’ll likely get a free ride on his religion. There is no religious test to be President, but since he seems to be wearing his religion on his political sleeve, I think it is fair game. Ramaswamy also gets a free ride on the caste system which no doubt has been part of his success. While he is asked questions about American racism based on skin color, the media aren’t even primed to ask about the Hindu caste system that is based on societal traditions. I suppose one question that one might ask is this: Will American evangelicals tolerate a polytheistic Hindu so long as he kisses Trump’s keester? After all, Trump is not and never will be an evangelical. In addition, can Ramaswamy “hide” his Hinduism in plain site by proclaiming “God is Real dammit!”? For those of us who’d like to see less church in our state, I’m sorry to say Ramaswamy would be as bad as Trump or Pence. The best way to hide this deficit is to overcompensate–he will overtly and loudly be a cheerleader for evangelical church-state entanglements. Hopefully, it doesn’t get that far, but I’ll be interested to watch and we need to make sure the media is asking the right questions to take Ramaswamy to task.
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.
If you search for my site, The Mind Set Free, you are likely to first find a book and sermon by Jimmy Evans, A Mind Set Free. Evans promises mental freedom. Yet he relies on the theme verse, “Casting down arguments, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.” That does not sound like mental freedom to me. That sounds like mental captivity.
By contrast, when I speak of the mind set free, I am encouraging intellectual freedom, which is the freedom to explore ideas that differ from your religious background or cultural demands. Evans, however, asks people to commit that they will listen only to that which is consistent with what he calls The Word of God. He asks people to consciously block out ideas that differ from the Word of God. That is mental captivity.
The Place of the Skull
He explains why he thinks they crucified Jesus at a location called The Place of the Skull. It turns out God chose this place, Evans tells us, because God wanted to show the inherent corruption of natural thoughts inside our skulls. How does Evans know this is the reason for the selection of this site for the crucifixion? He doesn’t know this. But it makes for a good story. And so, he tells it as truth, not merely as one possible explanation. We hear that Jesus died in the place of the skull so he could let us know he wanted control of what happens in the skull. Really? That explanation sounds contrived.
I know how this works. Years ago, I regularly taught Sunday School. One can simply make up an explanation that sounds feasible, and so that is what it is. There is no need to question it or say this is just one interpretation. We found an explanation, so that’s how it is. Onward.
We hear that the devil and others are corrupting our thoughts in our skulls. What is his solution? He asks us to cast those thoughts out. We cannot allow ourselves to listen to anything that differs from The Word of God, which is, of course, his name for the Bible.
Why listen to The Word of God? He explains that the words in the Bible are so powerful, that they even brought into existence the very matter that forms the pulpit from which he is preaching. That is quite a stretch. First, nobody knows how the universe came into existence, but most likely the ultimate cause of the universe did not even have a mind. But even if the ultimate source of the universe had a mind, and we choose to call that mind God, we are still a long way from proving that this cause revealed himself in the ancient Hebrew scriptures and that the Bible contains his words. But even if that book contains God’s words, those words wouldn’t be the same words that created the atoms that made up his pulpit. Nevertheless, Evans somehow equates the words of the Bible with words that created all the matter we see. So, listen up!
He tells us to force ourselves to live by these words that he finds so powerful. “Every thought that comes into my mind,” he argues, “I need to point a spear under its neck and say ‘You are going to listen to what Jesus has to say’…Any thought that does not agree with the Word of God, I take it out.”
A lot of thoughts pass through my mind each day. Even if I wanted to avoid thinking them, how would I prevent my mind from thinking about these things? I don’t even know what my next thought will be. How can I prevent it from being one that opposes the Bible? He proposes that we block out those thoughts through biblical meditation.
Biblical meditation, as he defines it, is quite different from Eastern meditation, which is a process by which one empties the conscious thought stream while observing the thoughts that enter the mind outside of the normal stream of conscious thought. Some find that emptying the conscious mind this way is an effective method to see what is really going on inside the mind outside the clamor of everyday life. Others use relaxing vacations to do the same thing. The whole idea is to give the mind a little freedom to generate its own thoughts.
But biblical medication, as he proposes it, is the opposite of emptying the mind to give it freedom. Instead, he argues for purposely filling one’s mind with a particular set of thoughts. He asks us to force these thoughts from The Word of God into our consciousness night and day, constantly ruminating on them, constantly forcing the consciousness to dwell on the desired thoughts. We overcome atheist thoughts, he says, by forcing the correct thoughts–the thoughts that supposedly created atoms–into our minds.
To illustrate this, he tells us that, if we are told we should not think about a yellow elephant, we would find it hard to keep thoughts of yellow elephants out of our minds by sheer willpower. But if, instead, we force ourselves to think about purple lizards, then we won’t be thinking about yellow elephants. And so, he tells us, if we constantly think about the Bible (or purple lizards), then we won’t be able to think about atheist books (or yellow elephants).
The whole idea of trying to suppress certain thoughts often has paradoxical results. In psychology, Ironic Process Theory suggests that trying to suppress thoughts actually makes them stronger. In a famous experiment, Daniel Wegner found that subjects who tried not to think of white bears later found themselves thinking of white bears even more. In another experiment subjects listening to a story on a tape were divided into three groups that were each instructed either to a) deliberately not think about the tape, b) think about anything at all, or c) think about anything including the tape during the time the tape played. After the story finished, those who had been asked not to think about the story were more likely to talk about the story compared with those in the other groups. Similarly, another experiment found that subjects with a spider phobia, who were told not to think about spiders for five minutes, found themselves more likely to speak about spiders after that period was over. In yet another experiment, subjects with chronic low back pain were asked to play a computer game against a harassing opponent. Some subjects were told to suppress feelings of anger during the game. Those subjects who were told to suppress feelings of anger were later more angry and more aware of their chronic back pain after the game was over.
All these experiments show it is not easy to suppress thoughts and feelings. Attempts to do so can have paradoxical effects. The suppressed thoughts often later rebound to become very strong. The person who is going to continually suppress thoughts against his religion and force himself to think only thoughts in line with his beliefs can find himself needing ever larger efforts to keep the unwanted thoughts out. The result is not mental freedom. It is mental captivity.
When we hear new ideas, and our minds are interested, then it is fine to listen. That is what I refer to as the mind set free. It is simply observing that some new way of viewing the world has stimulated our thinking and then taking the time to understand and analyze that new view. If we find the new thoughts helpful, we can incorporate them into our worldview. If we find the new ideas worthless, we now understand why we don’t want to pursue those ideas further. If the ideas come up again, we know immediately why we rejected them before. No need to pursue them further. We already thought it through. Those thoughts already had their day in court. We move on. That is true mental freedom.
But Evans apparently would not have us take time to understand opposing thoughts coming from the world. He tells us instead to take those thoughts out. When the atheist speaks, we should apparently metaphorically clap our hands over our ears and shout the thought down: “I don’t hear you! I don’t hear you! Thus saith the Lord . . . Be gone, yellow elephant. Purple lizards, purple lizards, I am thinking of purple lizards. I don’t see no yellow elephant!”
That is not mental freedom. It is mental captivity.
Self-Esteem
One thought stream he tells us to avoid is thoughts of low self-esteem. I agree that self-esteem issues can lead to depression and anxiety, so yes, it is important to have healthy self-esteem. The combination of our biology and previous experiences can sometimes lead many of us into dangerously negative self-thoughts. That is a real problem. To overcome this, Evans resorts again to his self-brainwashing technique, in which one overflows the mind with thoughts he considers proper such that the negative thoughts don’t even have a chance.
With his technique, we endlessly concentrate on The Word of God. One verse he suggests is Psalm 139:14, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” So, if you are feeling down, just keep repeating this verse? I can tell you from experience this does not work for me. Constantly repeating a verse that tells me what to think does not overcome what the mind wants to think.
Yes, we are wonderfully made. Any biology book will tell you the amazing details of human biology. And many books talk about the marvelous things that we can do. But, of course, our biology is also deeply flawed, leaving us susceptible to diseases and unnecessary limitations, and our inner selves can also be flawed. But still, the overall being is good. And so, we can find many reasons to view ourselves as something worthy of value and respect. If we understand those reasons, we can truly feel good about ourselves, while balancing this positive view with realistic knowledge of our limitations. Such understanding is far more fruitful than repeating that an ancient book says I am wonderfully made. We overcome low self-esteem by understanding what it means to be good as a human. We cannot overcome it by drowning out reason with a steady stream of preferred thoughts.
Evans turns to another verse to build our self-esteem: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13) Here we have a statement that is simply false. You cannot do all things, even if Christ strengthens you. You are human. You have human weaknesses. You are limited. Endlessly repeating that we can do all things is simply brainwashing ourselves to believe something that is not true. If you truly force yourself to believe that you can do all things through Christ, then you have an unrealistically high view of yourself, a view that others who see you can easily interpret as hubris.
If your solution to negative self-thinking is unrealistically positive I-can-do-all-things thinking, it is no wonder that such positive thoughts don’t do well at crowding out the negative. Eventually, those suppressed negative thoughts push their way to the forefront of consciousness. It is better to instead understand the many facts about the whole self that are both realistic and positive.
In the popular secular treatment, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, patients learn about negative thoughts that distort reality, such as, “People always focus attention on me, especially when I fail.” “Only my failures matter. I am measured by my failures,” and “I am responsible for every failure and every bad thing that happens.” These are distortions of reality. In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, one learns to identify these distortions that cloud the thinking and to view things more positively based on realistic assertions. Such therapy is far different from the therapy that simply brainwashes one’s self into thinking one set of thoughts that is not exactly true in the real world.
Evans tells us that it is the devil that is telling us to have low self-esteem. One wonders then why the Westminster Confession of Faith says, “We are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil,” and why John Calvin taught that self-love was a noxious pest. Were these people doing the work of the devil? Faced with the facts, Christians simply abandoned the historical Christian teaching on self-esteem, and conveniently found that thoughts that promote self-esteem were in their Bible all along. But the positive thoughts they find in the Bible are often far from reality.
Lust
Evans turns next to a discussion of sexual desire. He tells us that, when he was young, sexual thoughts overwhelmed him. He doesn’t tell us if his desires were for men or women, and I don’t care. Sexual thoughts are totally normal in young people. I have no problem with a person having and enjoying thoughts of sexual arousal, provided one doesn’t then behave and talk in ways that are inappropriate.
How did Evans conquer his lusts? “I began to meditate on scripture,” he tells us. “I got set free that quick,” he says with a snap of his fingers, “It didn’t take two seconds.”
Somehow, I don’t believe it was that simple. If sexual thoughts come to my mind, then no, constantly repeating “whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” (Matthew 5:28) does nothing to help me. Instead, I could simply acknowledge the thoughts and find ways to act morally and respectfully in the situation. If the drive becomes strong, there are ways for people to later relieve the urges in the privacy of one’s bedroom or with a consensual adult partner. But if one insists on removing the thoughts through self-brainwashing alone, then I doubt this will do the trick in two seconds as claimed. When faced with sexual desires, endlessly repeating Bible verses until the thought goes away only induces guilt without addressing the thoughts. Such attempts at mental freedom do not work.
Suppressing sexual desires can have all the familiar paradoxical effects of suppressing any thoughts. The suppression can lead to the thoughts becoming stronger. By contrast, understanding, accepting, and dealing rationally with desires can break the power of those thoughts.
Bruce Gerencser has documented countless times that members of the clergy have been charged with Black Collar Crimes, often involving sex. No doubt many of these people knew verses about sexual purity, preached them, and thought about the verses often. But in the end, somehow the urges allegedly drove these people to immoral activity. Endless meditation on commands does not end the desires. Understanding the desires and appropriate responses is far better.
Conclusion
Evans promises that his technique of metaphorically shouting down every idea that differs from the Bible is guaranteed to free you from fear, anxiety, depression, and lust, and that any Christian who does not know such verses is bound for defeat. He is simply wrong. Ask any good psychologist. There is simply no evidence that forcing yourself to think about how Jesus does not want you to fear, become discouraged, or lust will solve your problems. There are plenty of other good psychological options.
If you agree with Evans’ technique of closing your mind to every idea that differs from the Bible, it is doubtful that you have read this whole post. The words written here are specifically words he probably wants you to avoid. It is your choice. If you want to allow only those thoughts that say the Bible is God’s word, that say you can do all things through Christ, and that condemns any thought of sexual fulfillment outside of strict biblical norms, be my guest. But please, do not call that a mind set free. It is not. It is a mind held captive.
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.
David Tee/Derrick Thomas Thiessen is the tall man in the back
Dr. David Tee is a fake name used by Derrick Thomas Thiessen, a Christian Missionary and Alliance preacher who fled the United States/Canada twenty years ago and now lives in the Philippines. Thiessen has spent the past two years ripping off my writing, hurling sermons at me, and attacking my character. He has written over one hundred posts about me. And at times, I respond. (Search for Dr. David Tee and Derrick Thomas Thiessen.)
This concludes the series titled The Dr. David Tee Saga. From this point forward, Tee/Derrick Thomas Thiessen will not be mentioned on this site. I’m sure he will continue to “correct” me, but I will not respond.
BG [Bruce Gerencser] continues to publish distorted materials about us [this series] and we wonder why he is so afraid of us? All we do is point out the error of his thinking and content and do nothing else. He is a quitter and we have not known one quitter to have any credibility whatsoever.
He offers everyone nothing save his own disbelief, blank ideas, and baseless declarations. He has no credible evidence to support his views. Maybe he is tired of being reminded of the dreadful mistake that he made so many years ago when he left the faith.
We wish we could redeem him but he seems to be happy in his dark life. ‘His story’ is boring, old, and not new as he is just another person in a long line of former believers who have left the faith and blamed everyone else for their departure.
Maybe he does not like being reminded of what he has left and lost? We cannot be sure but he really should stop making himself an internet laughingstock as people laugh at his inability to continue in his faith. Who celebrates a quitter? God doesn’t.
But he likes the bad attention as he likes playing the victim so we do not expect to see any change in him. It is just sad to see a person being used like he is.
I will leave it to others to decide whether what Thiessen said about me is true. I’m confident thoughtful people will see Thiessen’s rant as pure projection; the man looking in the mirror.
Thiessen has been given the opportunity to write a facts-based rebuttal to the material provided by W.W. Jacobs.
Let me conclude this post with two more things about Thiessen you may not know.
First, Thiessen is a 1980 graduate of a Bible college in Canada. It is doubtful Thiessen has a doctorate, and if by some slim chance he does, the degree is likely from an unaccredited institution or diploma mill — both of which abound in Evangelicalism. Thiessen has been repeatedly asked by numerous people to provide documentation for his claim that he has a doctorate. Thiessen refuses to do so, saying that “God knows,” and that is all that matters.
Second, “Dr. David Tee” is a name given to Thiessen by fellow students during his Bible college days. I viewed a college publication in which Thiessen, the student, is called “Dr. Tee.”
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.
