When it comes to protecting and caring for his chosen ones, God is quite schizophrenic. You would think the Almighty would be consistent in his care of Christians, but that’s not the case. Tony Dwayne Albert II, dressed in tactical gear and carrying a loaded firearm, was headed to First Baptist Church in Vidor, Texas to do some killing when police thwarted and arrested him. Mass shooting averted. Amen, right? Amen. Afterward, Terry Wright, the pastor of First Baptist, said: “There is an overwhelming recognition that the Lord protected us and provided for us.” According to Wright, God stopped Albert from killing anyone. Most of us would say to God, Good job. Way to go protecting your followers. Of course, knowing that God has a hard time staying on task, we might also say, keep up the good work, Jesus. There will be other churches that need protecting from homicidal maniacs. Surely they deserve protection too, right?
Well, evidently not. You see God is quite hit-and-miss when it comes to stopping things such as rape, sexual assault, murder, violence, and, well, just about anything that negatively affects the human race. So, Jesus steps up in Vidor, Texas, and everyone pats him on the back. But what about what happened at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Spring, Texas? Devin Patrick Kelley entered the church and killed twenty-six people and wounded twenty others. If God was so loving and caring when it came to the people in Vidor, what does the series of events in Sutherland Springs say about his indifference towards the people there? Why is God Johnny-on-the-spot in Vidor but on an extended vacation in Sutherland Springs? Why intervene in one church, yet leave the other to suffer untold horrors?
That’s God, for ya. He’s been on the job for 6,023 years. You would think that he would have learned to do his job right by now. How hard can it be to stop a crazed gunman from shooting up a Baptist church? God is all-powerful, right? If God can protect the people in Vidor, surely he can do the same for the people in Sutherland Springs, and every other community that will have to deal with an attempted mass shooting in the future.
It seems, at least to me anyway, that God favors certain Christians. What other explanation is there for God’s behavior? I know if I lived in Sutherland Springs, I would be upset with God. Hey God, what did we do to piss you off? You “saved” the people in Vidor from harm. Why did you turn your back on us? Why did you encourage us to pray, knowing that you had no intention of answering our prayers?
I am sure a Christian commenter will attempt to explain me the sovereignty of God, and how God doesn’t owe anyone anything. But I thought God was the FATHER of his children? I know, as a human father, I want to ALWAYS protect my family from harm; and there’s never a time when I wouldn’t do everything in my power to keep them from being hurt. That’s what loving, caring fathers do. Yet, in the Christian family, God the Father plays favorites, choosing to love and care for some of his children, but not others. Don’t tell me how awesome God is, knowing that he stands on the sideline and passively watches as Christians are mowed down by crazed gunmen. A kind, loving father would go to the ends of the earth to protect his children from harm. Evidently the ends of God’s earth don’t extend to Sutherland Springs.
About Bruce Gerencser
Bruce Gerencser, 61, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 40 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve 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. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.
Bruce is a local photography business owner, operating Defiance County Photo out of his home. If you live in Northwest Ohio and would like to hire Bruce, please email him.
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In a post titled, Texas Church Massacre Has Haunting Muslim Aspect, Fundamentalist Steve Van Nattan dispenses advice to pastors and churches on how they can protect themselves from Muslim terrorist attacks. Enjoy!
The Facebook page of First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas has comments below many posts made by people with Muslim names. Some were comments with no message, just a name.
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The US Government crime investigating agencies will see these Muslim names, but the official word will be that there is no connection to Islamic terrorists. The US Government is desperate to convince Americans that terrorist acts are only one off generic crimes.
The moral we must take away from this information is that churches need to watch their Facebook pages carefully. If you see Middle Eastern names coming up in the Comment section of articles, you need to double security around your church.
You cannot expect the US Government, or even your local law enforcement, to take Islamic terrorism seriously. The common attitude of national leaders toward Islamic terrorists is that it will not get any worse than it is now. Furthermore, there really is nothing the US Government can do to prevent acts of terror by ISIS, ANTIFA, and other such terrorist groups. They have a wide open nation in the USA in which to choose targets and attack.
YOU ARE THE ONE, PASTOR. Either you will take aggressive measures in security for your church, or you could be the next target.
I have a couple of suggestions which 99% of you Baptist pastors will tell me are heresy. You are a jack ass if you wait until over half your people are in the morgue before you take this seriously. And, as usual, I say that in all good Christian charity.
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4. Preacher, YOU must have a permit to carry, and carry everywhere you go. Have your handgun in the pulpit when you preach. You have the best shot at a gunman, and he will be looking to kill you first. If you want to stay alive and protect your people, you will be prepared. Just do not leave your gun laying around carelessly. Also, go to a shooting range, and set a target at the distance of you pulpit from the front door. Do not stop practicing until you can put a group the size of your hand in the heart of the target image. Also, learn to shoot for the head. These creeps wear body armor.
5. Wear body armor when you are having services at the church house. Keep the doors locked when you are in the church house alone in your study. When any group meets at the church house, like the youth, or the ladies fellowship, you or some other man MUST be on hand carrying to do security duty. Tell anyone carrying not to bow and close their eyes when the people pray together. Watch and pray.
6. When you see a man with a gun enter the door, or you hear “Allah u Akbar,” shoot to kill. If the man has a machete, order him to drop it or be killed. Make sure your security man in the entrance of foyer is not in the line of fire from the pulpit to the front door so that you can shoot without worrying about hitting your own man. Keep one man outside the church house moving about watching anyone approaching the church. Strangers need to be sent away, even if the security man must pull his gun to stop the stranger. Require your security people to go to a rifle range and do target practice regularly. Discuss your plan if a car comes at the church trying to run over people. Every gun should be out and firing at the driver through the windshield. You may want to have large stone blocks brought in and placed around the entrance.
Hans Fiene, pastor of River of Life Lutheran Church in Channahon, Illinois (affiliated with the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod, a Fundamentalist sect) believes that the twenty-six Baptists murdered at a Sutherland Springs, Texas church service were killed because God was answering their prayers to be “delivered from evil.” Writing for the website The Federalist, Fiene stated:
It’s also an act of profound ignorance [to say that prayer doesn’t work]. For those with little understanding of and less regard for the Christian faith, there may be no greater image of prayer’s futility than Christians being gunned down mid-supplication. But for those familiar with the Bible’s promises concerning prayer and violence, nothing could be further from the truth. When those saints of First Baptist Church were murdered yesterday, God wasn’t ignoring their prayers. He was answering them.
“Deliver us from evil.” Millions of Christians throughout the world pray these words every Sunday morning. While it doesn’t appear that the Lord’s Prayer is formally a part of the worship services at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, I have no doubt that members of that congregation have prayed these words countless times in their lives.
When we pray these words, we are certainly praying that God would deliver us from evil temporally—that is, in this earthly life. Through these words, we are asking God to send his holy angels to guard us from those who would seek to destroy us with knives and bombs and bullets. It may seem, on the surface, that God was refusing to give such protection to his Texan children. But we are also praying that God would deliver us from evil eternally. Through these same words, we are asking God to deliver us out of this evil world and into his heavenly glory, where no violence, persecution, cruelty, or hatred will ever afflict us again.
We also pray in the Lord’s Prayer that God’s will be done. Sometimes, his will is done by allowing temporal evil to be the means through which he delivers us from eternal evil. Despite the best (or, more accurately, the worst) intentions of the wicked against his children, God hoists them on their own petard by using their wickedness to give those children his victory, even as the wicked often mock the prayers of their prey.
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Because of Christ’s saving death and resurrection, death no longer has any power over those who belong to him through faith. So the enemies of the gospel can pour out their murderous rage upon Christians, but all they can truly accomplish is placing us into the arms of our savior.
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Despite the horror that madman made the saints of First Baptist endure, those who endured it with faith in Christ have received his victory. Although the murderer filled their eyes with terror, God has now filled them with his glory. Although he persecuted them with violence, God seized that violence and has now used it to deliver his faithful into a kingdom of peace. Although this madman brought death to so many, God has used that death to give them the eternal life won for them in the blood of Jesus.
Those who persecute the church and those who mock Christians for trusting in Almighty God rather than Almighty Government may believe that the bloodshed in Texas proves the futility of prayer. But we believers see the shooting in Texas as proof of something far different—proof that Christ has counted us worthy to suffer dishonor for his name and proof that no amount of dishonor, persecution, or violence can stop him from answering our prayer to deliver us from evil.
Fiene takes umbrage at people suggesting that these deaths are a poignant reminder of the fact that God does not answer prayer. I have no doubt that those who had time to pray before the gunman mowed them down prayed. I am sure they prayed for the Almighty to protect them and keep them from harm. From a rational perspective, it is clear that the Christian God did not hear their prayers, or he did hear them and chose to do nothing. Either way, twenty-six people died. Fiene, providing yet another example of how irrational Christians can be, rejects the obvious and says that the people killed in Sutherland Springs died because God WAS answering their prayers — deliver us from evil. That’s right, God let or commanded the murders to happen because he decided to answer prayers in a way that only a bat-shit crazy preacher could think up. Instead of admitting that God, once again, failed to come through for his children, Fiene cooked up an explanation that I am sure even some Christians will think is crazy. (Please read The Indifference of God )
Lurking under Fiene’s argument is the belief that the God is sovereign over his creation; that everything that happens is according to the will of God; that nothing happens that is not decreed by God; that everything that happens is controlled, orchestrated, and managed by God. The gunman, then, was just a tool used by God to execute his will at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The people who died? Their numbers were up. The Bible states that everyone has an appointed time of death; that God is in control of whether we live or die; that there is nothing we can do lengthen or lessen our time among the living. If the living want to blame someone for the gunman’s murderous rampage, the blame solely rests on the shoulders of Hans Fiene’s God. (Please read Is God Sovereign and Does Everything Happen for a Reason?)
While Christian apologists have all sorts of arguments they use to get around the implications of believing God is sovereign, the fact remains that if God is the first cause, the creator, the ruler of all things, then he is culpable for what happens on planet earth. I give Fiene credit for at least admitting as much.
As atheists, we know that God doesn’t answer prayer. He can’t because he doesn’t exist. Most of the Sutherland Springs victims likely prayed before succumbing to a hail of bullets. Their prayers for deliverance and safety did not help them. God was blind, deaf, and indifferent, as are all the Gods created by human hands. Perhaps the God of Christianity is very much like Baal, spoken of by Elijah in 1 Kings 18:27:
And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he [Baal] is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.
Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, suggesting that their God’s inaction was due to him being busy talking to someone, taking a shit, being on vacation, or sleeping. This passage equally applies to the Christian God, who for the past two thousand years has been AWOL. Billions of prayers to God are uttered each day, yet they go unanswered — save God helping Granny find her keys or helping a Christian NFL quarterback score the game-winning touchdown. While twenty-six Baptists being murdered is no small thing, their deaths pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of people who die each day because of war, gun violence, starvation, and disease. Where God is needed most, he is nowhere to be found. Only in the alternate universe inhabited by the Hans Fiens of the world can it be said that God is hearing and answering prayers.
What is needed now is sympathy for the victims and families whose lives were shredded and destroyed. Fuck the clergy with their empty clichés and religious platitudes. Let them live with their delusions while rational, thoughtful Americans band together to tackle the immoral gun lobby and gun violence. How much more blood must be spilled before we realize that GUNS GUNS GUNS GUNS are the problem, and the ONLY solution is strict, enforceable Federal gun control laws. How much more blood must be spilled before we do something to fix our broken mental health system. When will we realize that the U.S. military trains men and women to kill; that some soldiers can’t turn off the violence once they return home; that PTSD among veterans is an ignored and increasing epidemic.
There is much we could do to put an end to gun violence IF we will but do so. Or, we could just keep on doing nothing — you know, praying.
About Bruce Gerencser
Bruce Gerencser, 60, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 39 years. He and his wife have six grown children and eleven 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. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.
Bruce is a local photography business owner, operating Defiance County Photo out of his home. If you live in Northwest Ohio and would like to hire Bruce, please email him.
Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section. If you are a first-time commenter, please read the commenting policy before wowing readers with your words. All first-time comments are moderated. If you would like to contact Bruce directly, please use the contact form to do so.
Donations are always appreciated. Donations on a monthly basis can be made through Patreon. One-time donations can be made through PayPal.
