A 'righteous' response that is just wrong

            City Magazine, a local Central Florida publication, recently printed a letter from Dr.Terry Pooler who is the Lead Pastor of the Sabbath Grace Fellowship Church in Apopka, Fl. in response to a CNN iReport’s article Why I Raise My Children without God by Deborah Mitchell. Her article was a mother’s response to the way religion, particularly Christianity, justified certain actions and was used to shape people’s thinking in a manner that she realized was wrong.

            I sensed before reading it that Dr. Pooler probably had a vested interest in ‘debunking” Deborah Mitchell’s story as it could have a long term effect on any possible growth at his church, and bottom-line, his paycheck. So he had to find ways to dissect and disembowel her article in a way that makes it appeared she just didn’t truly understand the living god and that’s why she was raising her children free of religion.(How he knows…actually knows...the living god, and by what means he confirms this is never addressed.) But he makes the same errors that all other theists make when they try to defend their version of Christianity. They fall back on the Bible and what God and Jesus supposedly said (actually, what Dr. Pooler interprets as he reads the Bible)…by cherry-picking the verses they believe will bolster their view. That is not a wise direction in which to go because, as any ‘True Christian’ will tell you, you have to take the whole Bible into consideration, not just the parts you like.

            In the second sentence of his article, Dr. Pooler starts by stating that Mitchell ‘brushed aside a grieving parent’s plea that taking God out of our public schools was partially to blame.’ As if, up until the removal of all things Christian, our schools were models of Christian morality, thought, and conscience. Sorry Doctor Pooler, but you have to be able to prove God was actually there to begin with. You can’t just say ‘because I believe so’, or ‘because the bible says it is written’. You wouldn’t give that latitude to Muslims or Hindus and their ‘holy’ books. You have to provide evidence. And you can’t. So don’t take her to task because she dismisses a grieving parent who falls back on an emotional plea about the supposed presence, or lack of presence, of a god as an explanation for why a mass murder occurred. Does that grieving parent really believe that, if only the Ten Commandments were placed in the school, if only teacher-led Christian prayers were allowed, and if only every child had a bible on their desk, that somehow, that would have thwarted the gunman from entering the school and killing twenty students and six teachers? It didn’t stop Charles Roberts in Lancaster Pennsylvania on October 2, 2006 from killing five little Amish girls in the West Nickel Mines School. Oh, but they didn’t practice the right kind of Christianity, did they? When the God Dr. Pooler believes in has fixed the child abuse that routinely occurs in His churches, eliminates starvation that occurs all over the world, stops creating “natural” disasters that kill and maim and leave children orphaned, and ceases creating agonizing diseases that disfigure and kill, then He, or those who claim to speak for him, can come back and ask us about schools.

            Dr. Pooler then comes up with a strange non-sequitur. Mrs. Mitchell states she is not campaigning for the elimination of religion, but wants it kept at home like a toothbrush or a pair of shoes. From that statement, Dr. Pooler indicates that what she meant, without any explanation, was, religion ‘should be quarantined.’ Last time I checked, no one’s toothbrush or shoes were quarantined from the public. How do you go from something taught at home (and is practiced in numerous churches and religious institutions that vastly outnumber schools across the country) to, it is being quarantined? Dr. Pooler simply uses outrageous and disingenuous hyperbole to cast Mitchell’s intent in as negative a light as possible.

            He goes on to claim she is a victim of erroneous indoctrination, missing the irony of making such a claim himself. He chastises her for writing that ‘a child should make moral choices for the right reasons’, and not feel as though he or she is being watched over by a heavenly policeman who is much like Santa Claus looking to see who’s naughty or nice. But that is exactly how the bible portrays God. Believe He is watching you, and you’d better believe in him and return that love. Because he loves you SO MUCH, that he created a special place called Hell to send you to if you don’t love him back. I found it quite amazing that Dr. Pooler would use the imaginary Santa character as a contrast to convince readers of the legitimacy of the god character. There is not a shred of evidence that either one exists. Why should we believe in one and not the other? Doctor?

            The God’s Desire versus the God’s Plan comparison argument he makes is a mountain of nonsense piled on an even bigger mountain of nonsense. How do you know God’s Desire OR God’s plan, Doctor? If you draw it from the Bible, how do you know it is accurate? If you claim God talks with you, how do you know it is the Christian God, or any god supposedly responding to you? How do you assess that you are not just making up the conversation in your mind and reading into it?

The rest of his article is filled with one a priori assumption after another. All fall back on ‘God is’, ‘it is from the Bible’, ‘God’s plan’, God’s desire’, ‘eternal God’, yet he offers no proof or evidence that ANY of those are accurate or reliable. He simply believes them because, most likely, he was taught as a young child to believe them. In his later adult years, he sought out and studied books and texts which adhered with what he was taught as a child. If I wrote ‘Allah says’,’ the Koran is explicit’, ‘Vishnu is eternal’, ‘the book of Mormon states’, Zeus is all-knowing’, would Dr. Pooler give them the same weight and credence as he does in his world view seen solely through the prism of Christianity?

                                        
    He ends his article with a paragraph that begins with, “I wonder if the number of school shootings and child abusers will dramatically decrease if the next generation, flushed with the belief that they are insignificant parts of a big machine, can successfully squelch the current religious fever in our country that promotes God’s moral values…” If Dr. Pooler recalls his bible reading, God requires that unruly children be stoned to death. The same sentence is also mandatory for homosexuality, witches, and even picking up sticks on Sunday. Or how about when a woman is raped; the rapist has to marry that woman and pay her father fifty pieces of silver? Does that sound fair? Are those the moral values he is referring to? They are all God’s; it says so right in the Bible. Read it yourself and see if it is correct. How many slaves does Dr. Pooler own? Because neither God nor Jesus condemn slavery. If a tree doesn’t produce fruit, even when it is not in season, would Dr. Pooler demand it be cut down? Jesus condemned a fig tree for the same reason, and it follows that Jesus was only reflecting God’s values and morals.

                           According to the Bible, that fig tree has only a few moments left to live

Dr. Pooler has a right to express his views about Mrs. Mitchell’s article. What concerns me is his attitude that she is wrong because the God he believes in says it is wrong. But he offers nothing at all to prove his belief is correct, accurate, or true. He simply believes it because he wants it to be true. As I stated earlier, would Dr. Pooler give that same latitude to someone of a different faith, or even a different denomination within Christianity? If they stated they believed it because they want it to be true, would that make it true? If Deborah Mitchell rejects it, does that make her belief or lack of belief false? As Stephen Roberts once wrote: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” Dr. Pooler, I dismiss yours.