From Evangelical Teetotaler to Atheist Wino

found online by Raymond

 
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

I was almost forty-five years old before I drank alcohol, and then I only did it because I thought it might help with my pain. (It didn’t. I quickly learned that I have to drink a lot of alcohol before I feel its effects.) It has only been since I left Christianity that I have felt the freedom to drink alcohol at home and socially.

As a youth, the frequent sermons I heard about the dangers of drinking alcohol made a deep psychological impression on me. How could it not? Week after week, month after month, and year after year, the pastors and youth directors of the churches I attended made sure that congregants knew that drinking alcohol would lead a person straight to hell. As with many forbidden behaviors, preachers used violent, bloody, extreme stories to illustrate their anti-booze sermons, not-so-subtly reminding us that if we touched one drop of the Devil’s brew, we too could face such calamities and even death.

How did these men of God justify their anti-alcohol crusading on a Biblical basis?

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