Just over the border in Amherst, Nova Scotia, CA is Gospel Light Baptist Church. At the end of last month, Oct 2021, they hosted a face-to-face conference that ran for several days. It was not just them, it included people from many different groups scattered all across the Provence.
The prevailing public health order takes the stance that this is fine, but mandates that those hosting such events must insist that attendees show proof of vaccination.
Being good loving Christians with absolutely no grasp of any social responsibility at all, they decided to just ignore that. Their position is that “We didn’t know”. No doubt the pandemic and also lots of people dying has also been a complete surprise to them.
It really must be nice to still be living in 2019.
The inevitable happened, they are the source of a COVID-19 outbreak that resulted in at least three people dying.
How did they respond to what happened?
“I followed what God wanted us to do,” Smith said from the pulpit. “We had a great week of meetings … a young lady got saved.”
Permit me to play that back for you. It is such a jaw-droppingly insensitive stance that it truly merits a spotlight being thrown upon it.
If we are to follow this line of thought then apparently God planned for three people to catch COVID and then die from a wholly preventable disease. Because there were public health mandates in place, God needed to motivate his “chosen ones” to ignore common sense, and get a big mix of people from all over the province huddled closely together to ensure that COVID could spread and that these three people would then die a horrible death gasping for air as their lungs collapsed.
Three people died – The will of God.
Tough luck to their relatives and all those around them greaving the loss, it was apparently the plan of Gospel Light Baptist Church’s God that they should suffer and die like this.
How is this justified?
This was all just fine because one person “got saved”.
Yea, that thud was my jaw hitting the floor.
What is going on inside this Pastor’s head?
The belief is that our life here is simply temporary and so if somebody can be “saved” then that literally takes precedence over everything. This is something that is, from the viewpoint of the belief, of eternal significance.
In reality, many deeply committed Christians will often respond to alter calls just to be sure. You really would be hard-pressed to find somebody attending such a meeting to hear about Jesus for the very first time. Who actually attends a week of religious meetings without actually being religious?
All the term “Saved” means is that somebody, who is already religious, simply became a little bit more religious and demonstrated this in a public meeting by responding in the heat of emotion to an altar call, and perhaps went forward and was then prayed over.
This is what supposedly justifies three people dying.
Did he really say what is being reported?
He sure did, you can find the 20-minute clip of him saying what he said hosted on CBC (here).
To save you the trauma of enduring 18 minutes of him waffling nonsense, here is a small selection of highlights:
- He opens by explaining that having the meeting is what God wanted him to do – Apparently God told him to do this about one year ago. How does anybody ever actually “know” what God wants, are they paying attention to voices in their heads?
- “We had a Great week of meetings” – For Fuck’s sake, if 3 people dying was a “great week”, then how many need to die for it to be a bad week
- “A young lady got saved” (Amen’s from the audience) – Er, that’s really not the highlight of the week for the three that died.
- He then moves on to claim that all the attention this is getting is “persecution” – That claim truly deserves yet another “For Fuck’s sake” from me. Valid fact-based criticism of them ignoring health mandates that then results in three deaths is NOT “persecution”.
- “A lot of people have been trying to shame us” – Nobody is trying, they did this to themselves.
- “Satan is trying to drag us down” – No mythlogical supernatural entities needed, this is wholly self-inflicted
- “I trying to be truthful” – Why oh why do I not believe that?
- “We still need to rejoice in what God did” – Seriously, no, just no. No God required to explain what happened.
Consequences?
Pastor Smith has been fined $2,422 for violating COVID-19 rules, so I guess that is where the donations will be going now.
Other Baptist churches are also leaping in and distancing themselves from this group…
Baptist church leaders in Atlantic Canada say Amherst pastor Robert Smith and the Gospel Light Baptist church are not a member of the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada (CBAC) and are in an independent church group.
Meanwhile, all content from their YouTube channel is gone and their Facebook page has been wiped.
When you simply don’t give a flying f**k for those around you in the community and choose to ignore health guidance, then your actions will have consequences.
If this is all done to your variation of God, then you really don’t need Satan, because your God is filling that role rather well.
If I actually believed in the concept of “being saved”, I don’t, and I had actually been “saved” and then later discovered that the cost was three human lives, I really don’t think I’d be very happy about that.
Until I read the link I deduced this was a case of Assisted Suicide, for I assumed it was the church people who died. After learning two of the deaths were at a nursing home, this has become some kind of murder so far as I’m concerned. I doubt if the Good Christians involved will have much trouble convincing themselves that their blowing off every safety procedure was in any way responsible for the deaths. Double-think is what they’re really good at.
The preacher is the key, for these characters have an unbelievable grip on small sects like this. True story: a few years back I was in a theological discussion with an elderly relative. I had the advantage of having read the Bible in a modern translation and knew what I was talking about. When I showed her the Bible chapter and verse as evidence my position was the correct one, she dug in her heels. She told me that her preacher had said something else, and she’d believe what he said about the issue rather than what was in her own Bible.
It would be altogether fitting if Preacher Robert Smith’s God decides to “take him home” prematurely for all this. I suspect that will be his only concern, for it appears the Local Authorities in Canada aren’t going to do a thing about this except hunker down for a while.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8381021/baptists-of-atlantic-canada-amherst-church-covid-19-outbreak/