Ergun Caner YouTube Spoof - Demonstrating Absurdity by Being Absurd

If you haven't seen these Ergun Caner spoof videos yet, check them out.

I appreciate a blogger using parody and hyperbole to make their point, and this guy does a jam-up job. I've tried my hand at parodying the Ergun Caner saga myself in my Willie Mehmet Nazzarino Antonio Watchdog April Fool's post, but this guy is on to something. I predict as the Caner debacle gains steam in the mainstream media, this guy's website will become very, very popular. The horse is out of the barn now, and before the end of the year, sad to say, Caner and Liberty University jokes will likely be on the Tonight Show, I predict.

I hope this "Ergun Caner" fellow produces more. Those of us who are Rush Limbaugh fans know how effective parodies can be in speaking truth, and as Rush says "demonstrating absurdity by being absurd".

Above is my favorite of the three videos currently at the Dr. Ergun Caner YouTube channel, as Ergun is celebrating the "Good Times" of the Christianity Today article and the Elmer Towns quote, and the takedown of Mohammad Khan's Internet videos.

Might want to check in periodically to see future videos: Dr. Ergun Caner YouTube Channel

Liberty Announces Committee to Investigate Caner

Update: I captured and posted the Liberty Statement at about 8:00 pm EST on 5/10/10. Apparently Liberty changed the wording of the last paragraph, as well as added the word "Internet" in the 2nd paragraph, at about 9:30 pm EST, and I have made the corrections below to show the new paragraph and the insertion into the 2nd paragraph. How sad, Liberty seems intent on making the issues of Caner's deceptions more about bloggers and the Internet, rather than about Caner himself.

As I have said before: "Secular media, please save us from ourselves."

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Just posted on the Liberty University web site is this statement:

Liberty University’s Provost Dr. Ron Godwin is forming a committee to investigate a series of accusations against Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary.

The Internet allegations have questioned public statements Caner has made regarding the details of his personal life story.

Godwin is forming a committee to conduct an official inquiry with a goal of issuing its conclusions by the end of June.

Following inquiries from several members of the mainstream media, Liberty decided to initiate its own investigation.

“In light of the fact that several newspapers have raised questions, we felt it necessary to initiate a formal inquiry,” Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr. said.

“Liberty does not initiate personnel evaluations based upon accusations from Internet blogs,” Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr. said. “However, In light of the fact that several newspapers have raised questions, we felt it necessary to initiate a formal inquiry.”

Story developing....

Caner and Klouda: Turning Blind Eye Toward Deceit While Punishing the Sin of Being a Woman

On this Mother's Day, I couldn't help but think of Dr. Sheri Klouda, Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Taylor University, and loving wife and mother.

It sickens me to think of the men who are now defending the lies and deceit of Dr. Ergun Caner, the President of Liberty Theological Seminary - belong to the same theological bunch that supported Paige Patterson's removal of Dr. Klouda from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for the "sin" of, well, being a woman who was teaching college classes to men.

Caner spends a decade deceiving Southern Baptists into thinking he was raised in Turkey speaking Arabic and trained as an Islamic Jihadist watching Dukes of Hazard in Istanbul while learning how to do the deeds of 9/11 - that is fine and dandy - but a female seminary professor happens to have men in her college classes - she has to be shown the door and booted from our convention's seminary at great emotional and financial pain to her family.

Some of these men that are now defending Caner - Tim Guthrie, Bart Barber, Jeff Haney, Tim Rogers, and others - thought that having Dr. Klouda teach men at SWBTS presented a sin, or a danger, or some kind of theological threat to the Southern Baptist Convention. They thought God would be pleased in her dismissal, that the Bible mandated SWBTS to violate U.S. employment law and discriminate against a female professor for being a female.

A documented opportunistic deceiver keeps his job, a woman loses hers for being a woman.

It's a new day in the Southern Baptist Convention: lying to and deceiving church members all over the country for a decade is now no longer a sin. As Elmer Towns says about the decision to keep Caner in his post as president of LBTS: "It's not an ethical issue, it's not a moral issue". But let a female professor who has a genuine Ph.D teach a male student, that's over the top apparently and she has to get the boot.

I'm glad I'm with the bunch that believes what Caner did was wrong (and that believes his racial stereotyping is wrong, too) and he has no business being a seminary president . I'm glad that I'm with the bunch that believes it was wrong to fire a seminary professor for being a woman.

I actually have pity for the other bunch.

Happy Mother's Day, Professor Klouda.

On the Lighter Side: Maybe Ergun's Embellishments Aren't So Bad After All

Below is one of my all-time favorite Monty Python skits, "Four Yorkshiremen". Its basically four rich men sitting around one-upping each other on how tough they used to have it growing up.

Given recent events at Liberty University and their seminary president, I think it appropriate to watch these four guys "embellish" their past, as they get more and more absurd, to the absolute extreme.

You have to see it. Enjoy!

The Ergun Caner Evangelical Crisis

The website "Christianity Today" posted an article yesterday (5/3/10) entitled "Bloggers Target Seminary President". Interesting. Who is actually doing the "targetting"? Perhaps a better title describing this mess is: "Caner Targets Evangelical Churches with Deception for 9 1/2 Years".

We are on the verge of an evangelical crisis over Caner's embellishments and the refusal of the evangelical leaders and evangelical press to hold Caner accountable for his decade-long deception over his upbringing. Sadly, it will now take the secular press to save us evangelicals from ourselves. They will have to expose the depths of the Caner deception for what it is, because we apparently are unable to deal with it appropriately in even a secular, much less biblical, fashion.

Here is the opening paragraph from this article:

"Liberty University's board of directors has declined to take public action against Ergun Caner, president of the university seminary, as bloggers raise doubts about Caner's account of his childhood as a Muslim."

The CT story is about "bloggers raising doubts". Bloggers like myself aren't "raising doubts". We're exposing lies. This would be akin to saying "Bloggers Raising Doubts over Clinton's Fidelity" in the Monika Lewinsky fiasco. There was a stained dress with Clinton's DNA on it. For Caner, the "stained dress" is the audio tapes and video tapes that have captured the Caner deception - and with documentary court evidence to substantiate outright lies dating all the way back to November 2001.

The elements of the crisis:

- how do we expect the world we are trying to reach with the gospel to listen to us, when it is revealed that one of our most exalted speakers and defenders of the faith himself felt he needed to lie for a decade about his conversion to Christ. What does the secular society see when Caner seemed to take advantage of the tragic events of 9/11 to vault himself into evangelical stardom as an "expert" in Islam - perhaps for the glory of himself and for financial gain - and his peers and superiors are either silent or have agressively attacked those who shone the light on his sin? Then consider the message received by non-Christians when they read:

"It's not an ethical issue, it's not a moral issue," Towns told Christianity Today on April 27. "We give faculty a certain amount of theological leverage. The arguments of the bloggers would not stand up in court."

So Caner's deception is not "ethical" or "moral". If I were a lost person, this would be a huge step forward in my belief that Christianity itself is a lie, and Christian leaders are mostly hypocritical charletons selling their spiritual elixirs, whose "ethical" and "moral" standards are much lower than the average non-Christian.

- what are evangelical church members to think? Apparently our leaders endorse lying when sharing Christ. What else are evangelical leaders, pastors, lying to us about in the pulpit but won't admit? Southern Baptists leaders, who are staunch Caner defenders, claim that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, for instance - and cleared the SBC seminaries of any men who disagreed on this point back in the late 1980s. Men trained in seminaries like Liberty's seminary tell us about the inerrancy and infallibility of scripture - but are they lying about that too? Maybe that's just an "embellishment" for the "good" of gospel? Southern Baptist pastors are telling everyone that they are obligated to fork over 10% of their income to their church - perhaps that's just embellishments of what the scripture actually teaches - again, for the "good" of the gospel?

- this is much more damaging to evangelical Christianity than the Swaggart or Bakker scandals of the 1980s, or even the more recent Haggard scandal. In these there was exposure, remorse and repentance over sexual and financial impropriety. But the Caner scandal goes much deeper. Its about the truth of one's testimony that led to a person becoming a Christian. Imagine if we found out that the story of Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul after his conversion, the writer of much of the New Testament - was all a great embellishment, that Paul's writings about himself were all great fibs and yarns. And this is about church leaders refusing to call a very public sin a sin - and about Christian leaders going on the attack against fellow Christians who dared to shine a light on that sin. The eventual story of this debacle is going to be very, very ugly.

- Caner is the PRESIDENT OF A SEMINARY - what can we expect in the next generation of pastors who have been influenced by him and his story - embellishing pastors who play loose with facts and truth, showmen, story tellers, yarn spinners, and ethnic/racial comedians?

The damage caused by Caner's deceptions on evangelical Christianity will be far reaching - and it will be his fault but even moreso the fault of his defenders who have their head in the sand. It will not be the fault of those involved in the exposure of the sin.

At the end of the CT article, Elmer Towns is quoted again:.

"We don't see any way that bloggers will damage Liberty," Towns says.

What a sad day - the question to Liberty University leaders and the defenders of Caner is not whether Ergun Caner is deeply harming the cause of Christ, it's whether bloggers who are exposing the deceptions, are damaging Liberty University.

Its a sad day.

Secular media, please save us from ourselves.