TECHNICALLY the Bible doesn’t give a shit what you do, it’s just a dubious compilation of anecdotes
And it’s not like it’s the BOOK’S fault. The book was just PAPER, all bright-eyed and eager, showing up at the plant EXCITED for its big day, its DESTINY…
**comes in after watching a 2+ hour long video on Stargate SG1 that delves into how the last two seasons discussed, among other things, using the (intentional) misinterpretation of scripture to justify horrific actions.**
The various books of the bible are lots of things written by lots of people with different viewpoints over a long period of time for a variety of reasons. Not all of them were ever intended to be read as literal history, and those that were range in… well, in probable historical accuracy.
I’m not sure that any of them were written as literal history. Not in anything like the way we think of history at least.
The Gospels in particular were clearly written to promote the author’s own take on not only the events, but on the meanings behind them. Different competing ideas in early Christianity.
Some of the OT books such as Kings, Judges, Corinthians seem like at least an attempt was made at a historical account rather than some sort of propaganda nobody was going to read because copying books was expensive back then. 🤷♀️
Generally, Kings and Judges are considered part of the Deuteronomistic school. Written (or heavily edited out of earlier works) during the period of the Babylonian Exile, hundreds of years after most of the events. Largely for explicitly propagandic purposes. To justify their faith and identity despite the Exile and to explain God’s purpose behind their troubles.
Individual people don’t have to have copies to read when it’s made part of the priestly tradition. Priests can read it and spread it as part of the religious teachings.
I mean TECHNICALLY TECHNICALLY, the bible only says “don’t sleep with men in the same way you sleep with women” (Levi) and “look I get you have issues with gay people but seriously you’re being such hypocrites that you’re condemning yourselves and your followers to hell so just stop” (the entire book of romans in summary)
And that’s the whole list of everything the bible has to say about gay couples. Now if we want to look at the hundreds of verses about why men shouldn’t sleep with women, it starts to look like god actually encourages gay sex in the levi verse.
I find your summary of Romans to be much easier to read than Romans. I have sufficient difficulty deciphering Romans that I cannot judge the accuracy of the summary, however.
Technically I think that’s actually about threesomes and paternity. Or something. Original translation being about two guys sleeping together in a woman’s bed. So it could literally be “Dudes, that’s her space, go to your own bed!”
The only other time being gay comes up IIRC, is with that guy who is in love with his slave and Jesus is all like “Dude, if you love him then why is he still your slave?”
TECHNICALLY… If that’s true then Leviticus might mean “Men and women have different needs. Women need (and like) foreplay. Don’t go straight to hammer time.” Or it might mean “Women can get pregnant. Maybe think about that before sexy times.” Or it might mean “Women have emotions. Hang around and cuddle a bit. Don’t just offer a high-five and doze off. And it wouldn’t hurt to get up early and make her breakfast instead of bailing. Looking at you, Zebulon.”
That would just confuse Joyce-during-her-fundie-period more, because she’s fairly petite, but someone like Joe or Ethan has much longer arms, but then again people were generally smaller thousands of years ago, but oh no, acknowledging that might point to evolution so what’s the official cubit?!
i don’t think the difference in average height between modern humans and biblical humans, if any, has much to do with evolution, and everything to do with dietary and medical improvements. 6000 years, or about 25,000 generations, is not a whole lot on the evolutionary time scale.
related, i once met someone with a graduated ruler tattooed on his forearm. i thought that was pretty neat
it’s actually a really complicated question.
it depends where you draw the line, really.
our species, homo sapiens, is considered to have evolved around 300k years ago from H. heidelbergensis. possibly the line as to when that transition took place is when H. neanderthalensis split off; it’s still arbitrary, though, and i’m sure anthropaleontologists disagree about every part of this ^^
still, the overall human population is regarded as a single species by all and any biological criteria because we’ve interbred enough until recently enough that we’re all very, very similar genetically (it bears repeating that the most genetic diversity is found within Africa)
if i remember right, the human gene pool was basically united until about 70k years ago, which is around the time of the second major human expansion out of Africa. that means at least 70k years for some human divergence within human evolution. Besides, different modern populations have varying levels of DNA from other human species (mostly Neanderthals and Denisovans); either from different levels of interbreeding, or from different selective pressures to keep or lose that hybrid DNA.
So anyway, evolution continued within the H. sapiens stock, and another subdivision i’ve seen is early vs. post-glacial human, in terms of skeletal build. later humans are supposed to be more gracile, earlier ones slightly more heavy-built. i’m not sure which populations we’re talking about though, European probably?
it’s also alleged that there’s been an observed diminishing of our braincase volume over the last 10 to 20k years (SciAm article)
the Caucasian body type seems to have appeared about 20k years ago.
lactose digestion in adults was selected for in populations that domesticated cattle during the neolithic revolution starting ~10k years ago.
and some claim to have discovered evolutionary effects in human populations having happened over more recent time spans than that, like adaptations for underwater fishing in the Sama-Bajau people of Southeast Asia that would have had to occur in the last couple millenia. It’s pretty fascinating, they found that members of this group have enlarged spleens, which helps store haemoglobin in the blood longer while freediving; they found the same effect in members of the population who didn’t dive, which indicates it’s genetic, and not the effect of constant training from childhood.
i’m not sure what that any of that says about the possible genetic component of height, and i should’ve said that while 6000 years is not a lot, it’s also not nothing in evolutionary terms; some evolution may have been observed over that amount of time. It just seems likely to me that environmental factors would have a much more visible impact.
…anyway i looked up Adam Savage’s tattoo. nice! yeah that’s the idea! except why not the entire forearm?
lol! by commenting before i’ve had any coffee apparently!
i don’t even know how i got that figure. i calculate 25 years to a generation so i guess that’s where the 25 comes from. (maybe it’s closer to 20 years on average? idk) anyway what i meant to type was 240 generations. thanks for the catch
It should probably be closer to 300 generations, as people historically started families earlier than they do today. Sure, not all of them, but even today we have people starting families anywhere between around 13 and 52 years of age. And even with those extreme ranges, there’s probably some outliers on either side that I missed. I just went with the ages of people I actually have met when they started their families.
by your logic, why would 20 years old be the average generation span then? the midway point between 13 and 52 is 32.5
i’m sure there’s been scholarly work into guesstimating what the average generation rate has been for earlier times in human history. it might even be below 20 for all i know!
Actually, those dietary and medical advancements ARE evolution in action, it’s our adaptation to the environment around us and our adaptation to it. Physical evolution is just one piece of the whole. We weren’t around to see the behavioral or even intellectual adaptations extinct species made.
sure, that’s one way to look at it. but a creationist would find that a lot less challenging to their worldview. i assume. not that Doctor Who’s comment was meant to be taken THAT seriously.
I’d say the dietary and medical advancements are the result of evolution. But to be evolution, they’d need to be represented in the offspring without being handed them by the existing population – and that doesn’t happen.
Not yet, anyway. We will probably get there some day, if we survive what we’re currently doing to our planet and ourselves on a global scale.
there’s a case to be made that culturally-transmitted characteristics such as knowledge and behaviour are as much a part of evolution as genes. What’s special about genetic units of transmission that doesn’t also apply to cultural units, unless we specifically restrict the definition of evolution to exclude them? they exhibit inheritance, modification, and can be selectively advantageous or disadvantageous.
Probably as official as Yard or Foot was, and varying from principality to principality and cloth merchant to cloth merchant.
This is the only reason I don’t like SI, besides the order of the letters in the name.
The Meter Just Happens to be a close approximation of a PARISIAN YARD. There were many other yards even just in France, and they chose the one used in PARIS specifically. The Meter was DEFINED AS, (old definition, long defunct), one ten-thousandth the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, passing through Paris, which means the Meter was defined as roughly one forty-thousandth of a polar circumference. This is a VERY awkward “natural measurement”. Had they gone with the Cubit, which historically ranges VERY broadly, from the Macedonian Cubit of about 14 inches up to the Roman Cubit of about 47 inches, they could have chosen 1/50,000th, at about 31.50 inches, or 1/100,000th, at about 15.75 inches., which is also close to one of old definitions of a Pace. Both of which would have fit better into their supposed “natural measure” scheme than does the, now offical, Meter.
If a meter is one ten-thousandth of the distance from the pole to the equator, that makes that distance 10,000 meters or 10 Kilometers (just over 6 miles).
I’m too lazy to look up the correct definition, but you have obviously mis-remembered it.
Thank you. Yes. I “Meant” ten-millionth in that remembered it wrong, and regurgitated my faulty memory without doing any gut check.
The definition was one ten-millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator.
See if God had asked one of the Nephilim to build the Ark, it would have been much bigger because of the size of a giant cubit, and more kinds would fit and we would still have unicorns
What I find funny is how the ark actually does work…
…But only the local area would have flooded that much. And for many back then, the local area was the entire world. So to them, that’s two of every animal. It makes a LOT more sense looking at it through those eyes, for sure. Some crazed farmer shoving all his animals onto a large boat along with some wild animals, then holy shit actual floods come wtf!?
Though I dunno, the idea that homo sapiens is “an inventive, invincible species” is probably the sort of thing that Old Testament God would kill us all over again for thinking.
I forget if it was here or on Twitter, but I got into a conversation about the cubit as it related to Roman bread and Galasso’s sammich offerings. This must have happened at least a year or two ago. It turns out the Romans and the Hebrews used different lengths of cubits. Got very confusing.
Cubit is an English word subbed in for the original Hebrew word, because no one knows what that word meant. Thus people who build arcs? Don’t know what they’re doing.
Exactly where my mind went as well. I grew up listening to all his albums. He had some great routines: 59th St Bridge, Frankenstein, Noah, 200MPH, etc. And then it turns out he’s a turd of a human.
In fairness, while Whedon was obviously integral to their BEING a Buffy, I think primarily of the actors when I think of it.
… And the characters when I think of Harry Potter, which is slightly more problematic, and there is a chance her Trans* urghness was creeping in with Rita Skeeter, and there’s a decent amount of fat-shaming going on in those books, but OTHERWISE they’re a tale about friendship, loyalty, love, working out your principles and sticking to them, valuing compassion…
But yeah, not watched anything with Depp in since the whole Amber Heard thing…
As other comments are showing it’s really going to vary. For example I simply can’t enjoy HP since it’s author is literally using the platform she gained from it as the head of a hate movement that has had a huge cultural negative impact in my country on, well… my people. Any positive feelings there are massively overwhelmed by the negative.
My closest friend (who is also one of that particular group of “my people”) basically is able to divorce the pleasure found in the books and films from the author, while recognising what she’s done and how awful it is. And I think that last bit is important- if you’re able to still appreciate something without supporting the awful people and while recognising how they’re awful and the harm they’ve done, that’s valid and fine. And honestly, for me personally, enviable.
I used to get myself through anxiety at the dentist by reciting his bit on dentists to myself while I sat in the chair. Can’t do that anymore. I remember the routine, but then I think about the man who wrote it and it doesn’t make me laugh a bit and relax.
Cubit is the Early Modern English spelling of qubit, which is why it’s in KJV. Playing games with quantum mechanics was the only way to fit all the species into the ark.
— Source: Some irreverent with a Computer Science degree.
Yeah but the interpretation of the bible foisted onto Joyce was extremely specific about it, so Joyce had to accept it as inerrant fact like everything else.
Yeah, this sort of snap from extreme faith to extreme anti-faith seems to be relatively common with ex-fundies specifically, from what I’ve seen— biblical literalism requires you to do massive mental gymnastics to justify all the inherent contradictions, so if a single domino falls, the whole thing collapses.
And once one thing is proven wrong, then everything is wrong. Especially the flood story, everyone and thing would have suffocated by the end of three weeks because it was a terrible boat and the only way to keep it afloat was to make it almost airtight.
I did borrow the phrase from “I Love Lucy”.
Matthey 18:6
If anyone should cause one of these little ones to stumble in their faith, it would be better that they had a millstone hung around their neck and be cast into the sea.
And it sounds like the stress inherent in fervently believing contradictory things may have been contributing to Joyce’s anxiety – constant exhausting background mental gymnastics needed to hold her world together…
The Bible (at least, my version of it) treats the ACT of homosexuality as a sin, and to detest the sin as you would detest ALL sin, but to love the SINNER so long as they were repentant.
Now, several millennia later, we are being told that what WAS a sin is NO LONGER a sin, merely an ‘alternative lifestyle’, if you will. And I think THAT is what is driving a lot of Joyce’s confusion and questioning.
“Love the sinner hate the sin” is still calling people sinful and thus hellworthy and is ultimately kind of a shitty attitude, honestly. Like AT BEST and with the most charitable possible read it comes across as super PA, whatever the actual intent might be.
Like, I’m Catholic, and how I was always taught was “Sin is bad, but we’re ALL sinners, so don’t act like your sin is somehow less bad than somebody elses. It’s all bad in the eyes of God, so forgive them as you’d want Him to forgive you.”
Basically, don’t be a dick because we all know you’ve got plenty of skeletons in your closet and you wouldn’t like being judged for them either. Acknowledge it is sin, but then remember we’re all the same and it’s not our place to judge anybody elses soul. God called dibs on that.
Even the most soft-soap sugar-coated version is still basically saying homosexuality is immoral. And more and more these days, a lot of us are saying, “actually, no it’s not”.
Jesus never said a word about homosexuality, and it certainly existed in His time. There are lots of old ‘Laws’ from the Old Testament that we don’t care about anymore. The homosexuality bit is just a dumb thing to be hung up on, personally.
If you don’t want to marry homosexuals in a Church? Fine, that’s your right. Just leave them alone.
See this is how I was taught too. I still disagree with it because I realized a lot of people find it insulting. But I appreciate the honesty and attempt at understanding behind this attitude, even if it isn’t perfect.
Honestly, that’s always been one of my fundamental issues with Christianity (and Catholicism in particular, what with Original Sin)… It just seems to completely discard out of hand all the good people are capable of. Like literally the ONLY way to redeem our souls and count as a decent person is to accept that somebody else died for “our” sins, thousands of years ago? There is NO other way to live a good life in which we do more good than harm?! Babies are born STAINED WITH EVIL?
And somebody else’s brutal death is the key to making everything OK… But Judas was bad?
Jesus himself? Sounds like an awesome guy. His teachings re: judge not lest ye be judged, showing human compassion to others, not treating religion as a giant profit wheel (again HELLO ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH), treating everybody as equally worthy..? Hard to argue with that.
But yeah no. Babies are not born stained with the sin of eating a frickin’ apple (or fig). Bible actually SAYS people shouldn’t be judged for their father’s sins.
well, yeah, it does. “all the good people are capable of”? that’s just God working through them. people aren’t good, people are sinful. only God is good.
Which is one of the things we’ve clearly seen Joyce struggling with per the Rich Mullins dream, once the Biblical literalism started to crumble.
We were actually discussing the ethical contradictions inherent in Calvinism in my household last week. (Long story.) If there’s no free will and everything is predestined, then how does one justify punishing people for actions they did not, in fact, choose to do? Hell, with that in mind, how do you justify rewarding the ‘good’ ones if they were never CHOOSING to be good in the first place? One of those philosophies that has largely (though by no means entirely) faded since, but there’s still enough fingerprints of it in modern American Christianity and UGH I hate it.
That’s how I was taught as a Catholic, too. It’s definitely the correct way to go through life; the version of Christianity that vibes with me the best is as a support group. We all fall short of doing the right thing, we’re all flawed, so we should come together and help each other, even when we fall.
It doesn’t quite work with homosexuality, though, because being gay isn’t actually bad. It’s like being left-handed in that it’s different and therefore breaks against conformists, but that difference isn’t actually a sin. When you use “hate the sin, love the sinner” on a gay person, you’re carving off a central part of them, just like if you called a person using their left hand for things a sin.
in a sense, you’re underthinking the business here. “GO forth, multiply and be fruitful” doesn’t work if you’re trying to multiply with someome that has the same bits you do. I mean, outside of some pretty kinky porn memes., anyway, and you have to remember that you’re discussing the god not of machinists and engineers, but of farmers. Agrarian societies needed manpower, either through reproduction or going out and enslaving the neighbors. Marriage at the time the bible was written had nothing to do with romantic love, and everything to do with reproduction and economics.
How do you think they got more Spartans in Sparta? because remember, those guys were encouraged to get freaky with other dudes, as with the Sacred Band of Thebes-but they still needed recruits and they werent’ taking them through the recruiting office, so someone had to do the deed the old fashioned way with the women, and it was likely managed the same way they bred cattle.
Much of the Bible’s forbiddance of homosexuality dates from encounters with Hellenizers, so there was also a cultural thing going on there-not emulating the latest conquerors oppressing the people of Israel, whom were pretty avidly horny fellows and not averse to other fellows to scratch that itch. (Romans OR Greeks, or for that matter Persians, Babylonians…)
so there were a lot of sociological reasons for that that don’t apply in the modern world, but it wasn’t JUST irrational condemnation, it was preserving a culture that spent more time invaded and conquered, than free.
but did that actually make a difference? is there really that much more gay sex going on in permissive societies? to the point of literally threatening levels of social reproduction? do you have any source which, all else being equal, shows a link between the repression or liberation of homosexuality to the birth rate?
homophobia today is fairly well understood. it’s got to do with a patriarchal construction of gender roles, which ensures men stay in control of the material structures of the family and society etc.
do we need extra hypotheses to explain homophobia in the past?
at the very least, such hypotheses would need to be strongly supported.
There’s also a general opposition to sexuality and focus on sexual purity throughout large parts of the Bible, which I’ve seen interpreted as a reaction to various fertility religions which were common in the ancient world.
As for homophobia as a patriarchal construction of gender roles: Greeks were famous for not being homophobic, but yet still managed to retain strong patriarchal gender roles.
fair point re sexual purity being used to distance christianity from pagan societies. in fairness Daniel M Ball seems to be making that same point in a lower post.
re Greek attitudes to homosexuality, it’s a bit more complicated than that i think. from memory there’s a notion that adult patrician manhood only admits of taking an active role in a relationship with a passive younger man or even teenager. it’s been a while since i read up on that and i’m shaky on the details now though, so i could be wrong
I’m catholic, but the way I was taught is that any rule against homosexuality in the bible was on the level of hygiene rules, or the story about Sodom and Gomorra, which was about a breach against the hospitality laws. It had nothing to do with the actual sexuality. That and Christ himself never said a thing about homosexuality, either for or against.
The Bible teaches that a lot of things are sins in the context of 2000+ years ago that we do every day. The Bible also teaches that a lot of things are fine in the context of 2000+ years ago that we find abhorrent today. If you can’t look at two men or two women who are in love, devoted to one other, who want to spend the rest of their lives together and raise a family together, and realize that that’s not the same wanton debauchery that the Bible marks as a sin, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Ultimately all sex outside of marriage is technically a sin. If you’re giving gay people a harder time about it than heterosexuals, or if you don’t count gay marriage but do count heterosexual marriage not performed in a Christian church, or if hets are fine as long as they don’t actually penetrate but gays aren’t even allowed to kiss, please realize that that’s not coming from God. That’s coming from biases in you. We all have biases, and all we can do is be aware of them and do our best to correct for them.
To say nothing of translation issues between multiple languages. I seem to recall a few years back some direct translations from the Ancient Aramaic bits they have ending up having some drastically different meanings from many modern versions.
… actually more than a few years ago. I believe it was something my mother-in-law told me about, she being very in to comparative religion, and she died the better part of a decade ago, so…
The current debate is whether a mistranslation was about a practice called “mentoring” in ye olde rome, where men had sex with boys to teach them manliness. The words are similar and could have been mistranslated and then the translation replicated, and generally it makes more sense that pedophilia was the actual target.
Then again, even if it’s properly translated, just like not eating pork, we understand cleanliness on an entirely different level than back then. Guy gets feces and gut bacteria on his dick, doesn’t wash hands, various diseases happen, people go “God doesn’t like men doing the do with men, noted.” It’s no longer a disease vector (and therefor not a sin), hasn’t been since hygiene standards happened.
Nope! None of it is open to interpretation! NONE! The correct reading is objectively discernible to all upon a plain reading, which just so happens to match all the modern political viewpoints and priorities of American political and social conservatism, by total coincidence and/or the pure righteousness of conservatives and/or the satanic vileness of everyone else. And that’s a LITERAL reading, mind you. All parts of it, read literally! The parables may be read as literally being parables, except when it’s convenient for the Christian Right for them to be completely literal as well.
I know you’re trying for satire, or is it parody? I always get those two confused…anyway, the tone of your post? the people who say that the loudest, tend to have the least exposure to the Bible itself, and the most exposure to ‘spiritual guides’ who are banging their preteen sons and daughters behind their backs. (Seriously, ‘youth pastor’ might as well be code for ‘likes ’em REAL young’) and don’t leave your wife alone with the preacher unless you want a kid who doesn’t look like you. (Isn’t stereotyping fun??)
being more serious, I’ve met Democrat christians and Republican Christians, and Liberal Christians and *(Polticially) conservative Christians, and they’re all bonkers, they’re all certain ‘their way’ is the right way, the only way, they’re almost as self-righteous as Atheists, and usually about as conversant in the faith.
Because that’s kind of the thing about Faith-it’s belief not only without evidence, but in spite of it. Thomas Aquineas was a rarity, most religious folks (regardless of which religion) tend to be of the unquestioning type once they have settled on a brand of invisible sky friend to worship.
Yeah, but there are significant differences in terms of harm done others on the basis of beliefs, and in terms of raw numbers and political clout. The bonkers lefty Christians are far fewer and far less problematic, to the point where it’s almost punching down. Taking a few jabs at the right wing fundiegelicals, though, that’s DEFINITELY punching up.
Dunno about that, ever hear of a guy named “Fred Phelps” out of Kansas? or an entire school of “Liberation Theology” in the Catholic church? People who mix God and Government tend to degrade the usefulness of both, and there’s plenty of it to go around, only real difference is which one’s getting newsprint this week.
Yeah I’m pretty sure Jesus hates most modern conservatives as much as he hates anyone. The hypocrites and abusers of loopholes in enforcement standards anyway.
The Old Testament was ambiguous at worst; basically, every instance pointed at as anti-gay was actually about something else. The Letters in the New Testament, though? It’s pretty direct.
It’s accepted now that Paul was a self-loathing homosexual, and that’s where that came from. Jesus healed gay people, in the story of the centurion and his “servant”.
When I’ve looked into this, as someone not that religious? It’s not really all that unclear. The Greek Septuagint – which the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest is older, not newer, than the Masoretic text (which is harder to interpret simply due to Biblical Hebrew being essentially dead outside a liturgical context even by Ezra’s day) – uses a word that can be (and sometimes is) calqued to “manbedder,” with a word for “bed” seldom used outside a sexual context. What’s more, according to extrabiblical texts, one of the passages in which this commandment appears enumerates forms of “whoredom,” one of the seven things forbidden to Noah, which according to tradition are the only laws that apply to non-Jews, which is why Paul relates them to the Greeks when he tells them they don’t need to be circumcised or keep kosher (although he does say they should drain their meat, and how many Christians do you know who do that).
Are you aware that the red in the meat package at the grocery store is actually red dye?
Americans, at least, really don’t like looking at gray meat unless it’s pork.
The letter (one. singular) in the new testament only points out that the ancient church of Rome had issues with gay people in Athens. It calls them out for hypocrisy but also treats it as a problem of nationalism, not sexuality.
No, the “open to interpretation” stuff is the sort of double-thinky nonsense you don’t actually need if you realize that the bible was just wriitten by a bunch of ignorant superstitious bigots. When they call something an abomination, and sentence you to death for doing it, it’s not open to interpretation that the bigoted writers of the bible hate homosexuality, ffs.
Keep the ‘open to interpretation” nonsense to the prople who still need to believe the bible is sonehow good and divinely inspired.
What is pretty clear though is that the various writers of the Bible spent an awful lot less time thinking about homosexuality than modern evangelical readers of the Bible do. Even when they condemned it, it was in passing. They were far more focused on other concerns. Many books don’t mention it at all.
I’d say it’s more open to interpretation when people who speak the language it was originally written in (because the English translations are imprecise at best – case in point, the word traditionally translated as ‘virgin’ as in ‘the mother of the messiah will be a virgin’ actually just means ‘young woman’. No mention of virginity – hell, she might even have kids pre-Messiah) are saying ‘Not sure that word means what translators think it means’.
Most modern translations start with the KJV as a source anyway. And that one is just chock full of pop culture references of the day. Shakespeare, other playwrights, that sort of thing. It reads like nobody who participated in the translation took it seriously at all.
actually, there were REAL reasons for a lot of the stuff there are NO reasons for now. For example, pork-it’s not good for you without modern cleaning and cooking methods. Look up “Trichinosis’ for some parasite laden hilarity, snake meat tends to contain toxins because snakes don’t process waste the way mammals do, and shellfish concentrate every pollutant in their environment in their meat. Hence, Kosher dietary law. same way with processing animal kills-blood rots before teh rest of the carcass, draining the carcass means your meat is safer to eat, longer.
where it hits with Homosexuality is that these were agrarian people, and marriage wasn’t about love, it was about reproduction and economics. You have two ways to staff your farm/handle your herd: method one, is have lots of kids and put them to work, method two involves raidign your neighbors for slaves. These are PRE MACHINE PEOPLE, without the kind of leisure modern civilization allows.
They were also the target for everey empire around them and spent more time under occupation AS slaves, than they did as a coherent religio-political entity. Persians, Greeks, and later Romans were all avid practicioners of homosexuality, so one method of maintaining cultural identity, which would NOT be put down savagely, was strict rules about who to bang, because it creates a difference that, unlike language, or politics, most occupiers won’t have a problem with (or may even treat as ‘quaint slave habits’). The people of Abraham managed to hold on to their culture in the face of multiple invasions, this includes a national identity even when they had no ‘nation’ to identify.
I always forget just how weird bible crap is since I’ve been away from it for so long. Firmament, golems, people turning into salt, and all sorts of other crap.
I am happy I’ve forgotten most of it, leaves more room in my brain for thinking about butts.
It’s not uniquely weird as far as mythological stuff goes.
It just seems weirder than the rest because you don’t tend to run into people who believe the things attested in like the Metamorphoses or the Eddas are things that happened exactly as described.
I only believe in the Goa’uld; they’re the only REAL gods to rule over us! (I’m sure they’ve forgotten all about that little rebellion/uprising thing 2,000 years or so ago.)
I was just a kid when my grandmother looked up the story of Balaam’s Ass for me. “What are you beating me for? I’m a good ass. I’ve always been a good ass.” “Asses get beaten. Ask anyone.”
Out of every single page of Joyce’s deconversion, I’m not sure I’ve ever resonated more deeply than this one. The doublethinky crap that I welcomed into my brain as literal, objective truth and used to make my decisions for YEARS just galls me more and more. Especially as I see those same doublethink tendencies being actively exploited by manipulative church leaders.
I think religious belief is kind of funny like that, and I say that as a practicing Catholic.
Like, if you try to force everything to fit exactly as written, with no interpretation or flex, then it all explodes the second you find a contradiction you can’t rationalize.
But if your faith is more flexible, understanding the LESSONS of the bible instead of trying to call it all historical fact, then your faith can easily survive stresses put upon it. It’s malleable, based on a few key points and a bunch of fluff meant to reinforce those key points.
Like, for Christianity in general you can narrow it down to: Jesus was God made flesh. He died as a way to show His great love for all of his children. He died for ALL OF HIS CHILDREN, so love all of them the same way he would.
Everything else is really non-essential. Just love and care for one another like he taught us to. That’s what it means to be Christian. As that with my belief structure, my faith can easily withstand challenges to it, because it doesn’t matter to me if some historical logic in the Bible is untrue.
What confused me the most at the time, and what frustrates me now, is how all the church leaders I knew would play Guerilla Warfare with the Bible. It was literal, objective truth and meant to inform modern day laws…UNTIL it contradicted itself or conflicted with observable scientific fact, and then suddenly they would retreat back to the safety of “well, it’s meant to be a metaphor, it’s the Mystery of Faith, God Works in Mysterious Ways.”
Ambiguity or figurative lessons I can handle: that would be a much more comprehensible faith system…but my “elders” always handled it like Schroedinger’s Testament: literal and objective fact, until it suddenly wasn’t.
You. I like you. Because this is how I practice my faith.
For starters, everything became a lot easier once I realized: “Wait, the Bible wasn’t written by God. It was written by people. So if I take it as the objective truth and treat it as handed down by God, I’d be breaking the First Commandment.”
Also yeah, if God is all-loving, then why would he make a group of people different and tell you to condemn them? So I ended up in a similar place to Becky. God isn’t wrong, but his so-called preachers sure as hell can be.
What’s more interesting from my atheistic point of view is that many of those differences and contradictions crept in because the different authors were teaching different lessons. Using variations on the stories to make their own points.
You can learn a lot about what was happening in the early Church thinking about it this way.
I grew up in a small town with an even smaller Jewish population, so my denomination was “if we piss anyone off we lose a minyan.” I credit that with my ability to be athiest/agnostic (depends on my mood) and still consider myself religious, because the takeaway was “you may not be doing things the same as the person next to you and that’s fine, we’re all figuring out how to make this work.”
My point being that doing stuff like that is basically encouraged by the government. Don’t want to pay taxes? Want to literally torture your neighbors kids? Just claim it’s your religion.
That’s in the Apocrypha, the Acts of Peter and Paul.
There’s actually dozens of scriptural texts titled Acts of so-and-so, but since only one was widely accepted as universally accurate-ish, it’s the only one that made the cut for the “canon”. That one’s called the Acts of the Apostles, and is generally just referred to as Acts. There’s an encounter between Simon Magus and Paul in that one, but it’s far more mundane. No talking dogs, and no one flies carried by demons, nor does anyone explode.
I don’t remember if I heard about the Council of Nicea before or after I’d given up on religion, but if it was before it was probably a major factor for me to say “Fuck this.”
Heh– yeah, for me it was the moment I realized “oh hey, both Matthew and Luke begin with Jesus’ family tree! And oh hey, they, like… don’t agree at all! Including on something as basic as who Joseph’s dad is!” (There’s a Shortpacked!strip where he’s amusingly tagged as “joseph son of jacob or heli,” the former being from Matthew and the latter from Luke.)
I also remember my (relatively sane) parents having to explain to me that yes, evolution is real, and I really shouldn’t try to take Genesis too literally. And that the stuff about gay people was best understood in… the context of the times, I guess (even when I believed that was a big turn-off). And that no, if Dad died, Mom wouldn’t have to marry my Uncle.
Unfortunately for them, my natural personality seems to be “continuity nerd,” and once I accept that continuity errors exist in something I tend to also accept that it is fictional.
Boy do I have some bad news for you about human cognition and memory, and subsequently any attempt to construct a coherent narrative about anything at all.
I mean, you’re right, but at the same time most people recounting their flawed memories don’t claim said memories to be the inerrant word of an omnipotent deity– who, being omnipotent, should really remember everything with complete accuracy.
Judas put a down payment on a field, then while he was stringing the barbed wire fence, he tripped and got it wrapped around his neck so hard his intestines exploded. Then the priests used the settlement from the lawsuit to pay off the rest of the mortgage.
More evidence for time travel since barbed wire was invented in 1867. Mortgages were invented in the 1930s by insurance companies as a way to take advantage of borrowers during the great depression. so I don’t know what to say.
Mortgages go back to the middle ages, evolving in the thirteenth century out of the gage in land. The Federal Housing Act of 1934 reformed the mortgage industry in the USA and produced the current preponderance of long-term fixed-rate mortgages, but it did not invent the mortgage.
Yeaaaaahhhhh, trying to make up in-universe explanations for lore having plot holes or inconsistencies is only fun if you know it’s a fandom thing and that the IRL explanation is ‘The author probably forgot’. When it comes to setting worldviews on reality, not so much.
Judas bought a field, tripped, fell, damaged himself and, in pain and apparent remorse, hanged himself. The priests then bought the field with his own money. It was a poor bargain as nothing will grow in the field to this day. And it was difficult to resell since of the ghost of Judas walks at night, replaying the hanging, groaning in pain as it swings at the end of a spectral rope, grabbing it’s intestines as they fall out.
Easy Peasy. For a slight fee, I can arrange a tour.
“Crap. My intestines exploded. Which means I’ll spend the next week dying of peritonitis. I’ll just hang myself now, trading 5 minutes of pain for a week of it. Go me.”
People should treat the bible like we do with comic books and manga. Just accept that there’s tons of rewrites. To be fair that’s kinda true. Some people only think certain parts of the Bible are Canon. And the fandom is really split on who’s the main character of it. Honestly the Time-skip really divided fans and the sequel they foreshadowed in the final chapter still hasn’t come out yet!
This amuses me greatly and I’m almost tempted to copy it to facebook. However I am certain that it would cause a bunch of arguments so maybe I shouldn’t.
I always wanted to read a comic book of the Bible done in the style of Jack Kirby, with the Technocosmic Jehovah using vast fleets of mind-bending cybernetic angels to create the solar system and the Earth.
From the orbiting biolab used to seed the Earth with Life, inside a clone bay Adam is being prepared for instillation into Eden. The creator installs a personality into the neural networks of the nascent and still unconscious being, a living mind in imitation of their own. A senior lab assistant, Lucifer, fears this is a dangerous idea, making Adam a threat, and secretly overwrites part of Adam’s personality with a copy of their own.
PARTS. Parts of the Bible wants you to hate gay people. That’s the parts put out when the Jewish religion did not have a state sponsor and was struggling to keep from dissolving. In those times everything that might hurt the odds that the Jewish faith might be short on followers or funds were listed as abominations. Working on the Sabbath instead of attending service? Abomination! A Jewish person might pursue a relationship that can’t make more Jewish babies? Abomination!
Then you get to the parts covering Jesus himself. Whether you believe he was or was not deity is one thing, but he probably actually existed and had followers. He also seemed pretty chill with so many that his religion labeled as sinners, lowlifes, and abominations, including a few stories that clearly were about gay people that he seemed pretty supportive of. If only his fan club read those parts instead of the Old Testament parts that they are support ignore now based on their own religion.
The centurion whose “beloved servant” Jesus healed for one, from memory. In the original text, pretty sure that guy wasn’t the centurion’s servant ifyouknowwhatImean.
If God existed, and contributed to the writing of the bible at all, via divine inspiration or anything else, you’d think God could actually simply say “homosexuality is okay” instead of having to depend on people 2000 years later having fanon what the beloved servant of a centurion was to the centurion.
Aelfwine, I’m agnostic. I was making a joke of it above, but in all seriousness, I slept like two hours last night, am moving houses today, and don’t have time for your edgy “all religions are evil and must be destroyed at any cost” spiel right now. Miss me with that, please and thank you.
Religions are lies. And religion, in the modern world, is one of the primary sources of societal oppression, destroying and tyrannizing millions if not billions of people
You can defend the value of tyrannical lies all you want, and feel free to call it “edginess” when someone hates tyrants and liars.
You completely miss the fact that if God DOESN’T exist, then that means the Bible was written by people, and is just another popular work of fiction like any other, imperfect and meant to be interpreted, just like literally all works of literature. It does not need to be taken completely literally and as 100% true and perfect or Godly/Divine to be valuable.
Not blaming it on Judaism. I said some decisions of what to put in scripture AT THE TIME were made by individual leaders for reasons that I suspect were logistical. The religion as a whole does not reflect these isolated texts, which could make them even more suspect.
I’m not convinced that Paul has any more authority than that of, say, C. S. Lewis.
I mean, he lived closer to when this was all happening, but he only met Jesus once that I know of, in a dream, while blind.
While persecuting Christians.
He didn’t even CLAIM to have any special authority. In first Corinthians, he admonishes the early church for picking sides and arguing over which of the early leaders was most right.
Then he goes on to re-establish a bunch of old laws, after Jesus had simplified the laws to “Love your god with your whole heart. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Everything else follows from that”.
From a historian’s perspective, having two accounts that differ but share core details actually means this story is *more* likely to have a historical core truth to it. The stories agree that the betrayal money was used to buy a field, that Judas was buried there after a gruesome death (gruesome deaths are a way of showing that somebody was a bad guy in the historic literature of the time, so the exact nature of the gruesome death is less than important), and that the field was subsequently used as a cemetary (I think that part is in both versions). Those core elements are probably accurate, except maybe the immediacy or level of gruesomeness of his death. It’s possible he died a more normal death and was just buried there. Jesus was a pretty big deal in his lifetime and his followers mostly stayed local and were quite committed, so these sorts of stories were remembered quite well. The gospels were written only a few decades after the crucifixion. Mark was most likely written before 70 CE.
I mean a lot of myths have multiple different versions that share core details. It’s less a sign of truth than it is a sign of divergent evolution, it implies a root story that both versions are derived from
General scholarly consensus is that most of the gospels we have were written based on the same story/tradition, at times using each other as reference (or versions closely related to each other). They are not some completely independant stories/tellings codified together.
You may have heard about the story of George Washington and the cherry tree (I cannot tell a lie). This story is fictional, and showed up only 6 years after Washington’s death.
If you’re working from individual descriptions of historical events, yes discrepancies can help highlight truth, but once things pass into legend, and that legend is passed down, all bets are off.
Heck, we se in this modern day people concocting stories about events that aren’t what happened, wanting to believe some narrative about something they find tragic. Are you so certain people were so different 2000 years ago?
There’s two versions for the gospels that go different directions. The more traditional one is called a Gospel Harmony and it does what Joyce is describing and tries to make it all fit. The other extreme is the Jesus Seminar and they just cut out all the things they decided didn’t happen and basically just left in the parts they liked best and cut out the parts that didn’t fit (either didn’t fit the story or didn’t fit their worldview).
There are certainly plenty of criticism to be made of the Jesus Seminar, but they at least attempted a more scholarly approach than “kept what they liked and cut what they didn’t”.
As for “Gospel Harmony”, I’ve long thought that one problem with Christianity is that people are generally introduced to it that way. Even if it’s not a formal harmony attempt, most of us are introduced to the gospel narrative as kids as if it’s one story. See the Picture Bible Willis occasionally references as a good example. Even outside of literalist churches, people usually have some kind of patched together narrative before they have a chance to delve into the differences.
I love me some historical jesus studies, but while they attempted a more scholarly approach than that, it’s what it basically boiled down to. They really really really wanted to be objective, but they basically just created a Jesus who thought just like they did. Not saying I can do any better, we just all have to recognize how our own biases influence our history and recognize that there’s no such thing as objective history.
Just say there’s a cannon multiverse, or maybe God STARTS with the 6-day creation thing, but then creates a branching timeline (backwards, so it’s an alternate history rather than an alternate future) so that we also have a ~14 billion year old universe as an ALSO true history.
…. I mean, yeah, if you have to resort to branching timelines to have your continuity make any sense at all, it’s well and truly borked, but at least it’s an option. ISN’T THAT RIGHT, LEGEND OF ZELDA???
Whatchou talking ’bout? OBVIOUSLY my chosen rationale for Biblical inerrancy in face of modern science must take precedence over modern science. Science is just man’s word, while the BIBLE is God’s word, and how you use observed reality to dispute my insane interpretation of what I believe (on the basis of no evidence whatsoever) to be the inerrant word of God?
In the backstory of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series* there was a big council that tried to mush all the galaxy’s major religions together which produced “The Orange Catholic Bible.” Of course schisms broke out immediately.
I get the feeling that Joyce spending time with Liz is what will finally make her muster up the courage to tell Becky she is over the whole religion thing
I’m hoping that Joyce doesn’t tip over to “actually all religion is trash and a made up story, if you believe in something I’m gonna tell you how nonsensical and stupid it is, you sheeple” kinda atheist.
Is that a thing? The tipping, I mean. I sort of assumed some people were simply arrogant about what they believe. But Joyce never has been…even believing what she was told was the inerrant word of God, she still worked at being respectful of other people.
Mary would probably tip over like that, because Mary’s beliefs were always about how much better Mary is than other people. (I don’t miss her.)
It happens. New atheists who have been traumatized by religion can get pretty angry. It took me a _long_ time to emotionally grasp that the Christians who screamed at me that I’d burn in hell for my sexuality, and nearly drove me to suicide, weren’t the only sort or even the majority. It’s been over 30 years, and I’m still not completely there.
I do still think that religion is, on balance, harmful. But I try really hard not to be a jerk about it. Often, I succeed.
I can understand seeing things that way, and I definitely don’t think that religious people are generally evil, or that every church is harmful on the whole. However, even the nicest, most open Christian church promulgates harmful teachings from my perspective: it teaches that there is a God and an afterlife, and a divine Jesus who performed miracles, and it teaches its parishioners to believe these things without rational justification.
It teaches people to treat the Bible as some sort of special book that’s privileged and wise, and to read it less critically than they should and to accept its narratives more readily than they ought. And there are some really awful things in there that no one ought to use as a moral guide.
There are those that are simply arrogant or cynical or being an edgelord about it, that’s more commonly the condescending typically white typically male kind of atheist though where they can’t just think they are right, they must force you to believe they are right too.
It can however also come from a place of hurt though from people who are angry because religion was used as an excuse to hurt them or for abuse or neglect. They usually mellow out again with some time to heal and recognise not all religious people are like the ones that hurt them even if they still do not like religion much.
Oh, hey an example: a person tells people that gay people will burn in hell, because that’s what his religion tells him. Should I speak up against it or no? Is it enough that I simply “think” that I’m right, or should I “force people” to also believe I’m right in my belief that gay people do NOT burn in hell for their homosexuality?
Religion DOES EVIL. It’s a bunch of lies, and usually they’re a bunch of bigoted lies as well.
Or an example: A church happily marries gay people and ordains both women and gay bishops, but is attacked because “Christians believe gay people burn in hell”
You could perhaps condemn the groups that do bad things, without condemning the groups that don’t.
There’s also the whole rational skeptic atheist anti-SJW/anti-woke movement, a good chunk of which went full on fascist, but I don’t condemn all atheists because of that either.
If you believe that it’s okay for religion to believe in the existence of hell or to believe in Gods, then by what criteria can you even tell them that they’re wrong when they say that gay people burn in hell?
How the HELL can you condemn such people who do bad things, if you don’t condemn the practice of faith in religion by itself?
Ah, you found some specific church which *coincidentally* does good thing, because they believe that their particular god ordered to do good things. How very *lucky*. It’s very fortunate for us that they didn’t happen to believe in a god that ordered them to do evil things.
Atheists are *correct in their atheism*. Religious people are *wrong* in their theism. The symmetry you are trying to project doesn’t work, because one side is wrong and sane, and the other side is *insane*, but sometimes are harmlessly insane, and other times are harmfully insane.
I used to belong to a church that had a “recovering Christian” group for all the former Fundies to get it out of their systems and also for the people hurt by the church to get that out of their systems. And some people were in both subgroups.
I’m hoping she does, because the evils and lies of religion (all religions) must be confronted and defeated.
American pseudo-progressives have made an alliance with the devil by refusing to condemn religion in its entirety as a bunch of lies that promotes ignorance, bigotry and oppression.
One of the things I hear from your message is “anyone who is religious is equally culpable of religion’s sins as religion is, itself”. Is that something you believe or have I made that up?
Personally, I believe that, for example, Becky’s faith in God does not hurt anyone, because she chooses to act not-hurtfully as a result of that action. Even though her religion has caused a lot of people, including Becky, a lot of harm, Becky =/= Christianity.
Also, I think it would hurt Becky if all religion was destroyed. I’m not sure if that is what you’re advocating for, but even if you say “Becky’s feelings matter much less than not encouraging an evil institution like religion”, or “less people would get hurt”, some people would still get hurt if we eliminated all religion. A LOT of people, actually.
And even more directly, if progressives demanded opposition to all religion and refused to ally with any religious people even where they agreed, they’d have far less power and influence than even the small amount they do now.
If you want to be completely irrelevant and give the far right even more dominance than they have, drive a wedge between liberal atheists and liberal religious people.
I feel kind of bemused by that argument because it is an argument for religious warfare. If you are responsible for the sins of your religion then the only possible response to evil done in its name is to destroy said religious members. That or cede your religion to the forces of evil. Which is probably not what the poster meant.
They seem to think that its better to give up religion than try to reform it or keep it from the hands of those who misuse it.
Personally, I think that religion on the whole does more good than harm, but that’s an opinion — I don’t think there’s really a way to measure that. I also think that it’s racist to condemn all religion without, like, studying the practices and beliefs of ALL religions first. But I wanted to communicate more with aelfwine. While I’m pretty sure I overall disagree with their pov I was curious if there was any common ground. Was guessing at beliefs they seemed to have to see if, within that belief, there was any interesting discourse we could get to? Idk. Anyway, basically I was posting a bunch of hypotheticals and seeing where I could get with that.
Yeaaaaaaah, same. The thing about Christianity being the dominant cultural paradigm in large parts of the world (and the specifically toxic brand that’s become dominant in American Christianity) is that it’s very easy for it to be The Idea of What Religion Is for a lot of people, especially those who grew up with it. And when you realize how toxic American Evangelicalism is, and how much harm Christianity’s managed to do in the name of conversion and colonialism (not that other big religions are immune there – anything that gets endorsement of the state is ultimately going to justify the state’s unsavory actions – but it has some of the most high profile successes,) it’s easy to say ‘well then Christianity is evil,’ and therefore if Christianity’s your only paradigm for religion, so is religion as a whole.
But should that still apply to the Christian who acknowledges the harm Christianity has done, but still thinks that the Jesus of the Gospels would support universal basic income and takes strength in their faith in that? Should it apply to a Jewish person who believes it is their religious DUTY to help others and serve their community, and that ‘goodness’ is not a quality but an action? Should it apply to a Muslim socialist who argues that socialism is not just compatible with their religion, but actively supported by the Quran? And this is just religions I know enough about to see how their principles can play into progressive politics, giving singular examples. Religion doesn’t HAVE to be evil, and it doesn’t have to be incompatible with ethical debate or science or social progressivism. It can always be used for evil, because people have the capacity to be right utter bastards and will justify their desire to do so with whatever they have handy, but a lot of people who genuinely live by the principles of their religions do so for good.
And a fair number of atheists, as discussed by thejeff upthread, whose idea of ‘rationalism’ causes them to be complete and utter assholes who think transgender people scientifically don’t exist, or women are scientifically inferior because faulty understanding of biology, or various other things and a decent chunk of them just went straight-out fascist. ANY philosophy can be used as a bludgeon.
“One of the things I hear from your message is “anyone who is religious is equally culpable of religion’s sins as religion is, itself”. Is that something you believe or have I made that up?
—
No, I don’t believe that. The very opposite, the people who are *honestly* religious, have merely been deceived by a great big lie, and they have my sympathy. They are victims.
I’m much angrier at the people who KNOW that religion is a big fat lie, but they think it’s supposedly good and perfectly okay for people to believe that lie, and that atheists are being “obnoxious” if they want to reduce the number of people deceived by that lie.
I find this absolutely hilarious. How are you condemning religion and faith while unironically (or at least, I THINK unironically) saying that people are ‘aligning themselves with the devil’ and ‘doing evil’.
She might for a bit before balancing out. It’s pretty common for baby atheists coming from some sort of fundamentalist background. Hopefully Becky could knock some sense into her of that is the case.
When I was a kid and thought I’d write the Great American Novel, one thing I wanted to whet my teeth on was writing a coherent account of Jesus’ life. So I started researching the exact details into a timeline I could turn into a narrative. How hard could it be?
Honestly I recall being brought up on the suicidal version of the story and believed there was something wrong with me when I felt so sorry for him. Like it seemed like everyone else didn’t care or even (though more rarely) were kind of… gleeful about it. It kind of made me sick, not with them even, but there was something wrong with *me* that it would affect me so deeply in a way which apparently wasn’t the norm and the idea of him now in hell now too was just awful. The line from Jesus that it would be better if he’d never been born seemed accurate in such a context and just…damn.
It was really that story as well as the Abraham/Issac story (I actually didn’t believe my parents would ever murder me, but that was in fact a bad thing (so would I condemn them to hell by my mere existence???). That caused me a lot of anxiety as you can probably imagine. Like I believed but God terrified me and while we were taught we should fear god, the fact things he did felt wrong made me wonder if something was deeply wrong with me. That perhaps I couldn’t trust my own conscience because it was clearly so out of sync with him.
Hell seems to be mostly a later development. Even in the Biblical writings most of the apparent references can equally be taken as just “destroyed” – “cast into the lake of fire”, for example.
The Isaac story is one of those that makes sense as a cultural tradition explaining why they (no longer) performed human sacrifice like many cultures around them did, than as something than an actual benevolent God would do.
Joyce really needed someone with whom she could express her anger! Let’s hope, for Liz, that doesn’t become the one and only topic of the conversation, because that would be really heavy to stand.
Was Joyce ever introduced to the notion that Judas could have only ever “sold” Jesus as hoping that Jesus would reveal to everyone his true nature through the power of a miracle or magical enlightenment, only to see Jesus being condemned and you can’t force the hand off God nor demand for miracle and he killed himself out of shame for his Hubris, preferring to flee than ask for forgiveness, or is that just a Catholic thing?
Mmmm, not really. The Torah, which is not for Gentiles, says boys should not stick their you-knows in another boy’s whatsis. Lesbians don’t get mentioned at all. And like I said… The. Torah. And. It’s. Laws. Are. For. Jews. Nobody. Else. Has. To. Follow. Them.
Well, except for the Noahide Laws. Stay away from murder, incest, adultery, robbery, idolatry, and certain very specific blasphemies. Support your local Court system. And oh yeah. Don’t tear a hunk off a living animal and eat it. Think you can handle all of that?
I think there’s no hell or hell-equivalent in the Jewish faith. If I understand correctly, they think that when you die you go wander about in… Gehenna?, which I think is just boring with nothing to do, for a bit, and then you go before a judge and say “I deserve to be together with god because I was a good jew” and then Ha-Satan (god’s prosecution lawyer) goes “Actually, they don’t because A, B, and C” and then you get judged and either you go join god or you wander about Gehenna? a bit more getting bored out of your metaphysical skull until your appeal comes through and you get rejudged, with all the time you spent being bored counting as penance.
No. There is little to no discussion of an afterlife of any sort in the Torah. Two mentions of eventually the dead being resurrected (in Danial and Isaiah) , but very flowery.
“Mmmm, not really. The Torah, which is not for Gentiles, says boys should not stick their you-knows in another boy’s whatsis. Lesbians don’t get mentioned at all. And like I said… The. Torah. And. It’s. Laws. Are. For. Jews. Nobody. Else. Has. To. Follow. Them.”
Well, that’s so very nice that Jews should only murderize Jews to death for homosexuality. /s.
That’s the excuse you give? You would tolerate a modern-day politician that said that American should murder other American for being gay, but that’s okay because non-American are excluded and so are lesbians?
Wow, what a great book to follow. What a great god to follow!
No actually. That’s EVIL. And at the end of it, non-evil people either have to doublethink their way into respecting the bible by bullshit justfications, or simply decide to reject it.
Dude, I am with you on religion being garbage, as a whole entire concept, but you should try to be more pragmatic in your arguments.
Yes, any faith-based belief is inherently inferior to just opening your fucking eyes and seeing the world as it is, evidence will always win out, but when you’re dealing with a global population that statistically relies on faith (I’m pretty sure there’s more people of every stripe of faith than atheists and agnostics and every other faithless group combined) over reason, bludgeoning people with that in the least respectful manner possible does not do enough good to be worth the catharsis of telling people they’re wrong, even when they are.
I’m sorry. What? “Any faith-based belief is inherently inferior”? Y’all need to check yourselves. I’m not even religious, but making some blanket statement like ‘all religion is inherently inferior’ is the exactly kind of thing that makes dogmatic religious people so obnoxious in the first place.
Faith is valuable for a million different reasons, there is no one way to do it, and people are perfectly capable of incorporating it into their lives along with common sense and basic decency. If you decide to throw an entire cultural tradition under the bus as ‘backwards’ and ‘lesser’ without any consideration for nuance, YOU’RE the bigoted one.
Miss me with this garbage. Nothing faith has ever done has needed it to be done. Not the evil, and certainly not the good. It’s great that people can make themselves feel better about a world that truly genuinely does not care about them, but without the people to actually step up and fucking help, no dogma or creed or oath means a damn thing.
Is it a good thing if a Christian houses a family or feeds a thousand? Absolutely. Would the cold and hungry have been better off if someone has just up and helped them because it is the right thing to do instead of waiting on someone else to tell them to help? Yes, they would have. Probably wouldn’t have had to deal with pamphlets espousing a non-falsifiable open-to-interpretation flavor of groupthink, if proselytizing is still a thing the “good” people of faith do.
Lemme correct that second sentence. Faith has never done anything. People who did or did not know better attributed their actions to their faith, but since God isn’t real, their actions fall on them and them alone.
geez you two are angry. which you probably have your own good reasons for, but you’re spouting your anger at a lot of people who have done nothing to deserve it.
“nothing faith has ever done has ever needed it to be done” is entirely as non-falsifiable a claim as any religious belief.
in my experience, religious people don’t typically attribute their actions to their faith. They are aware that they possess agency. Faith may give them courage, or peace of mind, or patience, or humour. Whether god objectively does or doesn’t exist doesn’t change that. Faith is just a fact of many people’s lives.
You know, maybe watch yourself before you spout things that basically amount to “Jews are Evil and Backwards”. Try thinking for more than five seconds.
Nowhere did Tsath say that because it is mentioned that you shouldn’t do X, that you therefore must MURDER people for doing it, or that it would be acceptable for a politician to write such a thing into law.
Stop conflating Jews and their faith with the christian bible or with the assumption that Jews treat the Torah in the same way that Christians do the new testament. Because they don’t. This entire comment is extremely ignorant, please stop and check yourself.
(And no, that doesn’t make discrimination against gay men okay. What I’m saying is that treating Jews and their faith as the same as the way Christians do makes the assumption that Jews would read that part of the Torah and accept it uncritically. WHICH THEY DON’T. And rejecting things within the Torah based on your own inner morals and logic does not inherently invalidate the entirety of the faith, because the faith is not based on accepting all that is written without question or thought.)
Hell, even assuming all Christians would read that part of the Bible and accept it uncritically is bullshit. Some use them as excuses to justify their own prejudices. Some are pushed to accept literal interpretations of some such passages. Others read different passages and come to different conclusions about the overall meaning. Not all Christians are literalists. It’s really just a loud minority.
One great thing about the Bible is that the contradictions don’t just exist in the details of the events – like the Judas example in this strip. They exist in the theology and the doctrine as well. Because the Bible is the product of many different authors with many different ideas and understandings of what was important and what it all meant.
You are ignorant of what you’re talking about. This is the verse that the guy excused:
“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”
And that’s according to him seemingly FINE, because it’s only about Jews putting other Jews to death.
Modern people who still think that the bible was divinely inspired, need to somehow doublethink a way into thinking that the plain meaning of the words doesn’t actually mean what it says.
How are the only two options for you that people either must accept what is written literally and without question, or “doublethink” to excuse it? It was a thing that was written in a context and time that is not our context and time, and should be read and interpreted as such.
Many Jews ascribe to the belief that our right and ability to interpret the Torah for ourselves is what is godly and divine. Even if an angel were to descend from heaven to tell us exactly what interpretation was ‘correct’, that angel’s words should be disregarded, because the Torah was given to us as a tool to hone our ability to guide ourselves, and isn’t in heaven anymore. (I’m not actually religious, but my jewish cultural heritage is very important to me.)
Also. Jews, in my experience, are encouraged to read the Torah in the *original Hebrew*, specifically to avoid this whole ‘oh, what does the plain meaning of the words say’? Which can be inherently distorted by translation.
You put vastly too much emphasis on the words of the holy text and not enough on the fact that the vast majority of the time, people just use the text to excuse bigotry and biases that they ALREADY HAVE. It’s just a cultural tool that people can use for good or ill, like literally anything else. If it’s not the bible, people will twist something else to add an air of authority to their shitty beliefs. Like The Constitution or fake science experts or literally just random conspiracy theories.
Oh, and lastly: Funny how you’re operating under some very Christian thought patterns here. That things are either Good or Evil, that if something is not Wholly Good it must be completely discarded and rejected. That if something isn’t perfect, absolutely nothing of value can be taken from it, and any attempt to is disingenuous (sacreligious, even. Lol).
Most atheists aren’t actually self-aware enough to realize they’re still Christian.
I’d tell them to open their eyes, but they’re in a rut with their pattern of thought and lecturing them isn’t actually gonna help. This is especially true when most of them are American and therefore inculturated with a colonialist POV on different traditions around the world (i.e., confidently stating that everyone who’s religious believes in a sky-daddy, even though about half of the instances of that around the world come from Society of Jesus missions providing the foundation for how we understand stuff).
There’s basically a lot you’d have to educate them on before they’re ready to admit they’re even slightly wrong, and most of them are so confident in their beliefs that they aren’t gonna go out to learn more.
Yeah, it came up in the comments a month or two back, too, and I failed to articulate that sentiment as well as you two just did (in no small part because I am a culturally Christian atheist who’s only started studying some non-Christian ethics and philosophy, so I can tell it IS inaccurate but don’t really have the tools to explain how or point elsewhere, at least not yet.) Especially since Christianity is so normalized in our culture that a lot of atheists don’t realize things like that absolutism are actually significantly Christian-flavored.
As long as you accept the non-existence of God, and the *wrongness* of religion, you’re completely free to accept the “good” parts of the bible, and throw the rest to the trashbin.
But that can only happen IF you accept the non-existence of God, and that the Bible was written by human authors, some of them nice people, and some of them genocidal monsters.
If you however believe the Bible was divinely inspired (or even dictated by god word for word in the case of the Torah), you don’t have that luxury of actually freely deciding with your own mind what is good in the bible, and what is fucking evil.
And yet, people do it all the time. Not everyone follows every word in the Bible and that’s what happens when you get a book with fifteen thousand contradictions in it. Some try to reconcile them and some just pick the messages that seem the best to them. And L-O-L at the idea that Jewish people don’t interpret and decide themselves what is or is not right in the Torah.
You know it just occurred to me that… what if the whole anti-gay thing is actually just based on hygiene? Like the whole sticking dick-in-ass thing. Middle Eastern faiths seem to be big on hygiene so maybe that’s what it was about…
you’re the second person today to suggest that. i’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong, but there seems to be a lot of effort invested here today in trying to find an alternative to a fairly straightforward explanation: a patriarchal power structure that relies on strict gender roles. that’s right, the same reason homophobia is still around today.
Eh, I just think it’s an interesting idea. Like, a lot of religious rules seem to be codification of wisdom and advice people collected over the millennia. Some sensible, some senseless.
Given that this was written months ago, it’s hilarious to me that I’m currently following a discussion of this very topic (Contradictions in the Christian New Testament) on Twitter. Judas and his hangsplosion double-death have definitely come up in the discussion.
I’m now imagining some Frank Spencer-esque masterpiece of physical comedy where Judas buys a field and a lovely new piece of rope only to trip, flail around wildly unbalanced, which somehow makes the rope into a noose, which he then accidentally hangs himself with.
And then his intestines explode.
Like 2 Samuel 1:26 – If God hates gays, why allows David to be one: “thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”?
I got the same feeling of Joyce, about it. That’s not the reason I gave up my faith, but it helped it a lot.
you’ve mentioned before that you are surrounded by deeply christian, maybe fundamentalist (?) people? that you have to hide your opinions on religion to them? and you said thankfully they don’t understand english right? lol. anyway just wanted to communicate my sympathies. i hope you’re doing ok.
Joyce is college-age me right here, except replace Judas exploding with me trying to make a timeline of the passion week that incorporates everything from all four gospels…
Welcome to a couple years of deciding who to come out to and decades of feeling really dumb for ever having believed that stuff Joyce. Or so I’ve heard.
absolutely…. it’s kind of humiliating to still have to put christian work places in my cv, i can’t wait to have enough significant jobs under my belt to be able to boot that crap out ;D
wow, iirc this is the first time that Joyce admits out loud that she no longer believes, in an affirmative way of “i’m so over this crap“. It took me very long to get to that stage, but i relate a lot!!
She’s definitely discussed things like it, particularly in dreams or discussing her crumbling faith with Dorothy (also, that bit last arc with Joe as she realized she didn’t actually have to believe the literalist fundamentist version of the Ark story she’d been taught, had a crisis realizing humans aren’t inherently special, but also found that NOT having to believe in creationism anymore was freeing.) But this one definitely feels like a floodgate opening, especially since she’s saying it loudly and in public.
I don’t really get the Judas bit. I mean Jesus knew he was going to betray him and the betrayal was necessary in order for the sacrifice to happen. Thus, wasn’t Judas fated to betray Jesus, as it was a part of Gods plan?
And if that is the case, isn’t it kinda mean to have him meet three different horrible ends after being required to betray his friend and the son of God?
I like the Last Temptation of Jesus Christ take, in which Jesus told Judas — in the film his most loyal friend — straight up that he was supposed to betray Jesus, and Judas was really broken up about it, but eventually gave in.
Technically Judas helped apprehend a wanted criminal. A traitor even. The crime was questioning and causing others to question the Emperor’s authoritaw.
The Bible was never meant to be taken literally, it was understood to be allegorical even at the time of writing. It’s only the American Evangelicals who are idiotic enough to believe everthing in the bible is 100% accurate.
Well, more accurately, taking it “literally” is basically a nuclear option in terms of theological debate. That’s what fundamentalism, of all kinds, is. It’s screaming, “I’m right; you’re wrong,” taking your toys, walking away, and sending in the armies behind you. If you study Islamic stuff, you’ll notice the same trend: people cherry-picking passages and taking them overly literally in order to win points for their viewpoint. A lot of what the West terms “jihadist” is precisely this behavior. There are probably good examples in other traditions, but I don’t know them.
The individual books of the Bible were certainly not written with literal belief in mind, and their compilation into scripture was absolutely not done with the expectation of literal belief. Alas, Martin Luther said that everyone can interpret it correctly until he realized what a giant clusterfuck he’d opened up and tried to walk it back, but too late.
Allegories aren’t literal. That’s the point. Just because someone dies in an allegory doesn’t mean they need to IRL. It depends what the allegory is meant to stand for.
This is why the notion of treating a collection of oral traditions written down decades later and then translated into a new language by humans with agendas as a factual history book is baffling. If nothing else, Acts and Matthew were written between 5 and 15 years apart by different authors from different Christian communities, both nearly a lifetime after the death of a historical Jesus. Ever play a game of telephone? Yeah, try playing it for FORTY-NINE YEARS and see how different the final product is…
So we have this god-like figure from the planet Krypton. His story has gone various ways, from being raised in an orphanage to raised by Kansas farmers, being a bit of a self-absorbed office jerk to being an adorkable guy in love with Lois to being an angsty super-dude who visited multiple 9-11s on Metropolis because he didn’t take the fight outside. His abilities range from being bulletproof and able to jump over tall buildings to being pretty much able to destroy the Earth if he wanted to. And we don’t get in much more than fan arguments over it all because we understand that he is fictional. Instead, we mostly just enjoy the stories.
They took his house and his garden
in the name of His Great Holiness.
And Judas started to play hide-and-seek
with his mirror and with his dignity.
Then God came, who giveth and taketh away,
and called a taxi, and his wife got in;
and Judas walked off into the night
to die of wine, women and fistfights.
Magdalene grabbed him by the jacket.
She lived in the slums, in the decay,
amid a commune of drunkards
who believed in a kingdom in the sky.
And there was love, and there was revolution,
and speeches in the street, and overflowing life.
But what Judas loved, more than any sermon,
were the sweet screams of Magdalene.
Then something terrible happened one evening.
Judas was caught and thrown in prison.
Jesus Christ had escaped among the people
and Judas said he knew nothing about it.
But when Magdalene came to visit,
he saw her sick and missing a tooth.
“Inspector”, he said, “it was Jesus Christ
who brought in all that opium from the East”.
And he went back to his lover with his spoils:
30 coins for seven shots of bitter, thanks, and a Marsala wine!
and then he saw a box office
bearing the sign of a big multiplex.
and it said, “The Passion of Jesus Christ!
A new, truly moving film!
With an exceptional cast!
Including God, the great, the omnipotent!”
The theatre is dark with people.
They admire the actors like stars in the sky,
and no one notices as between the rows of seats,
these two have started fucking.
“Magdalene, I love you so much!
He wanted heaven, but i want to stay here.
They killed him, oh well! in any case, back then,
he kept telling everyone that he would rise again.
But my only paradise is between your hips;
your sweet breasts for my tired eyes;
your red lips like candy to mine;
this earthly life is just too beautiful.”
From the screen, God saw them and raised his voice:
“I will strike you with lightning, Judas Iscariote!
My son is dying on the cross,
and all because of such a stupid mortal!”
Magdalene got up, then, and yelled passionately:
“You don’t scare me, God!
You who made a son without making love,
how would you understand this whole thing is a scam?
Leave Judas alone, and look somewhere else.
Here, look at my cleavage!
And I will keep away from your envy,
for God is incapable of enjoying like a creature.”
God ran off to heaven, and furiously
got started on a massive project
to build a mighty Holy See
that would silence Magdalene.
Judas and Magdalene are still together.
They move around incognito among the people.
They go to the river to make love
on a tiny boat that goes against the current.
The great irony of fundamentalism is the fact that it’s pretty much a relatively new phenomenon in Christianity and a product of the Renassiance. Before, they had the Catholic Church and various heresies all pretty much agree “The book is useful but it’s hardly the be end all of Christianity.” It was the introduction of the printing press and the populist idea of, “If you have the book, ya don’t NEED an education to understand all this.”
I further narrow the focus of the blame to U.S.-based Christianity, because a lot of the absolutely reality divergent harmful stuff was dreamed up here, and most of it relies on Biblical literalism.
…personally my credulity would be stretched by the stories with the talking animals, but you know, I’m just a guy that knows cartoons aren’t real so who am I huh?
Judas goes to a remote field and hangs himself from a tree, perhaps obscured from passers-by by other trees. Over time his body decomposes and his intestines explode. The rope also decomposes (no synthetics then) and his body falls to the ground, as if he had tripped. Some time after that his body is discovered.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader what the priests did or did not do with his money and/or the field.
Or, how the doctrine of Biblical literalism drives people out of Christianity, in a nutshell.
Meanwhile over in Lukewarm Mainline Land, we were directed to bring an extra Bible to class and mark it up with colored highlighters to reveal the multiple narratives that were used, in parallel, with nobody worrying their heads about making them all agree, to compose the book of Genesis. And! This did not disprove our religion! Because the doctrine of Biblical literalism is bullshit.
Why should it need to be proved or disproved? That’s not what it’s about. If I want things proved, that’s what mathematics is about. The scientific method is never going to let me run experiments to tell me what the decent thing to do is.
(I’m going to run a blind test to see if killing my neighbor and taking his wife works out well. I wonder how large a sample set I’ll need to be statistically significant.]
The question does not apply, because science and faith run along parallel tracks. Attempting to apply the rules of absolute provable literal material factuality to something that was not formulated with any of that in mind (example: the aforementioned parallel and contradictory narratives of the Beginning, which were all accepted by the composers of the Bible) is as silly as fundamentalists’ accusation that people who believe in scientific rationality must therefore hate religion and simultaneously venerate scientists and consider them to be infallible.
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TECHNICALLY the Bible doesn’t give a shit what you do, it’s just a dubious compilation of anecdotes
And it’s not like it’s the BOOK’S fault. The book was just PAPER, all bright-eyed and eager, showing up at the plant EXCITED for its big day, its DESTINY…
**comes in after watching a 2+ hour long video on Stargate SG1 that delves into how the last two seasons discussed, among other things, using the (intentional) misinterpretation of scripture to justify horrific actions.**
Indeed.
The last 2 seasons have their issues but I will always appreciate them for their thinly-veiled critique of the dangers of biblical fundamentalism.
You should check out Ladyknightthebrave’s video on SG1 (the video I mentioned above). It’s good stuff.
Also Laura Crone’s video on the Swan Princess Sequels – it contains a surprisingly in-depth and thoughtful discussion of biblical interpretation.
The brave lady knight had me convinced to watch all her videos when I stumbled upon her M*A*S*H essay, I can thoroughly recommend her!
it’s just a dubious compilation of anecdotes
The various books of the bible are lots of things written by lots of people with different viewpoints over a long period of time for a variety of reasons. Not all of them were ever intended to be read as literal history, and those that were range in… well, in probable historical accuracy.
I’m not sure that any of them were written as literal history. Not in anything like the way we think of history at least.
The Gospels in particular were clearly written to promote the author’s own take on not only the events, but on the meanings behind them. Different competing ideas in early Christianity.
Some of the OT books such as Kings, Judges, Corinthians seem like at least an attempt was made at a historical account rather than some sort of propaganda nobody was going to read because copying books was expensive back then. 🤷♀️
Corinthians is in the New Testament. it was definitely meant to be read and widely circulated, at least, you know, in 1st century Corinth.
“Chronicles” maybe?
Generally, Kings and Judges are considered part of the Deuteronomistic school. Written (or heavily edited out of earlier works) during the period of the Babylonian Exile, hundreds of years after most of the events. Largely for explicitly propagandic purposes. To justify their faith and identity despite the Exile and to explain God’s purpose behind their troubles.
Individual people don’t have to have copies to read when it’s made part of the priestly tradition. Priests can read it and spread it as part of the religious teachings.
“Chronicles” maybe?
ah yes, maybe.
I mean TECHNICALLY TECHNICALLY, the bible only says “don’t sleep with men in the same way you sleep with women” (Levi) and “look I get you have issues with gay people but seriously you’re being such hypocrites that you’re condemning yourselves and your followers to hell so just stop” (the entire book of romans in summary)
And that’s the whole list of everything the bible has to say about gay couples. Now if we want to look at the hundreds of verses about why men shouldn’t sleep with women, it starts to look like god actually encourages gay sex in the levi verse.
I find your summary of Romans to be much easier to read than Romans. I have sufficient difficulty deciphering Romans that I cannot judge the accuracy of the summary, however.
Technically I think that’s actually about threesomes and paternity. Or something. Original translation being about two guys sleeping together in a woman’s bed. So it could literally be “Dudes, that’s her space, go to your own bed!”
The only other time being gay comes up IIRC, is with that guy who is in love with his slave and Jesus is all like “Dude, if you love him then why is he still your slave?”
TECHNICALLY… If that’s true then Leviticus might mean “Men and women have different needs. Women need (and like) foreplay. Don’t go straight to hammer time.” Or it might mean “Women can get pregnant. Maybe think about that before sexy times.” Or it might mean “Women have emotions. Hang around and cuddle a bit. Don’t just offer a high-five and doze off. And it wouldn’t hurt to get up early and make her breakfast instead of bailing. Looking at you, Zebulon.”
“Also I have no idea what a cubit is, and I’m afraid to ask!”
It’s the length of your forearm.
That would just confuse Joyce-during-her-fundie-period more, because she’s fairly petite, but someone like Joe or Ethan has much longer arms, but then again people were generally smaller thousands of years ago, but oh no, acknowledging that might point to evolution so what’s the official cubit?!
i don’t think the difference in average height between modern humans and biblical humans, if any, has much to do with evolution, and everything to do with dietary and medical improvements. 6000 years, or about 25,000 generations, is not a whole lot on the evolutionary time scale.
related, i once met someone with a graduated ruler tattooed on his forearm. i thought that was pretty neat
Adam Savage got one too, in both metric and US customary units.
Isn’t the current consensus that “anatomically modern humans” emerged roughly 100- to 200-thousand years ago?
it’s actually a really complicated question.
it depends where you draw the line, really.
our species, homo sapiens, is considered to have evolved around 300k years ago from H. heidelbergensis. possibly the line as to when that transition took place is when H. neanderthalensis split off; it’s still arbitrary, though, and i’m sure anthropaleontologists disagree about every part of this ^^
still, the overall human population is regarded as a single species by all and any biological criteria because we’ve interbred enough until recently enough that we’re all very, very similar genetically (it bears repeating that the most genetic diversity is found within Africa)
if i remember right, the human gene pool was basically united until about 70k years ago, which is around the time of the second major human expansion out of Africa. that means at least 70k years for some human divergence within human evolution. Besides, different modern populations have varying levels of DNA from other human species (mostly Neanderthals and Denisovans); either from different levels of interbreeding, or from different selective pressures to keep or lose that hybrid DNA.
So anyway, evolution continued within the H. sapiens stock, and another subdivision i’ve seen is early vs. post-glacial human, in terms of skeletal build. later humans are supposed to be more gracile, earlier ones slightly more heavy-built. i’m not sure which populations we’re talking about though, European probably?
it’s also alleged that there’s been an observed diminishing of our braincase volume over the last 10 to 20k years (SciAm article)
the Caucasian body type seems to have appeared about 20k years ago.
lactose digestion in adults was selected for in populations that domesticated cattle during the neolithic revolution starting ~10k years ago.
and some claim to have discovered evolutionary effects in human populations having happened over more recent time spans than that, like adaptations for underwater fishing in the Sama-Bajau people of Southeast Asia that would have had to occur in the last couple millenia. It’s pretty fascinating, they found that members of this group have enlarged spleens, which helps store haemoglobin in the blood longer while freediving; they found the same effect in members of the population who didn’t dive, which indicates it’s genetic, and not the effect of constant training from childhood.
i’m not sure what that any of that says about the possible genetic component of height, and i should’ve said that while 6000 years is not a lot, it’s also not nothing in evolutionary terms; some evolution may have been observed over that amount of time. It just seems likely to me that environmental factors would have a much more visible impact.
…anyway i looked up Adam Savage’s tattoo. nice! yeah that’s the idea! except why not the entire forearm?
Yes.
But how do you get 25000 generations of humans in just 6000 years?
lol! by commenting before i’ve had any coffee apparently!
i don’t even know how i got that figure. i calculate 25 years to a generation so i guess that’s where the 25 comes from. (maybe it’s closer to 20 years on average? idk) anyway what i meant to type was 240 generations. thanks for the catch
It should probably be closer to 300 generations, as people historically started families earlier than they do today. Sure, not all of them, but even today we have people starting families anywhere between around 13 and 52 years of age. And even with those extreme ranges, there’s probably some outliers on either side that I missed. I just went with the ages of people I actually have met when they started their families.
by your logic, why would 20 years old be the average generation span then? the midway point between 13 and 52 is 32.5
i’m sure there’s been scholarly work into guesstimating what the average generation rate has been for earlier times in human history. it might even be below 20 for all i know!
Actually, those dietary and medical advancements ARE evolution in action, it’s our adaptation to the environment around us and our adaptation to it. Physical evolution is just one piece of the whole. We weren’t around to see the behavioral or even intellectual adaptations extinct species made.
sure, that’s one way to look at it. but a creationist would find that a lot less challenging to their worldview. i assume. not that Doctor Who’s comment was meant to be taken THAT seriously.
I’d say the dietary and medical advancements are the result of evolution. But to be evolution, they’d need to be represented in the offspring without being handed them by the existing population – and that doesn’t happen.
Not yet, anyway. We will probably get there some day, if we survive what we’re currently doing to our planet and ourselves on a global scale.
there’s a case to be made that culturally-transmitted characteristics such as knowledge and behaviour are as much a part of evolution as genes. What’s special about genetic units of transmission that doesn’t also apply to cultural units, unless we specifically restrict the definition of evolution to exclude them? they exhibit inheritance, modification, and can be selectively advantageous or disadvantageous.
but yeah, it is an unorthodox view.
I’d have thought that 6000 years would be more like 300 generations, assuming each generation occupies a 20 year gap.
yep. mea culpa. my brain was not switched on
A cubit can be anywhere between 18-22 inches; I do not think that there is any officially recognized standard length, for a cubit.
Probably as official as Yard or Foot was, and varying from principality to principality and cloth merchant to cloth merchant.
This is the only reason I don’t like SI, besides the order of the letters in the name.
The Meter Just Happens to be a close approximation of a PARISIAN YARD. There were many other yards even just in France, and they chose the one used in PARIS specifically. The Meter was DEFINED AS, (old definition, long defunct), one ten-thousandth the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, passing through Paris, which means the Meter was defined as roughly one forty-thousandth of a polar circumference. This is a VERY awkward “natural measurement”. Had they gone with the Cubit, which historically ranges VERY broadly, from the Macedonian Cubit of about 14 inches up to the Roman Cubit of about 47 inches, they could have chosen 1/50,000th, at about 31.50 inches, or 1/100,000th, at about 15.75 inches., which is also close to one of old definitions of a Pace. Both of which would have fit better into their supposed “natural measure” scheme than does the, now offical, Meter.
Does not compute.
If a meter is one ten-thousandth of the distance from the pole to the equator, that makes that distance 10,000 meters or 10 Kilometers (just over 6 miles).
I’m too lazy to look up the correct definition, but you have obviously mis-remembered it.
they meant ten-millionth.
Thank you. Yes. I “Meant” ten-millionth in that remembered it wrong, and regurgitated my faulty memory without doing any gut check.
The definition was one ten-millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator.
See if God had asked one of the Nephilim to build the Ark, it would have been much bigger because of the size of a giant cubit, and more kinds would fit and we would still have unicorns
What I find funny is how the ark actually does work…
…But only the local area would have flooded that much. And for many back then, the local area was the entire world. So to them, that’s two of every animal. It makes a LOT more sense looking at it through those eyes, for sure. Some crazed farmer shoving all his animals onto a large boat along with some wild animals, then holy shit actual floods come wtf!?
But does a circle with diameter 3 have a circumference of 10?
“Lets see, a cubit…I used to know what a cubit was.
Well don’t worry about that, Doctor_Who, just build me an Ark.”
Maybe even an Ark… in Space?
Though I dunno, the idea that homo sapiens is “an inventive, invincible species” is probably the sort of thing that Old Testament God would kill us all over again for thinking.
Just hope it’s not a B Ark.
There have been several iterations. We’re now on ‘Q’.
Is a B Ark worse than a B Ite?
I’m afraid it’s all B Ark, no B Ite.
Well, sending off the B Ark would be fine… as long as we don’t succumb to a telephone-borne virus like our ancestors. Sadly I’d be on it.
The tips of your fingers extended, to your elbow. About 18 inches, or half a yard. Your milage may vary. See store for details.
I forget if it was here or on Twitter, but I got into a conversation about the cubit as it related to Roman bread and Galasso’s sammich offerings. This must have happened at least a year or two ago. It turns out the Romans and the Hebrews used different lengths of cubits. Got very confusing.
Here is the most scientific and relevant data on a cubit
as pertains to the bible.
That is easy, it’s the quantum computing equivalent of a bit.
Cubit is an English word subbed in for the original Hebrew word, because no one knows what that word meant. Thus people who build arcs? Don’t know what they’re doing.
“Riiiight! What’s a cubit?”
(Old Bill Cosby bit about Noah. From way back in the day when the Cos was more funny and less rapey.)
Exactly where my mind went as well. I grew up listening to all his albums. He had some great routines: 59th St Bridge, Frankenstein, Noah, 200MPH, etc. And then it turns out he’s a turd of a human.
But the bits didn’t get any less funny.
While I can’t speak to this example in particular, knowing someone is a monstrous human being will stain the works they made
It might not ruin them completely (I still really like Firefly & Buffy) but it will diminish them
Yeah. That was one of my favorite skits of his, and I can’t enjoy it nearly as much as I used to.
In fairness, while Whedon was obviously integral to their BEING a Buffy, I think primarily of the actors when I think of it.
… And the characters when I think of Harry Potter, which is slightly more problematic, and there is a chance her Trans* urghness was creeping in with Rita Skeeter, and there’s a decent amount of fat-shaming going on in those books, but OTHERWISE they’re a tale about friendship, loyalty, love, working out your principles and sticking to them, valuing compassion…
But yeah, not watched anything with Depp in since the whole Amber Heard thing…
As other comments are showing it’s really going to vary. For example I simply can’t enjoy HP since it’s author is literally using the platform she gained from it as the head of a hate movement that has had a huge cultural negative impact in my country on, well… my people. Any positive feelings there are massively overwhelmed by the negative.
My closest friend (who is also one of that particular group of “my people”) basically is able to divorce the pleasure found in the books and films from the author, while recognising what she’s done and how awful it is. And I think that last bit is important- if you’re able to still appreciate something without supporting the awful people and while recognising how they’re awful and the harm they’ve done, that’s valid and fine. And honestly, for me personally, enviable.
I used to be a Harry Potter fan, but these days about the only HP-related thing I can get any enjoyment out of is My Immortal.
Jason, I appreciate this nicely nuanced summary of the whole dilemma of good, or at least somewhat good, media produced by terrible people.
“The Chicken Heart was kept alive in a fluid of half alcohol, half human blood.
One day a careless janitor knocked it over.”, or word to that effect.
I’d love to be able to hear his stuff again without knowing it was his.
Yeah, I liked his sitcom years ago. Rewatching it now just isn’t the same.
I used to get myself through anxiety at the dentist by reciting his bit on dentists to myself while I sat in the chair. Can’t do that anymore. I remember the routine, but then I think about the man who wrote it and it doesn’t make me laugh a bit and relax.
Um… I’m pretty sure he was being just as rapey *then*. The above is just from before it was _known_.
It’s the same measuring length as a Maderaka.
I think you mean a Madaraka, about a foot an a half.
I know what I said. Maderaka.
The scholars of that time misspelled his name.
Cubit is the Early Modern English spelling of qubit, which is why it’s in KJV. Playing games with quantum mechanics was the only way to fit all the species into the ark.
— Source: Some irreverent with a Computer Science degree.
Isn’t the bible wanting you to hate gays kind of open to interpretation like most of it is?
Yeah but the interpretation of the bible foisted onto Joyce was extremely specific about it, so Joyce had to accept it as inerrant fact like everything else.
Yeah, this sort of snap from extreme faith to extreme anti-faith seems to be relatively common with ex-fundies specifically, from what I’ve seen— biblical literalism requires you to do massive mental gymnastics to justify all the inherent contradictions, so if a single domino falls, the whole thing collapses.
And once one thing is proven wrong, then everything is wrong. Especially the flood story, everyone and thing would have suffocated by the end of three weeks because it was a terrible boat and the only way to keep it afloat was to make it almost airtight.
This is the best I’ve seen this phenomenon explained yet.
Matthew 18:6.
Someone’s got some ‘splaining to do.
I thought that was Ricky Ricardo
I did borrow the phrase from “I Love Lucy”.
Matthey 18:6
If anyone should cause one of these little ones to stumble in their faith, it would be better that they had a millstone hung around their neck and be cast into the sea.
And are we casting the ones who caused the stuble, or the little ones into the sea?
And it sounds like the stress inherent in fervently believing contradictory things may have been contributing to Joyce’s anxiety – constant exhausting background mental gymnastics needed to hold her world together…
The Bible (at least, my version of it) treats the ACT of homosexuality as a sin, and to detest the sin as you would detest ALL sin, but to love the SINNER so long as they were repentant.
Now, several millennia later, we are being told that what WAS a sin is NO LONGER a sin, merely an ‘alternative lifestyle’, if you will. And I think THAT is what is driving a lot of Joyce’s confusion and questioning.
“Love the sinner hate the sin” is still calling people sinful and thus hellworthy and is ultimately kind of a shitty attitude, honestly. Like AT BEST and with the most charitable possible read it comes across as super PA, whatever the actual intent might be.
oh my god this is the worst gravatar i’ve been cursed for my hubris
Eh, coulda been worse, like Mary, Mike, or Tall Rachel.
Not sure I agree with that.
Like, I’m Catholic, and how I was always taught was “Sin is bad, but we’re ALL sinners, so don’t act like your sin is somehow less bad than somebody elses. It’s all bad in the eyes of God, so forgive them as you’d want Him to forgive you.”
Basically, don’t be a dick because we all know you’ve got plenty of skeletons in your closet and you wouldn’t like being judged for them either. Acknowledge it is sin, but then remember we’re all the same and it’s not our place to judge anybody elses soul. God called dibs on that.
Even the most soft-soap sugar-coated version is still basically saying homosexuality is immoral. And more and more these days, a lot of us are saying, “actually, no it’s not”.
Jesus never said a word about homosexuality, and it certainly existed in His time. There are lots of old ‘Laws’ from the Old Testament that we don’t care about anymore. The homosexuality bit is just a dumb thing to be hung up on, personally.
If you don’t want to marry homosexuals in a Church? Fine, that’s your right. Just leave them alone.
See this is how I was taught too. I still disagree with it because I realized a lot of people find it insulting. But I appreciate the honesty and attempt at understanding behind this attitude, even if it isn’t perfect.
Honestly, that’s always been one of my fundamental issues with Christianity (and Catholicism in particular, what with Original Sin)… It just seems to completely discard out of hand all the good people are capable of. Like literally the ONLY way to redeem our souls and count as a decent person is to accept that somebody else died for “our” sins, thousands of years ago? There is NO other way to live a good life in which we do more good than harm?! Babies are born STAINED WITH EVIL?
And somebody else’s brutal death is the key to making everything OK… But Judas was bad?
Jesus himself? Sounds like an awesome guy. His teachings re: judge not lest ye be judged, showing human compassion to others, not treating religion as a giant profit wheel (again HELLO ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH), treating everybody as equally worthy..? Hard to argue with that.
But yeah no. Babies are not born stained with the sin of eating a frickin’ apple (or fig). Bible actually SAYS people shouldn’t be judged for their father’s sins.
well, yeah, it does. “all the good people are capable of”? that’s just God working through them. people aren’t good, people are sinful. only God is good.
Which is one of the things we’ve clearly seen Joyce struggling with per the Rich Mullins dream, once the Biblical literalism started to crumble.
We were actually discussing the ethical contradictions inherent in Calvinism in my household last week. (Long story.) If there’s no free will and everything is predestined, then how does one justify punishing people for actions they did not, in fact, choose to do? Hell, with that in mind, how do you justify rewarding the ‘good’ ones if they were never CHOOSING to be good in the first place? One of those philosophies that has largely (though by no means entirely) faded since, but there’s still enough fingerprints of it in modern American Christianity and UGH I hate it.
The old joke that Catholic Guilt is about everything wrong you’ve done, and Jewish Guilt is about everything right you didn’t do.
That’s how I was taught as a Catholic, too. It’s definitely the correct way to go through life; the version of Christianity that vibes with me the best is as a support group. We all fall short of doing the right thing, we’re all flawed, so we should come together and help each other, even when we fall.
It doesn’t quite work with homosexuality, though, because being gay isn’t actually bad. It’s like being left-handed in that it’s different and therefore breaks against conformists, but that difference isn’t actually a sin. When you use “hate the sin, love the sinner” on a gay person, you’re carving off a central part of them, just like if you called a person using their left hand for things a sin.
in a sense, you’re underthinking the business here. “GO forth, multiply and be fruitful” doesn’t work if you’re trying to multiply with someome that has the same bits you do. I mean, outside of some pretty kinky porn memes., anyway, and you have to remember that you’re discussing the god not of machinists and engineers, but of farmers. Agrarian societies needed manpower, either through reproduction or going out and enslaving the neighbors. Marriage at the time the bible was written had nothing to do with romantic love, and everything to do with reproduction and economics.
How do you think they got more Spartans in Sparta? because remember, those guys were encouraged to get freaky with other dudes, as with the Sacred Band of Thebes-but they still needed recruits and they werent’ taking them through the recruiting office, so someone had to do the deed the old fashioned way with the women, and it was likely managed the same way they bred cattle.
Much of the Bible’s forbiddance of homosexuality dates from encounters with Hellenizers, so there was also a cultural thing going on there-not emulating the latest conquerors oppressing the people of Israel, whom were pretty avidly horny fellows and not averse to other fellows to scratch that itch. (Romans OR Greeks, or for that matter Persians, Babylonians…)
so there were a lot of sociological reasons for that that don’t apply in the modern world, but it wasn’t JUST irrational condemnation, it was preserving a culture that spent more time invaded and conquered, than free.
but did that actually make a difference? is there really that much more gay sex going on in permissive societies? to the point of literally threatening levels of social reproduction? do you have any source which, all else being equal, shows a link between the repression or liberation of homosexuality to the birth rate?
homophobia today is fairly well understood. it’s got to do with a patriarchal construction of gender roles, which ensures men stay in control of the material structures of the family and society etc.
do we need extra hypotheses to explain homophobia in the past?
at the very least, such hypotheses would need to be strongly supported.
There’s also a general opposition to sexuality and focus on sexual purity throughout large parts of the Bible, which I’ve seen interpreted as a reaction to various fertility religions which were common in the ancient world.
As for homophobia as a patriarchal construction of gender roles: Greeks were famous for not being homophobic, but yet still managed to retain strong patriarchal gender roles.
fair point re sexual purity being used to distance christianity from pagan societies. in fairness Daniel M Ball seems to be making that same point in a lower post.
re Greek attitudes to homosexuality, it’s a bit more complicated than that i think. from memory there’s a notion that adult patrician manhood only admits of taking an active role in a relationship with a passive younger man or even teenager. it’s been a while since i read up on that and i’m shaky on the details now though, so i could be wrong
I’m catholic, but the way I was taught is that any rule against homosexuality in the bible was on the level of hygiene rules, or the story about Sodom and Gomorra, which was about a breach against the hospitality laws. It had nothing to do with the actual sexuality. That and Christ himself never said a thing about homosexuality, either for or against.
This is how I learned it, like that section was the rules for getting on the Honor Roll or w/e, didn’t mean you couldn’t still graduate if you weren’t
The Bible teaches that a lot of things are sins in the context of 2000+ years ago that we do every day. The Bible also teaches that a lot of things are fine in the context of 2000+ years ago that we find abhorrent today. If you can’t look at two men or two women who are in love, devoted to one other, who want to spend the rest of their lives together and raise a family together, and realize that that’s not the same wanton debauchery that the Bible marks as a sin, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Ultimately all sex outside of marriage is technically a sin. If you’re giving gay people a harder time about it than heterosexuals, or if you don’t count gay marriage but do count heterosexual marriage not performed in a Christian church, or if hets are fine as long as they don’t actually penetrate but gays aren’t even allowed to kiss, please realize that that’s not coming from God. That’s coming from biases in you. We all have biases, and all we can do is be aware of them and do our best to correct for them.
Acts 10:11-15, 28
To say nothing of translation issues between multiple languages. I seem to recall a few years back some direct translations from the Ancient Aramaic bits they have ending up having some drastically different meanings from many modern versions.
… actually more than a few years ago. I believe it was something my mother-in-law told me about, she being very in to comparative religion, and she died the better part of a decade ago, so…
The current debate is whether a mistranslation was about a practice called “mentoring” in ye olde rome, where men had sex with boys to teach them manliness. The words are similar and could have been mistranslated and then the translation replicated, and generally it makes more sense that pedophilia was the actual target.
Then again, even if it’s properly translated, just like not eating pork, we understand cleanliness on an entirely different level than back then. Guy gets feces and gut bacteria on his dick, doesn’t wash hands, various diseases happen, people go “God doesn’t like men doing the do with men, noted.” It’s no longer a disease vector (and therefor not a sin), hasn’t been since hygiene standards happened.
Nope! None of it is open to interpretation! NONE! The correct reading is objectively discernible to all upon a plain reading, which just so happens to match all the modern political viewpoints and priorities of American political and social conservatism, by total coincidence and/or the pure righteousness of conservatives and/or the satanic vileness of everyone else. And that’s a LITERAL reading, mind you. All parts of it, read literally! The parables may be read as literally being parables, except when it’s convenient for the Christian Right for them to be completely literal as well.
I know you’re trying for satire, or is it parody? I always get those two confused…anyway, the tone of your post? the people who say that the loudest, tend to have the least exposure to the Bible itself, and the most exposure to ‘spiritual guides’ who are banging their preteen sons and daughters behind their backs. (Seriously, ‘youth pastor’ might as well be code for ‘likes ’em REAL young’) and don’t leave your wife alone with the preacher unless you want a kid who doesn’t look like you. (Isn’t stereotyping fun??)
being more serious, I’ve met Democrat christians and Republican Christians, and Liberal Christians and *(Polticially) conservative Christians, and they’re all bonkers, they’re all certain ‘their way’ is the right way, the only way, they’re almost as self-righteous as Atheists, and usually about as conversant in the faith.
Because that’s kind of the thing about Faith-it’s belief not only without evidence, but in spite of it. Thomas Aquineas was a rarity, most religious folks (regardless of which religion) tend to be of the unquestioning type once they have settled on a brand of invisible sky friend to worship.
Yeah, but there are significant differences in terms of harm done others on the basis of beliefs, and in terms of raw numbers and political clout. The bonkers lefty Christians are far fewer and far less problematic, to the point where it’s almost punching down. Taking a few jabs at the right wing fundiegelicals, though, that’s DEFINITELY punching up.
Dunno about that, ever hear of a guy named “Fred Phelps” out of Kansas? or an entire school of “Liberation Theology” in the Catholic church? People who mix God and Government tend to degrade the usefulness of both, and there’s plenty of it to go around, only real difference is which one’s getting newsprint this week.
Yeah I’m pretty sure Jesus hates most modern conservatives as much as he hates anyone. The hypocrites and abusers of loopholes in enforcement standards anyway.
If Jesus ever met a Prosperity Gospel type, I’m pretty sure he would be moved to actual violence.
There would definitely be whipping and/or table-flipping involved, IMO.
I. Want. To Upvote. This.
The Old Testament was ambiguous at worst; basically, every instance pointed at as anti-gay was actually about something else. The Letters in the New Testament, though? It’s pretty direct.
It’s accepted now that Paul was a self-loathing homosexual, and that’s where that came from. Jesus healed gay people, in the story of the centurion and his “servant”.
When I’ve looked into this, as someone not that religious? It’s not really all that unclear. The Greek Septuagint – which the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest is older, not newer, than the Masoretic text (which is harder to interpret simply due to Biblical Hebrew being essentially dead outside a liturgical context even by Ezra’s day) – uses a word that can be (and sometimes is) calqued to “manbedder,” with a word for “bed” seldom used outside a sexual context. What’s more, according to extrabiblical texts, one of the passages in which this commandment appears enumerates forms of “whoredom,” one of the seven things forbidden to Noah, which according to tradition are the only laws that apply to non-Jews, which is why Paul relates them to the Greeks when he tells them they don’t need to be circumcised or keep kosher (although he does say they should drain their meat, and how many Christians do you know who do that).
Are you aware that the red in the meat package at the grocery store is actually red dye?
Americans, at least, really don’t like looking at gray meat unless it’s pork.
The letter (one. singular) in the new testament only points out that the ancient church of Rome had issues with gay people in Athens. It calls them out for hypocrisy but also treats it as a problem of nationalism, not sexuality.
Yeah, the Bible is pretty much open to any interpretation as long as you end hating gay people.
No, the “open to interpretation” stuff is the sort of double-thinky nonsense you don’t actually need if you realize that the bible was just wriitten by a bunch of ignorant superstitious bigots. When they call something an abomination, and sentence you to death for doing it, it’s not open to interpretation that the bigoted writers of the bible hate homosexuality, ffs.
Keep the ‘open to interpretation” nonsense to the prople who still need to believe the bible is sonehow good and divinely inspired.
What is pretty clear though is that the various writers of the Bible spent an awful lot less time thinking about homosexuality than modern evangelical readers of the Bible do. Even when they condemned it, it was in passing. They were far more focused on other concerns. Many books don’t mention it at all.
I’d say it’s more open to interpretation when people who speak the language it was originally written in (because the English translations are imprecise at best – case in point, the word traditionally translated as ‘virgin’ as in ‘the mother of the messiah will be a virgin’ actually just means ‘young woman’. No mention of virginity – hell, she might even have kids pre-Messiah) are saying ‘Not sure that word means what translators think it means’.
Most modern translations start with the KJV as a source anyway. And that one is just chock full of pop culture references of the day. Shakespeare, other playwrights, that sort of thing. It reads like nobody who participated in the translation took it seriously at all.
actually, there were REAL reasons for a lot of the stuff there are NO reasons for now. For example, pork-it’s not good for you without modern cleaning and cooking methods. Look up “Trichinosis’ for some parasite laden hilarity, snake meat tends to contain toxins because snakes don’t process waste the way mammals do, and shellfish concentrate every pollutant in their environment in their meat. Hence, Kosher dietary law. same way with processing animal kills-blood rots before teh rest of the carcass, draining the carcass means your meat is safer to eat, longer.
where it hits with Homosexuality is that these were agrarian people, and marriage wasn’t about love, it was about reproduction and economics. You have two ways to staff your farm/handle your herd: method one, is have lots of kids and put them to work, method two involves raidign your neighbors for slaves. These are PRE MACHINE PEOPLE, without the kind of leisure modern civilization allows.
They were also the target for everey empire around them and spent more time under occupation AS slaves, than they did as a coherent religio-political entity. Persians, Greeks, and later Romans were all avid practicioners of homosexuality, so one method of maintaining cultural identity, which would NOT be put down savagely, was strict rules about who to bang, because it creates a difference that, unlike language, or politics, most occupiers won’t have a problem with (or may even treat as ‘quaint slave habits’). The people of Abraham managed to hold on to their culture in the face of multiple invasions, this includes a national identity even when they had no ‘nation’ to identify.
It’s not god, it’s economics and politics.
both. both is bad
I love that Joyce is talking openly to someone about this, like this.
Yes. It’s so good to see her vent instead of holding it in.
I’m kinda expecting Becky to walk around a corner and hear her.
Oh god please no
I see this as an absolute win.
I always forget just how weird bible crap is since I’ve been away from it for so long. Firmament, golems, people turning into salt, and all sorts of other crap.
I am happy I’ve forgotten most of it, leaves more room in my brain for thinking about butts.
It’s not uniquely weird as far as mythological stuff goes.
It just seems weirder than the rest because you don’t tend to run into people who believe the things attested in like the Metamorphoses or the Eddas are things that happened exactly as described.
I only believe in the Goa’uld; they’re the only REAL gods to rule over us! (I’m sure they’ve forgotten all about that little rebellion/uprising thing 2,000 years or so ago.)
I was just a kid when my grandmother looked up the story of Balaam’s Ass for me. “What are you beating me for? I’m a good ass. I’ve always been a good ass.” “Asses get beaten. Ask anyone.”
I can think about the Bible and butts. Proof positive my brain has a few too many clock cycles to spare.
If you drop the brain cycles devoted to the Bible, you could add Thighs into your rotation, those are fun to think about too!
Legs are pretty great.
Careful, that way lies
Chickweed Lanemadness.On the subject of thinking about butts: Don’t forget that the Bible also contains a talking ass.
Not that notable. The Internet has plenty.
Technically golems aren’t in the Bible. They’re folklore from the Talmud onward.
Well, (one version of) the Genesis creation has God forming Adam from dust (or I think some translations have it as clay) and breathing life into him.
So, yes. Golem.
That’s from the Talmud. A bunch of rabbis waxing poetic/philosophical about the Tanakh does not make it part of the Tanakh.
But it does get it into the Christian Bible, apparently.
Oh yeah, there’s so much stuff in the Bible that’s just plain weird and messed up.
Out of every single page of Joyce’s deconversion, I’m not sure I’ve ever resonated more deeply than this one. The doublethinky crap that I welcomed into my brain as literal, objective truth and used to make my decisions for YEARS just galls me more and more. Especially as I see those same doublethink tendencies being actively exploited by manipulative church leaders.
I think religious belief is kind of funny like that, and I say that as a practicing Catholic.
Like, if you try to force everything to fit exactly as written, with no interpretation or flex, then it all explodes the second you find a contradiction you can’t rationalize.
But if your faith is more flexible, understanding the LESSONS of the bible instead of trying to call it all historical fact, then your faith can easily survive stresses put upon it. It’s malleable, based on a few key points and a bunch of fluff meant to reinforce those key points.
Like, for Christianity in general you can narrow it down to: Jesus was God made flesh. He died as a way to show His great love for all of his children. He died for ALL OF HIS CHILDREN, so love all of them the same way he would.
Everything else is really non-essential. Just love and care for one another like he taught us to. That’s what it means to be Christian. As that with my belief structure, my faith can easily withstand challenges to it, because it doesn’t matter to me if some historical logic in the Bible is untrue.
Thanks for engaging.
What confused me the most at the time, and what frustrates me now, is how all the church leaders I knew would play Guerilla Warfare with the Bible. It was literal, objective truth and meant to inform modern day laws…UNTIL it contradicted itself or conflicted with observable scientific fact, and then suddenly they would retreat back to the safety of “well, it’s meant to be a metaphor, it’s the Mystery of Faith, God Works in Mysterious Ways.”
Ambiguity or figurative lessons I can handle: that would be a much more comprehensible faith system…but my “elders” always handled it like Schroedinger’s Testament: literal and objective fact, until it suddenly wasn’t.
Just going to say “Schroedinger’s Testament” made me crack up for a solid five minutes. Absolutely brilliant.
You. I like you. Because this is how I practice my faith.
For starters, everything became a lot easier once I realized: “Wait, the Bible wasn’t written by God. It was written by people. So if I take it as the objective truth and treat it as handed down by God, I’d be breaking the First Commandment.”
Also yeah, if God is all-loving, then why would he make a group of people different and tell you to condemn them? So I ended up in a similar place to Becky. God isn’t wrong, but his so-called preachers sure as hell can be.
Yeah. A thing being completely inflexible sounds strong, but put it under pressure and it can’t bend, so it breaks
What’s more interesting from my atheistic point of view is that many of those differences and contradictions crept in because the different authors were teaching different lessons. Using variations on the stories to make their own points.
You can learn a lot about what was happening in the early Church thinking about it this way.
I grew up in a small town with an even smaller Jewish population, so my denomination was “if we piss anyone off we lose a minyan.” I credit that with my ability to be athiest/agnostic (depends on my mood) and still consider myself religious, because the takeaway was “you may not be doing things the same as the person next to you and that’s fine, we’re all figuring out how to make this work.”
That shit with manipulative church leaders is so real. I’m dealing with one right now. I almost went on one throat preach last sunday.
The thing is. In the US at least, nothing is illegal as long as enough people claim that their religion demands it.
My point being that doing stuff like that is basically encouraged by the government. Don’t want to pay taxes? Want to literally torture your neighbors kids? Just claim it’s your religion.
Isn’t ACTS also where Simon Magus and Peter have a Miracle off?
Including Talking Dogs, Bringing the Dead back to Life like a Necromancer, amongst other such things?
That’s in the Apocrypha, the Acts of Peter and Paul.
There’s actually dozens of scriptural texts titled Acts of so-and-so, but since only one was widely accepted as universally accurate-ish, it’s the only one that made the cut for the “canon”. That one’s called the Acts of the Apostles, and is generally just referred to as Acts. There’s an encounter between Simon Magus and Paul in that one, but it’s far more mundane. No talking dogs, and no one flies carried by demons, nor does anyone explode.
The Apocrypha gets all the good stuff.
I don’t remember if I heard about the Council of Nicea before or after I’d given up on religion, but if it was before it was probably a major factor for me to say “Fuck this.”
Heh– yeah, for me it was the moment I realized “oh hey, both Matthew and Luke begin with Jesus’ family tree! And oh hey, they, like… don’t agree at all! Including on something as basic as who Joseph’s dad is!” (There’s a Shortpacked! strip where he’s amusingly tagged as “joseph son of jacob or heli,” the former being from Matthew and the latter from Luke.)
I also remember my (relatively sane) parents having to explain to me that yes, evolution is real, and I really shouldn’t try to take Genesis too literally. And that the stuff about gay people was best understood in… the context of the times, I guess (even when I believed that was a big turn-off). And that no, if Dad died, Mom wouldn’t have to marry my Uncle.
Unfortunately for them, my natural personality seems to be “continuity nerd,” and once I accept that continuity errors exist in something I tend to also accept that it is fictional.
Boy do I have some bad news for you about human cognition and memory, and subsequently any attempt to construct a coherent narrative about anything at all.
I mean, you’re right, but at the same time most people recounting their flawed memories don’t claim said memories to be the inerrant word of an omnipotent deity– who, being omnipotent, should really remember everything with complete accuracy.
I would think that’s the advantage of being omnipotent; you don’t have to remember anything. You can just know it again when you need to.
And if you remember it differently, you just change things so they match what you remember.
Well, you know what they say about “the very powerful and the very stupid”…
Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat?
Ah, but his omnipotence limited to only things that are true? That’s the real question.
My takeaway from this is gonna be that Jacob and Heli were gay married
Or maybe they were brothers and one of them died and the other one married the widow and it wasn’t quite clear who was Jospeh’s dad?
I hear you, Joyce. I sometimes have trouble reconciling different Batman stories. An equally momentous problem.
I mean, once you take the Bible to be fictional, it’s basically the exact same problem.
Damn Retcons!
Less people have died over Batman stories.
Give it time.
thats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEiPCkLQzhg
take on the Phantom Stranger
Just remember that DC has a whole bunch of canon AU’s, and then assume there’s a multiverse of multiverses. That simple.
….. A MULTIVERSE OF MULTIVERSES CAN TOO FIT THE (chosen for convenience) DEFINITION OF SIMPLE!
I didn’t think it was possible, but you’ve found the maximally munificent hypothesis. I sit in awe.
Judas put a down payment on a field, then while he was stringing the barbed wire fence, he tripped and got it wrapped around his neck so hard his intestines exploded. Then the priests used the settlement from the lawsuit to pay off the rest of the mortgage.
More evidence for time travel since barbed wire was invented in 1867. Mortgages were invented in the 1930s by insurance companies as a way to take advantage of borrowers during the great depression. so I don’t know what to say.
Otherwise it sounds plausible.
Mortgages go back to the middle ages, evolving in the thirteenth century out of the gage in land. The Federal Housing Act of 1934 reformed the mortgage industry in the USA and produced the current preponderance of long-term fixed-rate mortgages, but it did not invent the mortgage.
Obviously it’s a metaphor.
But what’s it a metaphor for?
Um…uh….Faith
Metaphorically I guess it could be something like… leave something useful for future people when you die?
But I prefer a more literal take: betray the Lord and he shall smite you and a field will be purchased. That is all. No further explanation.
I only just now realize how your religious background molded you into the perfect wiki caretaker.
As long as Ethan doesn’t get involved
Yeaaaaahhhhh, trying to make up in-universe explanations for lore having plot holes or inconsistencies is only fun if you know it’s a fandom thing and that the IRL explanation is ‘The author probably forgot’. When it comes to setting worldviews on reality, not so much.
That’s it, Joyce, let it out.
I don’t know; a challenge is always fun.
Judas bought a field, tripped, fell, damaged himself and, in pain and apparent remorse, hanged himself. The priests then bought the field with his own money. It was a poor bargain as nothing will grow in the field to this day. And it was difficult to resell since of the ghost of Judas walks at night, replaying the hanging, groaning in pain as it swings at the end of a spectral rope, grabbing it’s intestines as they fall out.
Easy Peasy. For a slight fee, I can arrange a tour.
“Crap. My intestines exploded. Which means I’ll spend the next week dying of peritonitis. I’ll just hang myself now, trading 5 minutes of pain for a week of it. Go me.”
I feel like Joyce has been holding this rant in for a while now
People should treat the bible like we do with comic books and manga. Just accept that there’s tons of rewrites. To be fair that’s kinda true. Some people only think certain parts of the Bible are Canon. And the fandom is really split on who’s the main character of it. Honestly the Time-skip really divided fans and the sequel they foreshadowed in the final chapter still hasn’t come out yet!
This amuses me greatly and I’m almost tempted to copy it to facebook. However I am certain that it would cause a bunch of arguments so maybe I shouldn’t.
The only real difference is that fandom argues over pieces of fiction written by flawed, mortal men
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/fandom/
I always wanted to read a comic book of the Bible done in the style of Jack Kirby, with the Technocosmic Jehovah using vast fleets of mind-bending cybernetic angels to create the solar system and the Earth.
I want to read the bible as drawn by Hirohiko Araki. Jessua’s Bizzare Adventure.
Isn’t that just Steel Ball Run
Naw SBL is the sequel to the bible.
SBR*
From the orbiting biolab used to seed the Earth with Life, inside a clone bay Adam is being prepared for instillation into Eden. The creator installs a personality into the neural networks of the nascent and still unconscious being, a living mind in imitation of their own. A senior lab assistant, Lucifer, fears this is a dangerous idea, making Adam a threat, and secretly overwrites part of Adam’s personality with a copy of their own.
By the time we reach Revelations, the artwork goes into overdrive, featuring page after page of two page spreads.
Spoiler for the movie “Spriggan:”*
Noah’s Ark was an alien seedship that planet life on Earth back when.
Spriggans is the name people in the organization that keep that a secret, sorta like the Men In Black.
*Nothing to do with the SF works of Lawrence Watt Evans.
Does that make the Council of Nicaea the first comics convention?
This but unironically.
Hating gay people is not great.
Or like the prophet once said…
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/pit/
You know, that makes me wonder if we’ll ever see her old roommate again. Likely not, but that’d be an interesting call back.
She’s appeared in the Patreon comics at least once or twice.
Excuse me, how is Becky part of the regular cast back in 2014, she just arrived. She’s the new character.
PARTS. Parts of the Bible wants you to hate gay people. That’s the parts put out when the Jewish religion did not have a state sponsor and was struggling to keep from dissolving. In those times everything that might hurt the odds that the Jewish faith might be short on followers or funds were listed as abominations. Working on the Sabbath instead of attending service? Abomination! A Jewish person might pursue a relationship that can’t make more Jewish babies? Abomination!
Then you get to the parts covering Jesus himself. Whether you believe he was or was not deity is one thing, but he probably actually existed and had followers. He also seemed pretty chill with so many that his religion labeled as sinners, lowlifes, and abominations, including a few stories that clearly were about gay people that he seemed pretty supportive of. If only his fan club read those parts instead of the Old Testament parts that they are support ignore now based on their own religion.
Which stories are those supportive of gay people?
The centurion whose “beloved servant” Jesus healed for one, from memory. In the original text, pretty sure that guy wasn’t the centurion’s servant ifyouknowwhatImean.
If God existed, and contributed to the writing of the bible at all, via divine inspiration or anything else, you’d think God could actually simply say “homosexuality is okay” instead of having to depend on people 2000 years later having fanon what the beloved servant of a centurion was to the centurion.
These are excuses a 1000 years after the fact.
Aelfwine, I’m agnostic. I was making a joke of it above, but in all seriousness, I slept like two hours last night, am moving houses today, and don’t have time for your edgy “all religions are evil and must be destroyed at any cost” spiel right now. Miss me with that, please and thank you.
Religions are lies. And religion, in the modern world, is one of the primary sources of societal oppression, destroying and tyrannizing millions if not billions of people
You can defend the value of tyrannical lies all you want, and feel free to call it “edginess” when someone hates tyrants and liars.
You can defend the value of tyrannical lies all you want, and feel free to call it “edginess” when someone hates tyrants and liars.
Well with the context of your other comments, with all due respect, fuck that. I don’t think we have anything more to say to each other.
You completely miss the fact that if God DOESN’T exist, then that means the Bible was written by people, and is just another popular work of fiction like any other, imperfect and meant to be interpreted, just like literally all works of literature. It does not need to be taken completely literally and as 100% true and perfect or Godly/Divine to be valuable.
that’s even true if God exists, and moreover that’s how many or most believers treat their holy books anyway.
Please don’t blame this on Judaism. There is a lot of debate among Jewish scholars on if the Torah actually cares about homosexuality at *all.*
https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1276272329325248512?s=19
Not blaming it on Judaism. I said some decisions of what to put in scripture AT THE TIME were made by individual leaders for reasons that I suspect were logistical. The religion as a whole does not reflect these isolated texts, which could make them even more suspect.
If it was JUST the old testament then you’d get a whole lot of people just saying “old covenant” and ignoring it.
There’s also that bit in Romans that you will on rare occasion hear EVERY TIME IT COMES UP with the religious-bigotry crowd.
I’m not convinced that Paul has any more authority than that of, say, C. S. Lewis.
I mean, he lived closer to when this was all happening, but he only met Jesus once that I know of, in a dream, while blind.
While persecuting Christians.
He didn’t even CLAIM to have any special authority. In first Corinthians, he admonishes the early church for picking sides and arguing over which of the early leaders was most right.
Then he goes on to re-establish a bunch of old laws, after Jesus had simplified the laws to “Love your god with your whole heart. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Everything else follows from that”.
According to other people who hadn’t known Jesus and lived farther from him than Paul did, of course.
Whatever Paul’s authority, his letters are the oldest Christian documents we have and the best look at what the early days of the Church were like.
From a historian’s perspective, having two accounts that differ but share core details actually means this story is *more* likely to have a historical core truth to it. The stories agree that the betrayal money was used to buy a field, that Judas was buried there after a gruesome death (gruesome deaths are a way of showing that somebody was a bad guy in the historic literature of the time, so the exact nature of the gruesome death is less than important), and that the field was subsequently used as a cemetary (I think that part is in both versions). Those core elements are probably accurate, except maybe the immediacy or level of gruesomeness of his death. It’s possible he died a more normal death and was just buried there. Jesus was a pretty big deal in his lifetime and his followers mostly stayed local and were quite committed, so these sorts of stories were remembered quite well. The gospels were written only a few decades after the crucifixion. Mark was most likely written before 70 CE.
Jesus had a gruesome death…
I mean a lot of myths have multiple different versions that share core details. It’s less a sign of truth than it is a sign of divergent evolution, it implies a root story that both versions are derived from
At the very least though, having two accounts that differ but share core details isn’t evidence the whole thing is made up.
It’s evidence that the whole work is not divinely inspired literal truth, but it’s not evidence that it’s all fiction.
Thag put it well.
General scholarly consensus is that most of the gospels we have were written based on the same story/tradition, at times using each other as reference (or versions closely related to each other). They are not some completely independant stories/tellings codified together.
You may have heard about the story of George Washington and the cherry tree (I cannot tell a lie). This story is fictional, and showed up only 6 years after Washington’s death.
If you’re working from individual descriptions of historical events, yes discrepancies can help highlight truth, but once things pass into legend, and that legend is passed down, all bets are off.
Heck, we se in this modern day people concocting stories about events that aren’t what happened, wanting to believe some narrative about something they find tragic. Are you so certain people were so different 2000 years ago?
I would love to see a united Bibleverse that attempts spectacularly to bring all these contradictory accounts together.
Has that been done?
Surely that’s been done and I’m just an idiot, right?
There’s two versions for the gospels that go different directions. The more traditional one is called a Gospel Harmony and it does what Joyce is describing and tries to make it all fit. The other extreme is the Jesus Seminar and they just cut out all the things they decided didn’t happen and basically just left in the parts they liked best and cut out the parts that didn’t fit (either didn’t fit the story or didn’t fit their worldview).
There are certainly plenty of criticism to be made of the Jesus Seminar, but they at least attempted a more scholarly approach than “kept what they liked and cut what they didn’t”.
As for “Gospel Harmony”, I’ve long thought that one problem with Christianity is that people are generally introduced to it that way. Even if it’s not a formal harmony attempt, most of us are introduced to the gospel narrative as kids as if it’s one story. See the Picture Bible Willis occasionally references as a good example. Even outside of literalist churches, people usually have some kind of patched together narrative before they have a chance to delve into the differences.
I love me some historical jesus studies, but while they attempted a more scholarly approach than that, it’s what it basically boiled down to. They really really really wanted to be objective, but they basically just created a Jesus who thought just like they did. Not saying I can do any better, we just all have to recognize how our own biases influence our history and recognize that there’s no such thing as objective history.
Just say there’s a cannon multiverse, or maybe God STARTS with the 6-day creation thing, but then creates a branching timeline (backwards, so it’s an alternate history rather than an alternate future) so that we also have a ~14 billion year old universe as an ALSO true history.
…. I mean, yeah, if you have to resort to branching timelines to have your continuity make any sense at all, it’s well and truly borked, but at least it’s an option. ISN’T THAT RIGHT, LEGEND OF ZELDA???
I hate to tell you that quantum mechanics works both directions in time.
Well, no. I actually enjoyed it a little.
Summing over histories is one of those things where when you get it you are gobsmacked for thirty seconds and then giggle.
Unless of course, you can manage to cling to Copenhagen fundamentalism and ignore the meaning of what you are doing.
Which is what my sophomore physics lecturer did.
Whatchou talking ’bout? OBVIOUSLY my chosen rationale for Biblical inerrancy in face of modern science must take precedence over modern science. Science is just man’s word, while the BIBLE is God’s word, and how you use observed reality to dispute my insane interpretation of what I believe (on the basis of no evidence whatsoever) to be the inerrant word of God?
……..
Dammit, how does one satirize any of this?
In the backstory of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series* there was a big council that tried to mush all the galaxy’s major religions together which produced “The Orange Catholic Bible.” Of course schisms broke out immediately.
* New movie out now, or soon!
I get the feeling that Joyce spending time with Liz is what will finally make her muster up the courage to tell Becky she is over the whole religion thing
Oh great so Becky can now treat Liz like she treats Dorothy. Hopefully Liz will nip that sort of thing in the bud right away.
I’m hoping that Joyce doesn’t tip over to “actually all religion is trash and a made up story, if you believe in something I’m gonna tell you how nonsensical and stupid it is, you sheeple” kinda atheist.
Is that a thing? The tipping, I mean. I sort of assumed some people were simply arrogant about what they believe. But Joyce never has been…even believing what she was told was the inerrant word of God, she still worked at being respectful of other people.
Mary would probably tip over like that, because Mary’s beliefs were always about how much better Mary is than other people. (I don’t miss her.)
It happens. Not with all atheist deconverts, and I don’t think with most of them, but it happens.
But even then, most of them are attacking the religion, and perhaps the concept of believing on faith, far more than the people.
It happens. New atheists who have been traumatized by religion can get pretty angry. It took me a _long_ time to emotionally grasp that the Christians who screamed at me that I’d burn in hell for my sexuality, and nearly drove me to suicide, weren’t the only sort or even the majority. It’s been over 30 years, and I’m still not completely there.
I do still think that religion is, on balance, harmful. But I try really hard not to be a jerk about it. Often, I succeed.
I believe religion is a good thing but only if the religion teaches good things. Why is that so hard?
I can understand seeing things that way, and I definitely don’t think that religious people are generally evil, or that every church is harmful on the whole. However, even the nicest, most open Christian church promulgates harmful teachings from my perspective: it teaches that there is a God and an afterlife, and a divine Jesus who performed miracles, and it teaches its parishioners to believe these things without rational justification.
It teaches people to treat the Bible as some sort of special book that’s privileged and wise, and to read it less critically than they should and to accept its narratives more readily than they ought. And there are some really awful things in there that no one ought to use as a moral guide.
There are those that are simply arrogant or cynical or being an edgelord about it, that’s more commonly the condescending typically white typically male kind of atheist though where they can’t just think they are right, they must force you to believe they are right too.
It can however also come from a place of hurt though from people who are angry because religion was used as an excuse to hurt them or for abuse or neglect. They usually mellow out again with some time to heal and recognise not all religious people are like the ones that hurt them even if they still do not like religion much.
Oh, hey an example: a person tells people that gay people will burn in hell, because that’s what his religion tells him. Should I speak up against it or no? Is it enough that I simply “think” that I’m right, or should I “force people” to also believe I’m right in my belief that gay people do NOT burn in hell for their homosexuality?
Religion DOES EVIL. It’s a bunch of lies, and usually they’re a bunch of bigoted lies as well.
Or an example: A church happily marries gay people and ordains both women and gay bishops, but is attacked because “Christians believe gay people burn in hell”
You could perhaps condemn the groups that do bad things, without condemning the groups that don’t.
There’s also the whole rational skeptic atheist anti-SJW/anti-woke movement, a good chunk of which went full on fascist, but I don’t condemn all atheists because of that either.
If you believe that it’s okay for religion to believe in the existence of hell or to believe in Gods, then by what criteria can you even tell them that they’re wrong when they say that gay people burn in hell?
How the HELL can you condemn such people who do bad things, if you don’t condemn the practice of faith in religion by itself?
Ah, you found some specific church which *coincidentally* does good thing, because they believe that their particular god ordered to do good things. How very *lucky*. It’s very fortunate for us that they didn’t happen to believe in a god that ordered them to do evil things.
Atheists are *correct in their atheism*. Religious people are *wrong* in their theism. The symmetry you are trying to project doesn’t work, because one side is wrong and sane, and the other side is *insane*, but sometimes are harmlessly insane, and other times are harmfully insane.
You are exactly one of those obnoxious atheists.
Thank you very much. I am VERY glad to be one of those obnoxious atheists who speak out against the evil of religion.
I used to belong to a church that had a “recovering Christian” group for all the former Fundies to get it out of their systems and also for the people hurt by the church to get that out of their systems. And some people were in both subgroups.
Wow, amazing, never saw a church with that kind of group;
I’m hoping she does, because the evils and lies of religion (all religions) must be confronted and defeated.
American pseudo-progressives have made an alliance with the devil by refusing to condemn religion in its entirety as a bunch of lies that promotes ignorance, bigotry and oppression.
One of the things I hear from your message is “anyone who is religious is equally culpable of religion’s sins as religion is, itself”. Is that something you believe or have I made that up?
Personally, I believe that, for example, Becky’s faith in God does not hurt anyone, because she chooses to act not-hurtfully as a result of that action. Even though her religion has caused a lot of people, including Becky, a lot of harm, Becky =/= Christianity.
Also, I think it would hurt Becky if all religion was destroyed. I’m not sure if that is what you’re advocating for, but even if you say “Becky’s feelings matter much less than not encouraging an evil institution like religion”, or “less people would get hurt”, some people would still get hurt if we eliminated all religion. A LOT of people, actually.
And even more directly, if progressives demanded opposition to all religion and refused to ally with any religious people even where they agreed, they’d have far less power and influence than even the small amount they do now.
If you want to be completely irrelevant and give the far right even more dominance than they have, drive a wedge between liberal atheists and liberal religious people.
I feel kind of bemused by that argument because it is an argument for religious warfare. If you are responsible for the sins of your religion then the only possible response to evil done in its name is to destroy said religious members. That or cede your religion to the forces of evil. Which is probably not what the poster meant.
They seem to think that its better to give up religion than try to reform it or keep it from the hands of those who misuse it.
Personally, I think that religion on the whole does more good than harm, but that’s an opinion — I don’t think there’s really a way to measure that. I also think that it’s racist to condemn all religion without, like, studying the practices and beliefs of ALL religions first. But I wanted to communicate more with aelfwine. While I’m pretty sure I overall disagree with their pov I was curious if there was any common ground. Was guessing at beliefs they seemed to have to see if, within that belief, there was any interesting discourse we could get to? Idk. Anyway, basically I was posting a bunch of hypotheticals and seeing where I could get with that.
A lot of the most progressive folks I know are religiously Jewish, so yeah, gonna have to call that one a bad idea.
Yeaaaaaaah, same. The thing about Christianity being the dominant cultural paradigm in large parts of the world (and the specifically toxic brand that’s become dominant in American Christianity) is that it’s very easy for it to be The Idea of What Religion Is for a lot of people, especially those who grew up with it. And when you realize how toxic American Evangelicalism is, and how much harm Christianity’s managed to do in the name of conversion and colonialism (not that other big religions are immune there – anything that gets endorsement of the state is ultimately going to justify the state’s unsavory actions – but it has some of the most high profile successes,) it’s easy to say ‘well then Christianity is evil,’ and therefore if Christianity’s your only paradigm for religion, so is religion as a whole.
But should that still apply to the Christian who acknowledges the harm Christianity has done, but still thinks that the Jesus of the Gospels would support universal basic income and takes strength in their faith in that? Should it apply to a Jewish person who believes it is their religious DUTY to help others and serve their community, and that ‘goodness’ is not a quality but an action? Should it apply to a Muslim socialist who argues that socialism is not just compatible with their religion, but actively supported by the Quran? And this is just religions I know enough about to see how their principles can play into progressive politics, giving singular examples. Religion doesn’t HAVE to be evil, and it doesn’t have to be incompatible with ethical debate or science or social progressivism. It can always be used for evil, because people have the capacity to be right utter bastards and will justify their desire to do so with whatever they have handy, but a lot of people who genuinely live by the principles of their religions do so for good.
And a fair number of atheists, as discussed by thejeff upthread, whose idea of ‘rationalism’ causes them to be complete and utter assholes who think transgender people scientifically don’t exist, or women are scientifically inferior because faulty understanding of biology, or various other things and a decent chunk of them just went straight-out fascist. ANY philosophy can be used as a bludgeon.
“One of the things I hear from your message is “anyone who is religious is equally culpable of religion’s sins as religion is, itself”. Is that something you believe or have I made that up?
—
No, I don’t believe that. The very opposite, the people who are *honestly* religious, have merely been deceived by a great big lie, and they have my sympathy. They are victims.
I’m much angrier at the people who KNOW that religion is a big fat lie, but they think it’s supposedly good and perfectly okay for people to believe that lie, and that atheists are being “obnoxious” if they want to reduce the number of people deceived by that lie.
I find this absolutely hilarious. How are you condemning religion and faith while unironically (or at least, I THINK unironically) saying that people are ‘aligning themselves with the devil’ and ‘doing evil’.
I’m talking about a metaphorical devil, not an actual supernatural being.
And I have no idea why you think that the phrase “doing evil” is incompatible with atheism.
She might for a bit before balancing out. It’s pretty common for baby atheists coming from some sort of fundamentalist background. Hopefully Becky could knock some sense into her of that is the case.
“I’ve done everything the bible says. Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff.” – Ned Flanders
When I was a kid and thought I’d write the Great American Novel, one thing I wanted to whet my teeth on was writing a coherent account of Jesus’ life. So I started researching the exact details into a timeline I could turn into a narrative. How hard could it be?
I got stuck on the names of the disciples.
Most people miss Fred.
especially Davan
Don’t forget Rufus.
I’m just here to ask the deep questions , like
‘So was the DingDong bandit autiobiographical
Honestly I recall being brought up on the suicidal version of the story and believed there was something wrong with me when I felt so sorry for him. Like it seemed like everyone else didn’t care or even (though more rarely) were kind of… gleeful about it. It kind of made me sick, not with them even, but there was something wrong with *me* that it would affect me so deeply in a way which apparently wasn’t the norm and the idea of him now in hell now too was just awful. The line from Jesus that it would be better if he’d never been born seemed accurate in such a context and just…damn.
It was really that story as well as the Abraham/Issac story (I actually didn’t believe my parents would ever murder me, but that was in fact a bad thing (so would I condemn them to hell by my mere existence???). That caused me a lot of anxiety as you can probably imagine. Like I believed but God terrified me and while we were taught we should fear god, the fact things he did felt wrong made me wonder if something was deeply wrong with me. That perhaps I couldn’t trust my own conscience because it was clearly so out of sync with him.
Whoops wasn’t meant to be a reply, sorry.
Oh, good. In context, I thought the first paragraph was about Willis being the DingDong Bandit.
Hell seems to be mostly a later development. Even in the Biblical writings most of the apparent references can equally be taken as just “destroyed” – “cast into the lake of fire”, for example.
The Isaac story is one of those that makes sense as a cultural tradition explaining why they (no longer) performed human sacrifice like many cultures around them did, than as something than an actual benevolent God would do.
Joyce really needed someone with whom she could express her anger! Let’s hope, for Liz, that doesn’t become the one and only topic of the conversation, because that would be really heavy to stand.
Was Joyce ever introduced to the notion that Judas could have only ever “sold” Jesus as hoping that Jesus would reveal to everyone his true nature through the power of a miracle or magical enlightenment, only to see Jesus being condemned and you can’t force the hand off God nor demand for miracle and he killed himself out of shame for his Hubris, preferring to flee than ask for forgiveness, or is that just a Catholic thing?
Apparently she was not.
I’ve never heard of that, and I was brought up Catholic.
Probably not.
i’ve also never heard that version but it’s a good story =)
I have never heard this notion before.
I’m pretty sure that’s technically heretical.
Mmmm, not really. The Torah, which is not for Gentiles, says boys should not stick their you-knows in another boy’s whatsis. Lesbians don’t get mentioned at all. And like I said… The. Torah. And. It’s. Laws. Are. For. Jews. Nobody. Else. Has. To. Follow. Them.
Well, except for the Noahide Laws. Stay away from murder, incest, adultery, robbery, idolatry, and certain very specific blasphemies. Support your local Court system. And oh yeah. Don’t tear a hunk off a living animal and eat it. Think you can handle all of that?
is there someplace like Hell in Torah, for non-believers?
I think there’s no hell or hell-equivalent in the Jewish faith. If I understand correctly, they think that when you die you go wander about in… Gehenna?, which I think is just boring with nothing to do, for a bit, and then you go before a judge and say “I deserve to be together with god because I was a good jew” and then Ha-Satan (god’s prosecution lawyer) goes “Actually, they don’t because A, B, and C” and then you get judged and either you go join god or you wander about Gehenna? a bit more getting bored out of your metaphysical skull until your appeal comes through and you get rejudged, with all the time you spent being bored counting as penance.
No. There is little to no discussion of an afterlife of any sort in the Torah. Two mentions of eventually the dead being resurrected (in Danial and Isaiah) , but very flowery.
Considering some of the decisions coming out of courts these days, I don’t think I can just go around supporting it willy-nilly.
“Mmmm, not really. The Torah, which is not for Gentiles, says boys should not stick their you-knows in another boy’s whatsis. Lesbians don’t get mentioned at all. And like I said… The. Torah. And. It’s. Laws. Are. For. Jews. Nobody. Else. Has. To. Follow. Them.”
Well, that’s so very nice that Jews should only murderize Jews to death for homosexuality. /s.
That’s the excuse you give? You would tolerate a modern-day politician that said that American should murder other American for being gay, but that’s okay because non-American are excluded and so are lesbians?
Wow, what a great book to follow. What a great god to follow!
No actually. That’s EVIL. And at the end of it, non-evil people either have to doublethink their way into respecting the bible by bullshit justfications, or simply decide to reject it.
Dude, I am with you on religion being garbage, as a whole entire concept, but you should try to be more pragmatic in your arguments.
Yes, any faith-based belief is inherently inferior to just opening your fucking eyes and seeing the world as it is, evidence will always win out, but when you’re dealing with a global population that statistically relies on faith (I’m pretty sure there’s more people of every stripe of faith than atheists and agnostics and every other faithless group combined) over reason, bludgeoning people with that in the least respectful manner possible does not do enough good to be worth the catharsis of telling people they’re wrong, even when they are.
I’m sorry. What? “Any faith-based belief is inherently inferior”? Y’all need to check yourselves. I’m not even religious, but making some blanket statement like ‘all religion is inherently inferior’ is the exactly kind of thing that makes dogmatic religious people so obnoxious in the first place.
Faith is valuable for a million different reasons, there is no one way to do it, and people are perfectly capable of incorporating it into their lives along with common sense and basic decency. If you decide to throw an entire cultural tradition under the bus as ‘backwards’ and ‘lesser’ without any consideration for nuance, YOU’RE the bigoted one.
Miss me with this garbage. Nothing faith has ever done has needed it to be done. Not the evil, and certainly not the good. It’s great that people can make themselves feel better about a world that truly genuinely does not care about them, but without the people to actually step up and fucking help, no dogma or creed or oath means a damn thing.
Is it a good thing if a Christian houses a family or feeds a thousand? Absolutely. Would the cold and hungry have been better off if someone has just up and helped them because it is the right thing to do instead of waiting on someone else to tell them to help? Yes, they would have. Probably wouldn’t have had to deal with pamphlets espousing a non-falsifiable open-to-interpretation flavor of groupthink, if proselytizing is still a thing the “good” people of faith do.
Lemme correct that second sentence. Faith has never done anything. People who did or did not know better attributed their actions to their faith, but since God isn’t real, their actions fall on them and them alone.
geez you two are angry. which you probably have your own good reasons for, but you’re spouting your anger at a lot of people who have done nothing to deserve it.
“nothing faith has ever done has ever needed it to be done” is entirely as non-falsifiable a claim as any religious belief.
in my experience, religious people don’t typically attribute their actions to their faith. They are aware that they possess agency. Faith may give them courage, or peace of mind, or patience, or humour. Whether god objectively does or doesn’t exist doesn’t change that. Faith is just a fact of many people’s lives.
Faith is a very bad thing which has been treated as a virtue by every religious organization as a means of ensuring the “faithful” blindly obey them.
Faith isn’t actually a virtue. Faith isn’t actually a good .thing
You know, maybe watch yourself before you spout things that basically amount to “Jews are Evil and Backwards”. Try thinking for more than five seconds.
Nowhere did Tsath say that because it is mentioned that you shouldn’t do X, that you therefore must MURDER people for doing it, or that it would be acceptable for a politician to write such a thing into law.
Stop conflating Jews and their faith with the christian bible or with the assumption that Jews treat the Torah in the same way that Christians do the new testament. Because they don’t. This entire comment is extremely ignorant, please stop and check yourself.
(And no, that doesn’t make discrimination against gay men okay. What I’m saying is that treating Jews and their faith as the same as the way Christians do makes the assumption that Jews would read that part of the Torah and accept it uncritically. WHICH THEY DON’T. And rejecting things within the Torah based on your own inner morals and logic does not inherently invalidate the entirety of the faith, because the faith is not based on accepting all that is written without question or thought.)
Hell, even assuming all Christians would read that part of the Bible and accept it uncritically is bullshit. Some use them as excuses to justify their own prejudices. Some are pushed to accept literal interpretations of some such passages. Others read different passages and come to different conclusions about the overall meaning. Not all Christians are literalists. It’s really just a loud minority.
One great thing about the Bible is that the contradictions don’t just exist in the details of the events – like the Judas example in this strip. They exist in the theology and the doctrine as well. Because the Bible is the product of many different authors with many different ideas and understandings of what was important and what it all meant.
You are ignorant of what you’re talking about. This is the verse that the guy excused:
“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”
And that’s according to him seemingly FINE, because it’s only about Jews putting other Jews to death.
Modern people who still think that the bible was divinely inspired, need to somehow doublethink a way into thinking that the plain meaning of the words doesn’t actually mean what it says.
How are the only two options for you that people either must accept what is written literally and without question, or “doublethink” to excuse it? It was a thing that was written in a context and time that is not our context and time, and should be read and interpreted as such.
Many Jews ascribe to the belief that our right and ability to interpret the Torah for ourselves is what is godly and divine. Even if an angel were to descend from heaven to tell us exactly what interpretation was ‘correct’, that angel’s words should be disregarded, because the Torah was given to us as a tool to hone our ability to guide ourselves, and isn’t in heaven anymore. (I’m not actually religious, but my jewish cultural heritage is very important to me.)
Also. Jews, in my experience, are encouraged to read the Torah in the *original Hebrew*, specifically to avoid this whole ‘oh, what does the plain meaning of the words say’? Which can be inherently distorted by translation.
You put vastly too much emphasis on the words of the holy text and not enough on the fact that the vast majority of the time, people just use the text to excuse bigotry and biases that they ALREADY HAVE. It’s just a cultural tool that people can use for good or ill, like literally anything else. If it’s not the bible, people will twist something else to add an air of authority to their shitty beliefs. Like The Constitution or fake science experts or literally just random conspiracy theories.
i’m impressed with your patient responses Joyfulldreams. thank you.
Oh, and lastly: Funny how you’re operating under some very Christian thought patterns here. That things are either Good or Evil, that if something is not Wholly Good it must be completely discarded and rejected. That if something isn’t perfect, absolutely nothing of value can be taken from it, and any attempt to is disingenuous (sacreligious, even. Lol).
Most atheists aren’t actually self-aware enough to realize they’re still Christian.
I’d tell them to open their eyes, but they’re in a rut with their pattern of thought and lecturing them isn’t actually gonna help. This is especially true when most of them are American and therefore inculturated with a colonialist POV on different traditions around the world (i.e., confidently stating that everyone who’s religious believes in a sky-daddy, even though about half of the instances of that around the world come from Society of Jesus missions providing the foundation for how we understand stuff).
There’s basically a lot you’d have to educate them on before they’re ready to admit they’re even slightly wrong, and most of them are so confident in their beliefs that they aren’t gonna go out to learn more.
Yeah, it came up in the comments a month or two back, too, and I failed to articulate that sentiment as well as you two just did (in no small part because I am a culturally Christian atheist who’s only started studying some non-Christian ethics and philosophy, so I can tell it IS inaccurate but don’t really have the tools to explain how or point elsewhere, at least not yet.) Especially since Christianity is so normalized in our culture that a lot of atheists don’t realize things like that absolutism are actually significantly Christian-flavored.
As long as you accept the non-existence of God, and the *wrongness* of religion, you’re completely free to accept the “good” parts of the bible, and throw the rest to the trashbin.
But that can only happen IF you accept the non-existence of God, and that the Bible was written by human authors, some of them nice people, and some of them genocidal monsters.
If you however believe the Bible was divinely inspired (or even dictated by god word for word in the case of the Torah), you don’t have that luxury of actually freely deciding with your own mind what is good in the bible, and what is fucking evil.
And yet, people do it all the time. Not everyone follows every word in the Bible and that’s what happens when you get a book with fifteen thousand contradictions in it. Some try to reconcile them and some just pick the messages that seem the best to them. And L-O-L at the idea that Jewish people don’t interpret and decide themselves what is or is not right in the Torah.
You know it just occurred to me that… what if the whole anti-gay thing is actually just based on hygiene? Like the whole sticking dick-in-ass thing. Middle Eastern faiths seem to be big on hygiene so maybe that’s what it was about…
you’re the second person today to suggest that. i’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong, but there seems to be a lot of effort invested here today in trying to find an alternative to a fairly straightforward explanation: a patriarchal power structure that relies on strict gender roles. that’s right, the same reason homophobia is still around today.
Eh, I just think it’s an interesting idea. Like, a lot of religious rules seem to be codification of wisdom and advice people collected over the millennia. Some sensible, some senseless.
well, sure… who knows.
got a bit heated for no good reason. sorry.
No worries
Given that this was written months ago, it’s hilarious to me that I’m currently following a discussion of this very topic (Contradictions in the Christian New Testament) on Twitter. Judas and his hangsplosion double-death have definitely come up in the discussion.
I’m now imagining some Frank Spencer-esque masterpiece of physical comedy where Judas buys a field and a lovely new piece of rope only to trip, flail around wildly unbalanced, which somehow makes the rope into a noose, which he then accidentally hangs himself with.
And then his intestines explode.
Like 2 Samuel 1:26 – If God hates gays, why allows David to be one: “thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”?
I got the same feeling of Joyce, about it. That’s not the reason I gave up my faith, but it helped it a lot.
and whats about I Corinthians 7? Why Paul just had all these speak. Why God just didn’t go to the point and said marrying is a sin, too?? Shit.
Yes, I finally the verses I wanted. In the same page, in the same paragraph:
For man did not come from woman, but woman from man;
For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.
I was so done after I read it..
(I’ll stop venting, sorry)
you’ve mentioned before that you are surrounded by deeply christian, maybe fundamentalist (?) people? that you have to hide your opinions on religion to them? and you said thankfully they don’t understand english right? lol. anyway just wanted to communicate my sympathies. i hope you’re doing ok.
Yeah right.
I’ll survive, we always find a way. Thanks for the kindness.
Joyce is so 13-year old me that I wonder how Willis could read my mind when he was still unborn.
Joyce is college-age me right here, except replace Judas exploding with me trying to make a timeline of the passion week that incorporates everything from all four gospels…
Welcome to a couple years of deciding who to come out to and decades of feeling really dumb for ever having believed that stuff Joyce. Or so I’ve heard.
absolutely…. it’s kind of humiliating to still have to put christian work places in my cv, i can’t wait to have enough significant jobs under my belt to be able to boot that crap out ;D
wow, iirc this is the first time that Joyce admits out loud that she no longer believes, in an affirmative way of “i’m so over this crap“. It took me very long to get to that stage, but i relate a lot!!
She’s definitely discussed things like it, particularly in dreams or discussing her crumbling faith with Dorothy (also, that bit last arc with Joe as she realized she didn’t actually have to believe the literalist fundamentist version of the Ark story she’d been taught, had a crisis realizing humans aren’t inherently special, but also found that NOT having to believe in creationism anymore was freeing.) But this one definitely feels like a floodgate opening, especially since she’s saying it loudly and in public.
I don’t really get the Judas bit. I mean Jesus knew he was going to betray him and the betrayal was necessary in order for the sacrifice to happen. Thus, wasn’t Judas fated to betray Jesus, as it was a part of Gods plan?
And if that is the case, isn’t it kinda mean to have him meet three different horrible ends after being required to betray his friend and the son of God?
I mean, the idea of giving Judas a pass because God (an omniscient being) saw it is silly. Dude still helped a man be murdered.
I like the Last Temptation of Jesus Christ take, in which Jesus told Judas — in the film his most loyal friend — straight up that he was supposed to betray Jesus, and Judas was really broken up about it, but eventually gave in.
Technically Judas helped apprehend a wanted criminal. A traitor even. The crime was questioning and causing others to question the Emperor’s authoritaw.
So, how do you feel about Moses, the Pharoah, and the Ten Plagues?
Judas is much less explicitly “God made him do it” than plenty of Old Testament villains.
The Bible was never meant to be taken literally, it was understood to be allegorical even at the time of writing. It’s only the American Evangelicals who are idiotic enough to believe everthing in the bible is 100% accurate.
Well, more accurately, taking it “literally” is basically a nuclear option in terms of theological debate. That’s what fundamentalism, of all kinds, is. It’s screaming, “I’m right; you’re wrong,” taking your toys, walking away, and sending in the armies behind you. If you study Islamic stuff, you’ll notice the same trend: people cherry-picking passages and taking them overly literally in order to win points for their viewpoint. A lot of what the West terms “jihadist” is precisely this behavior. There are probably good examples in other traditions, but I don’t know them.
The individual books of the Bible were certainly not written with literal belief in mind, and their compilation into scripture was absolutely not done with the expectation of literal belief. Alas, Martin Luther said that everyone can interpret it correctly until he realized what a giant clusterfuck he’d opened up and tried to walk it back, but too late.
How does one “allegorically” put people to death?
Allegories aren’t literal. That’s the point. Just because someone dies in an allegory doesn’t mean they need to IRL. It depends what the allegory is meant to stand for.
This is why the notion of treating a collection of oral traditions written down decades later and then translated into a new language by humans with agendas as a factual history book is baffling. If nothing else, Acts and Matthew were written between 5 and 15 years apart by different authors from different Christian communities, both nearly a lifetime after the death of a historical Jesus. Ever play a game of telephone? Yeah, try playing it for FORTY-NINE YEARS and see how different the final product is…
So we have this god-like figure from the planet Krypton. His story has gone various ways, from being raised in an orphanage to raised by Kansas farmers, being a bit of a self-absorbed office jerk to being an adorkable guy in love with Lois to being an angsty super-dude who visited multiple 9-11s on Metropolis because he didn’t take the fight outside. His abilities range from being bulletproof and able to jump over tall buildings to being pretty much able to destroy the Earth if he wanted to. And we don’t get in much more than fan arguments over it all because we understand that he is fictional. Instead, we mostly just enjoy the stories.
Well now I have a new favorite bit of biblical trivia.
Actually, did I have an old favorite bit of biblical trivia?
The Bible does not teach people to hate LGBTQ+, it is bigots, who abuse their position in the Theocracy, that teach people to hate LGBTQ+.
Well, her supposedly deeply religious parents certainly didn’t….
Since we’re talking about Judas, i’ve done my best to translate this song from Italian singer Mannarino called “Maddalena”:
They took his house and his garden
in the name of His Great Holiness.
And Judas started to play hide-and-seek
with his mirror and with his dignity.
Then God came, who giveth and taketh away,
and called a taxi, and his wife got in;
and Judas walked off into the night
to die of wine, women and fistfights.
Magdalene grabbed him by the jacket.
She lived in the slums, in the decay,
amid a commune of drunkards
who believed in a kingdom in the sky.
And there was love, and there was revolution,
and speeches in the street, and overflowing life.
But what Judas loved, more than any sermon,
were the sweet screams of Magdalene.
Then something terrible happened one evening.
Judas was caught and thrown in prison.
Jesus Christ had escaped among the people
and Judas said he knew nothing about it.
But when Magdalene came to visit,
he saw her sick and missing a tooth.
“Inspector”, he said, “it was Jesus Christ
who brought in all that opium from the East”.
And he went back to his lover with his spoils:
30 coins for seven shots of bitter, thanks, and a Marsala wine!
and then he saw a box office
bearing the sign of a big multiplex.
and it said, “The Passion of Jesus Christ!
A new, truly moving film!
With an exceptional cast!
Including God, the great, the omnipotent!”
The theatre is dark with people.
They admire the actors like stars in the sky,
and no one notices as between the rows of seats,
these two have started fucking.
“Magdalene, I love you so much!
He wanted heaven, but i want to stay here.
They killed him, oh well! in any case, back then,
he kept telling everyone that he would rise again.
But my only paradise is between your hips;
your sweet breasts for my tired eyes;
your red lips like candy to mine;
this earthly life is just too beautiful.”
From the screen, God saw them and raised his voice:
“I will strike you with lightning, Judas Iscariote!
My son is dying on the cross,
and all because of such a stupid mortal!”
Magdalene got up, then, and yelled passionately:
“You don’t scare me, God!
You who made a son without making love,
how would you understand this whole thing is a scam?
Leave Judas alone, and look somewhere else.
Here, look at my cleavage!
And I will keep away from your envy,
for God is incapable of enjoying like a creature.”
God ran off to heaven, and furiously
got started on a massive project
to build a mighty Holy See
that would silence Magdalene.
Judas and Magdalene are still together.
They move around incognito among the people.
They go to the river to make love
on a tiny boat that goes against the current.
The great irony of fundamentalism is the fact that it’s pretty much a relatively new phenomenon in Christianity and a product of the Renassiance. Before, they had the Catholic Church and various heresies all pretty much agree “The book is useful but it’s hardly the be end all of Christianity.” It was the introduction of the printing press and the populist idea of, “If you have the book, ya don’t NEED an education to understand all this.”
DIY religion and the disaster that resulted.
This!
I further narrow the focus of the blame to U.S.-based Christianity, because a lot of the absolutely reality divergent harmful stuff was dreamed up here, and most of it relies on Biblical literalism.
I blame John Calvin, specifically, as the origin of a lot of this shit.
Fucking Calvin.
For a historical bit of trolling, John Calvin was horrified when someone pointed out the Song of Solomon wasn’t about God but sex.
…personally my credulity would be stretched by the stories with the talking animals, but you know, I’m just a guy that knows cartoons aren’t real so who am I huh?
Judas goes to a remote field and hangs himself from a tree, perhaps obscured from passers-by by other trees. Over time his body decomposes and his intestines explode. The rope also decomposes (no synthetics then) and his body falls to the ground, as if he had tripped. Some time after that his body is discovered.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader what the priests did or did not do with his money and/or the field.
Or, how the doctrine of Biblical literalism drives people out of Christianity, in a nutshell.
Meanwhile over in Lukewarm Mainline Land, we were directed to bring an extra Bible to class and mark it up with colored highlighters to reveal the multiple narratives that were used, in parallel, with nobody worrying their heads about making them all agree, to compose the book of Genesis. And! This did not disprove our religion! Because the doctrine of Biblical literalism is bullshit.
What evidence would disprove your religion?
Well mathematically, a contradiction would be sufficient. The proliferation of those in the bible leave it as an exercise to the reader to pick one.
That only works to disprove literalism. Only a small fraction of Christians are Biblical literalists.
Why should it need to be proved or disproved? That’s not what it’s about. If I want things proved, that’s what mathematics is about. The scientific method is never going to let me run experiments to tell me what the decent thing to do is.
(I’m going to run a blind test to see if killing my neighbor and taking his wife works out well. I wonder how large a sample set I’ll need to be statistically significant.]
The question does not apply, because science and faith run along parallel tracks. Attempting to apply the rules of absolute provable literal material factuality to something that was not formulated with any of that in mind (example: the aforementioned parallel and contradictory narratives of the Beginning, which were all accepted by the composers of the Bible) is as silly as fundamentalists’ accusation that people who believe in scientific rationality must therefore hate religion and simultaneously venerate scientists and consider them to be infallible.
Math AND prayer.
I… still haven’t read the bible