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Merged (edited) General thoughts about Christianity and the bible

JayUtah said:
The physical nature of God seems to be something that's important to get right. You've managed to commit a heresy in all of Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, and Evangelicalism. Once again, the only major sect that agrees with you is (drum roll) the Mormons.
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"Heresy" is a funny word. (doesn't scare me)
To the orthodoxy of His day, Jesus was considered a heretic.
The reason they crucified Him.

Foster Zygote said:
Are you â—Šâ—Šâ—Šâ—Šâ—Šâ—Šâ—Š kidding me? Are we better for abolishing slavery? Are we better for recognizing women as having equal rights to men?
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That wasn't the question.
8enotto said:
The bronze age is long past for most. Humans have learned so much making the old mythology a historic side note.
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Better off for it?
 
In defense of the KJV: It's been a major part of English literature from the beginning. English lit,
and no other. There's good reason for that. If you must insist on repeating Iron Age* campfire tales, then
goddammit do it in high speech! Make it resound! The guy who composed the warhorse passage in Job
deserves to Englished with drums and trumpets!

All that superstitious crap about gods and kosher and messiahs, etc. can stay on the shelf.

* "Bronze Age bedtime stories" alliterates and has a good rhythm, and I'd love to irritate the
Chrrrristianists with it (even scare some of 'em), but it's not accurate. Late Bronze/Early Iron Age,
ca. 1,000 BC, is about as early as OT texts get. So I'm told. Damn if I can stay awake over any religious
text. I'd sooner browse ole Rudyard's Just So Stories.
 
Rusty Tyler said:
"Heresy" is a funny word. (doesn't scare me)
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Clearly not. But enthusiastically embracing heresy in order to seem reasonable undermines you when you suddenly want orthodoxy to have some kind of evidentiary value per se. It's special pleading. As you've now been told several times, your journey to reconcile your religion with the facts begins with you first reconciling your religion with your religion.

Rusty Tyler said:
Better off for it?
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Yes.
 
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Rusty Tyler said:
That wasn't the question.
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Yes, it was. You asked if we're better off for moving beyond Bronze Age superstition and mythology, which, as we're all aware, treated slavery and misogynistic bondage as normal and just. You said it yourself, if a woman chose her own sex partner, she'd be killed, and she'd be considered to have deserved that. So stop trying to play coy and either accept the answer or dispute it.
 
sackett said:
In defense of the KJV: It's been a major part of English literature from the beginning. English lit,
and no other. There's good reason for that. If you must insist on repeating Iron Age* campfire tales, then
goddammit do it in high speech! Make it resound! The guy who composed the warhorse passage in Job
deserves to Englished with drums and trumpets!
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Joseph Smith, on the other hand, kind of chewed the scenery with his imitation of KJV language.
 
Foster Zygote said:
....snip...

It's also a bit funny that the implication is that you can't divorce your wife for, say, trying to poison you with hemlock. Much less funny is the fact that the question of divorce is clearly entirely up to the husband. The wife has no say in the matter and cannot, for example, divorce a husband who beats and rapes her, or otherwise makes her life with him miserable.
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This persists into modern day - for instance in Orthodox Judaism (in regard to the religious marriage) a wife can't divorce her husband, the husband has to divorce her, if he won't give her a divorce she can't remarry in her religious community.
 
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W.D.Clinger said:
That's not what it means in the book of Job, where the phrase originated.

It was not a matter of chance. When @Rusty Tyler's Lord and Satan first agreed upon the terms of their cruel wager, the Lord stipulated "only upon himself put not forth thine hand." When Satan loses that bet, he/she/it proposes (chapter 2) a more trying trial: "Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face." To which the Lord says okay, whatever, "but save his life." So it was the terms of the wager that saved Job's life, not chance.

Job himself never learned that his misfortunes were caused by that Lord and Satan amusing themselves by betting on what Job would do when they kill off his family and servants and then (in the second bet) causing Job himself great pain and misery.

To Job's credit, he confronts those miscreants toward the end of the book, only to be told that, as a puny human, he's too insignificant to question the motives of the God he worships.
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You have a chicken/egg problem here.
 
Foster Zygote said:
All â—Šâ—Šâ—Šâ—Šâ—Šâ—Šâ—Šâ—Š, because we have the verses where God specifically commands the Hebrews to shed innocent blood. The mythology of the conquest of Canaan is filled with tales of slaughtering the innocent, including children. Killing everyone but the virgin girls also includes killing pregnant women.

Oh, and killing a young woman (generally at an age that we today would consider still a child) because she doesn't bleed when her new husband has sex with her the first time is also murdering someone innocent.
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You can also throw in things like god making people eat their children. I know people who can't believe that god would do such a thing and it isn't something that comes up in happy-clappy Sunday sermons or in Sunday school lessons, but it is unambiguous in the bible:

Jeremiah 19:9: "I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh because their enemies will press the siege so hard against them to destroy them."​
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That's the NIV version, and it is horrific but that is what the bible says god said. Oh and in this instance I think the King James version makes it seem even more horrific:

And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.​
​
And there is no way around this, god says it is his doing. It's not an "unfortunate" inevitable result of human behaviour, the bible in all translations and in the oldest texts tells us that god causes this to happen.
 
Helen said:
I've never understood why a foetus should have more rights than the woman it's freeloading on.
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But then loses those rights when born. For some reason the blokes who try to make abortion illegal don't want to be on the hook themselves - if for instance the kid needed a heart transplant at age 18 why can't they simply use their father's heart....
 
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