Literaly any other! Don’t need people who believe jn nonsense such as free will, or the human spirit, or anything that indicates humans are more than machines
Me when asked whether I’d date a religious person.
To me, at least with Judeo-Christian religions that believe in hell as the destination for people who do not believe in their god, I find it so baffling that people can have mixed or non religious serious relationships, with the idea “well we just don’t try to convert eachother”.
How the hell do you square.
I love my spouse.
I love my God.
One day my god is going to send my spouse to be tortured for all of eternity. I will then spend the rest of my life happily hanging out with my god.
It only makes sense if you either don’t really believe what you believe, or you are very certain your partner is going to change their view. From the atheist side it doesn’t really matter.
i never seen those relationship ends well, one is super religious christian, and one is not . the one that is religious wants conversion from the other one. or if you have different religions , which is just as complicated, if not more. it make sense is one is maybe agnostic/ or aethiest though, there is potential for converting to that religion.
I am a Christian. I also do not understand how Christians can choose to marry a person not of their faith. I certainly wouldn’t. I will try to explain why I hold this view.
My greatest fear is marrying someone who then apostacizes. I don’t want my heart to break that way, to love someone so personally and deeply and know they will cease to be.* I hope I do not choose a man who will become an apostate. I hope not to make a hasty choice, but I have a limited pool as a gay Christian, and it is stressful.
It isn’t that I would have any qualm with a difference in tradition or culture that would come with a partner from a different faith, but that I’d love them knowing they would die. That is a great and terrible grief, and is the same grief I believe God felt for every person (God is Love Itself—how can he be without grief at our suffering? No one has so much sorrow as the God who witnesses the death of his beloved children by the billions. God is Love who mourns.); the grief that compelled him to send Christ.
I see God like the sun (He is called Heaven’s Sun and Morning Star in Scripture); we must be with Him to live, but we are imperfect vessels, and His light will ablate our souls. Only through Christ’s sacrifice are we made holy to stand in such light without dying. And in such a way, I believe those who refuse salvation** burn in that light and cease to be.
Nonbelievers are beautiful, but they burn for only a short time. Would that they were everlasting…
*There are multiple beliefs about Hell/Hades/Sheol/Gehenna. Mine is annihilationism, which I have briefly surmised here. A good pastor I appreciate who shares this view is the progressive pastor Paul Drees. You may find he runs counter to the Christofascism that is so much of “evangelical” American church culture today. James Talarico also has good sermons in this more Christ-like vein of Christianity, although I do not think he is an annihilationist.
**This concept of refusal of salvation is core to Arminian Christianity.
It is okay if you disagree with me; I am just sharing how I view God. I hope this post helps some people understand my view.
Jewish people generally don’t believe in hell because their scripture doesn’t support it. Christians often believe in hell due to hellenization of Christian theology after the time of Jesus. Many Christians don’t really believe in hell. The parts of the Bible people interpret as supporting the existence of hell are generally being misinterpreted.
Not everyone is a purist. Lots of the more open minded religious types are willing to entertain the possibility that their god cares more about people living a good life rather than selecting the right religion. Those types are fully compatible with a multicultural society. Often they’ll play lip service to fit in with the more extreme religious nuts, but the fact they can coexist happily is proof their views are more nuanced.
I’m fine with anyone who is fine with anyone who is fine with anyone.
I don’t care how “progressive” a Christian is. They worship a god that thinks it’s okay to sell your own daughter into sex slavery and murder infants of the offense of their ancestors supposedly rebuffing Israelites during the exodus (and rightly so! Look what they did to Cannan.) even though the exodus never happened.
I don’t care how “anti-authoritarian” a socialist is. They believe that a highly centralized one-party state and rapid, state-directed industrialization and collectivization, accompanied by extensive political repression, censorship, and the suppression of dissent will lead to communism.
It doesn’t make sense, does it? Some traditions give birth to opposing schools, and it’s unjust to conflate the two just because they share a name. What your describing is fundamentalism, not Christianity, and “progressive fundamentalism” doesn’t have any sense, just like “anti-authoritarian stalinism”.
I didn’t say it was god. These are alleged historical events. You don’t get to just say it didn’t happen.
Slavery was real, and the Old Testament has explicit rules about it. And Jesus never had a single thing to say about it (besides the thing about fulfilling the old law. Which, again, explicitly includes slavery).
This has NOTHING to do with fundamentalism. You don’t get to hand wave this shit away, it’s at the very core of the religion you claim to believe.
You can’t change the subject of the discussion on a whim. The original argument was that Christians worshiped a God that condone slavery and child murder. I showed that, for most Christians, it isn’t the case.
(And by the way, these events did not happen. The Exodus is a myth according to the historians, so yes, I’m allowed to say so)
I do have to question the core concept though, consider this just me trying to make sense of the logic. I’ll admit I’ve only understood the 2 ends of the camp, I was raised a fundamentalist, and really didn’t have much of a mid point from that to atheism.
To me the idea there is like saying “I’m a big fan of Darth Vader”, but I’m not a fundamentalist, I know star wars isn’t literally true, I don’t consider him to have blown up planets or built death stars.
IE then comes the question. There’s only star wars materials to even imply a vader ever existed, and if you don’t believe in that… in what meaningful way does vader exist? Or more importantly how do you know ANYTHING about him. IE what does it mean to “believe in darth vader”, but I don’t think he did most if any of the things in star wars.
I could see “I believe in a god, but don’t think there is any way to know anything about him, I just feel like the world was made”, that I can understand. But the second you slap the label of an existing religion, how do you not inherit the baggage as well. Because well what else is there, why would I assume the bible has more godly information than the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. If I’m not ascribing something in it to be believed to be true. Whether you go with the moral parable or literal truth, say a story where god tells his people to go into a city and kill all the men women and children, and they refuse and god punishes them until they do… whether it’s true or not, the moral of that story is “do what god says, even if your personal morals tell you it’s horrible”. The message is what’s awful today.
Jesus stated unequivocally and emphatically (at least according to the scriptures) that the Law of Moses is eternal and will remain in force until the earth passes away.
And he cited a law that directs people to stone kids that talk back as a gotcha in a legal beef with the Pharisees- who were like “maybe stoning children to death doesn’t fit the crime of sassing your parents, so we should not do that”
That same legal code that Jesus explicitly endorsed expressly states that slavery is cool, and goes so far as to say that beating your slave to within an inch that slave’s life is acceptable.
That legal code also says roughly half of all women should be stoned because whoever wrote the damn thing didn’t understand female anatomy.
That legal code says it’s totally cool to sell your daughters as sex slaves.
It says you should stone kids that talk back.
That is “biblical morality”. They might be a decent person but they worship an awful scum bag that makes Epstein and Trump look positively benign.
And that is all just reading the damn book with some honesty.
Suffice it to say you’re analogy is stupid and doesn’t follow. Christians worship a dude who had more to say about paying taxes to your oppressors than he had to say about slavery.
The morality of Jesus isn’t a political spectrum. He’s a raging asshole and his morals should be left to rot in whatever unmarked grave his disciples hid his corpse in.
Jesus also said, “The law was made for the man, not the man for the law.” He disobeys the law more than once and asks his disciples to do the same. Then, after Jesus’s death, Peter is instructed to disobey the law even more. So no, the Bible is quite clear that when Jesus says, “Until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished,” he doesn’t mean that all the horrific commandments we find in the Bible must be obeyed. Just a few verses later, Jesus even changes the law!
You can always take verses out of context (both literary and historical) and make anything look horrible. Here, Matthew is actually doing the opposite of what you think. When he writes, “Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven,” he isn’t addressing u/FuglyDuck, an American from the 21st century, but people of his own time. He’s saying that those who “relax one of the least of these commandments and teach others to do the same” will still enter the kingdom, while many Jews of his time believed they wouldn’t enter it at all.
And right after that, he says, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Yet the scribes and Pharisees were well known for their meticulous observance of the letter of the law. So he’s saying that people who observe the letter of the law won’t enter the kingdom of heaven, while those who “relax” the “commandments” will! You see, if you read the text thoughtfully and take its context into account, it says something quite different. It’s convoluted indeed, but that’s the literary style of the time. You can’t make strong assertions like that without studying the subject a minimum. You can’t read 2000 years old texts like they were written yesterday. Even in translation, they have to be decoded.
I have no idea what you mean when you say that Jesus explicitly “cited a law that directs people to stone kids who talk back.” There’s no law in the Old Testament that says that. There’s Deuteronomy 21:18–21, which is a pretty bad law, and as far as I know, Jesus doesn’t cite it. But this law doesn’t speak about children: the “kid” in question is described, among other things, as someone who drinks alcohol. He isn’t a little child. But yes, Deuteronomy 21:18–21 is a shitty text, even without your exaggerations. There are other bad texts in the Bible, and not only in the Old Testament. But they have to be read in context.
For example, you say the Bible “says it’s totally cool to sell your daughters as sex slaves.” I assume you’re talking about Exodus 21:7–11. It’s another shitty law by our standards, but at the time it was a step forward: it protects women who were sold. Yes, selling a daughter is a horrible practice, but it was the norm for much of human history. The Bible wasn’t written in a cultural vacuum. It takes people’s practices as they are and tries to push things in the right direction. And it worked! We moved in the right direction, so those laws now seem backward. They seem backward because they succeeded. Jesus says as much in Matthew 19: the law was imperfect because it was given to an imperfect people. And when Jesus gives a commandment himself, it’s still the same principle.
But what you don’t understand is that only a small part of Christianity considers the Bible to be the “inerrant Word of God.” Jesus didn’t, and neither do “progressive Christians.” So no, my analogy still holds. You’re applying something that’s true of only one part of Christianity to all Christians, and that’s intellectually dishonest. Your criticism is completely justified when directed at people who believe God actually approves of killing people or selling slaves. But that doesn’t describe most of us. We objectively do not worship the God you’re describing.
Jesus also said, “The law was made for the man, not the man for the law.”
… <snip>
You can always take verses out of context (both literary and historical) and make anything look horrible.
First off, it’s amazing that you’re pulling out “CoNtExT” on me here while doing exactly that.
23One Sabbath he was going through the grain fields, and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” 25And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food, 26how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions?” 27Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath, 28so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”
-Mark 2:23-28
Now lets talk about that context.
The first thing here is that they weren’t harvesting or gathering. Harvesting is an entire process. With grains, they would use sickles to cut the grasses, stack them into sheaves to let the grass dry out, then take the bundles to the thresher, removing the seeds of grain, and bringing the grains into storage to keep it away from critters and such.
What is not prohibited is what the Disciples were doing. Plucking the heads of wheat and popping them into your mouth. That was not harvesting, except in the most pedantic and modern sense of the word.
Furthermore, most of the Laws have the exceptions for the preservation of life. The Disciples were hungry. Some translate it as ‘starving’. And this is the argument Jesus is making here. That it was an act to preserve life, which is in fact permissible.
And right after that, he says, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
… snip…
?You see, if you read the text thoughtfully and take its context into account, it says something quite different. It’s convoluted indeed, but that’s the literary style of the time. You can’t make strong assertions like that without studying the subject a minimum. You can’t read 2000 years old texts like they were written yesterday. Even in translation, they have to be decoded.
Sorry. You were lecturing me on context?
You should probably go study the basics. There are multiple legal codes being discussed in the passage. the author of Mark even explains this to you in a parenthetical aside, ya dingus. (Verse 3: “For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, *thus observing the tradition of the elders,”).
Jesus is advocating the written Law of Moses, as written in the Torah. Predominately, in Deuteronomy, but also in Exodus and Leviticus.
The Pharisees were citing the Oral Law, also called the Tradition of the Elders. (they, being the Elders.) the Oral Law fixes a large number of the things that went wrong in the written law. Like, for example, they knew (long before Jesus came around) that around half of women don’t actually bleed the first time they have sex; and that using a bloody cloth as evidence of virginity (and the lack of a blood cloth justification for stoning new brides) is simply fucked in the head…
Or that it’s normal for children to gripe about their parents, and normal for children to push boundaries as they grow up, and that stoning children for doing so is fucked in the head.
They also added things like “wash your food. and your hands.” to it. Mostly it was ritual and not about practical hygiene.
I mean. if you had just read the damn passage you’d know these things. the washing of food and hands as a ritual purity was not part of the torah. it’s part of the Oral Law.
So when he says “you’re righteousness must exceed the pharisees”… He’s saying they don’t measure up because they are not following the Law of Moses.
Also, if you actually read Mark 7, you’d also know the answer to this:
I have no idea what you mean when you say that Jesus explicitly “cited a law that directs people to stone kids who talk back.”
Specifically, Jesus says in verses 9 and 10:
9Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! 10For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
and
Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
What they mean by “honor your mother and father” here includes obedience. (as well as holding reverence and respect).
The second is Exodus 21:17 and Lev 20:9. most christian translations will say “cursed” or “speak ill of” or something to that effect, for example, the NSRVUE:
Whoever curses father or mother shall be put to death.
and
All who curse father or mother shall be put to death; having cursed father or mother, their bloodguilt is upon them.
the word being used in the original Hebrew is ‘qalal’, which yes, can mean “curse”. It also means “to insult:”, to “revile” or to “speak with contempt”. when they do so, it’s less in the sense of a ritual invoking harm on a person, and more speaking evil of them. (which is how Jesus phrased it. funny, huh?)
the JPS, though, as a jewish translation puts it as “insult”
Lev20:9, as the example:
Regarding anyone who insults their father or their mother: they shall be put to death; they have insulted their father and their mother—and the bloodguilt is theirs.
There’s no law in the Old Testament that says that.
lol. so, Jesus literally quotes the damn thing in the passage. still gonna lecture when you don’t even know that much?
Yes, selling a daughter is a horrible practice, but it was the norm for much of human history. The Bible wasn’t written in a cultural vacuum. It takes people’s practices as they are and tries to push things in the right direction.
So you’re saying an all-powerful god, dictating his eternal and absolute and perfect law to his bronze age idiots couldn’t be like “don’t do that, that’s messed up”, but he could say things like “don’t wear clothes of blended fabrics,” and “Don’t eat shellfish or pork”- all of which was far, far more common?
But what you don’t understand is that only a small part of Christianity considers the Bible to be the “inerrant Word of God.” Jesus didn’t,
yes. he. fucking. did. Read your damn book.
17“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 18For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Earlier you said:
Here, Matthew is actually doing the opposite of what you think. When he writes, “Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven,”
lets summarize the meaning of the words on the page, shall we?
“I didn’t come to abolish the law of the prophets”
“I didn’t come to abolish [the law] but fulfill [the prophets]”
“the law is eternal”
“whoever breaks it will be the least”
“you need to be more righteous than those asshats who don’t even follow the law.”
and you’re lecturing me on context? about twisting verses? You’re saying the exact opposite of what any honest person would read in that passage.
Now lets have some fun. the 'new covenant" comes from Jeremiah 31:31-37.
it says that god will create a new covenant because they broke the old one. And that god will do some magic binding rituals to ensure that this new covenant cannot be broken.
So if Jesus did what he said he came to do (fulfill the prophets)… we literally would be incapable of breaking the written Law of Moses. Further, if Jesus was Messiah, then we’d not be having this conversation, The Kingdom of Israel would lead the entire world, Rome would have fallen at the hands of Jesus, and all the Israelites would have been gathered back home and there would be peace because no one would be physically able to deny god.
Literally none of that happened. The very nature of the world as it exists today demonstrates the bullshit. So yeah. you actually did say one accurate thing:
He disobeys the law more than once and asks his disciples to do the same. Then, after Jesus’s death, Peter is instructed to disobey the law even more.
Being a blasphemer and false prophet is contrary to the Law of Moses. I get that’s not how you meant it. but it is true all the same. Jesus didn’t fulfill a single messianic prophecy.
You speak about basics, and you explain something written by Matthew using something Mark wrote? My citation was a part of a succession of citations to show what the general vibe of the Bible was, not a way to explain the details of a particular text, which is absurd. And the you ignore that I showed that Deuteronomy 21:18-21 doesn’t speak about kids? You know adult children exist too? This law was written when fathers could kill their children freely until they were married; this law imposes an exterior party, a social control on that practice, and is an other example of what I said (and that you dutifully ignored, you love to ignore what contradicts your hatred, don’t you?): the law was not written in a vacuum, but pushes things in the right direction. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is an explanation of Exodus 21:17, as it was written later. The fact what we find this law horrible is just the proof that this law worked! And then you invent laws? Gleaning is totally forbidden during the Sabbat, even to pick up a fallen fruit and eating it is forbidden! You’re intellectually dishonest and insulting, I love to discuss these things with people disagreeing with me, but I have no time to loose with disrespectful people. You’re blocked.
No it isn’t, or else this conversation wouldn’t be happening.
The Bible is a thousands-year-old compilation of local folk tales and the musings of illiterate sheepherders, munged together by rich elites who saw its usefulness in controlling the masses, and has been translated. modified, and reinterpreted dozens of times to keep it effective at controlling the masses. It’s fraught with inconsistencies, and calling anything in it “quite clear” is honestly just laughable.
The parts aren’t, the whole is, and I showed why. You have the right to disagree of course; but then it’s not a bad thing to answer to arguments by arguments.
You didn’t show anything, you shared your interpretation and claimed that it’s the one “most” Christians believe without any evidence.
More to the point though, your interpretation isn’t even clear - you yourself admitted that the Bible uses difficult prose, suffers from translation issues, and needs to be viewed through a cultural lense calibrated to the times it was written. How is that “clear” at all?
And I did give you an argument. I directly countered your claim that “the Bible is quite clear” by saying nothing in the Bible is clear and giving examples and reasoning for why I believe it isn’t clear. I thought that was quite clear.
I wish you were more correct than you intend, but you are grossly off the mark of reality.
Most people that hold onto religion into adulthood do so because it makes them feel special above their fellow humans. It doesn’t matter if all of it is correct so much as the things that make “believers” special are unique.
TL;DR: Most religious people want to be special, not moral or correct. Which makes them evil piles of shit.
I think a lot of religious people are happy to bend the rules of their religion to match their desired lifestyle. God will forgive them and Jesus is coming for them on white horse with a choir of angels. As long as you meet your performative obligations and ask for forgiveness later, you can do whatever you want.
Note this is not true of all religious people and while it is representative of my interactions with many American Christians of various denominations, my interactions with Christians in South and Central America and Europe have been quite different.
I grew up in a half-religious home, but it was a very chill “God Loves everyone” kind way. Nevertheless, religion can be dangerous. While my exposure in the home was harmless, just a little casual low-key exposure to a local church put me on a path to being a very devout young Evangelical for a decade or so.
My parents got along well and I barely remember them fighting or arguing. They made it work despite the religious gap. I now consider myself a non-theist/atheist/agnostic/non-religious/Buddhist-adjacent/Satan-loving/philosopher. I dated a few Catholic women (some more devout than others), a non-religious woman, but mostly people who just went to church with their parents or grandparents a few times a year and otherwise just lived a normal life.
Would I date a religious person now? Probably not if their values were tied to it and it wasn’t just a cultural connection. Sounds like hard work and life is difficult enough without intentionally setting everything to hard mode.
Mentioned in a different post on that, but I did phrase my statement badly
IE I meant to say I find the concept of a mixed marriage in the case of people who believe, salvation = belief, and those who don’t believe are damned, is crazy. not to imply all religious believe salvation = belief.
Judeo-Christian religions that believe in hell as the destination for people who do not believe in their god
If you studied the theology of judeo-Christian religions, you’d learn that this view is very much a minority one. In Christianity for example, outside evangelicalism, nobody teaches that (Catholicism teaches for example that a “hidden Jesus” saves outside the church). In Judaism, as far as I know, no sect teaches that at all. In Islam, outside a few sects, nobody teaches that either (in shia islam for example, most non-Muslims are Jahil-e-Qasir, “inculpable ignorant”).
First I would like to clarify my words a bit, when I said “judeo christian religions that believe X”
I intended to mean “in the case of religions that believe X” (as in, I wanted to apply my I don’t comprehend how a mixed religion relationship works for people who believe salvation is tied to belief), not to imply all judeo christian religions believe belief = salvation.
However.
At least from what I can see, just looking up different catholic sources. Unless I’m completely misunderstanding, https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-there-really-no-salvation-outside-the-catholic-church , more or less from what I can gather, that’s primarally applying for say people who… literally have never heard or rejected the gospel. IE, not someone who’s married to a catholic wife and had a bible in the house and has the choice to refuse church every week.
Sort of the old joke
Eskimo “If I did not know about god and sin would I go to hell”
Missionary: “of course not, if you didn’t know you couldn’t be blamed”
Eskimo: “Why did you tell me then?”
IE the concept of “invincible ignorance”. and from what I’m searching the “inculpable ignorant” in islam. basically applies to people who have never been exposed to the religion. IE if they were around people of the faith… had access to a church/mosque etc… that doesn’t seem to apply.
Pope francis had his line in 2018 that he implied atheists could go to heaven, but the vatican was quick to say taht should not “be considered as a faithful transcription of the Holy father’s words”. In other words, the vatican isn’t fully standing behind that, and that’s very far from anything that the previous popes would have said.
I apologize for that! Now that I read you again, yes your wording was pretty clear, I misunderstood. As you can see by my poor expression, English is not my mother tongue, and I often misunderstand some nuances like that. Sorry again!
the concept of “invincible ignorance”. and from what I’m searching the “inculpable ignorant” in Islam. basically applies to people who have never been exposed to the religion
No it’s still apply. I’m not Catholic myself, but I’ll use again Catholic texts, as they are a very hierarchical denomination it’s easier as they have authoritative texts. In Gaudium et Spes, a document from the last council (so one of the most authoritative texts of this church), it is written:
taken as a whole, atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, including a critical reaction against religious beliefs, and in some places against the Christian religion in particular. Hence believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion (§19)
One can then be atheist not because they never heard of Christianity, but because the Christians themselves taught by their words or their acts something wrong about the Church. And I mean, I’m a Christian, and I can’t reproach people to hate the Church (and by Church here I mean the Christian one, not specifically the Catholic one) when I see how far from the Gospel it often is! I didn’t heard what Francis said about atheism, so I have no opinion on the matter.
For Islam, as it’s a more horizontal faith, it will be harder to find clear proofs, but from discussions I had with Muslims I know, it’s more or less the same thing. They said to me that Islam is badly spoken about in our Western society, so even if they know what Islam is and have mosques around them, they still are seen as ignorant.
Eskimo: “Why did you tell me then?”
That’s a fun story, I never heard it, thanks!
If I were this missionary, I’d answer something like this: outside evangelicalism again, the Christian faith is only secondarily about salvation. If you read the Gospels, for example, Jesus almost never speaks about the afterlife. And when he does, he generally isn’t actually teaching about the afterlife; rather, he uses it as a metaphor to teach us how to live a full life here and now. The same is true of the Old Testament.
Paul emphasizes the subject more, but his point is something like: “This question is settled: you are saved by grace, so stop worrying about it and do good instead!” The problem is that his definition of “doing good” comes from a man living 2000 years ago, and some people (within evangelicalism, but unfortunately not only there this time) nowadays focus on the details of his definition of a good life rather than on the spirit of his teaching.
How convenient for you that you get to pick and choose which parts you like.
Even though your own lord and savior said that he didn’t come to abolish the old law but to fulfill it, and that not a single bit of that old law will change until the end of the earth (paraphrasing Matthew 5:17).
You don’t get to pick and choose what that “old law” was, it’s literally the entire first part of your holy book. And it explicitly condones slavery (among a litany of other heinous shit).
How convenient for you that you get to pick and choose which parts you like.
It’s not cherrypicking, it’s interpretation. I do not arbitrarily choose, I study the context, and use the Love of God as an hermeneutical key, to cite Martin Luther.
Even though your own lord and savior said that he didn’t come to abolish the old law but to fulfill it, and that not a single bit of that old law will change until the end of the earth (paraphrasing Matthew 5:17).
I’ll give a bit more detail there. also looks like I was way off on the year. First off I’ll admit, majority of my knowledge of Christianity is based on American versions. Of which I gotta admit, American believers are a different animal than European ones. IE hence American Catholics are basically considering our current president more authoritative than the pope in spiritual matters. But even so from what I’ve seen of say actual bishops debating with Hitchens etc… It still seems to me that at least a fairly significant portion even at an international level. This ain’t a Jubalee fact check episode so obviously we shouldn’t do it as, oh if 49.9% believe belief = salvation, then you are right and if 50.1% believe it than I’m right. I’m just saying it’s not an insignificant portion. My point is someone who believes belief = salvation, and also marries someone who doesn’t believe. Is either not as convinced of their belief as they claim, or they are expecting their spouse to change, maybe thinking that being around them but not preaching, is it’s own witnessing strategy (IE let them see the light in your life),
Yes, I agree with you on the last part. I’m happily married with someone who doesn’t believe, and I couldn’t live with the idea that she could be damned just for that.
god hangs out with his angels/demons, not lowly humans. evangelicals get mad, if its not the well known traditional angels, and not the more obscure angels in the older texts. they even have a “Great chain of being” ANGELS/demons are above men, who are above women and animals.
i also find christians funny, especially the rightie/fundementalist types, they are purist when it comes to christianity, when its been portrayed in media.
Me when asked whether I’d date a religious person.
Or something who believes in astrology, tarot or any other bullshit
It’s amazing what you can live with as soon as you start getting laid.
Literaly any other! Don’t need people who believe jn nonsense such as free will, or the human spirit, or anything that indicates humans are more than machines
Well those are a bit harder to explain away to me than tarot, in fact those explain tarot in my opinion.
To me, at least with Judeo-Christian religions that believe in hell as the destination for people who do not believe in their god, I find it so baffling that people can have mixed or non religious serious relationships, with the idea “well we just don’t try to convert eachother”.
How the hell do you square.
I love my spouse.
I love my God.
One day my god is going to send my spouse to be tortured for all of eternity. I will then spend the rest of my life happily hanging out with my god.
It only makes sense if you either don’t really believe what you believe, or you are very certain your partner is going to change their view. From the atheist side it doesn’t really matter.
i never seen those relationship ends well, one is super religious christian, and one is not . the one that is religious wants conversion from the other one. or if you have different religions , which is just as complicated, if not more. it make sense is one is maybe agnostic/ or aethiest though, there is potential for converting to that religion.
I am a Christian. I also do not understand how Christians can choose to marry a person not of their faith. I certainly wouldn’t. I will try to explain why I hold this view.
My greatest fear is marrying someone who then apostacizes. I don’t want my heart to break that way, to love someone so personally and deeply and know they will cease to be.* I hope I do not choose a man who will become an apostate. I hope not to make a hasty choice, but I have a limited pool as a gay Christian, and it is stressful.
It isn’t that I would have any qualm with a difference in tradition or culture that would come with a partner from a different faith, but that I’d love them knowing they would die. That is a great and terrible grief, and is the same grief I believe God felt for every person (God is Love Itself—how can he be without grief at our suffering? No one has so much sorrow as the God who witnesses the death of his beloved children by the billions. God is Love who mourns.); the grief that compelled him to send Christ.
I see God like the sun (He is called Heaven’s Sun and Morning Star in Scripture); we must be with Him to live, but we are imperfect vessels, and His light will ablate our souls. Only through Christ’s sacrifice are we made holy to stand in such light without dying. And in such a way, I believe those who refuse salvation** burn in that light and cease to be.
Nonbelievers are beautiful, but they burn for only a short time. Would that they were everlasting…
*There are multiple beliefs about Hell/Hades/Sheol/Gehenna. Mine is annihilationism, which I have briefly surmised here. A good pastor I appreciate who shares this view is the progressive pastor Paul Drees. You may find he runs counter to the Christofascism that is so much of “evangelical” American church culture today. James Talarico also has good sermons in this more Christ-like vein of Christianity, although I do not think he is an annihilationist.
**This concept of refusal of salvation is core to Arminian Christianity.
It is okay if you disagree with me; I am just sharing how I view God. I hope this post helps some people understand my view.
Jewish people generally don’t believe in hell because their scripture doesn’t support it. Christians often believe in hell due to hellenization of Christian theology after the time of Jesus. Many Christians don’t really believe in hell. The parts of the Bible people interpret as supporting the existence of hell are generally being misinterpreted.
Not everyone is a purist. Lots of the more open minded religious types are willing to entertain the possibility that their god cares more about people living a good life rather than selecting the right religion. Those types are fully compatible with a multicultural society. Often they’ll play lip service to fit in with the more extreme religious nuts, but the fact they can coexist happily is proof their views are more nuanced.
I’m fine with anyone who is fine with anyone who is fine with anyone.
I don’t care how “progressive” a Christian is. They worship a god that thinks it’s okay to sell your own daughter into sex slavery and murder infants of the offense of their ancestors supposedly rebuffing Israelites during the exodus (and rightly so! Look what they did to Cannan.) even though the exodus never happened.
It doesn’t make sense, does it? Some traditions give birth to opposing schools, and it’s unjust to conflate the two just because they share a name. What your describing is fundamentalism, not Christianity, and “progressive fundamentalism” doesn’t have any sense, just like “anti-authoritarian stalinism”.
No, they were just describing events from the Old Testament.
Again, the Bible ≠ God, except for fundamentalists.
I didn’t say it was god. These are alleged historical events. You don’t get to just say it didn’t happen.
Slavery was real, and the Old Testament has explicit rules about it. And Jesus never had a single thing to say about it (besides the thing about fulfilling the old law. Which, again, explicitly includes slavery).
This has NOTHING to do with fundamentalism. You don’t get to hand wave this shit away, it’s at the very core of the religion you claim to believe.
You can’t change the subject of the discussion on a whim. The original argument was that Christians worshiped a God that condone slavery and child murder. I showed that, for most Christians, it isn’t the case.
(And by the way, these events did not happen. The Exodus is a myth according to the historians, so yes, I’m allowed to say so)
I do have to question the core concept though, consider this just me trying to make sense of the logic. I’ll admit I’ve only understood the 2 ends of the camp, I was raised a fundamentalist, and really didn’t have much of a mid point from that to atheism.
To me the idea there is like saying “I’m a big fan of Darth Vader”, but I’m not a fundamentalist, I know star wars isn’t literally true, I don’t consider him to have blown up planets or built death stars.
IE then comes the question. There’s only star wars materials to even imply a vader ever existed, and if you don’t believe in that… in what meaningful way does vader exist? Or more importantly how do you know ANYTHING about him. IE what does it mean to “believe in darth vader”, but I don’t think he did most if any of the things in star wars.
I could see “I believe in a god, but don’t think there is any way to know anything about him, I just feel like the world was made”, that I can understand. But the second you slap the label of an existing religion, how do you not inherit the baggage as well. Because well what else is there, why would I assume the bible has more godly information than the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. If I’m not ascribing something in it to be believed to be true. Whether you go with the moral parable or literal truth, say a story where god tells his people to go into a city and kill all the men women and children, and they refuse and god punishes them until they do… whether it’s true or not, the moral of that story is “do what god says, even if your personal morals tell you it’s horrible”. The message is what’s awful today.
Jesus stated unequivocally and emphatically (at least according to the scriptures) that the Law of Moses is eternal and will remain in force until the earth passes away.
And he cited a law that directs people to stone kids that talk back as a gotcha in a legal beef with the Pharisees- who were like “maybe stoning children to death doesn’t fit the crime of sassing your parents, so we should not do that”
That same legal code that Jesus explicitly endorsed expressly states that slavery is cool, and goes so far as to say that beating your slave to within an inch that slave’s life is acceptable.
That legal code also says roughly half of all women should be stoned because whoever wrote the damn thing didn’t understand female anatomy.
That legal code says it’s totally cool to sell your daughters as sex slaves.
It says you should stone kids that talk back.
That is “biblical morality”. They might be a decent person but they worship an awful scum bag that makes Epstein and Trump look positively benign.
And that is all just reading the damn book with some honesty.
Suffice it to say you’re analogy is stupid and doesn’t follow. Christians worship a dude who had more to say about paying taxes to your oppressors than he had to say about slavery.
The morality of Jesus isn’t a political spectrum. He’s a raging asshole and his morals should be left to rot in whatever unmarked grave his disciples hid his corpse in.
Jesus also said, “The law was made for the man, not the man for the law.” He disobeys the law more than once and asks his disciples to do the same. Then, after Jesus’s death, Peter is instructed to disobey the law even more. So no, the Bible is quite clear that when Jesus says, “Until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished,” he doesn’t mean that all the horrific commandments we find in the Bible must be obeyed. Just a few verses later, Jesus even changes the law!
You can always take verses out of context (both literary and historical) and make anything look horrible. Here, Matthew is actually doing the opposite of what you think. When he writes, “Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven,” he isn’t addressing u/FuglyDuck, an American from the 21st century, but people of his own time. He’s saying that those who “relax one of the least of these commandments and teach others to do the same” will still enter the kingdom, while many Jews of his time believed they wouldn’t enter it at all.
And right after that, he says, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Yet the scribes and Pharisees were well known for their meticulous observance of the letter of the law. So he’s saying that people who observe the letter of the law won’t enter the kingdom of heaven, while those who “relax” the “commandments” will! You see, if you read the text thoughtfully and take its context into account, it says something quite different. It’s convoluted indeed, but that’s the literary style of the time. You can’t make strong assertions like that without studying the subject a minimum. You can’t read 2000 years old texts like they were written yesterday. Even in translation, they have to be decoded.
I have no idea what you mean when you say that Jesus explicitly “cited a law that directs people to stone kids who talk back.” There’s no law in the Old Testament that says that. There’s Deuteronomy 21:18–21, which is a pretty bad law, and as far as I know, Jesus doesn’t cite it. But this law doesn’t speak about children: the “kid” in question is described, among other things, as someone who drinks alcohol. He isn’t a little child. But yes, Deuteronomy 21:18–21 is a shitty text, even without your exaggerations. There are other bad texts in the Bible, and not only in the Old Testament. But they have to be read in context.
For example, you say the Bible “says it’s totally cool to sell your daughters as sex slaves.” I assume you’re talking about Exodus 21:7–11. It’s another shitty law by our standards, but at the time it was a step forward: it protects women who were sold. Yes, selling a daughter is a horrible practice, but it was the norm for much of human history. The Bible wasn’t written in a cultural vacuum. It takes people’s practices as they are and tries to push things in the right direction. And it worked! We moved in the right direction, so those laws now seem backward. They seem backward because they succeeded. Jesus says as much in Matthew 19: the law was imperfect because it was given to an imperfect people. And when Jesus gives a commandment himself, it’s still the same principle.
But what you don’t understand is that only a small part of Christianity considers the Bible to be the “inerrant Word of God.” Jesus didn’t, and neither do “progressive Christians.” So no, my analogy still holds. You’re applying something that’s true of only one part of Christianity to all Christians, and that’s intellectually dishonest. Your criticism is completely justified when directed at people who believe God actually approves of killing people or selling slaves. But that doesn’t describe most of us. We objectively do not worship the God you’re describing.
First off, it’s amazing that you’re pulling out “CoNtExT” on me here while doing exactly that.
Now lets talk about that context.
The first thing here is that they weren’t harvesting or gathering. Harvesting is an entire process. With grains, they would use sickles to cut the grasses, stack them into sheaves to let the grass dry out, then take the bundles to the thresher, removing the seeds of grain, and bringing the grains into storage to keep it away from critters and such.
What is not prohibited is what the Disciples were doing. Plucking the heads of wheat and popping them into your mouth. That was not harvesting, except in the most pedantic and modern sense of the word.
Furthermore, most of the Laws have the exceptions for the preservation of life. The Disciples were hungry. Some translate it as ‘starving’. And this is the argument Jesus is making here. That it was an act to preserve life, which is in fact permissible.
Sorry. You were lecturing me on context?
You should probably go study the basics. There are multiple legal codes being discussed in the passage. the author of Mark even explains this to you in a parenthetical aside, ya dingus. (Verse 3: “For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, *thus observing the tradition of the elders,”).
Jesus is advocating the written Law of Moses, as written in the Torah. Predominately, in Deuteronomy, but also in Exodus and Leviticus.
The Pharisees were citing the Oral Law, also called the Tradition of the Elders. (they, being the Elders.) the Oral Law fixes a large number of the things that went wrong in the written law. Like, for example, they knew (long before Jesus came around) that around half of women don’t actually bleed the first time they have sex; and that using a bloody cloth as evidence of virginity (and the lack of a blood cloth justification for stoning new brides) is simply fucked in the head…
Or that it’s normal for children to gripe about their parents, and normal for children to push boundaries as they grow up, and that stoning children for doing so is fucked in the head.
They also added things like “wash your food. and your hands.” to it. Mostly it was ritual and not about practical hygiene.
I mean. if you had just read the damn passage you’d know these things. the washing of food and hands as a ritual purity was not part of the torah. it’s part of the Oral Law.
So when he says “you’re righteousness must exceed the pharisees”… He’s saying they don’t measure up because they are not following the Law of Moses.
Also, if you actually read Mark 7, you’d also know the answer to this:
Specifically, Jesus says in verses 9 and 10:
The first is found in Exodus 20:12 and Deuteronomy 5:16
What they mean by “honor your mother and father” here includes obedience. (as well as holding reverence and respect).
The second is Exodus 21:17 and Lev 20:9. most christian translations will say “cursed” or “speak ill of” or something to that effect, for example, the NSRVUE:
the word being used in the original Hebrew is ‘qalal’, which yes, can mean “curse”. It also means “to insult:”, to “revile” or to “speak with contempt”. when they do so, it’s less in the sense of a ritual invoking harm on a person, and more speaking evil of them. (which is how Jesus phrased it. funny, huh?)
the JPS, though, as a jewish translation puts it as “insult”
Lev20:9, as the example:
lol. so, Jesus literally quotes the damn thing in the passage. still gonna lecture when you don’t even know that much?
So you’re saying an all-powerful god, dictating his eternal and absolute and perfect law to his bronze age idiots couldn’t be like “don’t do that, that’s messed up”, but he could say things like “don’t wear clothes of blended fabrics,” and “Don’t eat shellfish or pork”- all of which was far, far more common?
yes. he. fucking. did. Read your damn book.
Earlier you said:
lets summarize the meaning of the words on the page, shall we?
and you’re lecturing me on context? about twisting verses? You’re saying the exact opposite of what any honest person would read in that passage.
Now lets have some fun. the 'new covenant" comes from Jeremiah 31:31-37.
it says that god will create a new covenant because they broke the old one. And that god will do some magic binding rituals to ensure that this new covenant cannot be broken.
So if Jesus did what he said he came to do (fulfill the prophets)… we literally would be incapable of breaking the written Law of Moses. Further, if Jesus was Messiah, then we’d not be having this conversation, The Kingdom of Israel would lead the entire world, Rome would have fallen at the hands of Jesus, and all the Israelites would have been gathered back home and there would be peace because no one would be physically able to deny god.
Literally none of that happened. The very nature of the world as it exists today demonstrates the bullshit. So yeah. you actually did say one accurate thing:
Being a blasphemer and false prophet is contrary to the Law of Moses. I get that’s not how you meant it. but it is true all the same. Jesus didn’t fulfill a single messianic prophecy.
You speak about basics, and you explain something written by Matthew using something Mark wrote? My citation was a part of a succession of citations to show what the general vibe of the Bible was, not a way to explain the details of a particular text, which is absurd. And the you ignore that I showed that Deuteronomy 21:18-21 doesn’t speak about kids? You know adult children exist too? This law was written when fathers could kill their children freely until they were married; this law imposes an exterior party, a social control on that practice, and is an other example of what I said (and that you dutifully ignored, you love to ignore what contradicts your hatred, don’t you?): the law was not written in a vacuum, but pushes things in the right direction. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is an explanation of Exodus 21:17, as it was written later. The fact what we find this law horrible is just the proof that this law worked! And then you invent laws? Gleaning is totally forbidden during the Sabbat, even to pick up a fallen fruit and eating it is forbidden! You’re intellectually dishonest and insulting, I love to discuss these things with people disagreeing with me, but I have no time to loose with disrespectful people. You’re blocked.
No it isn’t, or else this conversation wouldn’t be happening.
The Bible is a thousands-year-old compilation of local folk tales and the musings of illiterate sheepherders, munged together by rich elites who saw its usefulness in controlling the masses, and has been translated. modified, and reinterpreted dozens of times to keep it effective at controlling the masses. It’s fraught with inconsistencies, and calling anything in it “quite clear” is honestly just laughable.
The parts aren’t, the whole is, and I showed why. You have the right to disagree of course; but then it’s not a bad thing to answer to arguments by arguments.
You didn’t show anything, you shared your interpretation and claimed that it’s the one “most” Christians believe without any evidence.
More to the point though, your interpretation isn’t even clear - you yourself admitted that the Bible uses difficult prose, suffers from translation issues, and needs to be viewed through a cultural lense calibrated to the times it was written. How is that “clear” at all?
And I did give you an argument. I directly countered your claim that “the Bible is quite clear” by saying nothing in the Bible is clear and giving examples and reasoning for why I believe it isn’t clear. I thought that was quite clear.
🔥
They probably don’t subscribe to the entire package. Very few people do. They always cherry pick what is convenient.
Seems like a lot of Christians likes to ignore/forget the 10 commandments.
I wish you were more correct than you intend, but you are grossly off the mark of reality.
Most people that hold onto religion into adulthood do so because it makes them feel special above their fellow humans. It doesn’t matter if all of it is correct so much as the things that make “believers” special are unique.
TL;DR: Most religious people want to be special, not moral or correct. Which makes them evil piles of shit.
I’m not even religious but this just feels like reductionist BS. That and that you’re projecting just a wee bit.
I was a young adult in Orange County, California, in the Age of Reagan. And at least back then, Christian girls could be pretty freaky.
A god like that has no right to exist.
I think a lot of religious people are happy to bend the rules of their religion to match their desired lifestyle. God will forgive them and Jesus is coming for them on white horse with a choir of angels. As long as you meet your performative obligations and ask for forgiveness later, you can do whatever you want.
Note this is not true of all religious people and while it is representative of my interactions with many American Christians of various denominations, my interactions with Christians in South and Central America and Europe have been quite different.
I grew up in a half-religious home, but it was a very chill “God Loves everyone” kind way. Nevertheless, religion can be dangerous. While my exposure in the home was harmless, just a little casual low-key exposure to a local church put me on a path to being a very devout young Evangelical for a decade or so.
My parents got along well and I barely remember them fighting or arguing. They made it work despite the religious gap. I now consider myself a non-theist/atheist/agnostic/non-religious/Buddhist-adjacent/Satan-loving/philosopher. I dated a few Catholic women (some more devout than others), a non-religious woman, but mostly people who just went to church with their parents or grandparents a few times a year and otherwise just lived a normal life.
Would I date a religious person now? Probably not if their values were tied to it and it wasn’t just a cultural connection. Sounds like hard work and life is difficult enough without intentionally setting everything to hard mode.
That’s only a minority of religions. Don’t paint every religiin with an evangelical Protestant brush.
Mentioned in a different post on that, but I did phrase my statement badly
IE I meant to say I find the concept of a mixed marriage in the case of people who believe, salvation = belief, and those who don’t believe are damned, is crazy. not to imply all religious believe salvation = belief.
All religions are stupid and full of hatred
Spoken like someone who hasn’t checked.
And is himself apparently full of hatred.
If you studied the theology of judeo-Christian religions, you’d learn that this view is very much a minority one. In Christianity for example, outside evangelicalism, nobody teaches that (Catholicism teaches for example that a “hidden Jesus” saves outside the church). In Judaism, as far as I know, no sect teaches that at all. In Islam, outside a few sects, nobody teaches that either (in shia islam for example, most non-Muslims are Jahil-e-Qasir, “inculpable ignorant”).
First I would like to clarify my words a bit, when I said “judeo christian religions that believe X”
I intended to mean “in the case of religions that believe X” (as in, I wanted to apply my I don’t comprehend how a mixed religion relationship works for people who believe salvation is tied to belief), not to imply all judeo christian religions believe belief = salvation.
However.
At least from what I can see, just looking up different catholic sources. Unless I’m completely misunderstanding, https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-there-really-no-salvation-outside-the-catholic-church , more or less from what I can gather, that’s primarally applying for say people who… literally have never heard or rejected the gospel. IE, not someone who’s married to a catholic wife and had a bible in the house and has the choice to refuse church every week.
Sort of the old joke
Eskimo “If I did not know about god and sin would I go to hell”
Missionary: “of course not, if you didn’t know you couldn’t be blamed”
Eskimo: “Why did you tell me then?”
IE the concept of “invincible ignorance”. and from what I’m searching the “inculpable ignorant” in islam. basically applies to people who have never been exposed to the religion. IE if they were around people of the faith… had access to a church/mosque etc… that doesn’t seem to apply.
Pope francis had his line in 2018 that he implied atheists could go to heaven, but the vatican was quick to say taht should not “be considered as a faithful transcription of the Holy father’s words”. In other words, the vatican isn’t fully standing behind that, and that’s very far from anything that the previous popes would have said.
I apologize for that! Now that I read you again, yes your wording was pretty clear, I misunderstood. As you can see by my poor expression, English is not my mother tongue, and I often misunderstand some nuances like that. Sorry again!
No it’s still apply. I’m not Catholic myself, but I’ll use again Catholic texts, as they are a very hierarchical denomination it’s easier as they have authoritative texts. In Gaudium et Spes, a document from the last council (so one of the most authoritative texts of this church), it is written:
One can then be atheist not because they never heard of Christianity, but because the Christians themselves taught by their words or their acts something wrong about the Church. And I mean, I’m a Christian, and I can’t reproach people to hate the Church (and by Church here I mean the Christian one, not specifically the Catholic one) when I see how far from the Gospel it often is! I didn’t heard what Francis said about atheism, so I have no opinion on the matter.
For Islam, as it’s a more horizontal faith, it will be harder to find clear proofs, but from discussions I had with Muslims I know, it’s more or less the same thing. They said to me that Islam is badly spoken about in our Western society, so even if they know what Islam is and have mosques around them, they still are seen as ignorant.
That’s a fun story, I never heard it, thanks!
If I were this missionary, I’d answer something like this: outside evangelicalism again, the Christian faith is only secondarily about salvation. If you read the Gospels, for example, Jesus almost never speaks about the afterlife. And when he does, he generally isn’t actually teaching about the afterlife; rather, he uses it as a metaphor to teach us how to live a full life here and now. The same is true of the Old Testament.
Paul emphasizes the subject more, but his point is something like: “This question is settled: you are saved by grace, so stop worrying about it and do good instead!” The problem is that his definition of “doing good” comes from a man living 2000 years ago, and some people (within evangelicalism, but unfortunately not only there this time) nowadays focus on the details of his definition of a good life rather than on the spirit of his teaching.
Your god condones slavery. You can pontificate all you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that your religion is vile.
It doesn’t. Parts of the Bible do, but I do not believe that the Bible is the inherent word of God. Only fundamentalists believe that.
How convenient for you that you get to pick and choose which parts you like.
Even though your own lord and savior said that he didn’t come to abolish the old law but to fulfill it, and that not a single bit of that old law will change until the end of the earth (paraphrasing Matthew 5:17).
You don’t get to pick and choose what that “old law” was, it’s literally the entire first part of your holy book. And it explicitly condones slavery (among a litany of other heinous shit).
It’s not cherrypicking, it’s interpretation. I do not arbitrarily choose, I study the context, and use the Love of God as an hermeneutical key, to cite Martin Luther.
I answered about this text here.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/05/29/187009384/Pope-Francis-Even-Atheists-Can-Be-Redeemed
I’ll give a bit more detail there. also looks like I was way off on the year. First off I’ll admit, majority of my knowledge of Christianity is based on American versions. Of which I gotta admit, American believers are a different animal than European ones. IE hence American Catholics are basically considering our current president more authoritative than the pope in spiritual matters. But even so from what I’ve seen of say actual bishops debating with Hitchens etc… It still seems to me that at least a fairly significant portion even at an international level. This ain’t a Jubalee fact check episode so obviously we shouldn’t do it as, oh if 49.9% believe belief = salvation, then you are right and if 50.1% believe it than I’m right. I’m just saying it’s not an insignificant portion. My point is someone who believes belief = salvation, and also marries someone who doesn’t believe. Is either not as convinced of their belief as they claim, or they are expecting their spouse to change, maybe thinking that being around them but not preaching, is it’s own witnessing strategy (IE let them see the light in your life),
Yes, I agree with you on the last part. I’m happily married with someone who doesn’t believe, and I couldn’t live with the idea that she could be damned just for that.
Doubt.
god hangs out with his angels/demons, not lowly humans. evangelicals get mad, if its not the well known traditional angels, and not the more obscure angels in the older texts. they even have a “Great chain of being” ANGELS/demons are above men, who are above women and animals.
i also find christians funny, especially the rightie/fundementalist types, they are purist when it comes to christianity, when its been portrayed in media.