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.
I’ll use an actual biblical example. Moses didn’t exist, and the Exodus was not a historical event. I think the people who wrote these texts knew that to some extent. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many inconsistencies. They weren’t stupid; they knew what a contradiction was.
But I don’t care. How would the fate of a people 3000 years ago change my life today? It wouldn’t. But the story is a lesson, a lesson that can change my life today. I believe that people were inspired by God to convey a message. They did so in their own language and cultural framework, using the rhetorical tools available to them: myth. That message can be summed up in a few words: God wants God’s people to be free, and God walks with us when we try to free ourselves. I’m not a slave in Egypt, but I’m not always free. I can be a slave to my anger, my passions, or a habit, and God helps me in my struggle for freedom. When I read the story of the Exodus, I look for what it can teach me about freedom today.
How do I know the Bible is truer than, say, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, or the IKEA catalogue? The truth is, I don’t. I do think, not just believe, but philosophically think that something beyond the world, which we might call “God” as an approximation, exists. Or, to be more precise, I think its existence is more probable than its nonexistence. I don’t know that it exists; it just makes more sense to me.
As for the rest, yes, those are beliefs, not certainties. I can live with that. Uncertainty is part of life! If we acted only when we knew something for sure, we’d do nothing. A lot of people like to lie to themselves, pretending that we can know whether God exists, that our political ideology is the best one, or what is right and wrong. Sometimes we can know these things. For example, I know that my political ideology is better than fascism; I have no uncertainty about that. But in most cases, we can’t be certain. I could stop at “a God probably exists” while continuing my life as if not, but I choose to thrive in uncertainty rather than fight it, and that leaves me freer to explore and open myself to other traditions and schools of thought.
I said that most Christians (by far) believe people can be saved without believing, while a minority believe that salvation is impossible without the correct belief. I believe something else. I belong to another minority, probably the smallest one: I believe there is more than one legitimate spiritual path. The Catholic Church still teaches that there is no salvation outside the Church; it’s just that some people are members of the Church without knowing it. I believe the Church is one path among others, and simply the one that fits me today. The Bible helps me, the liberal Christian tradition nourishes me, and the community shelters me.
God is unknowable by definition. We’re talking about a being that exists outside time and space, so our words can’t legitimately claim to describe it. When we describe things, words that seem to contradict one another may both be true. It’s like two people describing the same mountain: someone on its northern face might describe it as a different mountain from the one described by someone on its southern face, even though they’re both describing the same mountain.
If I’m wrong, if there is no God, or if I’m irredeemably ignorant of the One True Religion™, it’s not a big deal. My faith has helped me live a better, fuller, and freer life. Who cares if an effective medicine turns out to be a placebo? And if I’m wrong and only people who believe a precise set of doctrines are saved, then I don’t want to be saved by such an assholish God. So everything works out for the best. (Though that idea makes no sense to me.)
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.
You’re mixing things up, maybe because I’m not clear or maybe consciously. It’s probably the first. I hope.
What most Christians believe is that one can be saved without believing, and I proved that citing official Catholic texts. Maybe these texts aren’t true to the Bible, but that is of no consequence, they’re still a proof that most Christians believe what I said. The first question was not “can non-Christian be saved?” it was “does Christians believe that non-Christian can be saved?” and these are two different things.
Now, about the Bible, I did not contradict myself. Let’s take an other text: The Capital by Marx and Engels. It’s not a simple text: to understand it wholly, you must have a strong economical, philosophical and historical culture. It needs time, efforts, and this text is still debated today, as there are different legitimate interpretations. But even without them, you can read it and some things will be clear, for example that capitalism should be fought. A text can be difficult on its parts and clear on the whole on a few subjects.
It’s the case with the Bible. That the Law is not eternal is very clear, so if you see a text that says the contrary it should either be dismissed as a text contradicting the whole message, or interpreted to find the actual message.
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.
I’ll use an actual biblical example. Moses didn’t exist, and the Exodus was not a historical event. I think the people who wrote these texts knew that to some extent. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many inconsistencies. They weren’t stupid; they knew what a contradiction was.
But I don’t care. How would the fate of a people 3000 years ago change my life today? It wouldn’t. But the story is a lesson, a lesson that can change my life today. I believe that people were inspired by God to convey a message. They did so in their own language and cultural framework, using the rhetorical tools available to them: myth. That message can be summed up in a few words: God wants God’s people to be free, and God walks with us when we try to free ourselves. I’m not a slave in Egypt, but I’m not always free. I can be a slave to my anger, my passions, or a habit, and God helps me in my struggle for freedom. When I read the story of the Exodus, I look for what it can teach me about freedom today.
How do I know the Bible is truer than, say, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, or the IKEA catalogue? The truth is, I don’t. I do think, not just believe, but philosophically think that something beyond the world, which we might call “God” as an approximation, exists. Or, to be more precise, I think its existence is more probable than its nonexistence. I don’t know that it exists; it just makes more sense to me.
As for the rest, yes, those are beliefs, not certainties. I can live with that. Uncertainty is part of life! If we acted only when we knew something for sure, we’d do nothing. A lot of people like to lie to themselves, pretending that we can know whether God exists, that our political ideology is the best one, or what is right and wrong. Sometimes we can know these things. For example, I know that my political ideology is better than fascism; I have no uncertainty about that. But in most cases, we can’t be certain. I could stop at “a God probably exists” while continuing my life as if not, but I choose to thrive in uncertainty rather than fight it, and that leaves me freer to explore and open myself to other traditions and schools of thought.
I said that most Christians (by far) believe people can be saved without believing, while a minority believe that salvation is impossible without the correct belief. I believe something else. I belong to another minority, probably the smallest one: I believe there is more than one legitimate spiritual path. The Catholic Church still teaches that there is no salvation outside the Church; it’s just that some people are members of the Church without knowing it. I believe the Church is one path among others, and simply the one that fits me today. The Bible helps me, the liberal Christian tradition nourishes me, and the community shelters me.
God is unknowable by definition. We’re talking about a being that exists outside time and space, so our words can’t legitimately claim to describe it. When we describe things, words that seem to contradict one another may both be true. It’s like two people describing the same mountain: someone on its northern face might describe it as a different mountain from the one described by someone on its southern face, even though they’re both describing the same mountain.
If I’m wrong, if there is no God, or if I’m irredeemably ignorant of the One True Religion™, it’s not a big deal. My faith has helped me live a better, fuller, and freer life. Who cares if an effective medicine turns out to be a placebo? And if I’m wrong and only people who believe a precise set of doctrines are saved, then I don’t want to be saved by such an assholish God. So everything works out for the best. (Though that idea makes no sense to me.)
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.
You’re mixing things up, maybe because I’m not clear or maybe consciously. It’s probably the first. I hope.
What most Christians believe is that one can be saved without believing, and I proved that citing official Catholic texts. Maybe these texts aren’t true to the Bible, but that is of no consequence, they’re still a proof that most Christians believe what I said. The first question was not “can non-Christian be saved?” it was “does Christians believe that non-Christian can be saved?” and these are two different things.
Now, about the Bible, I did not contradict myself. Let’s take an other text: The Capital by Marx and Engels. It’s not a simple text: to understand it wholly, you must have a strong economical, philosophical and historical culture. It needs time, efforts, and this text is still debated today, as there are different legitimate interpretations. But even without them, you can read it and some things will be clear, for example that capitalism should be fought. A text can be difficult on its parts and clear on the whole on a few subjects.
It’s the case with the Bible. That the Law is not eternal is very clear, so if you see a text that says the contrary it should either be dismissed as a text contradicting the whole message, or interpreted to find the actual message.
🔥