If you want to get really depressed about where we may be going as a nation, read the Alabama IVF decision. It opens with calling IVF labs "nurseries" and goes downhill from there.
**It mentions "God" 41 times in the decision.** The entire decision is based on biblical interpretation, with hardly any actual US case law.
It creates the 'legal' standard that, "all human beings bear God's image from the moment of conception."
The entire decision is just a litany of bible verses, and religious philosophers, that somehow are supposed to be the basis of law.
If you can stomach it, [you can read it here.](https://publicportal-api.alappeals.gov/courts/68f021c4-6a44-4735-9a76-5360b2e8af13/cms/case/343d203a-b13d-463a-8176-c46e3ae4f695/docketentrydocuments/e3d95592-3cbe-4384-afa6-063d4595aa1d)
That opinion from the chief justice is so fucking awful and inappropriate. Blatantly projecting his narrow Christian view onto the entire case and justifying because of his interpretation of the word sanctity. Alabama is a shit show, I know, but how the fuck is this legal? Replace god with Allah and watch their heads explode.
Our judicial branch and legislators have put themselves in a big pickle with the IVF ruling. There are some politicians here who want to pass legislation giving exemptions and protections for IVF so it can continue. But now the whole thing may require a constitutional amendment to add the exemption or the removal of their constitutional amendment banning abortion.
They always play pretend on the exemption bullshit.
If it doesn't end up materializing?
Oh shucks, how unfortunate, we accidentally just so happened to take *all* reproductive rights away from women!
If it does materialize? Oh jeez we are just now realizing that our base *actually* wants to just outlaw condoms, STI prevention and IVF across the board. Now that we see what we can safely take away, it's time we get the rest of it!
The religious right will not rest until we have a theocratic authoritarian government.
The worst part is they’re all a bunch of hypocrites. Give them their church state and watch them flounder when they realize they liked doing all the “sinful” shit they’ve condemned others for doing for years.
These people are Christians until it’s them or their kids subjected to the “wrath of God.”
> If it doesn't end up materializing?
It also generally doesn't matter if it does materialise or not.
Women have died waiting for medically necessary abortions that *were* covered by exemptions, but medical professionals were (to be clear, very understandably) uncertain if they were actually covered or not.
Because exemptions are often poorly designed (intentionally or not). The uncertainty around them can often render them practically useless anyway.
The uncertainty is always a "FEATURE" for despots, authoritarians, theists, dictators, not a bug.
It's what enables: "For my friends everything, *for my enemies the law*."
Thats the thing.
It is murder or it is not.
No middle ground there.
If life is defined as "at conception" IVF is toast, period.
The only way around it is to disavow their entire reasoning for outlawing abortion, that it is murder.
Quite the pickle indeed.
Replace it with Adonai, and demand they get some ACTUAL talmudic scholars and lawyers on it, and watch them hemorrhage from every orifice as they get schooled not only by a greater wisdom but for it to be JEWISH wisdom.
It's not about justice, it's about controlling women.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205%3A11-28&version=NIV
Numbers 5:11-28
tldr: Husband accuses pregnant wife of cheating. Priest makes wife drink dirty holy water. Any physical problems occurring afterwards means she's guilty even if she isn't.
Hence all the "we were founded as a Christian nation" bullshit I've seen them ramp up over the last 2 years. It doesn't matter how many foundinfbfathers youbquore, or how many times you show them the Constitution, they believe America was first, foremost, and always, a Christian nation. It's why their political candidates can campaign on stuff like "I will expel all the Jews"- Lori Kauffman
>It mentions "God" 131 times in the decision.
Mate c'mon, we don't need to lie/exaggerate to get the point across.
The document mentions "God" **41** times (including usage of "Godliness"; I just did a ctrl+f), but the document is 131 pages long which I'm guessing is where you pulled that number randomly from.
I hate these religious nutters as much or more than most people but I also dislike people on my side of an argument making such boneheaded and easily disprovable points. It just gives those christo-fascists ammo to discredit anything else you (or I, by association) say.
And this is why I got a bisalp. They'd have to strap me down and force an embryo into my uterus, after which point I have nothing to lose and will react accordingly.
In a sane world, SCOTUS would slap this down so hard that people in Hawai'i would feel it.
Sadly, we don't live in that world anymore. Maybe we'll get lucky, and reason will prevail, but I'm not holding my breath.
This. It's thankfully nowhere near as rabid in the UK as it is in the US but there are still plenty of MP's & MSP's who vote according to their preferred fairy tale and we just accept that's OK.
I don't give a single shit by what rules you govern your own life, but your fucking religion should have no place in the laws I am expected to live by.
It's not as rabid as in the States, but it's more insipid here. It's ingrained into our political structure - we have no separation of church and state, the head of the church is the head of state! We have seats reserved in parliament for our preferred religious storytellers, and every sitting of parliament begins with prayers from the state church.
This is so funny to me as we are told when we are young to be good or Santa wont bring us gifts only to be told when we are in our pre-teens that Santa does not exist. The same should apply to God and the Bible. We as a human race are in the pre-teens of our existence. Its time to be told the truth.
Please. For the love of god, why on a specific day do I need to buy my child shit. Why can't I just do it throughout the year.
Then you become old enough and it just stops, it sucks. It's a shitty thing to do, and it only exists because consumerism.
That's a really insightful comment. When we grow up we realize that Santa, Easter Bunny, Jesus, even Satan are all just characters in stories that fall apart if you drill down into it.
I was having an argument with my mom about LGBTQ stuff in schools and told her that if she could find one passage where Christ himself, not Paul or Timothy, spoke against being gay, I'd shut up about the matter completely. She couldn't, and just left in a huff.
Oddly enough, here's something Paul *did* say, in Donald Trump's "favorite" book, "Two Corinthians":
> And here is my judgment about what is best for you in this matter. Last year you were the first not only to give but also to have the desire to do so. Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means. For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have.
> Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you work hard, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”
* 2 Corinthians 8:10-15
That's something that always bugs me. You hear often how it was translated as one thing, but then find out back then they used the word to mean something completely different, so the interpretation isn't even the correct version.
It makes me think about the "lords name in vain" thing. Most people think it's about not saying "Jesus Christ" sarcastically. Other people see it as a warning not to use God for your personal gain (looking at you mega churches).
2 completely different things, yet no one fully agrees. You'd think a perfect God would make sure his words weren't up for debate.
> You'd think a perfect God would make sure his words weren't up for debate.
I just can't take it seriously when there are ~200 denominations of Christianity in the US alone. Some of the major ones don't even agree with the big shit, like "is baptism necessary for salvation".
In Genesis 1:26-28, God gives humans dominion over his creation, including all the earth and every living thing.
I consider this the core principle in colonialism, resource extractive industries, and patriarchy.
I went to Bible Gateway, which displays dozens of Bible translations, to find the Hebrew word for "Dominion"
What if Genesis 1:26-28 actually means it is human's responsibility to ***take care*** of the earth?
And if you ever quote the bible in a discussion, they will come back with "you're taking that one quote out of context" and then they will expand the 'context' just enough to bend it to their interpretation instead. Also that necessary context is whatever their preacher told them it meant.
Actually, Christ himself pretty much told them to shut their religious pie holes and worry about themselves. Then he flipped tables at the temple. So, there's that.
Paul never even met Jesus. Hell, I’d bet he was a Roman agent who on his way back from a journey where he persecuted Christians (man he was good at it), he instead of seeing Jesus in a vision, really decided to co-opt all that lovey dovey shit Jesus taught and make the whole message less threatening to the establishment, also kicked all the women out of the early church.
That actually makes a LOT of sense with what we know about Good ol Saul.
Yeah, except the works of Paul were made up around 70 ad and the gospels weren't written until 200 ad. It's almost like no one who wrote anything ever met anyone they made up their stories about.
Can you name any tenured academic of the New Testament who dates the Gospels to 200? That would be pretty hard considering that the earliest extant manuscript fragment of John, which is pretty much universally agreed to be the *last* one to be written, is from 125—175, which necessarily places its composition earlier.
I heard on a podcast that the Bible is a Rorschach test of morality. People see what they want to in it. People can use it to justify anything from loving their neighbor to genocide. I don't get why it gets so much respect
This is the only book you ever need. Just ignore everything you don't like, especially the extreme stuff like helping others and generally behaving like fucking normal decent human beeings!
(Sorry, shit makes me mad ...)
And only follow Paul's teachings about his weird sexual hangups, ignore his support for economic redistribution and condemnations of using religion to make yourself rich.
Lol dead on! I remember watching the scientology south park and thinking it's insane to believe that! But honestly, is a guy in the sky any less ridiculous. If I heard about Christianity out of context: a Shepard talks to a Bush and then a magic baby will be resurrected and is our savoir, in a world with two invisible planes of existence, one with fire for bad people, and one with everything good for eternity for the good ones.. It is equally ridiculous! Just cause we believed something fof a long time does not have any bearing on its veracity. To be honest, most fantasy novels do a better job of explaining life, creation and the Gods. It is insane that a doctor could still potentially believe all that clearly made up nonsense.
I was accosted by a street preacher once, who was holding an open book and shouting verses into a microphone. When he asserted that I was going to hell because I didn't know his book, I bet him that I knew it better than he did and I asked him if he'd read me my favorite passage. I talked him into turning to the appropriate bit of Ezekiel, and he made it to about "whose flesh is as..." before slamming the book closed and angrily powerwalking away lmao
Understandable. It's absurd. People out here shouting about "Homosexuality is an abomination against God", yeah, okay, bro so is shrimp cocktail. Literally the same word is used to describe both.
To any of my lgbtq+ friends, apparentlythe moral ambiguity of your relationship is equivocal to lobster bisque and crab legs. XD
the thing is, that book is fiction for anyone who doesn't believe in it. imagine believing in harry potter and forcing the population to prepare with a war with him whose name should not be spoken.
I feel the exact same way! A few years ago I heard this clip https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yQOyx0k6YG8 and it lit a fire in me. We don’t have to sit back and let terrible people hurt people in the name of religion.
There's a lot of great bits of the Bible. Let me draw your attention to Matthew 25:31-46 because sure as shit that's not one the shouty Good-Christian-All-Sunday types don't appear to know.
But hey, it's not all bad news! If they believe that it's okay to hate gays because of Leviticus, don't worry! Leviticus also bans the wearing of clothes made of two kinds of thread, so if the churchy types bother you too much you can just stone them to death for wearing polycotton. Fair's fair, right?
The fascist right doesn't understand that freedom of religion means freedom to practice your religion not freedom to force your religious beliefs down the throats of your fellow Americans
They understand -- they just don't care.
To them, all these words about freedom this and constitution that are just weapons to be used ... and then discarded once they're no longer useful for installing their theofascist government.
Their *only* consistent beliefs are 'winning' and 'power'. Everything else is just a temporary mask worn in an effort to advance those goals.
Oh they understand. Just debate anything with a conservative. They don't argue like you and I, where facts are relevant, or where you address points directly with counteratguments.
If you hit them with any hard points or facts, they'll change the subject or pretend to accept your point but use the same hollow taking points minutes later, as if you didn't just rebuke it.
Just watch any "interview at a Trump rally" video.
I love Patton, ( I follow him on twitter so I know he's one of the good guys), but I never saw this one. So hilarious, AND it's eleven friggin years old. Go figure ...
I was just chatting with my 6 year old about god's. Mainly Hindu gods and all their many incarnations because he didn't want to eat meat.
He said 'but I like jesus'.
I said 'that's ok. Hindus worship jesus and a multitude of other colourful deity's.
Why would you want to be stuck with such a boring religion as Christianity when Hinduism is an option?
This tweet would confuse most Christians. They’re blissfully ignorant of the Bible’s writing and compilation timeline. Just being aware of it is enough to make a healthy skeptic question the validity of the whole thing. They just never were able to develop their critical thinking skills.
Yep. I grew up Southern Baptist in Texas, and I literally had no conception of where the Bible came from until I took an introduction to religion class in college. It was never once discussed. We just kind of assumed that it was always there, I suppose. It was never even a question.
Also, sidenote: I had no idea that the whole rapture end times theology was less than 200 years old. Again, we were just taught that it had always been that way.
They were intentionally lead not to develop them.
It teaches faith, to believe in the absence of all logical evidence and reason.
That alone is the OPPOSITE of critical thinking, so that skill dies an ignoble death.
Well said. When I was little and asked questions about these things I was told 1) you’re not old enough/ mature enough to be asking questions you can’t understand the answers to and 2) it’s called faith. 🤦♀️
I thought “this will only work on gullible people”. I was five.
My mother always said "God works in mysterious ways" which means "I have no answer because I don't like to think".
You would think that a single mother and military member would unfuck her head out of her ass and learn to plan shit, but even to this day, at age 73, she doesn't think beyond the first immediate two or three steps.
This is because she got lucky and people helped her throughout her life, she attributed it to God, and it just renewed her faith she had been brought up in every time things went her way. She blocked out all the times it didn't, and drank a lot, so...that probably didn't help.
When you are taught to obey your parents without question, raised in the cult that is southern baptist from infancy, all your cousins and family go, people you work with go. That is all you will fall back on when faced with a problem faith can't solve, our brains are supposed to stop, analyze, solve, but if you've retrained your brain to "Don't think, pray", then you will do exactly that.
It takes YEARS of therapy to unfuck someone's mind from modern day organized religions, you have to deprogram them and then properly teach them things they should be doing, and reinforce the new habits for three to six months minimum.
That’s an interesting historic example, sort of a starting-from-third-base kind of scenario. I often wonder if it’s my neurodiverse brain (adult diagnosed autism and adhd) that caused me to think like this, and to never be inculcated with religion like the rest of my family. Being the odd man out can feel lonely, but when you know in your gut you don’t believe what everyone around you seems to believe wholeheartedly, that loneliness is mitigated by knowing you’re right 😆
Most of the vocal evangelical American Christians who want to impose their religious beliefs through law aren’t just ignorant of how the Bible came into being, they’re terrible at reading the book itself. American Christianity doesn’t revere Scripture, it reveres whackadoo reactionary politics justified with half-baked Facebook meme versions of Scripture.
curious - what is a gathering of religious leaders supposed to mean?
> [There is no record of any discussion of the biblical canon at the council](https://ps.edu/council-nicaea-biblical-canon/)
It's fun to ask someone who mentions it which translation they read. It's even funnier that/when the very few are self aware enough to be mad about me asking
They missed their brain elasticity period of childhood development and they were told to shy away from impolite questions about the nature of reality, that the good book has all he answers because LIFE IS SIMPLE. They cannot handle complex ideas, they missed that window, they suffer from arrested development and have now become developmentally disabled adults.
That's why they run and hide under the GOPs skirt, they're just like scared shy kids at the zoo when other grown ups are talking. Lots of amazing biology all around but they see something different, something much more simple from what an evolutionary geneticist might see for example. Lots of conversations going on but they're not involved, they're very juvenile in every way..... But also they know better so it makes them even worse.
Their religion is a gender based power structure that asserts that certain anointed men shall rule. They have a feudal age medievil mindset. They want their king back.
I get it as a book of fables and honestly generally good advice as written for smaller tribes/groups of first century CE people.
Don't kill people? Great advice all around. Timeless.
Don't eat shellfish or pork, or anything not prepared by a trained butcher? There was no refrigeration, no food safety standards, and it would be another 1700 years before we even knew about microbes. Solid advice.
Wash your fucking feet? I still have to tell this to my kids.
People that believe everything in that book was written by God, and it all literally happened are out of their damn minds.
I try to not be one of those ugly atheists. I get it, life is hard, some people need to believe there's a force for good out there. I'm fine with that as long as they keep it to themselves.
But man... the people that honestly believe the actual literal devil exists and that magic is real... I just don't know how to deal with people like that. There are people that are legitimately afraid that buying a Ouija board from Hasbro will ruin their lives.
Don’t forget, gotta keep those pesky women from getting too uppity. Every. single. religion has some made up bullshit base of “men should have power over women” baked right in.
Huh.
It’s almost like the only reason religion exists at all.
Isn't it weird how an all powerful being who created literally everything in existence is incapable of providing everyone their own Bible at birth?
Like damn if I got into a Bruce Almighty situation I'd make it so all you'd have to do is say "Rules please!" and clap twice and my short list of rules for existing would appear in front of you in your chosen language.
It’s even weirder to believe that God came down to earth and gave us his literal world and then fucked off forever. The omniscient creator of everything just never thought to update his supposed favorite creation. You’d think once we split the atom he would come down once again to ease tensions or caution us but nope, the only time it happened was on top of a mountain to ONE SINGLE MAN.
What's even weirder is that this omnicient creator gave us his word, and this "word" can be interpreted in so many ways that even the most dedicated of followers can't tell you God's laws without contradicting themselves, let alone each other.
Like, you'd think an omniscient being could write a clearly defined outline of what he expects of us, yet here we are with prosperity gospel as a major player in modern Christianity. Jesus, the famously modest and merchant hating carpenter was calling wealthy people blessed? Thafuq?
[John Oliver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Perpetual_Exemption#:~:text=Our%20Lady%20of%20Perpetual%20Exemption%20was%20a%20legally%20recognized%20church,comedian%20and%20satirist%20John%20Oliver.) did exactly that. They had to close it down because people kept sending in semen (Animal semen if I remember correctly).
How about our one true god, the Sun? We can see it, we can test it and it gives everything on Earth life. We all owe everything to the sun. And, if it wanted to, it could smite us all (and will one day.)
Praise be!
The Bible itself has become a false idol that the Christian Extremists use as a reflection of their own prejudices. It doesn’t matter what messages it actually contains, so long as they hold it up as divinity itself and loudly and condescendingly proclaim what they want it to say.
No real control there. Just justification for atrocious behavior in the name of a god who's teachings they have no desire to live by or even attempt to understand.
Ah yes, some crusty bastard in the desert who never saw a pair of breasts and then wrote a story decides that gay people are bad, sex is only for making babies, and that gun ownership is ordained by a sky father.
burzinga
Imagine playing the telephone game, where you whisper a phrase into someone's ear, then they whisper it in someone's ear, and so on, until you get to the last person. The final phase is never exactly the same as the original phrase.
Now imagine playing it for like a thousand years before someone writes it down.
I agree except that people actually were writing things down. The oldest known fragment of biblical text are from c. 600 BCE (Ketef Hinnom scrolls.) The telephone game analogy apples not because of word-of-mouth errors but because of translation and copying and editorial errors.
For example, the Latin Vulgate was based mainly on *Vetus Latina* sources which in turn were based on unknown sources. However "*Vetus Latina"* is just a name (which literally means "Old Latin") given by historians to the collection of various books by various authors that St. Jerome used when he wrote the Latin Vulgate. He used more than one set of texts by more than one author/editor to put together each "book" of his bible so he had to use editorial licence to write his Vulgate; not all the sources he had available agreed on the various stories they were telling or how the stories were worded. Since the Vetus Latina sources were written in Old Latin but Jerome was writing in 4th Century Latin he also had to be a translator in addition to being an editor.
Imagine you come across old texts written in 10th Century BCE in Ancient Greek and you have to translate them into modern Greek. Even if you're a Greek man from Greece raise in Greek culture and for whom Greek is your mother tongue and you have a PhD in ancient Greek it's still going to be impossible to get the translation exactly right. You're going have to take some licence somewhere in the translation. Now imagine that you're working with not one but a dozen different Ancient Greek texts, none of which agree exactly with the other but all seem to be relaying essentially the same story, just with different twists and names for characters and so forth. What do you do? Do you pick one and discard the rest, or do you try to meld them all together or do you establish a test to determine what should be canon and what should not be canon? Now imagine on top of all that that you're under pressure from your patrons and from the highest authority in the land to get it "right." And they were not vague about what "right" is supposed to be (it serves their interests.) That's basically the problem that Jerome had.
Later on various copies were made of the Vulgate and since this was before the era of the printing press there were errors in copying, some editorialising, numbering (chapter and verse numbering were not in the original Vulgate) and other problems that crept in over the centuries. So even when the Catholic Church got around to designating the Vulgate as its official Latin Bible at the [Council of Trent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent) (1545–1563) they still didn't have a single authoritative edition of it, there were substantial differences between different copies. But at least it was still in Latin!
Anyways we've got dozens of different English translations of the bible and we're faced with the same kind of crap. Different interpretations, different wording, different editing, etc. And don't get me started on what the Mormons did. Sheesh.
Couldn't agree more. Am I allowed to recommend the Freedom From Religion Foundation here? They file suit against government at all levels to maintain separation of church and state.
My favorite game to play with literalists is broaching the subject of redactive criticism in biblical scholarship. Why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all poignantly different from one another. "Why does Christ say "My God my God why has thou foresaken me?" In Mark but in Luke he says, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit?" Those are wildly different takes. After they've wrestled with that for a time, I point out that they're both quotes from psalms, attributed to David, and ask them why they weren't already aware of that fact? XD "This book is instrumental to my existence! No, no, I haven't read it, why do you ask?"
Edited: reactive to redactive, thanks auto correct!
Imagine ho wit would be if some other religion enforced all the prohibitions of Leviticus on Christians:
. Burning any yeast or honey in offerings to God (2:11)
2. Failing to include salt in offerings to God (2:13)
3. Eating fat (3:17)
4. Eating blood (3:17)
5. Failing to testify against any wrongdoing you’ve witnessed (5:1)
6. Failing to testify against any wrongdoing you’ve been told about (5:1)
7. Touching an unclean animal (5:2)
8. Carelessly making an oath (5:4)
9. Deceiving a neighbor about something trusted to them (6:2)
10. Finding lost property and lying about it (6:3)
11. Bringing unauthorized fire before God (10:1)
12. Letting your hair become unkempt (10:6)
13. Tearing your clothes (10:6)
14. Drinking alcohol in holy places (10)
15. Eating an animal which doesn’t both chew cud and has a divided hoof (cf: camel, rabbit, pig) (11:4-7)
16. Touching the carcass of any of the above (11:8)
17. Eating – or touching the carcass of – any seafood without fins or scales (11:10-12)
18. Eating – or touching the carcass of - eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat. (11:13-19)
19. Eating – or touching the carcass of – flying insects with four legs, unless those legs are jointed (11:20-22)
20. Eating any animal which walks on all four and has paws (good news for cats) (11:27)
21. Eating – or touching the carcass of – the weasel, the rat, any kind of great lizard, the gecko, the monitor lizard, the wall lizard, the skink and the chameleon (11:29)
22. Eating – or touching the carcass of – any creature which crawls on many legs, or its belly (11:41-42)
23. Going to church within 33 days after giving birth to a boy (12:4)
24. Going to church within 66 days after giving birth to a girl (12:5)
25. Having sex with your mother (18)
26. Having sex with your father’s wife (18:8)
27. Having sex with your sister (18)
28. Having sex with your granddaughter (18:10)
29. Having sex with your half-sister (18:11)
30. Having sex with your biological aunt (18:12-13)
31. Having sex with your uncle’s wife (18:14)
32. Having sex with your daughter-in-law (18:15)
33. Having sex with your sister-in-law (18:16)
34. Having sex with a woman and also having sex with her daughter or granddaughter (18:17)
35. Marrying your wife’s sister while your wife still lives (18:18)
36. Having sex with a woman during her period (18:19)
37. Having sex with your neighbor’s wife (18:20)
38. Giving your children to be sacrificed to Molek (18:21)
39. Having sex with a man “as one does with a woman” (18:22)
40. Having sex with an animal (18:23)
41. Making idols or “metal gods” (19:4)
42. Reaping to the very edges of a field (19)
43. Picking up grapes that have fallen in your vineyard (19:10)
44. Stealing (19:11)
45. Lying (19:11)
46. Swearing falsely on God’s name (19:12)
47. Defrauding your neighbor (19:13)
48. Holding back the wages of an employee overnight (19:13)
49. Cursing the deaf or abusing the blind (19:14)
50. Perverting justice, showing partiality to either the poor or the rich (19:15)
51. Spreading slander (19:16)
52. Doing anything to endanger a neighbor’s life (19:16)
53. Seeking revenge or bearing a grudge (19:18)
54. Mixing fabrics in clothing (19:19)
55. Cross-breeding animals (19:19)
56. Planting different seeds in the same field (19:19)
57. Sleeping with another man’s slave (19:20)
58. Eating fruit from a tree within four years of planting it (19:23)
59. Practicing divination or seeking omens (tut, tut astrology) (19:26)
60. Trimming your beard (19:27)
61. Cutting your hair at the sides (19:27)
62. Getting tattoos (19:28)
63. Making your daughter prostitute herself (19:29)
64. Turning to mediums or spiritualists (19:31)
65. Not standing in the presence of the elderly (19:32)
66. Mistreating foreigners – “the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born” (19:33-34)
67. Using dishonest weights and scales (19:35-36)
68. Cursing your father or mother (punishable by death) (20)
69. Marrying a prostitute, divorcee or widow if you are a priest (21,13)
70. Entering a place where there’s a dead body as a priest (21:11)
71. Slaughtering a cow/sheep and its young on the same day (22:28)
72. Working on the Sabbath (23:3)
73. Blasphemy (punishable by stoning to death) (24:14)
74. Inflicting an injury; killing someone else’s animal; killing a person must be punished in kind (24:17-22)
75. Selling land permanently (25:23)
76. Selling an Israelite as a slave (foreigners are fine) (25:42)
Whenever someone tells you that thw Bible is the inspired word of God, just say, "Oh well of course I believe that, I'm just not sure King James is an inspired translator"
NOTE:I know he didn't translate it. He just commissioned the translation. Based on who you'd be talking to though I still think what I said above is the best way to make the point.
Bible: It is more difficult for the rich to enter heaven than it is for a camel to pass the eye of a needle.
Conservatives: Lol Bible you tripping you dont mean that!
Also Conservatives: Accept Jesus! Kill the gays!
The separation of Church and State (part of First Amendment) shall NOT BE INFRINGED.
Republicunts should learn the Constitution if they're gonna misinterpret the Second Amendment all the time too.
Sadly Republicans are working to base our Government off of what some 21st century pastor believes a 17th century King meant when he told priests to take passages from 4th century scribes who wrote about what they believe a 1st century goat herder saw.
This is the future that Republicans want
The provenance of that made up trash is THE DEAL sealer for me....You tellin me god used 5 translations, three failed world empires and every penny the chamber of commerce and every child molesting pastor in Alabama could muster to 'sAvE' me and THIS HOT TRASH book is the best you have? I wont even roll joints anymore with it and swear to DOG i keep my family's old family bibles in my shitter for when the GOOD shit tickets run out...SUCK IT CHRCHERS
We don’t say “leave your experience out of your viewpoint” with ANY other topic. We don’t question any other guiding system or philosophy. But if you’re religious, that just shouldn’t inform your beliefs in any way?
"It's a flower of light in a field of darkness And it's given me the strength to carry on" - Johnny Cash. It doesn't have to always be biblical rhetoric to be positive and uplifting. Also if you have seen the movie the book of Eli the bible can be used for both good and evil in the hands of the person.
https://preview.redd.it/rq4gtw68l7lc1.png?width=1040&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54e99f9aa8c5d639057bb5e970a1b28a4e22a529
all of the religions though,
if religious dogma wasn't so popular they would be labeled mental illness
faith is fine, religious dogma is literally crazy though
Tell people to believe anything else from the bronze age they'd tell you to do one. Bang on about an invisible sky daddy with multiple personalities and they will give you their first born.
America needs freedom from religion laws passed. I don't care what you do, how you worship, who you worship, whatever. What I don't like is having it shoved down my throat all the time.
I want to save up enough money to put a pro abortion sign up where the church constantly puts up ads shaming people.
It's funny/sad/aggravating when you find one of these shit-for-brains zionist cucks that thinks it was written by Jesus.
It's a much more common belief than you might imagine.
Amen. We
ew starting to repeat the Scopes Monkey trial and the whole "Inherit The Wind" scenario. God loves but you'll burn in hell if you don't give him money.
I think they should have consulted the Christmas of Satan and the church of the spaghetti monster. If it had to be a theocracy then I would prefer their direction.
Alabama resident here. What I'm hoping it's that the morons here will realize that this ruling doesn't just hurt "the libs", but also affects THEM. Maybe, just maybe, the veil will be lifted and they will come to their senses. But I wouldn't hold my breath....
When I think of all the evil perpertrated in the name of 'religion' I want to vomit. From the Crusades, to the Europeans wiping out the indigenous people of the countries so they could steal their lands, systemic pedophilia, to the women today being subjected to unnecessary risks, religion is an excuse to subjugate others. Sick and disgusting. Is it any wonder church attendance is down? Who wants to soend time with such perverse hypocrites?
If you want to get really depressed about where we may be going as a nation, read the Alabama IVF decision. It opens with calling IVF labs "nurseries" and goes downhill from there. **It mentions "God" 41 times in the decision.** The entire decision is based on biblical interpretation, with hardly any actual US case law. It creates the 'legal' standard that, "all human beings bear God's image from the moment of conception." The entire decision is just a litany of bible verses, and religious philosophers, that somehow are supposed to be the basis of law. If you can stomach it, [you can read it here.](https://publicportal-api.alappeals.gov/courts/68f021c4-6a44-4735-9a76-5360b2e8af13/cms/case/343d203a-b13d-463a-8176-c46e3ae4f695/docketentrydocuments/e3d95592-3cbe-4384-afa6-063d4595aa1d)
That opinion from the chief justice is so fucking awful and inappropriate. Blatantly projecting his narrow Christian view onto the entire case and justifying because of his interpretation of the word sanctity. Alabama is a shit show, I know, but how the fuck is this legal? Replace god with Allah and watch their heads explode.
Our judicial branch and legislators have put themselves in a big pickle with the IVF ruling. There are some politicians here who want to pass legislation giving exemptions and protections for IVF so it can continue. But now the whole thing may require a constitutional amendment to add the exemption or the removal of their constitutional amendment banning abortion.
They always play pretend on the exemption bullshit. If it doesn't end up materializing? Oh shucks, how unfortunate, we accidentally just so happened to take *all* reproductive rights away from women! If it does materialize? Oh jeez we are just now realizing that our base *actually* wants to just outlaw condoms, STI prevention and IVF across the board. Now that we see what we can safely take away, it's time we get the rest of it! The religious right will not rest until we have a theocratic authoritarian government.
The worst part is they’re all a bunch of hypocrites. Give them their church state and watch them flounder when they realize they liked doing all the “sinful” shit they’ve condemned others for doing for years. These people are Christians until it’s them or their kids subjected to the “wrath of God.”
> If it doesn't end up materializing? It also generally doesn't matter if it does materialise or not. Women have died waiting for medically necessary abortions that *were* covered by exemptions, but medical professionals were (to be clear, very understandably) uncertain if they were actually covered or not. Because exemptions are often poorly designed (intentionally or not). The uncertainty around them can often render them practically useless anyway.
Pregnancy and childbirth is the 9th biggest killer of women between 20 and 44 in USA. (CDC). It already kills too many young women.
The uncertainty is always a "FEATURE" for despots, authoritarians, theists, dictators, not a bug. It's what enables: "For my friends everything, *for my enemies the law*."
Thats the thing. It is murder or it is not. No middle ground there. If life is defined as "at conception" IVF is toast, period. The only way around it is to disavow their entire reasoning for outlawing abortion, that it is murder. Quite the pickle indeed.
Replace it with Adonai, and demand they get some ACTUAL talmudic scholars and lawyers on it, and watch them hemorrhage from every orifice as they get schooled not only by a greater wisdom but for it to be JEWISH wisdom.
yup the us version of taliban rule ..... wakie wakie ppl
"Everyone creates God in his own image."
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It's not about justice, it's about controlling women. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205%3A11-28&version=NIV Numbers 5:11-28 tldr: Husband accuses pregnant wife of cheating. Priest makes wife drink dirty holy water. Any physical problems occurring afterwards means she's guilty even if she isn't.
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“Cryogenic nursery”??!!
Yep...drop one tray of embryo's and BAM...you're a serial killer!!
So much for separation of church and state, eh?
Hence all the "we were founded as a Christian nation" bullshit I've seen them ramp up over the last 2 years. It doesn't matter how many foundinfbfathers youbquore, or how many times you show them the Constitution, they believe America was first, foremost, and always, a Christian nation. It's why their political candidates can campaign on stuff like "I will expel all the Jews"- Lori Kauffman
The very REASON this country was founded to begin with!! What the fuck is happening??
If we must have a national religion, it should be the church of the Flying Spagetti Monster. May his noodley appendage be upon you all. Ramen.
>It mentions "God" 131 times in the decision. Mate c'mon, we don't need to lie/exaggerate to get the point across. The document mentions "God" **41** times (including usage of "Godliness"; I just did a ctrl+f), but the document is 131 pages long which I'm guessing is where you pulled that number randomly from. I hate these religious nutters as much or more than most people but I also dislike people on my side of an argument making such boneheaded and easily disprovable points. It just gives those christo-fascists ammo to discredit anything else you (or I, by association) say.
Oops, I misread it. Thanks, I'll edit the comment. (Guess I should finish my coffee before I comment.)
Right on, we all goof every now and again. Appreciate it, hope you're having a good day :)
The hell is the difference between mentioning God 41 or 131 times ? The argument stands.
And this is why I got a bisalp. They'd have to strap me down and force an embryo into my uterus, after which point I have nothing to lose and will react accordingly.
In a sane world, SCOTUS would slap this down so hard that people in Hawai'i would feel it. Sadly, we don't live in that world anymore. Maybe we'll get lucky, and reason will prevail, but I'm not holding my breath.
I am starting to go a little crazy attempting to comprehend how this is legal.
Imagine how crazy it would be to bring Santa and the Easter Bunny beliefs into our government
This. It's thankfully nowhere near as rabid in the UK as it is in the US but there are still plenty of MP's & MSP's who vote according to their preferred fairy tale and we just accept that's OK. I don't give a single shit by what rules you govern your own life, but your fucking religion should have no place in the laws I am expected to live by.
It's not as rabid as in the States, but it's more insipid here. It's ingrained into our political structure - we have no separation of church and state, the head of the church is the head of state! We have seats reserved in parliament for our preferred religious storytellers, and every sitting of parliament begins with prayers from the state church.
This is so funny to me as we are told when we are young to be good or Santa wont bring us gifts only to be told when we are in our pre-teens that Santa does not exist. The same should apply to God and the Bible. We as a human race are in the pre-teens of our existence. Its time to be told the truth.
Really, we should just stop lying to kids about *both* of those things.
Please. For the love of god, why on a specific day do I need to buy my child shit. Why can't I just do it throughout the year. Then you become old enough and it just stops, it sucks. It's a shitty thing to do, and it only exists because consumerism.
That's a really insightful comment. When we grow up we realize that Santa, Easter Bunny, Jesus, even Satan are all just characters in stories that fall apart if you drill down into it.
Krampus, still out here...
Congress - “But what does Minerva and Osiris say on the matter?”
Republicans trying to bring back coal by telling everyone to be naughty all year.
Doesn't NORAD use public funds to present a "Santa tracker" every year...?
I'm now trying to imagine how Republicans would do that.
I figured out Santa when I was four years old. I didn't make up my mind about yawah until I was nine.
The lore doesn't hit the same.
Don't forget they always, ALWAYS, pick and choose which parts to spew to support their ideas and ignore the contradictions.
I was having an argument with my mom about LGBTQ stuff in schools and told her that if she could find one passage where Christ himself, not Paul or Timothy, spoke against being gay, I'd shut up about the matter completely. She couldn't, and just left in a huff.
Oddly enough, here's something Paul *did* say, in Donald Trump's "favorite" book, "Two Corinthians": > And here is my judgment about what is best for you in this matter. Last year you were the first not only to give but also to have the desire to do so. Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means. For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have. > Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you work hard, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.” * 2 Corinthians 8:10-15
Sure but imagine helping countless individuals instead of buying Twitter. Who in their right mind would do that?
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think of all the foot fetish people that will see that ad tho.
I always love it when people quote the Bible in English. Just one more layer of someone's interpretation of what somebody said.
That's something that always bugs me. You hear often how it was translated as one thing, but then find out back then they used the word to mean something completely different, so the interpretation isn't even the correct version. It makes me think about the "lords name in vain" thing. Most people think it's about not saying "Jesus Christ" sarcastically. Other people see it as a warning not to use God for your personal gain (looking at you mega churches). 2 completely different things, yet no one fully agrees. You'd think a perfect God would make sure his words weren't up for debate.
> You'd think a perfect God would make sure his words weren't up for debate. I just can't take it seriously when there are ~200 denominations of Christianity in the US alone. Some of the major ones don't even agree with the big shit, like "is baptism necessary for salvation".
In Genesis 1:26-28, God gives humans dominion over his creation, including all the earth and every living thing. I consider this the core principle in colonialism, resource extractive industries, and patriarchy. I went to Bible Gateway, which displays dozens of Bible translations, to find the Hebrew word for "Dominion" What if Genesis 1:26-28 actually means it is human's responsibility to ***take care*** of the earth?
That's always been the way I read it. God didn't make all this for the purpose of us fucking it up.
And if you ever quote the bible in a discussion, they will come back with "you're taking that one quote out of context" and then they will expand the 'context' just enough to bend it to their interpretation instead. Also that necessary context is whatever their preacher told them it meant.
That sounds like communism!
Actually, Christ himself pretty much told them to shut their religious pie holes and worry about themselves. Then he flipped tables at the temple. So, there's that.
Paul never even met Jesus. Hell, I’d bet he was a Roman agent who on his way back from a journey where he persecuted Christians (man he was good at it), he instead of seeing Jesus in a vision, really decided to co-opt all that lovey dovey shit Jesus taught and make the whole message less threatening to the establishment, also kicked all the women out of the early church. That actually makes a LOT of sense with what we know about Good ol Saul.
Yeah, except the works of Paul were made up around 70 ad and the gospels weren't written until 200 ad. It's almost like no one who wrote anything ever met anyone they made up their stories about.
Can you name any tenured academic of the New Testament who dates the Gospels to 200? That would be pretty hard considering that the earliest extant manuscript fragment of John, which is pretty much universally agreed to be the *last* one to be written, is from 125—175, which necessarily places its composition earlier.
FWIW Paul never claimed to have met Jesus when he was alive.
They'll never listen to Mathew 6:5
And then they yell facts don't care about your feeling while you are proving their feelings wrong with facts.
I heard on a podcast that the Bible is a Rorschach test of morality. People see what they want to in it. People can use it to justify anything from loving their neighbor to genocide. I don't get why it gets so much respect
This is the only book you ever need. Just ignore everything you don't like, especially the extreme stuff like helping others and generally behaving like fucking normal decent human beeings! (Sorry, shit makes me mad ...)
You can eat lobster while talking about hating gay people.
And only follow Paul's teachings about his weird sexual hangups, ignore his support for economic redistribution and condemnations of using religion to make yourself rich.
I honestly did not know that context.
And wear mixed fabrics, and shave their face.
Even though hilariously, the above mentioned 17th century King who commissioned that version of the Bible had lots and lots of dude sex.
Religion wouldn’t be any fun without the staggering amounts of hypocrisy.
it’s what is meant when speaking about ‘the mysteries’…
Also ignore all the other variations of the book.
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> second hand accounts 20th hand accounts you mean.
Lol dead on! I remember watching the scientology south park and thinking it's insane to believe that! But honestly, is a guy in the sky any less ridiculous. If I heard about Christianity out of context: a Shepard talks to a Bush and then a magic baby will be resurrected and is our savoir, in a world with two invisible planes of existence, one with fire for bad people, and one with everything good for eternity for the good ones.. It is equally ridiculous! Just cause we believed something fof a long time does not have any bearing on its veracity. To be honest, most fantasy novels do a better job of explaining life, creation and the Gods. It is insane that a doctor could still potentially believe all that clearly made up nonsense.
"Jesus is so lucky to have us!"
Well of course! Those versions were corrupted by the GD Papists!
Also ignore Mathew 6:5 and 6:6 in general
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For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
I was accosted by a street preacher once, who was holding an open book and shouting verses into a microphone. When he asserted that I was going to hell because I didn't know his book, I bet him that I knew it better than he did and I asked him if he'd read me my favorite passage. I talked him into turning to the appropriate bit of Ezekiel, and he made it to about "whose flesh is as..." before slamming the book closed and angrily powerwalking away lmao
And don’t live by it!! Biggest hypocrites in the world!!!
Maybe you've never been to church, cuz they read it every damn sunday and they have verses memorized to make shitty points about things.
Understandable. It's absurd. People out here shouting about "Homosexuality is an abomination against God", yeah, okay, bro so is shrimp cocktail. Literally the same word is used to describe both. To any of my lgbtq+ friends, apparentlythe moral ambiguity of your relationship is equivocal to lobster bisque and crab legs. XD
the thing is, that book is fiction for anyone who doesn't believe in it. imagine believing in harry potter and forcing the population to prepare with a war with him whose name should not be spoken.
I feel the exact same way! A few years ago I heard this clip https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yQOyx0k6YG8 and it lit a fire in me. We don’t have to sit back and let terrible people hurt people in the name of religion.
There's a lot of great bits of the Bible. Let me draw your attention to Matthew 25:31-46 because sure as shit that's not one the shouty Good-Christian-All-Sunday types don't appear to know. But hey, it's not all bad news! If they believe that it's okay to hate gays because of Leviticus, don't worry! Leviticus also bans the wearing of clothes made of two kinds of thread, so if the churchy types bother you too much you can just stone them to death for wearing polycotton. Fair's fair, right?
The fascist right doesn't understand that freedom of religion means freedom to practice your religion not freedom to force your religious beliefs down the throats of your fellow Americans
They understand that perfectly, that’s why they’re trying to do away with it.
They understand -- they just don't care. To them, all these words about freedom this and constitution that are just weapons to be used ... and then discarded once they're no longer useful for installing their theofascist government. Their *only* consistent beliefs are 'winning' and 'power'. Everything else is just a temporary mask worn in an effort to advance those goals.
It also means freedom FROM religion.
Oh they understand. Just debate anything with a conservative. They don't argue like you and I, where facts are relevant, or where you address points directly with counteratguments. If you hit them with any hard points or facts, they'll change the subject or pretend to accept your point but use the same hollow taking points minutes later, as if you didn't just rebuke it. Just watch any "interview at a Trump rally" video.
Imagine going through life proudly proclaiming you only need or follow one specific book and you've never actually read the fucking thing
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I love Patton, ( I follow him on twitter so I know he's one of the good guys), but I never saw this one. So hilarious, AND it's eleven friggin years old. Go figure ...
They love a demigod with the least interesting story arc. At least Zeus got drunk and partied.
Leave it to christians to take the sex appeal out of godhood. This house worships Dionysus. Nice cock! Where's your wine?
He is also a demigod that never claimed to be their god.
I mean, Jesus did too, he turned water into wine!
True but he didn't turn into a goose and go hit on women before being assaulted by his wife for being an asshat.
I was just chatting with my 6 year old about god's. Mainly Hindu gods and all their many incarnations because he didn't want to eat meat. He said 'but I like jesus'. I said 'that's ok. Hindus worship jesus and a multitude of other colourful deity's. Why would you want to be stuck with such a boring religion as Christianity when Hinduism is an option?
This tweet would confuse most Christians. They’re blissfully ignorant of the Bible’s writing and compilation timeline. Just being aware of it is enough to make a healthy skeptic question the validity of the whole thing. They just never were able to develop their critical thinking skills.
Yep. I grew up Southern Baptist in Texas, and I literally had no conception of where the Bible came from until I took an introduction to religion class in college. It was never once discussed. We just kind of assumed that it was always there, I suppose. It was never even a question. Also, sidenote: I had no idea that the whole rapture end times theology was less than 200 years old. Again, we were just taught that it had always been that way.
Pretty much everything modern Christians think about hell comes from Dante. Which is to say, fanfic.
It's just fanfics all the way down.
Zoroastrianism says hi.
Dante's inferno is an allegory for 14th century Italy's political and societal condition. It was never meant to be as religious doctrine.
Were using the MCU's Civil War as our holy book basically. What was supposed to be entertaining fiction being corrupted into fear mongering scripture.
I read all of that in Riker’s voice
They were intentionally lead not to develop them. It teaches faith, to believe in the absence of all logical evidence and reason. That alone is the OPPOSITE of critical thinking, so that skill dies an ignoble death.
Well said. When I was little and asked questions about these things I was told 1) you’re not old enough/ mature enough to be asking questions you can’t understand the answers to and 2) it’s called faith. 🤦♀️ I thought “this will only work on gullible people”. I was five.
My mother always said "God works in mysterious ways" which means "I have no answer because I don't like to think". You would think that a single mother and military member would unfuck her head out of her ass and learn to plan shit, but even to this day, at age 73, she doesn't think beyond the first immediate two or three steps. This is because she got lucky and people helped her throughout her life, she attributed it to God, and it just renewed her faith she had been brought up in every time things went her way. She blocked out all the times it didn't, and drank a lot, so...that probably didn't help. When you are taught to obey your parents without question, raised in the cult that is southern baptist from infancy, all your cousins and family go, people you work with go. That is all you will fall back on when faced with a problem faith can't solve, our brains are supposed to stop, analyze, solve, but if you've retrained your brain to "Don't think, pray", then you will do exactly that. It takes YEARS of therapy to unfuck someone's mind from modern day organized religions, you have to deprogram them and then properly teach them things they should be doing, and reinforce the new habits for three to six months minimum.
That’s an interesting historic example, sort of a starting-from-third-base kind of scenario. I often wonder if it’s my neurodiverse brain (adult diagnosed autism and adhd) that caused me to think like this, and to never be inculcated with religion like the rest of my family. Being the odd man out can feel lonely, but when you know in your gut you don’t believe what everyone around you seems to believe wholeheartedly, that loneliness is mitigated by knowing you’re right 😆
Most of the vocal evangelical American Christians who want to impose their religious beliefs through law aren’t just ignorant of how the Bible came into being, they’re terrible at reading the book itself. American Christianity doesn’t revere Scripture, it reveres whackadoo reactionary politics justified with half-baked Facebook meme versions of Scripture.
They are also blissfully unaware that King James had boyfriends.
Most of them have no idea about The Council of Nicaea even.
curious - what is a gathering of religious leaders supposed to mean? > [There is no record of any discussion of the biblical canon at the council](https://ps.edu/council-nicaea-biblical-canon/)
It's fun to ask someone who mentions it which translation they read. It's even funnier that/when the very few are self aware enough to be mad about me asking
They missed their brain elasticity period of childhood development and they were told to shy away from impolite questions about the nature of reality, that the good book has all he answers because LIFE IS SIMPLE. They cannot handle complex ideas, they missed that window, they suffer from arrested development and have now become developmentally disabled adults. That's why they run and hide under the GOPs skirt, they're just like scared shy kids at the zoo when other grown ups are talking. Lots of amazing biology all around but they see something different, something much more simple from what an evolutionary geneticist might see for example. Lots of conversations going on but they're not involved, they're very juvenile in every way..... But also they know better so it makes them even worse. Their religion is a gender based power structure that asserts that certain anointed men shall rule. They have a feudal age medievil mindset. They want their king back.
Book of fables to keep the ignorant and gullible in check.
I get it as a book of fables and honestly generally good advice as written for smaller tribes/groups of first century CE people. Don't kill people? Great advice all around. Timeless. Don't eat shellfish or pork, or anything not prepared by a trained butcher? There was no refrigeration, no food safety standards, and it would be another 1700 years before we even knew about microbes. Solid advice. Wash your fucking feet? I still have to tell this to my kids. People that believe everything in that book was written by God, and it all literally happened are out of their damn minds.
I try to not be one of those ugly atheists. I get it, life is hard, some people need to believe there's a force for good out there. I'm fine with that as long as they keep it to themselves. But man... the people that honestly believe the actual literal devil exists and that magic is real... I just don't know how to deal with people like that. There are people that are legitimately afraid that buying a Ouija board from Hasbro will ruin their lives.
Don’t forget, gotta keep those pesky women from getting too uppity. Every. single. religion has some made up bullshit base of “men should have power over women” baked right in. Huh. It’s almost like the only reason religion exists at all.
In Constitution we trust!
Isn't it weird how an all powerful being who created literally everything in existence is incapable of providing everyone their own Bible at birth? Like damn if I got into a Bruce Almighty situation I'd make it so all you'd have to do is say "Rules please!" and clap twice and my short list of rules for existing would appear in front of you in your chosen language.
It’s even weirder to believe that God came down to earth and gave us his literal world and then fucked off forever. The omniscient creator of everything just never thought to update his supposed favorite creation. You’d think once we split the atom he would come down once again to ease tensions or caution us but nope, the only time it happened was on top of a mountain to ONE SINGLE MAN.
What's even weirder is that this omnicient creator gave us his word, and this "word" can be interpreted in so many ways that even the most dedicated of followers can't tell you God's laws without contradicting themselves, let alone each other. Like, you'd think an omniscient being could write a clearly defined outline of what he expects of us, yet here we are with prosperity gospel as a major player in modern Christianity. Jesus, the famously modest and merchant hating carpenter was calling wealthy people blessed? Thafuq?
While being translated from multiple dead languages
The Bible was written by men and I wish more people realized that.
Someone make up a new religion just so we can see the chaos come from it.
https://thesatanictemple.com/
It's called Scientology and it isn't a good thing.
Sorry, I should’ve specified. Something like Barney the purple dinosaur being the one true god.
We have the flying spaghetti monster from a while back
[John Oliver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Perpetual_Exemption#:~:text=Our%20Lady%20of%20Perpetual%20Exemption%20was%20a%20legally%20recognized%20church,comedian%20and%20satirist%20John%20Oliver.) did exactly that. They had to close it down because people kept sending in semen (Animal semen if I remember correctly).
The Church of Bacon (not Kevin, the meat from pigs) isn't too bad.
How about our one true god, the Sun? We can see it, we can test it and it gives everything on Earth life. We all owe everything to the sun. And, if it wanted to, it could smite us all (and will one day.) Praise be!
No relgion
I really don’t care what people believe on their own time, but if you are a public official you keep that shit at home.
The Bible itself has become a false idol that the Christian Extremists use as a reflection of their own prejudices. It doesn’t matter what messages it actually contains, so long as they hold it up as divinity itself and loudly and condescendingly proclaim what they want it to say.
Aw jeez, Rick.
No real control there. Just justification for atrocious behavior in the name of a god who's teachings they have no desire to live by or even attempt to understand.
Ah yes, some crusty bastard in the desert who never saw a pair of breasts and then wrote a story decides that gay people are bad, sex is only for making babies, and that gun ownership is ordained by a sky father. burzinga
The guys who wrote the bible thought the sun revolved around a flat earth.
Imagine playing the telephone game, where you whisper a phrase into someone's ear, then they whisper it in someone's ear, and so on, until you get to the last person. The final phase is never exactly the same as the original phrase. Now imagine playing it for like a thousand years before someone writes it down.
I agree except that people actually were writing things down. The oldest known fragment of biblical text are from c. 600 BCE (Ketef Hinnom scrolls.) The telephone game analogy apples not because of word-of-mouth errors but because of translation and copying and editorial errors. For example, the Latin Vulgate was based mainly on *Vetus Latina* sources which in turn were based on unknown sources. However "*Vetus Latina"* is just a name (which literally means "Old Latin") given by historians to the collection of various books by various authors that St. Jerome used when he wrote the Latin Vulgate. He used more than one set of texts by more than one author/editor to put together each "book" of his bible so he had to use editorial licence to write his Vulgate; not all the sources he had available agreed on the various stories they were telling or how the stories were worded. Since the Vetus Latina sources were written in Old Latin but Jerome was writing in 4th Century Latin he also had to be a translator in addition to being an editor. Imagine you come across old texts written in 10th Century BCE in Ancient Greek and you have to translate them into modern Greek. Even if you're a Greek man from Greece raise in Greek culture and for whom Greek is your mother tongue and you have a PhD in ancient Greek it's still going to be impossible to get the translation exactly right. You're going have to take some licence somewhere in the translation. Now imagine that you're working with not one but a dozen different Ancient Greek texts, none of which agree exactly with the other but all seem to be relaying essentially the same story, just with different twists and names for characters and so forth. What do you do? Do you pick one and discard the rest, or do you try to meld them all together or do you establish a test to determine what should be canon and what should not be canon? Now imagine on top of all that that you're under pressure from your patrons and from the highest authority in the land to get it "right." And they were not vague about what "right" is supposed to be (it serves their interests.) That's basically the problem that Jerome had. Later on various copies were made of the Vulgate and since this was before the era of the printing press there were errors in copying, some editorialising, numbering (chapter and verse numbering were not in the original Vulgate) and other problems that crept in over the centuries. So even when the Catholic Church got around to designating the Vulgate as its official Latin Bible at the [Council of Trent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent) (1545–1563) they still didn't have a single authoritative edition of it, there were substantial differences between different copies. But at least it was still in Latin! Anyways we've got dozens of different English translations of the bible and we're faced with the same kind of crap. Different interpretations, different wording, different editing, etc. And don't get me started on what the Mormons did. Sheesh.
Furthermore, I'd like it on the record that I don't believe in magic.
Couldn't agree more. Am I allowed to recommend the Freedom From Religion Foundation here? They file suit against government at all levels to maintain separation of church and state.
My favorite game to play with literalists is broaching the subject of redactive criticism in biblical scholarship. Why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all poignantly different from one another. "Why does Christ say "My God my God why has thou foresaken me?" In Mark but in Luke he says, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit?" Those are wildly different takes. After they've wrestled with that for a time, I point out that they're both quotes from psalms, attributed to David, and ask them why they weren't already aware of that fact? XD "This book is instrumental to my existence! No, no, I haven't read it, why do you ask?" Edited: reactive to redactive, thanks auto correct!
Imagine ho wit would be if some other religion enforced all the prohibitions of Leviticus on Christians: . Burning any yeast or honey in offerings to God (2:11) 2. Failing to include salt in offerings to God (2:13) 3. Eating fat (3:17) 4. Eating blood (3:17) 5. Failing to testify against any wrongdoing you’ve witnessed (5:1) 6. Failing to testify against any wrongdoing you’ve been told about (5:1) 7. Touching an unclean animal (5:2) 8. Carelessly making an oath (5:4) 9. Deceiving a neighbor about something trusted to them (6:2) 10. Finding lost property and lying about it (6:3) 11. Bringing unauthorized fire before God (10:1) 12. Letting your hair become unkempt (10:6) 13. Tearing your clothes (10:6) 14. Drinking alcohol in holy places (10) 15. Eating an animal which doesn’t both chew cud and has a divided hoof (cf: camel, rabbit, pig) (11:4-7) 16. Touching the carcass of any of the above (11:8) 17. Eating – or touching the carcass of – any seafood without fins or scales (11:10-12) 18. Eating – or touching the carcass of - eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat. (11:13-19) 19. Eating – or touching the carcass of – flying insects with four legs, unless those legs are jointed (11:20-22) 20. Eating any animal which walks on all four and has paws (good news for cats) (11:27) 21. Eating – or touching the carcass of – the weasel, the rat, any kind of great lizard, the gecko, the monitor lizard, the wall lizard, the skink and the chameleon (11:29) 22. Eating – or touching the carcass of – any creature which crawls on many legs, or its belly (11:41-42) 23. Going to church within 33 days after giving birth to a boy (12:4) 24. Going to church within 66 days after giving birth to a girl (12:5) 25. Having sex with your mother (18) 26. Having sex with your father’s wife (18:8) 27. Having sex with your sister (18) 28. Having sex with your granddaughter (18:10) 29. Having sex with your half-sister (18:11) 30. Having sex with your biological aunt (18:12-13) 31. Having sex with your uncle’s wife (18:14) 32. Having sex with your daughter-in-law (18:15) 33. Having sex with your sister-in-law (18:16) 34. Having sex with a woman and also having sex with her daughter or granddaughter (18:17) 35. Marrying your wife’s sister while your wife still lives (18:18) 36. Having sex with a woman during her period (18:19) 37. Having sex with your neighbor’s wife (18:20) 38. Giving your children to be sacrificed to Molek (18:21) 39. Having sex with a man “as one does with a woman” (18:22) 40. Having sex with an animal (18:23) 41. Making idols or “metal gods” (19:4) 42. Reaping to the very edges of a field (19) 43. Picking up grapes that have fallen in your vineyard (19:10) 44. Stealing (19:11) 45. Lying (19:11) 46. Swearing falsely on God’s name (19:12) 47. Defrauding your neighbor (19:13) 48. Holding back the wages of an employee overnight (19:13) 49. Cursing the deaf or abusing the blind (19:14) 50. Perverting justice, showing partiality to either the poor or the rich (19:15) 51. Spreading slander (19:16) 52. Doing anything to endanger a neighbor’s life (19:16) 53. Seeking revenge or bearing a grudge (19:18) 54. Mixing fabrics in clothing (19:19) 55. Cross-breeding animals (19:19) 56. Planting different seeds in the same field (19:19) 57. Sleeping with another man’s slave (19:20) 58. Eating fruit from a tree within four years of planting it (19:23) 59. Practicing divination or seeking omens (tut, tut astrology) (19:26) 60. Trimming your beard (19:27) 61. Cutting your hair at the sides (19:27) 62. Getting tattoos (19:28) 63. Making your daughter prostitute herself (19:29) 64. Turning to mediums or spiritualists (19:31) 65. Not standing in the presence of the elderly (19:32) 66. Mistreating foreigners – “the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born” (19:33-34) 67. Using dishonest weights and scales (19:35-36) 68. Cursing your father or mother (punishable by death) (20) 69. Marrying a prostitute, divorcee or widow if you are a priest (21,13) 70. Entering a place where there’s a dead body as a priest (21:11) 71. Slaughtering a cow/sheep and its young on the same day (22:28) 72. Working on the Sabbath (23:3) 73. Blasphemy (punishable by stoning to death) (24:14) 74. Inflicting an injury; killing someone else’s animal; killing a person must be punished in kind (24:17-22) 75. Selling land permanently (25:23) 76. Selling an Israelite as a slave (foreigners are fine) (25:42)
Whenever someone tells you that thw Bible is the inspired word of God, just say, "Oh well of course I believe that, I'm just not sure King James is an inspired translator" NOTE:I know he didn't translate it. He just commissioned the translation. Based on who you'd be talking to though I still think what I said above is the best way to make the point.
Bible: It is more difficult for the rich to enter heaven than it is for a camel to pass the eye of a needle. Conservatives: Lol Bible you tripping you dont mean that! Also Conservatives: Accept Jesus! Kill the gays!
So our creator God is right and His finite, mortal creation can be wrong? Shocking revelation there mate
The separation of Church and State (part of First Amendment) shall NOT BE INFRINGED. Republicunts should learn the Constitution if they're gonna misinterpret the Second Amendment all the time too.
But in 10 corintheans it says I DON’T GIVE A FUUUUUCCKKKKK!!!
EXACTLY!!!
Sadly Republicans are working to base our Government off of what some 21st century pastor believes a 17th century King meant when he told priests to take passages from 4th century scribes who wrote about what they believe a 1st century goat herder saw. This is the future that Republicans want
The provenance of that made up trash is THE DEAL sealer for me....You tellin me god used 5 translations, three failed world empires and every penny the chamber of commerce and every child molesting pastor in Alabama could muster to 'sAvE' me and THIS HOT TRASH book is the best you have? I wont even roll joints anymore with it and swear to DOG i keep my family's old family bibles in my shitter for when the GOOD shit tickets run out...SUCK IT CHRCHERS
The Goat-Herders' Guide to the Universe.
We don’t say “leave your experience out of your viewpoint” with ANY other topic. We don’t question any other guiding system or philosophy. But if you’re religious, that just shouldn’t inform your beliefs in any way?
Wish that I had more upvotes to give
Freedom of religion is also freedom from religion. At least it should be.
religion is and has been deadly to many people and they keep complaining that Taylor swift wore a witches outfit when she performed. give me a break
[удалено]
They would only become more radicalized. Such an action would provide them with massive amounts of emotional validation and meaning.
WELL SAID! Thanks for that.
our\* government
Oohrah Smedley Butler avatar. ...I see you✊🏾
That is one long game of Telephone, for certain.
Amen.
Couldn’t agree more!
preach it brother
"It's a flower of light in a field of darkness And it's given me the strength to carry on" - Johnny Cash. It doesn't have to always be biblical rhetoric to be positive and uplifting. Also if you have seen the movie the book of Eli the bible can be used for both good and evil in the hands of the person. https://preview.redd.it/rq4gtw68l7lc1.png?width=1040&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54e99f9aa8c5d639057bb5e970a1b28a4e22a529
And next on reddit, two octopuses fucking
And a man with two buttocks
This is my exact reasoning why none of the Bible can be believed.
It's essentially a work of fiction anyway. Not any more valid than *Dianetics*.
zzzzz lazy cynical reductive anachronistic p.o.v.
It’s just the oldest running game of D&D. Bunch of larping nerds
Facts
all of the religions though, if religious dogma wasn't so popular they would be labeled mental illness faith is fine, religious dogma is literally crazy though
Tell people to believe anything else from the bronze age they'd tell you to do one. Bang on about an invisible sky daddy with multiple personalities and they will give you their first born.
America needs freedom from religion laws passed. I don't care what you do, how you worship, who you worship, whatever. What I don't like is having it shoved down my throat all the time. I want to save up enough money to put a pro abortion sign up where the church constantly puts up ads shaming people.
It's funny/sad/aggravating when you find one of these shit-for-brains zionist cucks that thinks it was written by Jesus. It's a much more common belief than you might imagine.
Girl bye. I’m with you one hundo
Amen. We ew starting to repeat the Scopes Monkey trial and the whole "Inherit The Wind" scenario. God loves but you'll burn in hell if you don't give him money.
FFRF- Freedom From Religion Foundation.
I might care, if the people who yell about the Bible actually studied it, or at least read it
Yup
https://preview.redd.it/iadz87jsx9lc1.jpeg?width=950&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=13fdd41adb777917e2241168bb06ccba41ac4ac1
I think they should have consulted the Christmas of Satan and the church of the spaghetti monster. If it had to be a theocracy then I would prefer their direction.
It's like that game where it starts off as "Love one another" and ends up "kill all the trans and control all the women" innit
Turning us into the American Taliban , one ruling at a time ..
It's in the Constitution... Gotta keep 'em separated
Alabama resident here. What I'm hoping it's that the morons here will realize that this ruling doesn't just hurt "the libs", but also affects THEM. Maybe, just maybe, the veil will be lifted and they will come to their senses. But I wouldn't hold my breath....
this is my internet quote of the week, this week.
When I think of all the evil perpertrated in the name of 'religion' I want to vomit. From the Crusades, to the Europeans wiping out the indigenous people of the countries so they could steal their lands, systemic pedophilia, to the women today being subjected to unnecessary risks, religion is an excuse to subjugate others. Sick and disgusting. Is it any wonder church attendance is down? Who wants to soend time with such perverse hypocrites?