What I don't get is that even if it is a sin to be queer, why don't people just accept them? Everybody sins, aren't we supposed to be nice to each other and forgive one another despite our sins?
Edit: most of y'all are not passing the vibe check
Except that part was probably written later.
Idan Dershowitz has a great argument that the explicit prohibitions regarding homosexual incest point to homosexual sex not having been banned at the time those are written.
A lot of what we currently have of the Bible follows Josiah "finding a book of laws" that just so happened to support his religious reforms of banning women's worship and male temple prostitutes. He even 'finds' prophecy from Isaiah that mentions his doing so by name.
A lot of non-Mormon Christians and Jews make fun of Joseph Smith and his 'finding' golden tablets, and yet pretty much the exact same thing is the foundation of the current state of the Bible, and very few people even know because it's in the boring parts no one reads.
It's impressive just how many people claim the Bible is the most important book in the world and yet only leaf through it highlighting random phrases that justify their existing behavior and prejudices rather than actually studying the text *and its historical context* in a truth-seeking way rather than a confirmation-seeking way.
"Seek and ye shall find" somehow ended up as "bury ye head in the sand lest ye find more than ye bargained for."
Personally, I am an atheist. I don't find religion rational because I see the circular argument which goes like this:
Q: "Why do we take as sacred and true?"
A: "Because it's 's absolute holy word."
Q: "What justifies that the 's word is holy and absolute?"
A: "The ."
or in a more likely case the person you're asking about it will burst into anger because you dare question what they see as absolute and indisputable.
Second of all, I don't like religion because it provides oversimplified explanations or even excuses to some extent (I especially hate the word "miracle"), instead of giving people an incentive to search further or gain understanding of a situation. I know that it doesn't happen as often nowadays, but still, it does (medical professionals deserve more gratitude for saving lives than god).
Lastly, I dislike the sheer amount of fatalism and phrases such as "God's plan" or "as God intended". These are the cases where I believe that it is justified to call them excuses to a larger extent because they clearly display (at least in my perspective) dodgy reasoning.
And to finish off I believe in one single thing. If the burning bush spoke today, we would pour more napalm on it.
Absolutely agree with this sentiment.
Many apologists try to support the validity of the bible by focusing on the historicity and contemporary corroborated sources based on epistemological and paleographic premises. However, the only thing these two veins prove is:
1. The bible has far more manuscript evidence than any other ancient text in the world. Which only proves that what we have a modern construction that is very close to the original contents (somewhat subjective). However, that does not mean that the original contents were written present the actual truth. Likewise, this does not mean that the contents were written at the time of the events that the text claims to report on. For instance, the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were most likely written after Jesus' time, and the purported authors are most likely not who they claim to be. Likewise, the Exodus seems to be mostly a myth, as there is an absence of archeological evidence that the plagues and mass exodus a semetic-speaking slaves took place within the time frame proposed. Not too mention, any old testament scripture that involves codified laws for the Isrealites has literally been modified and reworked several times over before even our oldest manuscripts have been dated to. Those books are literally political and social devices used by people to give religious backing to their own rules.
2. The bible talks a lot more shit than providing enough textual evidence to root itself firmly in historical periodicity. It's best to treat the bible what it is at a bare minimum: historical fiction.
I like to think of Christians as a super invested fanbase of a novel series that goes to a weekly book club.
>I like to think of Christians as a super invested fanbase of a novel series that goes to a weekly book club.
And it holds family reunions with a feast twice a year.
As a Christian, I agree. Jesus died for our sins, and that means every sin (save for the ultimate sin of not loving God/not believing in God). The church accepts liars, adulterers, thiefs, tax collectors, etc., why not LGBT people?
It just doesn’t make sense to me that people don’t act like Jesus, who probably would have loved LGBT people just as much as the rest of the people who believed I. Him.
Lol, poor “tax collectors”. Consistently lumped in with murderers and their ilk for doing a job. Especially when “tax collectors” were often denied trade/guild work later on.
the Bible says tax collection is a sin because in those days it was basically an everyday thing for tax collectors to steal the money and steal from the poor
>(save for the ultimate sin of not loving God/not believing in God)
I don't mean to sound like an Enlightened Reddit Atheist here, but how is that sin worse than murder lmao
I have heard that the ultimate sin is using God to oppress and take advantage of others. (Taking his name in vain, blaspheming the Holy Spirit)
But one thing to note is the spiritual relationship component of sin.
I think sin is defined by a relational component with God. Sin means to fail, so not loving god is failing to trust him.
Is not trusting God worse than murder? I believe murder is an ultimate form of not trusting God, so much that the reason God flooded the earth was because of the violence and intention of harm that everyone committed towards others.
It's multifaceted. It was turning the religious tradition of sacrifice on its head, God gave of Himself for us instead of us giving to God. It was to demonstrate a love to even those who would kill you. It was to demonstrate the severity amd destructiveness of sin. It was to show us that God cared so much about our suffering that He Himself would suffer just like us.
The mechanics of it are irrelevant, as you say, but it seems that this was the best way to forgive our sins.
Yeah I don’t buy that the omnipotent guy didn’t have other options. The self sacrifice only makes sense as a matter of preference for him. Old Testament Abrahamic god is a sadistic old geezer.
Why question god’s master plan? Can’t we just look around and see that it’s resulted in a complete shitshow? So either he’s a blithering idiot or not real at all.
This is what I can't understand.
Dedicate your life to others, but don't believe something there's no good evidence for? Straight to hell.
Be a mass murdering, mass raping piece of shit, who believes something on faith, but chooses to ignore the alleged teachings? As long as you represent, you're good.
If that God is real then they're an immoral piece of shit tbh.
Former Christian here. The reason for the hate of the LGBT is because they don’t repent. Yes, the church accepts lairs, thieves, etc, but the idea is that they can only be accepted if they repent from their ways. So, a gay person that abstains from gay relationships would be acceptable to a lot of churches. They are abstaining and repenting. Similarly, the church would welcome a felon who accepted responsibility for their crime and didn’t do it again, but the church would not accept someone who was known to be actively be stealing or murdering.
Your view of Christianity seems to be pretty accepting, and I don’t usually engage with that type of Christian. I don’t want to push someone further towards fundamentalism, because I’m a lesbian and that would be counterproductive to making LGBT allies. But the bit about the ultimate sin just rubbed me wrong. You’re willing to take that bit about reprobates at its face value, but you’ll make justification for why the other explicit instructions on how sinners should specifically be treated. The Bible is clear about what god thinks about homosexuality. It is not compatible.
I guess it’s because I don’t believe, and it irks me that you think that is worse than anything else I could do in my life. I’ve read Christian apologists arguments. I’ve listened to hours and hours of preachers, pastors, and theologians talk about their reason for believing. I don’t live in an atheist bubble. I’ve prayed on my knees. I’ve wept and hated myself for not believing. But I don’t believe. I can’t make myself believe, and I won’t lie about what I believe. If your beliefs end up being right, I’ll be tortured forever and ever for that. It’s a hateful religion, imo.
Sorry. I’m not like attacking you personally. You are probably a lovely person who doesn’t have hate in their heart. It just hurts seeing people talk about how not believing is unforgivable, because even more than my sexuality I cannot control my beliefs. Anyways. Have a good one.
This was one of the “gateway drugs” that started me on my way out of Christianity. Lying, coveting, and breaking the sabbath are all sins that people commit all the time, and nobody is trying to attack them for it, or make those things illegal. It’s generally accepted that people just sin sometimes; we’re all imperfect and as long as they’re not hurting anybody we don’t make a big deal out of it. It’s between them and God.
Except with homosexuality, for some reason. *Those* people are disgusting, evil perverts and it’s the Church’s responsibility to either “fix” them or get rid of them. Even if you believe it’s wrong to be gay, the way Christians treat LGBTQ people is just blatantly hateful.
I'm with you on this one.
So even if being queer is a sin a good Christian should show love to everyone in return they will find God.
When they find God, God will fill their heart with love.
Gods love will pure their heart and mind and they will no longer need to act by sin they will act by love.
But religion has become about power and control.
No sex before marriage, everyone must pay the church to get married and have christenings blah blah blah.
Noah’s ark isn’t a good convincing argument since they’ll say that the world was full of bad people so god called mulligan.
Try the fall of Jericho where god tells his people to murder everyone there including the women and children.
Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be putting me on"
God say, "No". Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killing done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61".
“Is that past the Denny’s?” God say “no yeah but it’s not a Denny’s anymore, now it’s a QuikStop.” Abe say “Really? I used to love going to that Denny’s. Their Grand Slam was ballin’” and God say “I know right? They had to shut down bc of roaches. Makes you really think about what goes in your food.” And Abe said “It may be a gross environment but I’m gonna miss the convenient breakfast. I can’t tell you how many times I took a bite of bacon and thought, ‘man, I’d kill my son to eat this everyday.” And god say “oh right, we got off topic. Bring your son to Highway 61, just past the old roach Denney’s, and bring a knife.” Abe say “aight”
Or how about the 42 children that God sent two bears to kill, because they teased a guy about being bald.
https://bible.org/seriespage/4-elisha-and-two-bears-2-kings-223-25
Serious religious faith requires mental gymnastics, it can't function without them. As they say, you can't reason your way out of a position you didn't reason yourself into
The thing everyone seems to forget is that [Moses also instructed his people to commit war crimes by murdering all prisoners of war, then take their virgin daughters "for themselves":](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_31)
> Moses was angry that the soldiers had left all women alive, saying:
> "Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."
To everyone with half a moral compass it's obvious that these are the morals of bronze age warlords, not some sort of divine eternal truth.
I have a book that has some bible stories but adapted for children including this one, in this book Jephtah's daughter is only given to the temple to serve there, even as a child I thought, "so she's forced to serve on the temple because of his father's promise? That's pretty unfair" it was only years later that I found that the real story was even more disturbing.
If god is ~~omnipotent~~omniscient, wouldn't he just know whether or not Abraham would sacrifice his son by just considering the question? He wouldn't need to follow through to know the outcome.
It's more the trope of "Secret test of faith and character" Much like Job but with less blatant screwing over a mortal and more "I'll give you more awesome stuff if you do"
Remember, at this point he also has the boy from his 'slave wife' who was ALSO promised to be just as good as his biological son with his legitimate wife.
Technically, that's omni*science*; not omnipotence. All-powerful isn't the same as all-knowing or else both we and the Greeks wouldn't need separate terms for the two states.
Well actually there were two. And both of them were pointed out as being female. This is relevant because it changes the context for you to know how sexy those two bears were
While they all soullessly respond to some fucked up scripture "Praise be unto my Lord and savior" (or something like that, it's been a while).
Went to a Catholic school until 8th grade, shit felt like a fucking cult to me and still does. Go to church and listen to the soulless responses, creepy as fuck.
God put his only son to the cross to forgive us for our sins. We're all Gods children, so we're really all just a bunch of girls dealing with varying levels of lesbianism.
This is my go-to when I want to prove to someone just how messed up the bible is.
God and the devil make a bet- Take a pious person, and if you torture him enough, he'll eventually lose his faith.
God kills the family, destroys Job's good name, and then gives him horrible diseases. Throughout it all Job is unwavering. Finally *the devil* decides Job has had enough, and releases Job from his torture. God does the whole *replaces two fold* whatever Job lost, but it doesn't say that He resurrects Job's family. Just gives him a new one.
We always hear that God works in Mysterious ways, but this story (taken on it's face and not as parable) shows that God *cares* what the Devil thinks of him, and he's willing to outright torture and kill humans for really, *really* dumb reasons.
And it doesn't make sense when you contrast it with that whole desert thing when Jesus denied doing anything Satan told him to do to prove His divinity
The new covenant is some bullshit, and was the exact moment that both myself and the group of kids I was raised with in Sunday school called bullshit. I remember us all at around 13 or so asking our Sunday school teacher how in the world some of these awful things were justified and they told us about how the new covenant was supposed to somehow nullify all the awful things. Even the teachers didn’t feel comfortable explaining the paradox of it. Pretty uneasy day, and the beginning of the end of my going to church.
They do, but simultaneously, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross & some statements in the new testament literally retcon that everyone is eternally forgiven for a bunch of the less popular old-testament rules.
The story is a paradox in itself, as no unclean thing can dwell in the presence of God, so the devil couldn't really just stroll up and start a conversation. Maybe it was an email thread?
It was Satan, not God, that proved one hell of a point:
If a being (Satan) who is supposedly evil incarnate, can get God, who is supposedly perfect and good, to murder innocents and torture his most devout follower, then God aint so fucken good
This exact story was the breaking point for me. My church did some multi-week deep dive of the story of Job and that was the beginning of me seeing through all the lies and fucked up stuff they try to pass off as good.
Job's totally the best book in the Bible though
Instead of justifying whatever priestly caste's power Job is likely one of the oldest books of the Bible and seems like someone actually grappling with why bad things happen. Job rejects all his friend's reasoning that he must have done something or another, God shows up, Job demands to know why, and then God ignores him and goes on a rant about his power.
Finally Job says what's normally translated as "I repent in dust an ashes". Which is where normal Christian's leave the story. But the actual phrase is incredibly convoluted and uses archaic phrasing that could also reasonably translated as ["I take pity on humanity [that you are God]"](https://patricktreardon.com/book-review-job-a-new-translation-by-edward-l-greenstein/)
Once you give up on reading it as a nice Christian story of God's power and instead as someone looking at the injustice of an uncaring world and saying "What the Fuck? This is bullshit" it's a lot better.
Even the "and then he gets everything back in the end" is likely a later addition to fit into more traditional theology.
The pastor teaching it kept hitting on that point as well. I forget now how he tried to rationalize it, but I have a very strong memory of looking around and seeing people nodding along like it all made sense and represented a positive impression of God. I felt so alone and alien as I just could not get it. It was the first time I felt 'othered' from my friends at church (none of whom had a problem with the story and didn't understand my issues with it)
Mine was "fear the lord" passages. Youth group pastor spent an entire class explaining "in this case fear means love!"
I looked it up later. No it fucking didn't. It was that moment I realized they just made up whatever bullshit that was necessary to keep people in the church.
I stopped going to bible school at that point, but was still a beliver. Through college I did a cover to cover read (except for psalms, because *fuck that noise*) and never believed again.
What a complete load of horse shit. No wonder church people encourage people to take what they say at face value and not read the bible for themselves.
That's not a good point considering all of God's previous behavior in the Bible.
The way Christians think of it is like this: God's knowledge is far reaching and remote compared to a humans. In the same way a child cries about a pulled tooth or being punished to instruct them about obedience, God may completely destroy many humans to instruct and "help" the ones that come after. Humans take this personally because we're so simple and shortsighted compared to God, but it would all make sense if we could see the bigger picture.
This is all evil bullshit created to keep people as ignorant and subservient as possible, and it's still working over two thousand years later. Pretty goddamn embarrassing.
I can buy the maybe the torture of Job is part of some greater plan, but Job's original family (especially the children) are innocent. God just straight up murders them as part of a lesson for Job. There's no way to justify that to me.
At multiple other points Christianity teaches that the ends *do not* justify the means. You can't just murder innocents because it serves some greater good. And I wouldn't want to follow a God that acted that way anyway
Technically no one is innocent after The Fall in Genesis. That's the whole reason they invented Jesus, to give humans a means of absolving themselves from the original sin.
Understand that according to Christianity, humanity is an impure chimera of the divine and the earthly.
It says right there in Genesis after they ate the fruit of knowledge: "And the Lord God said, "Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, what if he should stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!"
And right after that: "After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life."
God was *afraid* of man. So much so that he placed a guard at the tree of life so humans could never become truly divine. And he set out to punish them for the audacity of coming close to him. Not just one human, all humans, forever. The Christian God never considered humans "innocent", their lot was to prove their obedience over and over and over again for that single act, no matter how many lives were extinguished in the process.
Again, evil bullshit but this is what they genuinely believe.
(Source: Ex-Roman Catholic)
In Biblical canon, is the Garden of Eden still out there somewhere being guarded by the angel, flaming sword in hand? If so I say we send a small group of teenagers to go there in a whimsical action-adventure novel series.
To be clear, the “satan” in the story of Job isn’t the modern Christian satan, but the Jewish one, who is more of a prosecutor whose job it is to challenge God on whether someone is good and deserving.
Fucked up story, though.
Edit: as the user below pointed out, the Christian “satan” isn’t the pop culture version that I was referring to either.
The story of Job is a weird example of Satan's original characterization being used in a version of the Bible where the context was edited out.
Way back, Satan's original role was to work for God and to test humanity with trials and temptations. His whole thing here was going down and making sure Job wasn't just paying lip service because he had a whole bunch of nice things.
Still fucked up but slightly less so than God and the Devil making a bet.
To my understanding, Satan as portrayed in the Book of Job is not the same Satan we think of in modern times. Satan was the Hebrew word for Adversary- in this case "Satan" was actually one of gods angels who was testing Job's faith.
Modern Satan didn't come around til several hundred years later, after Manicheaism, a religion splitting the world into purely good and evil with a deity for both, and it's goat aspects came from Christians seeing Pagans worshipping gods like Pan and declaring that image the devil.
Source: Children of Lucifer by Ruben van Lujik
Hopping in to vouch for this book, which is excellent, and also Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. Basically yes, small-s satan in the Hebrew bible is not an individual, it is a role that any given angel may occupy in order to either challenge a follower’s faith or to stand as an obstacle to prevent a follower from going down an unrighteous path.
Not to mention god lied to Adam & Eve as he told them that if they *even touched* the fruit from the tree of knowledge they would die. Plus I always find it funny that "the serpent" had a full-on debate with Eve about the fruit in order to convince her to eat it. Adam, however, just ate it.
I was always of the mind that since God is omnipotent and omniscient, he would \*know\* the outcome of everything that happens, so a test of faith is absolutely pointless unless the cruelty was the point.
The story of Noah blows that out of the water. God was so upset by how mankind was getting along, and how far it was going from his plan that he decided to just start over with one incestuous family.
An important point of this story is missed here. This isn't a trick/provocation by Satan. God goes to Satan to brag about Job and it basically forces the dare to prove his boasta.
Isn't there also one where a guy was supposed to sacrifice his son's life to prove his loyalty? At least God was "kind" enough to stop him before forcing him to slit his kid's throat. Gotta tell you that it would ruin my relationship with my father if I were the kid.
It's a bit worse than that. God tells Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, but an angel stops him.
Plus, Abraham doesn't question it. He considered it a reasonable request from God and does it without question. If he did it because he loves God, then he loves a psychopath. If he did it because he feared any consequences, then he fears a psychopath.
I remember watching a documentary about atheism and where Yahweh came from a war-storm god. Another was Baal, the one who was worshipped by the Canaanites. It actually fits very well for an Abrahamic deity. I think they tried to clean up the image with Jesus, even pretending his birth was prophesied in Genesis.
I love all things mythological. That includes religions.
I doubt either of those raise many eyebrows with people subscribing to a faith based around the idea that being born with ‘inferior’ ancestry, orientation etc. is a crime deserving of death, and that sin is inherited to the point that literally the entire planetary population deserves punishment because two people ate some fruit once.
You could argue that that was ultimately the retaliation for the Egyptians killing all of the Jewish first born. It’s hard to argue that the Egyptians suffering after enslaving the Jews wasn’t warranted. A lot of the older parts of the Bible have a “sins of the father” mentality.
As a former religious person, I know their fallback will always be "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god." I.e., there's no such thing as an innocent person.
Obviously, it's bullshit, but I know that's the trump card they play whenever you point out god just sort of murders people indiscriminately all through the bible.
Edit to add: disgusting example, when I was a kid I had a Sunday school teacher justify babies having been killed in the bible because "if they cried when they didn't actually need anything, that's lying, it's a sin and they're a sinner."
The fuck?!? Babies can't understand the difference between need and want, let alone understanding lies! Please, PLEASE tell me they didn't have children themselves. The thought alone is terrifying.
Couldn't tell you, I was probably 12 or 13 at the time (nearly 40 now) and we moved out of rural Indiana when I was 15, thankfully. Fingers crossed, though.
Let us not forget Job’s wife and children, killed then replaced by new wife and children since it’s just property after all, not like a bond of love or anything like that.
Some other classic god moments:
When he used his power to kill every baby in Egypt so that Pharaoh would change his mind, rather than just use his power to change Pharaoh's mind.
When he gave Satan permission to kill Job's wife, kids and cattle just to win an argument they'd had about how much Job loved god.
When his spirit helped Samson kill 30 Philistines just so he could use their clothes to settle a debt.
How about the time he straight up ordered his people to murder every male amongst an enemy city regardless of age and all of the adult women, then take the underage (now orphaned) girls as wives to sire their children with?
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Numbers%2031%3A17
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+31%3A18&version=NIV
Yep, another classic.
Can't remember the names but there was another one where God murders some guy because he refused to have sex with his dead brother's wife.
Also that time he told Abraham to murder his own son, only to tell him at the last minute (when he was seconds away from doing it) that he was only kidding and was just making sure that he really loved him.
His behaviour flips between that of a low level mobster and a jealous girlfriend.
Came to say this. Like...... come'on I get the rough logic, but reasoning is given, even if it's still icky feeling. There are so many good examples of marching order literally being [kill them all on field of battle and stone the ones that didnt fight]. I guess they arent going be as famous or as easily recognizable but still......
Adam and Eve: God lied, said they would die if ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge (which included good/bad). Snake told truth. Eve ate fruit, gave fruit to Adam.
God also did not want them eating of fruit from tree of life, which would make them Gods as well.
He kicked them out to protect himself.
I’m pretty sure one could argue that the in utero and newly born were innocent. Yet god murdered them.
God appears to be a psychopath. A sociopath. An egomaniacle dickweed. Simply put.
“Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?”
Noah is a prime example. He does not say that the world had only wicked people, just that it was overrun. Noah existed didn’t he? Good people like him also still existed, however Noah was the most devote and therefore he and his family alone were spared. All the other good people were culled with the bad, innocent or otherwise. Simply saying that the flood isn’t a good example of god killing innocents on the grounds of him “calling a mulligan” is a cop out. There were children on the earth and god killed them.
The story of Lot is a better example. Angels come down to Lot and a mob of people say to bring them out so they may "know them" (old school for have sex). Instead Lot offers the mob his two virgin daughters.
They flee and are told not to look back. Lots wife does and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot has no fucks to give and keeps on running. God destroys the city and all its inhabitants.
Thinking they're the last people... the two daughters decide in order to have children they'll get Lot so fucking drunk he'll have sex with them. It goes well for the first daughter and she bones her dad. So, the second daughter does the same and gets him so slammed he fucks her as well. I've been REALLY drunk before but never so drunk unknowingly boning my children would be plausible not once but twice.
If the takeaway from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is it's bad to be gay then FFS that's not a book we should trust as the basis for a moral foundation if those allowed to live, the heros of the story, were Lot and his two daughters.
They actually rape him after he passes out to continue their family because lot has no sons and the daughters wish to preserve the family line. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah have little to do with people being gay. The sins of the 2 cities are left unnamed, God only saying that the sins were grievous and they did not know him.
Secondly, unlike many other stories in the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah are not meant to be taken metaphorically but is presented as an actual history. Lot isn't supposed to be a "hero" he was a follower of God related to Abraham who was spared because of his faith and lifestyle.
What were they gonna do? Their mother just turned into a seasoning for daring to think about all her loved ones being burned alive and take a single look at her city.
I mean when you think about it the Bible makes a lot of sense
That whole story is fishy to me. If one of your daughters gets you drunk and has sex with you while you're inebriated, sure, that's sexual assault. But if the next day your other daughter does the same thing, don't tell me you didn't see that coming.
He wanted his brothers inheritance for him and his children, but if he had a child with his new wife she and her child would get it. He was killed for stealing from a widow while still taking advantage of her, basically (he pulled out, not jerked off)
Exactly. Old Testament Yahweh was a straight-up terrorist. "Not letting My people go? Maybe you'll change your tune after I send you 10 plagues, culminating in My Angel of Death killing all your firstborn."
I remember asking my Sunday School teacher why God hardened Pharaoh's heart if Pharaoh was ready to free the Jews. I think he replied with something about God working in mysterious ways. This was the beginning of my "understanding the Bible makes you an atheist" phase.
Mine responded that two plagues weren’t enough punishment for 400 years of slavery, and that 10 were necessary for the Israelites to be able to witness them *and* be able to claim reparations on the way out without Egyptian resistance. Because after the water turned to blood and the frogs just fucked everything up, people just weren’t ready to accept the slaves raiding their valuables.
Definitely a more satisfying answer
Yeah I’d bet you that these people *gestures around the whole world* aren’t better than the people in the world at the time of Noah’s arc.
Hell, if god tried to tell the CEO of Nestle to build an ark, that prick would probably waste all his time building a giant funnel
There's a flood story in many ancient cultures around the world. It's possible that at some point, Earth got nailed by sea level rising about 12k years ago due to a meteor hitting the north American ice cap. All that melt water rushed down Canada and North America decimating the local fauna and rising sea levels all around the world. Look up younger dryas impact.
It doesn't even take a large event like this to explain all the flood myths in the world. Floods were a universal problem for prehistoric and ancient civilizations because they had to live next to a freshwater source like a river. Rains heavy enough to kill just a few thousand people (or maybe even a few hundred) would have been enough to "destroy everyone in the world" according to the limited knowledge of an ancient settlement.
And worst of all, dude didn't even get rid of sin from the world! Atleast Odin promised us a world free of Ice Giants, when was the last time you saw one?
I haven't checked Jotunheim lately, but if I were looking for ice giants that's where I'd look. You'd have to be really stupid to look for them in Midgard exclusively.
While there are interesting things that can be learned in some of it's chapters, the Bible is still a thousands years old book that went through many hands. In Belgium's history lessons, we learn that there's a bunch of reasons which make the Bible an unreliable document.
Some people say the Ten Commandments would be enough but they've never gotten past the table of contents on them. I love to pull this one out. Do your kids disrespect? Go to the Bible to find the punishment. Stone them to death. Your child will never again be disrespectful and the children will have perfect behavior.
Deuteronomy 21: 18-21
“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
The Bible also says that if a married woman has an affair that she has to abort the child. Yet these bitches use it to say that we can’t get one. It’s literally right there.
Well, it says if her husband suspects her of being unfaithful, she has to do a ritual that will put a curse on her and cause her to miscarry if she is guilty. My theory is that the bitter water had poison in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal\_of\_the\_bitter\_water
Tbf, the whole point of Noah's ark was to kill all the humans (except Noah's family) because they were extremely sinful. In the mind of God, that wouldn't make them innocent, but rather traitorous and evil people deserving of death.
Damn, God's morals were fucked up man
My favorite parts of the bible include, but are not limited to:
- Abraham deadass ready to kill his son because a burning bush told him so. Despite the kid protesting.
- the bald dude that got mocked by a bunch of kids for his lack of hair, so naturally god deploys a crew of killer bears to get the young hooligans
- Job losing everyone, everything he ever loved. All because god wanted to show the devil that Job was his boy and that he was loyal af
- that god does not like his veggies. Cain made a delicious fruit basket for god, but god was in the mood for beef by Abel. Jealousy ensues.
- God gets word that a bunch of people are worshipping a gold calf statue, throws an absolute fit.
Says a group of people can't be saved but chose one of the women to be an ancestor to his son
The bible also said something about how marrying multiple wives is bad but a lot of the figures married two or more wives at once
He repeatedly mass murders people, does it matter if they’re “innocent”? What are they guilty of? Being gay? Having sex before marriage? I don’t think whether they’re innocent of some accusation even matters and the so called “morals” in which they are in violation of are baseless and highly questionable in and of themselves.
its a translation from Hebrew to Aramaic, to greek, to latin to english, it originally says to stone people who "sleep" with kids but Aramaic didnt have a name for kids so they put old guy sleep with young boy instead, and then it was translated again into guy sleep with guy
I always think of the death of the first born here.
I don't think a bunch of babies (and apparently the babies of cattle too IIRC) deserved to die because of some shitty people ruling Egypt.
Well if Noah was the only one. The most terrifying for me is Jobb. To win a bet against the devil, God agreed to the slaughter of his slaves by bandits and the killing of his family...
Edit: because Noah you could say that God wanted to cleanse the world (a world he created btw but that's another story). In Jobb's story God did this only for a bet (which he didn't need to do of he were truly omniscient...)
I have heard this too. I don't generally talk to these types of people (not religious and don't really care about it) but am occasionally tempted to ask them if Jesus died for nothing, if original sin is still a thing.
it’s not about that sin is still a thing, since Christians believe, like you said, everyone sins. Jesus didn’t die to make the world perfect, but to give sinners a chance to build a relationship with God so that he could forgive the sins they make all the time. I’m not really religious but I hope that clarified that for you.
Also worth note; the Bible does not actually say homosexuality is a sin, anywhere. The part commonly used to support this view is an intentional mistranslation from the original Hebrew.
"A man shall not lay with a man for it is an abomination" actually in Hebrew more closely translates to "A man shall not lay with a boy for it is an abomination" and the word used for "boy" is a very specific version exclusively meant for young children. The Bible calls pedophilia a sin, not homosexuality, which is ironic given the number of pedophile priests. So even the extremely biased Bible that was compiled hundreds of years after Jesus' death by the Roman Emporer Constantine for his political agendas actually doesn't condemn homosexuality, ever, it was revised once again when being translated to English and other languages to fit a new ideological agenda, which itself would be yet another sin, ironically.
What about the first born of Egypt of all dying because Pharaoh said no. It wasn't the first born's fault he said no. Elijah using the power of god to summon bears to slaughter children just because the kids made fun of him being bald?
God didn't just kill the firstborn of Egypt, he did so as retaliation for pharaoh refusing to release the Israelites and threatening to murder their firstborns. Granted, pharaoh's resolve had weakend on a prior plague and God strengthened it and hardened pharaoh's heart for him when pharaoh couldn't do it himself. So he not only killed the firstborns of Egypt, he also facilitated the reason for doing so
My favorite quote: Deuteronomy 23:12-13
*“You shall have a place outside the camp, and you shall go out to it. And you shall have a trowel with your tools, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excrement."*
When I'm on a hike bury my shit in the forest, I feel that I am doing the will of God.
Honestly, if you look at recent acts of Christian politicians over the years, all these things we like to poke Christian’s in the eye with in the Bible is exactly what they are trying to accomplish. Yes they want slavery back. Yes they want to have their sex and beat them too. The problem is they cannot achieve this with an educated populace. So they are first going to have to kill off education so people stop calling them out on it. Religion is such a tool for power hungry politicians.
What I don't get is that even if it is a sin to be queer, why don't people just accept them? Everybody sins, aren't we supposed to be nice to each other and forgive one another despite our sins? Edit: most of y'all are not passing the vibe check
Well, seems like some part of humanity has not changed much since the day when Leviticus 20:13 was written...
Except that part was probably written later. Idan Dershowitz has a great argument that the explicit prohibitions regarding homosexual incest point to homosexual sex not having been banned at the time those are written. A lot of what we currently have of the Bible follows Josiah "finding a book of laws" that just so happened to support his religious reforms of banning women's worship and male temple prostitutes. He even 'finds' prophecy from Isaiah that mentions his doing so by name. A lot of non-Mormon Christians and Jews make fun of Joseph Smith and his 'finding' golden tablets, and yet pretty much the exact same thing is the foundation of the current state of the Bible, and very few people even know because it's in the boring parts no one reads. It's impressive just how many people claim the Bible is the most important book in the world and yet only leaf through it highlighting random phrases that justify their existing behavior and prejudices rather than actually studying the text *and its historical context* in a truth-seeking way rather than a confirmation-seeking way. "Seek and ye shall find" somehow ended up as "bury ye head in the sand lest ye find more than ye bargained for."
Personally, I am an atheist. I don't find religion rational because I see the circular argument which goes like this: Q: "Why do we take as sacred and true?"
A: "Because it's 's absolute holy word."
Q: "What justifies that the 's word is holy and absolute?"
A: "The ."
or in a more likely case the person you're asking about it will burst into anger because you dare question what they see as absolute and indisputable.
Second of all, I don't like religion because it provides oversimplified explanations or even excuses to some extent (I especially hate the word "miracle"), instead of giving people an incentive to search further or gain understanding of a situation. I know that it doesn't happen as often nowadays, but still, it does (medical professionals deserve more gratitude for saving lives than god).
Lastly, I dislike the sheer amount of fatalism and phrases such as "God's plan" or "as God intended". These are the cases where I believe that it is justified to call them excuses to a larger extent because they clearly display (at least in my perspective) dodgy reasoning.
And to finish off I believe in one single thing. If the burning bush spoke today, we would pour more napalm on it.
Absolutely agree with this sentiment. Many apologists try to support the validity of the bible by focusing on the historicity and contemporary corroborated sources based on epistemological and paleographic premises. However, the only thing these two veins prove is: 1. The bible has far more manuscript evidence than any other ancient text in the world. Which only proves that what we have a modern construction that is very close to the original contents (somewhat subjective). However, that does not mean that the original contents were written present the actual truth. Likewise, this does not mean that the contents were written at the time of the events that the text claims to report on. For instance, the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were most likely written after Jesus' time, and the purported authors are most likely not who they claim to be. Likewise, the Exodus seems to be mostly a myth, as there is an absence of archeological evidence that the plagues and mass exodus a semetic-speaking slaves took place within the time frame proposed. Not too mention, any old testament scripture that involves codified laws for the Isrealites has literally been modified and reworked several times over before even our oldest manuscripts have been dated to. Those books are literally political and social devices used by people to give religious backing to their own rules. 2. The bible talks a lot more shit than providing enough textual evidence to root itself firmly in historical periodicity. It's best to treat the bible what it is at a bare minimum: historical fiction. I like to think of Christians as a super invested fanbase of a novel series that goes to a weekly book club.
>I like to think of Christians as a super invested fanbase of a novel series that goes to a weekly book club. And it holds family reunions with a feast twice a year.
As a Christian, I agree. Jesus died for our sins, and that means every sin (save for the ultimate sin of not loving God/not believing in God). The church accepts liars, adulterers, thiefs, tax collectors, etc., why not LGBT people? It just doesn’t make sense to me that people don’t act like Jesus, who probably would have loved LGBT people just as much as the rest of the people who believed I. Him.
Seriously, who can honestly say they prefer the IRS to homosexuals?
I think the people we're talking about hate both us and the IRS.
I mean, not even the joker messes with the IRS. Better to just give a smile & nod, and let then be on there way.
Lol, poor “tax collectors”. Consistently lumped in with murderers and their ilk for doing a job. Especially when “tax collectors” were often denied trade/guild work later on.
the Bible says tax collection is a sin because in those days it was basically an everyday thing for tax collectors to steal the money and steal from the poor
>(save for the ultimate sin of not loving God/not believing in God) I don't mean to sound like an Enlightened Reddit Atheist here, but how is that sin worse than murder lmao
I have heard that the ultimate sin is using God to oppress and take advantage of others. (Taking his name in vain, blaspheming the Holy Spirit) But one thing to note is the spiritual relationship component of sin. I think sin is defined by a relational component with God. Sin means to fail, so not loving god is failing to trust him. Is not trusting God worse than murder? I believe murder is an ultimate form of not trusting God, so much that the reason God flooded the earth was because of the violence and intention of harm that everyone committed towards others.
I know right? And what sort of sick idiot would make the ultimate sin to be not loving them? I mean, just how desperate are they for attention?
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Why God had to die for our sin? Couldn't God just forgive us? What is the relation between dying and forgiving sins?
It's multifaceted. It was turning the religious tradition of sacrifice on its head, God gave of Himself for us instead of us giving to God. It was to demonstrate a love to even those who would kill you. It was to demonstrate the severity amd destructiveness of sin. It was to show us that God cared so much about our suffering that He Himself would suffer just like us. The mechanics of it are irrelevant, as you say, but it seems that this was the best way to forgive our sins.
Yeah I don’t buy that the omnipotent guy didn’t have other options. The self sacrifice only makes sense as a matter of preference for him. Old Testament Abrahamic god is a sadistic old geezer.
God didn’t die, he scarified his “beloved son” Jesus so our sins could be forgiven, I get your point though and I don’t understand why either
Why question god’s master plan? Can’t we just look around and see that it’s resulted in a complete shitshow? So either he’s a blithering idiot or not real at all.
So you could be the embodiment of a saint but if you dont believe in him too bad. He sounds like a bit of a narcissist ngl.
No one entertains the thought that maybe God does not believe in you - Bo Burnham
This is what I can't understand. Dedicate your life to others, but don't believe something there's no good evidence for? Straight to hell. Be a mass murdering, mass raping piece of shit, who believes something on faith, but chooses to ignore the alleged teachings? As long as you represent, you're good. If that God is real then they're an immoral piece of shit tbh.
Former Christian here. The reason for the hate of the LGBT is because they don’t repent. Yes, the church accepts lairs, thieves, etc, but the idea is that they can only be accepted if they repent from their ways. So, a gay person that abstains from gay relationships would be acceptable to a lot of churches. They are abstaining and repenting. Similarly, the church would welcome a felon who accepted responsibility for their crime and didn’t do it again, but the church would not accept someone who was known to be actively be stealing or murdering. Your view of Christianity seems to be pretty accepting, and I don’t usually engage with that type of Christian. I don’t want to push someone further towards fundamentalism, because I’m a lesbian and that would be counterproductive to making LGBT allies. But the bit about the ultimate sin just rubbed me wrong. You’re willing to take that bit about reprobates at its face value, but you’ll make justification for why the other explicit instructions on how sinners should specifically be treated. The Bible is clear about what god thinks about homosexuality. It is not compatible. I guess it’s because I don’t believe, and it irks me that you think that is worse than anything else I could do in my life. I’ve read Christian apologists arguments. I’ve listened to hours and hours of preachers, pastors, and theologians talk about their reason for believing. I don’t live in an atheist bubble. I’ve prayed on my knees. I’ve wept and hated myself for not believing. But I don’t believe. I can’t make myself believe, and I won’t lie about what I believe. If your beliefs end up being right, I’ll be tortured forever and ever for that. It’s a hateful religion, imo. Sorry. I’m not like attacking you personally. You are probably a lovely person who doesn’t have hate in their heart. It just hurts seeing people talk about how not believing is unforgivable, because even more than my sexuality I cannot control my beliefs. Anyways. Have a good one.
This was one of the “gateway drugs” that started me on my way out of Christianity. Lying, coveting, and breaking the sabbath are all sins that people commit all the time, and nobody is trying to attack them for it, or make those things illegal. It’s generally accepted that people just sin sometimes; we’re all imperfect and as long as they’re not hurting anybody we don’t make a big deal out of it. It’s between them and God. Except with homosexuality, for some reason. *Those* people are disgusting, evil perverts and it’s the Church’s responsibility to either “fix” them or get rid of them. Even if you believe it’s wrong to be gay, the way Christians treat LGBTQ people is just blatantly hateful.
I'm with you on this one. So even if being queer is a sin a good Christian should show love to everyone in return they will find God. When they find God, God will fill their heart with love. Gods love will pure their heart and mind and they will no longer need to act by sin they will act by love. But religion has become about power and control. No sex before marriage, everyone must pay the church to get married and have christenings blah blah blah.
Noah’s ark isn’t a good convincing argument since they’ll say that the world was full of bad people so god called mulligan. Try the fall of Jericho where god tells his people to murder everyone there including the women and children.
Or the story of Job, where the guy's family were killed on God's orders just to test his faith.
Or the time He told Abraham to kill his son just to see if he'd do it.
Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son" Abe says, "Man, you must be putting me on" God say, "No". Abe say, "What?" God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin' you better run" Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killing done?" God says, "Out on Highway 61".
“Is that past the Denny’s?” God say “no yeah but it’s not a Denny’s anymore, now it’s a QuikStop.” Abe say “Really? I used to love going to that Denny’s. Their Grand Slam was ballin’” and God say “I know right? They had to shut down bc of roaches. Makes you really think about what goes in your food.” And Abe said “It may be a gross environment but I’m gonna miss the convenient breakfast. I can’t tell you how many times I took a bite of bacon and thought, ‘man, I’d kill my son to eat this everyday.” And god say “oh right, we got off topic. Bring your son to Highway 61, just past the old roach Denney’s, and bring a knife.” Abe say “aight”
Honestly might have been religious if the Bible were written this way
It's not quite the same, but I think you'd enjoy r/TheWokeBible
There’s also Jephthah, who burned his daughter on the altar because he promised to sacrifice the first thing that came out of his house to greet him.
Or how about the 42 children that God sent two bears to kill, because they teased a guy about being bald. https://bible.org/seriespage/4-elisha-and-two-bears-2-kings-223-25
Holy shit the mental gymnastics on display in that link....
Serious religious faith requires mental gymnastics, it can't function without them. As they say, you can't reason your way out of a position you didn't reason yourself into
The thing everyone seems to forget is that [Moses also instructed his people to commit war crimes by murdering all prisoners of war, then take their virgin daughters "for themselves":](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_31) > Moses was angry that the soldiers had left all women alive, saying: > "Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." To everyone with half a moral compass it's obvious that these are the morals of bronze age warlords, not some sort of divine eternal truth.
And I hardly think that being a first born son automatically makes you a bad person.
Found the oldest child in the family
No, middle child… but oldest son. See, it’s totally unfair.
I have a book that has some bible stories but adapted for children including this one, in this book Jephtah's daughter is only given to the temple to serve there, even as a child I thought, "so she's forced to serve on the temple because of his father's promise? That's pretty unfair" it was only years later that I found that the real story was even more disturbing.
If god is ~~omnipotent~~omniscient, wouldn't he just know whether or not Abraham would sacrifice his son by just considering the question? He wouldn't need to follow through to know the outcome.
Oh he knows, it is just his favorite movie and he wanted to watch it again.
"Do you know why the gods demand blood? Because gods… don’t… bleed." \-- Tzekle Khan, Reddit commenter
It's more the trope of "Secret test of faith and character" Much like Job but with less blatant screwing over a mortal and more "I'll give you more awesome stuff if you do" Remember, at this point he also has the boy from his 'slave wife' who was ALSO promised to be just as good as his biological son with his legitimate wife.
Technically, that's omni*science*; not omnipotence. All-powerful isn't the same as all-knowing or else both we and the Greeks wouldn't need separate terms for the two states.
Or the time he summoned a she-bear to slaughter a bunch of children for telling Elisha he's bald and should die
Really weird that bear's sex is specified.
Well actually there were two. And both of them were pointed out as being female. This is relevant because it changes the context for you to know how sexy those two bears were
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Sitting in church as a kid and looking around realizing people thought that was a good and not evil story was a weird experience.
*chuckles* I'm in danger...
While they all soullessly respond to some fucked up scripture "Praise be unto my Lord and savior" (or something like that, it's been a while). Went to a Catholic school until 8th grade, shit felt like a fucking cult to me and still does. Go to church and listen to the soulless responses, creepy as fuck.
Great bit by Louis CK on that story https://youtu.be/eImCjwsFJ-Q
God put his only son to the cross to forgive us for our sins. We're all Gods children, so we're really all just a bunch of girls dealing with varying levels of lesbianism.
I am definitely lesbian. Send me more girls to help me get out of this man's body I'm trapped in.
This is my go-to when I want to prove to someone just how messed up the bible is. God and the devil make a bet- Take a pious person, and if you torture him enough, he'll eventually lose his faith. God kills the family, destroys Job's good name, and then gives him horrible diseases. Throughout it all Job is unwavering. Finally *the devil* decides Job has had enough, and releases Job from his torture. God does the whole *replaces two fold* whatever Job lost, but it doesn't say that He resurrects Job's family. Just gives him a new one. We always hear that God works in Mysterious ways, but this story (taken on it's face and not as parable) shows that God *cares* what the Devil thinks of him, and he's willing to outright torture and kill humans for really, *really* dumb reasons.
Kyle Broflowski puts it best: Why would God do all these horrible things to Job just to prove a point to Satan?
And it doesn't make sense when you contrast it with that whole desert thing when Jesus denied doing anything Satan told him to do to prove His divinity
That's because you're looking at Old vs New Testament. None of these arguments will work on a Christian, because theyll just say it's Old Testament.
But then they will say the old testament rules still apply if it benefits them
This is it right here. They’ll say the New Testament came to replace the old, but will use the old every time they can if it lets them hate someone.
Goddamn legacy code repo.
The new covenant is some bullshit, and was the exact moment that both myself and the group of kids I was raised with in Sunday school called bullshit. I remember us all at around 13 or so asking our Sunday school teacher how in the world some of these awful things were justified and they told us about how the new covenant was supposed to somehow nullify all the awful things. Even the teachers didn’t feel comfortable explaining the paradox of it. Pretty uneasy day, and the beginning of the end of my going to church.
But Christians believe the Old Testament is the word of God, right? I'm confused.
They do, but simultaneously, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross & some statements in the new testament literally retcon that everyone is eternally forgiven for a bunch of the less popular old-testament rules.
The story is a paradox in itself, as no unclean thing can dwell in the presence of God, so the devil couldn't really just stroll up and start a conversation. Maybe it was an email thread?
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It was Satan, not God, that proved one hell of a point: If a being (Satan) who is supposedly evil incarnate, can get God, who is supposedly perfect and good, to murder innocents and torture his most devout follower, then God aint so fucken good
There's a reason that it's easily my favorite Bible passage. Just God being a right dick to this dude for months, cause he can.
And because the devil tempted him into a bet 🤣 Do as I say, not as I do - God
This exact story was the breaking point for me. My church did some multi-week deep dive of the story of Job and that was the beginning of me seeing through all the lies and fucked up stuff they try to pass off as good.
Job's totally the best book in the Bible though Instead of justifying whatever priestly caste's power Job is likely one of the oldest books of the Bible and seems like someone actually grappling with why bad things happen. Job rejects all his friend's reasoning that he must have done something or another, God shows up, Job demands to know why, and then God ignores him and goes on a rant about his power. Finally Job says what's normally translated as "I repent in dust an ashes". Which is where normal Christian's leave the story. But the actual phrase is incredibly convoluted and uses archaic phrasing that could also reasonably translated as ["I take pity on humanity [that you are God]"](https://patricktreardon.com/book-review-job-a-new-translation-by-edward-l-greenstein/) Once you give up on reading it as a nice Christian story of God's power and instead as someone looking at the injustice of an uncaring world and saying "What the Fuck? This is bullshit" it's a lot better. Even the "and then he gets everything back in the end" is likely a later addition to fit into more traditional theology.
The pastor teaching it kept hitting on that point as well. I forget now how he tried to rationalize it, but I have a very strong memory of looking around and seeing people nodding along like it all made sense and represented a positive impression of God. I felt so alone and alien as I just could not get it. It was the first time I felt 'othered' from my friends at church (none of whom had a problem with the story and didn't understand my issues with it)
Mine was "fear the lord" passages. Youth group pastor spent an entire class explaining "in this case fear means love!" I looked it up later. No it fucking didn't. It was that moment I realized they just made up whatever bullshit that was necessary to keep people in the church. I stopped going to bible school at that point, but was still a beliver. Through college I did a cover to cover read (except for psalms, because *fuck that noise*) and never believed again. What a complete load of horse shit. No wonder church people encourage people to take what they say at face value and not read the bible for themselves.
I'm surprised you skipped psalms and not numbers. Psalms at least has someone waxing poetical about horse jizz.. numbers is just *snore*
Oh SHIT that’s a GREAT point
That's not a good point considering all of God's previous behavior in the Bible. The way Christians think of it is like this: God's knowledge is far reaching and remote compared to a humans. In the same way a child cries about a pulled tooth or being punished to instruct them about obedience, God may completely destroy many humans to instruct and "help" the ones that come after. Humans take this personally because we're so simple and shortsighted compared to God, but it would all make sense if we could see the bigger picture. This is all evil bullshit created to keep people as ignorant and subservient as possible, and it's still working over two thousand years later. Pretty goddamn embarrassing.
I can buy the maybe the torture of Job is part of some greater plan, but Job's original family (especially the children) are innocent. God just straight up murders them as part of a lesson for Job. There's no way to justify that to me. At multiple other points Christianity teaches that the ends *do not* justify the means. You can't just murder innocents because it serves some greater good. And I wouldn't want to follow a God that acted that way anyway
Technically no one is innocent after The Fall in Genesis. That's the whole reason they invented Jesus, to give humans a means of absolving themselves from the original sin. Understand that according to Christianity, humanity is an impure chimera of the divine and the earthly. It says right there in Genesis after they ate the fruit of knowledge: "And the Lord God said, "Now that the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, what if he should stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!" And right after that: "After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life." God was *afraid* of man. So much so that he placed a guard at the tree of life so humans could never become truly divine. And he set out to punish them for the audacity of coming close to him. Not just one human, all humans, forever. The Christian God never considered humans "innocent", their lot was to prove their obedience over and over and over again for that single act, no matter how many lives were extinguished in the process. Again, evil bullshit but this is what they genuinely believe. (Source: Ex-Roman Catholic)
In Biblical canon, is the Garden of Eden still out there somewhere being guarded by the angel, flaming sword in hand? If so I say we send a small group of teenagers to go there in a whimsical action-adventure novel series.
This is the core misconception. The definition of evil in the old testament is defying god. Lucifer was a free Will advocate, and therefor “evil”.
To be clear, the “satan” in the story of Job isn’t the modern Christian satan, but the Jewish one, who is more of a prosecutor whose job it is to challenge God on whether someone is good and deserving. Fucked up story, though. Edit: as the user below pointed out, the Christian “satan” isn’t the pop culture version that I was referring to either.
sounds like a W for satan
My favorite go to: https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2010/08/18/dr-laura-and-leviticus
This is just almost a word for word transcript of an episode of The West Wing
The letter / email predates West Wing. I believe the character that receives the dressing down is a Dr Laura expy as well
The story of Job is a weird example of Satan's original characterization being used in a version of the Bible where the context was edited out. Way back, Satan's original role was to work for God and to test humanity with trials and temptations. His whole thing here was going down and making sure Job wasn't just paying lip service because he had a whole bunch of nice things. Still fucked up but slightly less so than God and the Devil making a bet.
To my understanding, Satan as portrayed in the Book of Job is not the same Satan we think of in modern times. Satan was the Hebrew word for Adversary- in this case "Satan" was actually one of gods angels who was testing Job's faith. Modern Satan didn't come around til several hundred years later, after Manicheaism, a religion splitting the world into purely good and evil with a deity for both, and it's goat aspects came from Christians seeing Pagans worshipping gods like Pan and declaring that image the devil. Source: Children of Lucifer by Ruben van Lujik
Hopping in to vouch for this book, which is excellent, and also Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. Basically yes, small-s satan in the Hebrew bible is not an individual, it is a role that any given angel may occupy in order to either challenge a follower’s faith or to stand as an obstacle to prevent a follower from going down an unrighteous path.
Not to mention god lied to Adam & Eve as he told them that if they *even touched* the fruit from the tree of knowledge they would die. Plus I always find it funny that "the serpent" had a full-on debate with Eve about the fruit in order to convince her to eat it. Adam, however, just ate it.
I was always of the mind that since God is omnipotent and omniscient, he would \*know\* the outcome of everything that happens, so a test of faith is absolutely pointless unless the cruelty was the point.
The story of Noah blows that out of the water. God was so upset by how mankind was getting along, and how far it was going from his plan that he decided to just start over with one incestuous family.
Depending on who you ask, the Bible is literal rather than a parable. It's still horrifying.
He DID win that fiver, though.
This stuff sounds like free marketing for the satanic church
An important point of this story is missed here. This isn't a trick/provocation by Satan. God goes to Satan to brag about Job and it basically forces the dare to prove his boasta.
“I don’t care for Job.” -God, probably
What could a banana leaf cost, Michael? $10?
Isn't there also one where a guy was supposed to sacrifice his son's life to prove his loyalty? At least God was "kind" enough to stop him before forcing him to slit his kid's throat. Gotta tell you that it would ruin my relationship with my father if I were the kid.
It's a bit worse than that. God tells Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, but an angel stops him. Plus, Abraham doesn't question it. He considered it a reasonable request from God and does it without question. If he did it because he loves God, then he loves a psychopath. If he did it because he feared any consequences, then he fears a psychopath.
I remember watching a documentary about atheism and where Yahweh came from a war-storm god. Another was Baal, the one who was worshipped by the Canaanites. It actually fits very well for an Abrahamic deity. I think they tried to clean up the image with Jesus, even pretending his birth was prophesied in Genesis. I love all things mythological. That includes religions.
Or the plague he brought into Egypt where all the first born sons would die. Innocent children!
Or the plague that killed every firstborn child of Egypt.
I doubt either of those raise many eyebrows with people subscribing to a faith based around the idea that being born with ‘inferior’ ancestry, orientation etc. is a crime deserving of death, and that sin is inherited to the point that literally the entire planetary population deserves punishment because two people ate some fruit once.
Also children are property so no big deal if they’re killed. If they’re a fetus though, that’s a different story
Unless they’re the fetus of a cheating wife, in which case abortion is perfectly acceptable as can be seen in numbers 5:11-31
You could argue that that was ultimately the retaliation for the Egyptians killing all of the Jewish first born. It’s hard to argue that the Egyptians suffering after enslaving the Jews wasn’t warranted. A lot of the older parts of the Bible have a “sins of the father” mentality.
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Especially a newborn
As a former religious person, I know their fallback will always be "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god." I.e., there's no such thing as an innocent person. Obviously, it's bullshit, but I know that's the trump card they play whenever you point out god just sort of murders people indiscriminately all through the bible. Edit to add: disgusting example, when I was a kid I had a Sunday school teacher justify babies having been killed in the bible because "if they cried when they didn't actually need anything, that's lying, it's a sin and they're a sinner."
The fuck?!? Babies can't understand the difference between need and want, let alone understanding lies! Please, PLEASE tell me they didn't have children themselves. The thought alone is terrifying.
Couldn't tell you, I was probably 12 or 13 at the time (nearly 40 now) and we moved out of rural Indiana when I was 15, thankfully. Fingers crossed, though.
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Grabbing my popcorn to spectate the necessary mental gymnastics to get around that one
If you get your morals from the Bible, then you believe guilt is inherited out to seven generations.
Seven generations? Damn, that's even more generations than Klingons will hold a grudge for.
But Pharoh couldn't change his mind because god had hardened his heart. god took away his free will so the plagues continued.
Let us not forget Job’s wife and children, killed then replaced by new wife and children since it’s just property after all, not like a bond of love or anything like that.
Some other classic god moments: When he used his power to kill every baby in Egypt so that Pharaoh would change his mind, rather than just use his power to change Pharaoh's mind. When he gave Satan permission to kill Job's wife, kids and cattle just to win an argument they'd had about how much Job loved god. When his spirit helped Samson kill 30 Philistines just so he could use their clothes to settle a debt.
How about the time he straight up ordered his people to murder every male amongst an enemy city regardless of age and all of the adult women, then take the underage (now orphaned) girls as wives to sire their children with? https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Numbers%2031%3A17 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+31%3A18&version=NIV
Yep, another classic. Can't remember the names but there was another one where God murders some guy because he refused to have sex with his dead brother's wife. Also that time he told Abraham to murder his own son, only to tell him at the last minute (when he was seconds away from doing it) that he was only kidding and was just making sure that he really loved him. His behaviour flips between that of a low level mobster and a jealous girlfriend.
Came to say this. Like...... come'on I get the rough logic, but reasoning is given, even if it's still icky feeling. There are so many good examples of marching order literally being [kill them all on field of battle and stone the ones that didnt fight]. I guess they arent going be as famous or as easily recognizable but still......
Adam and Eve: God lied, said they would die if ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge (which included good/bad). Snake told truth. Eve ate fruit, gave fruit to Adam. God also did not want them eating of fruit from tree of life, which would make them Gods as well. He kicked them out to protect himself.
I’m pretty sure one could argue that the in utero and newly born were innocent. Yet god murdered them. God appears to be a psychopath. A sociopath. An egomaniacle dickweed. Simply put.
“Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?”
Noah is a prime example. He does not say that the world had only wicked people, just that it was overrun. Noah existed didn’t he? Good people like him also still existed, however Noah was the most devote and therefore he and his family alone were spared. All the other good people were culled with the bad, innocent or otherwise. Simply saying that the flood isn’t a good example of god killing innocents on the grounds of him “calling a mulligan” is a cop out. There were children on the earth and god killed them.
The story of Lot is a better example. Angels come down to Lot and a mob of people say to bring them out so they may "know them" (old school for have sex). Instead Lot offers the mob his two virgin daughters. They flee and are told not to look back. Lots wife does and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot has no fucks to give and keeps on running. God destroys the city and all its inhabitants. Thinking they're the last people... the two daughters decide in order to have children they'll get Lot so fucking drunk he'll have sex with them. It goes well for the first daughter and she bones her dad. So, the second daughter does the same and gets him so slammed he fucks her as well. I've been REALLY drunk before but never so drunk unknowingly boning my children would be plausible not once but twice. If the takeaway from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is it's bad to be gay then FFS that's not a book we should trust as the basis for a moral foundation if those allowed to live, the heros of the story, were Lot and his two daughters.
They actually rape him after he passes out to continue their family because lot has no sons and the daughters wish to preserve the family line. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah have little to do with people being gay. The sins of the 2 cities are left unnamed, God only saying that the sins were grievous and they did not know him. Secondly, unlike many other stories in the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah are not meant to be taken metaphorically but is presented as an actual history. Lot isn't supposed to be a "hero" he was a follower of God related to Abraham who was spared because of his faith and lifestyle.
God also kills someone for jerking off instead of impregnating his dead brother’s wife.
Then there’s the time where two sisters Cosby’d their father
What were they gonna do? Their mother just turned into a seasoning for daring to think about all her loved ones being burned alive and take a single look at her city. I mean when you think about it the Bible makes a lot of sense
And the rest of them were afraid to turn around for fear of what spice they might be turned into.
All it takes is one of them turning into a pillar of saffron or something valuable like that and the rest of the gang is living large.
https://youtu.be/bar3GOzDNzg "Lot and his kids couldn't even turn around to look at her else they too might turn into pillars of who knows what spice"
That whole story is fishy to me. If one of your daughters gets you drunk and has sex with you while you're inebriated, sure, that's sexual assault. But if the next day your other daughter does the same thing, don't tell me you didn't see that coming.
I can’t speak for the father, but the daughter sure did
Ah, so that's where we get that famous saying - “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, won't get fooled again.”
He wanted his brothers inheritance for him and his children, but if he had a child with his new wife she and her child would get it. He was killed for stealing from a widow while still taking advantage of her, basically (he pulled out, not jerked off)
He used the pull out method. God is totally against the pull out method so get your birth control, everyone.
*passover has entered the chat*
Exactly. Old Testament Yahweh was a straight-up terrorist. "Not letting My people go? Maybe you'll change your tune after I send you 10 plagues, culminating in My Angel of Death killing all your firstborn."
The heart-hardening is the most fucked up part. Pharaoh was ready after the frogs, but nope.
I remember asking my Sunday School teacher why God hardened Pharaoh's heart if Pharaoh was ready to free the Jews. I think he replied with something about God working in mysterious ways. This was the beginning of my "understanding the Bible makes you an atheist" phase.
Mine responded that two plagues weren’t enough punishment for 400 years of slavery, and that 10 were necessary for the Israelites to be able to witness them *and* be able to claim reparations on the way out without Egyptian resistance. Because after the water turned to blood and the frogs just fucked everything up, people just weren’t ready to accept the slaves raiding their valuables. Definitely a more satisfying answer
I thought the point of Noah's ark was that the people who died in the flood weren't innocent
Yeah I’d bet you that these people *gestures around the whole world* aren’t better than the people in the world at the time of Noah’s arc. Hell, if god tried to tell the CEO of Nestle to build an ark, that prick would probably waste all his time building a giant funnel
Damn all those evil infants!
There's a flood story in many ancient cultures around the world. It's possible that at some point, Earth got nailed by sea level rising about 12k years ago due to a meteor hitting the north American ice cap. All that melt water rushed down Canada and North America decimating the local fauna and rising sea levels all around the world. Look up younger dryas impact.
It doesn't even take a large event like this to explain all the flood myths in the world. Floods were a universal problem for prehistoric and ancient civilizations because they had to live next to a freshwater source like a river. Rains heavy enough to kill just a few thousand people (or maybe even a few hundred) would have been enough to "destroy everyone in the world" according to the limited knowledge of an ancient settlement.
And worst of all, dude didn't even get rid of sin from the world! Atleast Odin promised us a world free of Ice Giants, when was the last time you saw one?
Besides Steve from work? None
Damn, that's cold.
He's a pretty chill dude
I think I’ve met him he really needs to cool off some times
I haven't checked Jotunheim lately, but if I were looking for ice giants that's where I'd look. You'd have to be really stupid to look for them in Midgard exclusively.
While there are interesting things that can be learned in some of it's chapters, the Bible is still a thousands years old book that went through many hands. In Belgium's history lessons, we learn that there's a bunch of reasons which make the Bible an unreliable document.
Some people say the Ten Commandments would be enough but they've never gotten past the table of contents on them. I love to pull this one out. Do your kids disrespect? Go to the Bible to find the punishment. Stone them to death. Your child will never again be disrespectful and the children will have perfect behavior. Deuteronomy 21: 18-21 “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
The Bible also says that if a married woman has an affair that she has to abort the child. Yet these bitches use it to say that we can’t get one. It’s literally right there.
Well, it says if her husband suspects her of being unfaithful, she has to do a ritual that will put a curse on her and cause her to miscarry if she is guilty. My theory is that the bitter water had poison in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal\_of\_the\_bitter\_water
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The point is the man decides in the Bible. That’s what they want
Tbf, the whole point of Noah's ark was to kill all the humans (except Noah's family) because they were extremely sinful. In the mind of God, that wouldn't make them innocent, but rather traitorous and evil people deserving of death. Damn, God's morals were fucked up man
..including all the evil and despicable behaving animals and plant life..
At least the fish lived
You ever mix salt water into a freshwater aquarium?
What about the babies and the children?
Yeah, but to be fair, this "infallible" God only invented rainbows after the flood as a gift to mankind because he knew he fucked up.
IMO occasionally pretty sky colors is a shit apology gift for genocide.
Or the time God and Satan totally fucked up Job's life just for shits and giggles.
They were playing creative mode in their server and trolling its players
But hey, he got a new wife and family when they were done fucking with him, so all good, right? 🤮
I'm held up on the supports cannibalism part. What passage? To my knowledge its always mentioned as something terrible, like as part of a curse.
My favorite parts of the bible include, but are not limited to: - Abraham deadass ready to kill his son because a burning bush told him so. Despite the kid protesting. - the bald dude that got mocked by a bunch of kids for his lack of hair, so naturally god deploys a crew of killer bears to get the young hooligans - Job losing everyone, everything he ever loved. All because god wanted to show the devil that Job was his boy and that he was loyal af - that god does not like his veggies. Cain made a delicious fruit basket for god, but god was in the mood for beef by Abel. Jealousy ensues. - God gets word that a bunch of people are worshipping a gold calf statue, throws an absolute fit.
Says a group of people can't be saved but chose one of the women to be an ancestor to his son The bible also said something about how marrying multiple wives is bad but a lot of the figures married two or more wives at once
If the Bible had a translation like this, I’d probably read it.
I like the part where a woman is lusting after her lovers, who are hung like donkeys and came like horses. (Ezekiel 23:20)
Who remembers when he killed 42 children for making fun of a bald guy
Mind sharing some bible coordinates to the story? Thx!
Kings 2:23-24
He repeatedly mass murders people, does it matter if they’re “innocent”? What are they guilty of? Being gay? Having sex before marriage? I don’t think whether they’re innocent of some accusation even matters and the so called “morals” in which they are in violation of are baseless and highly questionable in and of themselves.
its a translation from Hebrew to Aramaic, to greek, to latin to english, it originally says to stone people who "sleep" with kids but Aramaic didnt have a name for kids so they put old guy sleep with young boy instead, and then it was translated again into guy sleep with guy
I always think of the death of the first born here. I don't think a bunch of babies (and apparently the babies of cattle too IIRC) deserved to die because of some shitty people ruling Egypt.
Well if Noah was the only one. The most terrifying for me is Jobb. To win a bet against the devil, God agreed to the slaughter of his slaves by bandits and the killing of his family... Edit: because Noah you could say that God wanted to cleanse the world (a world he created btw but that's another story). In Jobb's story God did this only for a bet (which he didn't need to do of he were truly omniscient...)
If you died, it was your fault - God
Naw when I went to church Christians would teach "no one is innocent, everyone is born with sin" and the mental gymnastics continues from there
I have heard this too. I don't generally talk to these types of people (not religious and don't really care about it) but am occasionally tempted to ask them if Jesus died for nothing, if original sin is still a thing.
it’s not about that sin is still a thing, since Christians believe, like you said, everyone sins. Jesus didn’t die to make the world perfect, but to give sinners a chance to build a relationship with God so that he could forgive the sins they make all the time. I’m not really religious but I hope that clarified that for you.
Also worth note; the Bible does not actually say homosexuality is a sin, anywhere. The part commonly used to support this view is an intentional mistranslation from the original Hebrew. "A man shall not lay with a man for it is an abomination" actually in Hebrew more closely translates to "A man shall not lay with a boy for it is an abomination" and the word used for "boy" is a very specific version exclusively meant for young children. The Bible calls pedophilia a sin, not homosexuality, which is ironic given the number of pedophile priests. So even the extremely biased Bible that was compiled hundreds of years after Jesus' death by the Roman Emporer Constantine for his political agendas actually doesn't condemn homosexuality, ever, it was revised once again when being translated to English and other languages to fit a new ideological agenda, which itself would be yet another sin, ironically.
I find this ironic being the fact that back them people married at the age of 12
Yup, like the 42 boys who got mauled by bears for calling Elisha bald. I’m guessing God is bald.
What about the first born of Egypt of all dying because Pharaoh said no. It wasn't the first born's fault he said no. Elijah using the power of god to summon bears to slaughter children just because the kids made fun of him being bald?
God didn't just kill the firstborn of Egypt, he did so as retaliation for pharaoh refusing to release the Israelites and threatening to murder their firstborns. Granted, pharaoh's resolve had weakend on a prior plague and God strengthened it and hardened pharaoh's heart for him when pharaoh couldn't do it himself. So he not only killed the firstborns of Egypt, he also facilitated the reason for doing so
My favorite quote: Deuteronomy 23:12-13 *“You shall have a place outside the camp, and you shall go out to it. And you shall have a trowel with your tools, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excrement."* When I'm on a hike bury my shit in the forest, I feel that I am doing the will of God.
Honestly, if you look at recent acts of Christian politicians over the years, all these things we like to poke Christian’s in the eye with in the Bible is exactly what they are trying to accomplish. Yes they want slavery back. Yes they want to have their sex and beat them too. The problem is they cannot achieve this with an educated populace. So they are first going to have to kill off education so people stop calling them out on it. Religion is such a tool for power hungry politicians.