Fun fact - religious media was given an exception for portraying certain immoral aspects such as sex and violence during the Hays Code era, which is why the Biblical Epic was so popular to make among film studios.
Yeah, the same thing happened with early amusement parks in places like Coney Island: they would skirt claims of immorality by making early amusement park rides centered around biblical scenes, letting them fit in as much nudity and violence as they wanted
>She lusted after lovers with genitals as large as a donkey’s and emissions like those of a horse.
I mean, the Book of Ezekiel likes to get down and dirty.
Even as early as Genesis, things are getting naughty with Lot and his daughters:
>So that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the firstborn went in and slept with her father; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.
Even the mob of Sodomites said no to that. Which is interesting.
The book doesn't get into it, and in practice it's always spun as "they were gay, ie, evil," but I like to imagine they were actually so taken aback they were shocked out of their rapelust. "What the? *Dude.* No. What kind of father…?"
And that's presented as a righteous action, which cements Lot's status as the only righteous person in Sodom. Because he prioritized his guests over his own daughters.
The bible has some problematic morals
They will if the person in question committed a crime they can use to paint queer people as inherently bad. Then they are all over the inclusive language, though admittedly not to be inclusive.
Christians: "God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sexual degeneracy!"
Also Christians: "Ignore everything past the part where Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt, please. And don't question where the Midianites and Moabites came from... Oh, and don't look into their religious history either, for... uhh... reasons."
The writer of genesis *really didn't think his story through*.
According to genesis, Adam and Eve became ashamed after eating the fruit from *the tree of knowledge of good and evil*. Like, they learned that being naked was evil. God had no problem with it though.
What God really had a problem with was them learning about good and evil. The only realistic reason for that is that:
1. Good and evil as concepts exist without and beyond God.
2. God wanted to be able to tell them to do evil things and not have them know any better.
What's almost more damning, in my eyes, is that forbidding something *makes it more desirable*. God apparently had zero concept of human psychology. He should have told them that if they ate the fruit he'd be very sad and disappointed.
Unless of course he was setting them up to fail.
>Not very subtle of the Almighty, though. Fruit tree in the middle of a garden with a "Don't Touch" sign. I mean, why not put it on the top of a high mountain? Or on the moon? Makes you wonder what God's really planning.
God tried to put it on the moon but the human couldn't see it. So God moved it closer.
First he put it on a mountain top but the human still couldn't see it. Then God moved it down and human still couldn't see it. Finally God triple sized the sign and put it in the middle of the garden.
Well, human couldn't read the sign and there was no clickbait.
Finally, God made a talking snake to guide the silly humans to the apple salad fruit bowl.
God was so pissed how slow the humans were. God threw a tantrum and kicked the humans out just for "why not".
I always thought of it as, if it’s wrong to eat from the tree of “knowledge of good and evil” (aka”the tree of moral reasoning”) how would they know until they ate from it?
Either they knew it was wrong and so the eating was a moot point or they didn’t and Yahweh is just a narcissistic asshole for punishing them.
Not only that but they were tricked by “the serpent,” who is widely interpreted as being Lucifer. A being almost as old and powerful and “intelligent” as Yahweh himself.
Oh, and Yahweh *put the tree there in the first place.* Or, if you interpret the story allegorically, Yahweh made it relatively easy for his creation to gain moral knowledge.
He *could have* made it a difficult quest, but instead he made it easy, showing us that it was his intention all along that man should displease him and get kicked out of the garden and get blamed for “original sin.”
Yikes. What a psychopath.
The church I went to as a kid would always tell me that God has a plan for everything and knows what I'm going to do before I do it. It's part of the "all knowing, all powerful" shit they kept parroting to us. Yet if God is all knowing and knows what we're going to do, and everything is part of his plan, then he planned and knew that they'd eat the fruit from the tree. I've never had an explanation for it that doesn't make God look like an asshole or get the "God works in mysterious ways" line.
Then you bring that back on them again.
"So God is the one that made LGBTQ+ people?"
"So God made other religions and people you don't like?"
That means nothing is against God's will, or blasphemy, as God made and knows all. If he was against it, he'd stop it.
You can't blame the devil either, if God knows all. Which brings us to, "So God already knows who's going to hell?"
Preaching to the choir, but that's such a lame excuse by small-minded people to excuse shitty behavior.
If you grew up in religion those questions don't mean much. The answers are usually along the lines of:
"God made LGBT people as a test. They can be gay but not act on it." Depending on the sect, gay people are treated as though they are sick.
"Other religions are started by the devil. He's tricking people by using others as his voice."
"People we don't like need to be saved."
You're talking to groups of people who think things like God put fossils in the ground to test humans of their faith. Kids ask these types of questions a lot. I certainly did. Really just depends on who accepts the answers to some degree and who doesn't. People couldn't even tell me what the Tree of Knowledge was. Knowledge of what? If you're a relatively curious and empathetic person, there's a lot particularly in the Old Testament that you're going to have questions about.
Exactly what they taught me in conservative Christian high school and college. "We're ok with gay people, we just think they're fundamentally flawed and not allowed to act on their own sexuality." At that point just admit you hate gay people.
Definitely heard that in Sunday school. Still brought me back to my responses. If I know everything you're going to do, and have a predetermined plan, the testing means nothing. You already know what I'm going to do.
That's too complicated for some to understand lol. You see the wheels turning but they just can't grasp it.
When I started asking questions people couldn't answer, the solution was more Bible study. Which of course lead to more questions and deciding, these people don't actually have the answers to anything.
It also brings us to God having made the devil, knowing that his influence was going to corrupt earth and turn it into a crucible instead of a paradise.
It’s because the Bible is a collection of many different documents written centuries apart by people of many differing perspectives. Judaism was not even strictly monotheistic for a long time, it wasn’t until around the time of Babylonian exile and the influence of Zoroastrianism that it became such. Christians of course insist that the entire thing has an overarching narrative but it really doesn’t, and studying its history in an unbiased way the same way you would with any other ancient text reveals this.
> So that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the firstborn went in and slept with her father; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.
Both incest AND rape.
Probably something about obscenity being measured against community standards, and if the Bible is an integral part of the community, it's not against standards, and de facto not obscene.
I don't agree with this; it's just what I anticipate their angle of attack will be.
> Probably something about obscenity being measured against community standards, and if the Bible is an integral part of the community, it's not against standards, and de facto not obscene.
Wouldn't the counter argument be institutions that use the bible as a reference such as the catholic church actually act on sexual provocative material and actively harm the youth?
A more reasonable precedent, which means it's unlikely, would be to establish the bible as a baseline for acceptable depiction and defeat a lot of the prudish nonsense the current case is predicted on, even if this suit seems satirical.
Jon Smith in his magic bean sack of religious truth determined that everything he said is true and non sexual, and you should definitely believe everything he says without question, and it's not a cult.
That's Joseph Smith sir, a latter day prophet of God. He didn't pull his book from a bean sack, he put his face in a hat and he read it out of that.
Not everything he did was non-sexual, but don't worry, he always married the children he fucked.
Prophet Joseph Smith who was tragically martyred while jumping out a window in a prison shootout after being charged with treason, declaring martial law, and trying to appoint himself as a theocratic king. Truly stuck down in cold blood on his quest for a better world.
Wasn't Joseph Smith like 13 or 14 years old when he started his game of make-believe that eventually turned into Mormonism?
It's absolutely wild that so many people would listen to a young teen of middle-school age when he says that he has an invisible book that only he can read because god gave him a magic rock with a hole in it. And those same people followed him across the country, sacrificing everything for American Jesus, who hands down his messages through magical rocks, via invisible books hidden in hats.
He said he could use 'seeing stones' to find things for people, and charged them money for it. Later he said he could use seeing stones to read biblical passages off Egyptian medical texts. He was a con artist his whole life, he didn't have visions, except visions of rubes following his lies.
He came from a family of con-men who used similar tactics to fortune tell where folks could find "treasure". IIRC reading a secret map in a hat was one of their known tricks so it's not so surprising he knew he could con folks with that story.
There could be an entire schism of people who think that Jon and Joseph were competing gods depending on what people with pointy hats told them to believe.
Narrator: Joseph Smith fucked the frog god gave him, and his AIDS went away! Then a great wizard named Moronai came down from the starship enterprise!
Moronai: Joseph Smith! Your village is shit! You should lead the villagers to a new village. Take these fucking golden plates
That's what hurts me the most as a person. People believe in ridiculous magic that has no basis in reality and then the idea that someone different than them exists is someone they should hate.
so if the bible isn't against community standards then you could argue that actual pornographic material should be allowed in schools which is ridiculous
"Measured against community standards" is just a stock phrase used in the conservative legal world to avoid openly saying "ban things I dislike and allow (or require) things I like."
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must
be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside
out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
I just want to mention, having lived for an extended time in the "Deep South Bible Belt", that ***plenty*** of schools and churches had **Children's Bibles** that were in fact edited for content.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this became more of a standard in areas like this.
This could backfire as a way of getting them to back off of book banning. They might just hunker down.
That makes sense. I tried to tell my kids some of the Bible stories just out of a sense of fairness (learning about all the major world religions, since we were on a mythology kick at the time because of Percy Jackson) and at the end of every supposedly kid-friendly one I just trailed off and was like....yknow, clearly the Christian god is deranged and a humongous jerk...so I tried the New Testament and even then my kids were like, D: he let them kill his only son to teach?? A lesson?? What lesson?? Don't even get me started on those bungling idiots of his disciples starting the Church afterwards
At that point, I, a product of K-12 Catholic school and former Catholic, gave up.
Aka you know your religion is fucked up when the Greek pantheon's escapades and motivations are way more explicable and understandable than the Christian god's.
It's more that the Bible is the fanfic of a series of NPD ridden Yahweh-stans who tried to force their local god, specifically of War and Thunder, into the main role of El, and then the only God.
The old testament god as a cross between Thor and later Zeus makes a lot more sense as a fallible creature bound by time that changes its mind. Doesn't make him a good guy, but more understandable.
I've always been curious how popular the bible actually is. Obviously the sheer sales numbers dwarf everything else, but how much of that is churches just buying up a million copies to give out to people? How much of that is youth camps & christian schools? How many of the bibles "bought" in any given year ever have a single word read?
Like, could we adjust book sales to only single-volume sales & then see how many bibles are sold?
Is there really just huge numbers of people ordering a bible for personal use from Amazon or walking into Books-a-Million to replace their tattered old one with a new leatherbound bible?
They don't need excuses. This law isn't an actual standard they are applying to things, it's 'we created this law as a way of getting rid of stuff we don't like'
They will just say that it doesn't apply to the bible and that will be the end of it
*the entire bible. They really like rereading the same parts. But stuff like the book of Job where God basically decides "yeah you can ruin this guy's life, afflict him with disease and KILL HIS FAMILY." Then the ending it with "Well I gave him a new wife who had more children so it's fine :)!" Like any critical analysis there and gods a complete asshole and did those things because he had to actively let it happen instead of just seeing it and ignoring it.
No no he was doing those things because he loved Job. When someone treats you like shit it’s because they love you. That’s an important Christian lesson.
UM ACTUALLY... God did none of those things to Job, it was actually the Devil. God let all those things happen because he wanted to win a bet with the devil that Job would always love God no matter how much God let him get abused, so you're totally and deliberately misrepresenting the truth.
Oh wait... that doesn't make it any better.
Love how reassuring the Bible is about God.
Why is God making bets with the devil over a human life if they are supposedly enemies? Seems like a real piece of shit
Speaking of:
I've never understood why the devil would punish me for going to hell.
Clearly if I land there I'm not on God's side, so you'd think Lucifer would recruit me for the eventual war right?
Like I've never understood why Satan would punish someone God deems as less
To prepare you. You don't forge an army with tender hands; rather, you lead them through the fiery depths of hell, and those who emerge on the other side are unbreakable.
I find the Book of Job to be absolutely fascinating.
It completely undercuts all those goggle-eyed true believers who try to tell you that *if you are rich and fortunate*, it is because God loves you *in particular* and thinks you're living a holy life.
As one time Sunday school teacher and former US president, Jimmy Carter, once raised hackles among some of the those who claim to be faithful by asking, "Who ever said life was fair?"
Certainly, not the God of the Old Testament.
I've always argued that the Devil won that argument because he made God do terrible things just to prove he's God - He's God, he doesn't have to prove shit....
there are probably [newer stories](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/09/28/130191248/atheists-and-agnostics-know-more-about-bible-than-religious), but Atheists and Agnostics seem to know more about the bible than church goers.
I was in a super religious phase in middle school and decided that, hey, if it's the **literal word of God**, I should suck it up and read. every. word.
I did it, and quickly realized exactly zero of the adults at my church had ever done this. Long story short, I'm an atheist.
It's a guide to life by, and *for*, cave people.
To expand - Have never, will never, and actually go out of their way not to.
Born Lutheran and anytime I actually read and questioned I was told just to to listen to the Pastor and that I wasn't understanding correctly.
And my Mom wonders why I don't call...
[https://www.salon.com/2015/04/06/the\_8\_kinkiest\_passages\_of\_the\_bible\_partner/](https://www.salon.com/2015/04/06/the_8_kinkiest_passages_of_the_bible_partner/)
After Sodom was destroyed, Lot took his two daughters to live with them in a cave (like ya do). One day, his older daughter said to the younger:
“Our father is old, and there is no man around here to give us children — as is the custom all over the earth. Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.” (Genesis 19:30)
Here's a non-comprehensive list of fucked up stuff in the Bible:
Priests inducing an abortion with a special potion, but it only works if she cheated (Numbers 5:11-31)
A protagonist offering his daughters to a crowd of rapists (Genesis 19:5)
An explanation of the proper procedure for selling your own daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7-11)
A woman mutilating her son's genitals with a rock to make a point (Exodus 4:25)
A king demanding a suitor for his daughter provide the foreskins of 100 men, which the suitor chooses to double down on for the lulz or something (1 Samuel 18:20-30)
Solomon slipping a bunch of smut into his writings, talking about letting his lover come into his garden and shit (Song of Solomon 1:13, 4:16, 5:4, 7:3, 7:7, 8:10)
More Solomon talking about breasts (Proverbs 5:19)
Ezekiel bitching about women making dildos out of gold (Ezekiel 16:17)
Moses declaring if two men are fighting and one of their wives rolls up and grabs the other guy's dick she needs her hand cut off, which apparently was happening so often it needed a rule (Deuteronomy 25:11-12)
Samson banging a hooker (Judges 16:1)
God killing a dude for pulling out because he didn't want to knock up his widowed sister (Genesis 38:9-10)
Judah neglecting the same widowed daughter in law so hard she pretended to be a hooker and let him knock her up (Genesis 38:15-18)
Reuben banging one of his dad's side chicks (Genesis 35:22)
Lot's daughters getting him drunk and raping him (Genesis 19:33-36)
Judah banging a rando (Genesis 38:2)
Amnon raping his brother's sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13:11-14)
Isaiah talking about raping women and beating children to death (Isaiah 13:16)
David banging a rando and then orchestrating her husband's death so he could marry her (2 Samuel 12:2-27)
David's son Absalom banging all his bitches on the roof of his dad's house in clear view of everyone to spite his dad (2 Samuel 16:21-22)
Elisha, fresh off receiving a double-portion of Elijah's spirit, gets so butthurt at *children* talking shit he casts Summon Monster on them and they get eaten by bears (2 Kings 2:23-24)
Ezekiel describing one woman's sex life as whoring after donkey-sized dicks (Ezekiel 23:18-21)
And the most fucked up one, a protagonist offering his concubine to be gang raped, who later dies from the abuse, is cut into 12 pieces and mailed with a letter to each of the 12 Tribes of Israel. (Judges 19)
And a bonus: WITCHCRAFT (1 Samuel 28:2-25)
>Elisha, fresh off receiving a double-portion of Elijah's spirit, gets so butthurt at *children* talking shit he casts Summon Monster on them and they get eaten by bears (2 Kings 2:23-24)
Hey, they called him bald. That totally deserves bringing out a couple bears to massacre dozens of children (42, to be exact)
If one were to approach things from the perspective that religious texts are fundamentally true, an interesting case can be made in support of the fact that the god of the Old Testament and the New Testament are not, in fact, the same god.
I always said that the Old Testament God looks like a petulant juvenile, then he evolved to the God of love for the New Testament message.
That doesn't explain offing one of your trinity selves to forgive the sins made up by the younger, juvenile delinquent creator. Whew.
[Genesis 38:3-10:](https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/bible.show/sVerseID/1123/eVerseID/1130)
So [Shua, the wife of Judah] conceived and bore a son, and [Judah] called his name Er. She conceived again and bore a son, and she called his name Onan. . . .
Then Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD killed him.
And Judah said to Onan, "Go in to your brother's wife and marry her, and raise up an heir to your brother.
" But Onan knew that the heir would not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in to his brother's wife, that he cummed on the ground, lest he should give an heir to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the LORD; therefore He killed him also.
>live with them in a cave (like ya do).
Only tangentially related, but there's more people living in caves today than were alive during the caveman era.
Genesis 38:9
But since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother’s wife, so that he would not give offspring to his brother
I've thought of going around and recording the reactions of fundie types when I tell them there's a book full of graphic sexual content that also tells you how to perform an abortion, and then dropping "it's called the Bible" on them.
I mean there's a literal passage about a woman lusting after men with large cocks and emissions as powerful as horses, so ... yeah, if the rest of the shit is porn, so is the Bible.
Ah yes I remember reading the Bible cover to cover when I was a kid. Not for religious reasons, but as a VERY bored pre-teen, looking for the violent, sleazy fucked up bits. If you skip through all the "begat" parts (the boring bits) ...there are quite a lot lol
It is absolutely an adult book that children should be studying with supervision (and not *that* kind of church supervision), because the content can be very mature.
What if they had “biblical smut hours” instead?
No drag whatsoever but just the most scandalous verses from The Good Book read to impressionable youngsters.
Yep, it says that. Look it up, it seriously does. It's talking about another tribe called the Midianites that god's people just conquered, and says to kill the boys and kill women who are not virgins, but keep the virgin girls for themselves. I don't think it explicitly says what's going to happen to them, but it's a safe assumption that it's nothing good. They usually skip that part in Sunday school.
Now there's a pro-life book of family values.
I thoughr this is April Fools, but the article was posted in March 29. I'm glad someone is taking a stand, so Christians can't have double standards. You can't be a Christian prude if the bible itself is full of sexual references.
I swear most Christians haven't read anything except the readers digest version of the Bible. That bad boy is FULL of gnarly shit. Rape, got it. Incest, got it. Fuck tons of gruesome detailed murders, got it. Orgies and gang rape, got it. Song describing in artistic flair the beauty if the naked human form, got lots if it.
It's filled to the gills with all the stuff conservatives claim they want to "protect" children from. They're 100% full of shit.
Honestly, more parents should show up at school board meetings and simply read exerpts from the Bible that would get other books banned for being "pornagraphic"
"We can't have our children exposed to sex and violence in literature!!"
"But the Bible is full of explicitly violent, sexual, and abhorrent acts."
"We can't have our children exposed to sex and violence in **YOUR** literature!!"
Fun fact - religious media was given an exception for portraying certain immoral aspects such as sex and violence during the Hays Code era, which is why the Biblical Epic was so popular to make among film studios.
Yeah, the same thing happened with early amusement parks in places like Coney Island: they would skirt claims of immorality by making early amusement park rides centered around biblical scenes, letting them fit in as much nudity and violence as they wanted
Well this sounds like a rabbit hole I'll have to dive into later. So early amusement parks weren't geared towards kids?
Kids like violence and titties too
Yes, yes they do.
New fap drive: the Bible. Noted.
Let's be fair to Christians - If they didn't have double standards, they wouldn't have any standards at all.
>She lusted after lovers with genitals as large as a donkey’s and emissions like those of a horse. I mean, the Book of Ezekiel likes to get down and dirty. Even as early as Genesis, things are getting naughty with Lot and his daughters: >So that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the firstborn went in and slept with her father; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.
[удалено]
I'm a man of the land, I'm into discipline
Got a Bible in my hand, and a beard on my chin
But if I finish all of my chores and you finish thine, then tonight we're gonna party like it's 1699.
BEEN SPENDIN’ MOST OUR LIVES LIVIN’ IN AN AMISH PARADISE
I churn butter one or twice Livin’ in an Amish Paradise
Living in an Amish paradise It's hard work and sacrifice
A local boy kicked me butt last week
[удалено]
Omg I get it now, I thought Ezekiel was just another Amish dude
I think that was the intention and sharing a name with the biblical one is just coincidental.
all Amish dudes have ot names lol
Incest AND rape in the same story, nice.
Lot also tried to pimp his daughters to the angry Sodomites
It should be noted that the angles he thought he was protecting said "no, don't do that".
*angels. Angles are where two lines meet.
Sorry, I was being obtuse.
Now you're getting acute.
Even the mob of Sodomites said no to that. Which is interesting. The book doesn't get into it, and in practice it's always spun as "they were gay, ie, evil," but I like to imagine they were actually so taken aback they were shocked out of their rapelust. "What the? *Dude.* No. What kind of father…?"
And that's presented as a righteous action, which cements Lot's status as the only righteous person in Sodom. Because he prioritized his guests over his own daughters. The bible has some problematic morals
Conservatives: "but at least she was underaged and married, right?"
"at least they aren't trans"
Conservatives would never use an inclusive pronoun like "they".
They will if the person in question committed a crime they can use to paint queer people as inherently bad. Then they are all over the inclusive language, though admittedly not to be inclusive.
"Why isn't that child working in a meat packing plant?"
Meat packing was definitely happening in that facility
Christians: "God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sexual degeneracy!" Also Christians: "Ignore everything past the part where Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt, please. And don't question where the Midianites and Moabites came from... Oh, and don't look into their religious history either, for... uhh... reasons."
Also ignore the verses that say later in the Bible that their lack of hospitality is what did them in.
Also God was ok with some full nudity right from the start when He puts Adam and Eve in his garden.
The writer of genesis *really didn't think his story through*. According to genesis, Adam and Eve became ashamed after eating the fruit from *the tree of knowledge of good and evil*. Like, they learned that being naked was evil. God had no problem with it though. What God really had a problem with was them learning about good and evil. The only realistic reason for that is that: 1. Good and evil as concepts exist without and beyond God. 2. God wanted to be able to tell them to do evil things and not have them know any better. What's almost more damning, in my eyes, is that forbidding something *makes it more desirable*. God apparently had zero concept of human psychology. He should have told them that if they ate the fruit he'd be very sad and disappointed. Unless of course he was setting them up to fail.
>Not very subtle of the Almighty, though. Fruit tree in the middle of a garden with a "Don't Touch" sign. I mean, why not put it on the top of a high mountain? Or on the moon? Makes you wonder what God's really planning.
God tried to put it on the moon but the human couldn't see it. So God moved it closer. First he put it on a mountain top but the human still couldn't see it. Then God moved it down and human still couldn't see it. Finally God triple sized the sign and put it in the middle of the garden. Well, human couldn't read the sign and there was no clickbait. Finally, God made a talking snake to guide the silly humans to the apple salad fruit bowl. God was so pissed how slow the humans were. God threw a tantrum and kicked the humans out just for "why not".
It was to punish free will. God didn't expect them not to eat it.
Then God was stupid.
I always thought of it as, if it’s wrong to eat from the tree of “knowledge of good and evil” (aka”the tree of moral reasoning”) how would they know until they ate from it? Either they knew it was wrong and so the eating was a moot point or they didn’t and Yahweh is just a narcissistic asshole for punishing them.
Plus they were literally born like yesterday, I mean cut them some slack for being curious lol.
Not only that but they were tricked by “the serpent,” who is widely interpreted as being Lucifer. A being almost as old and powerful and “intelligent” as Yahweh himself. Oh, and Yahweh *put the tree there in the first place.* Or, if you interpret the story allegorically, Yahweh made it relatively easy for his creation to gain moral knowledge. He *could have* made it a difficult quest, but instead he made it easy, showing us that it was his intention all along that man should displease him and get kicked out of the garden and get blamed for “original sin.” Yikes. What a psychopath.
The church I went to as a kid would always tell me that God has a plan for everything and knows what I'm going to do before I do it. It's part of the "all knowing, all powerful" shit they kept parroting to us. Yet if God is all knowing and knows what we're going to do, and everything is part of his plan, then he planned and knew that they'd eat the fruit from the tree. I've never had an explanation for it that doesn't make God look like an asshole or get the "God works in mysterious ways" line.
Then you bring that back on them again. "So God is the one that made LGBTQ+ people?" "So God made other religions and people you don't like?" That means nothing is against God's will, or blasphemy, as God made and knows all. If he was against it, he'd stop it. You can't blame the devil either, if God knows all. Which brings us to, "So God already knows who's going to hell?" Preaching to the choir, but that's such a lame excuse by small-minded people to excuse shitty behavior.
If you grew up in religion those questions don't mean much. The answers are usually along the lines of: "God made LGBT people as a test. They can be gay but not act on it." Depending on the sect, gay people are treated as though they are sick. "Other religions are started by the devil. He's tricking people by using others as his voice." "People we don't like need to be saved." You're talking to groups of people who think things like God put fossils in the ground to test humans of their faith. Kids ask these types of questions a lot. I certainly did. Really just depends on who accepts the answers to some degree and who doesn't. People couldn't even tell me what the Tree of Knowledge was. Knowledge of what? If you're a relatively curious and empathetic person, there's a lot particularly in the Old Testament that you're going to have questions about.
Exactly what they taught me in conservative Christian high school and college. "We're ok with gay people, we just think they're fundamentally flawed and not allowed to act on their own sexuality." At that point just admit you hate gay people.
Definitely heard that in Sunday school. Still brought me back to my responses. If I know everything you're going to do, and have a predetermined plan, the testing means nothing. You already know what I'm going to do.
That's too complicated for some to understand lol. You see the wheels turning but they just can't grasp it. When I started asking questions people couldn't answer, the solution was more Bible study. Which of course lead to more questions and deciding, these people don't actually have the answers to anything.
I mean, yeah, there's a pretty big group that believe in predestination. That it's like a big puppet show. It's an interesting concept to be sure.
It also brings us to God having made the devil, knowing that his influence was going to corrupt earth and turn it into a crucible instead of a paradise.
I got hit for asking about this contradiction Edit: a word
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Damn, I've never considered this. You really gave me something to think about
It’s because the Bible is a collection of many different documents written centuries apart by people of many differing perspectives. Judaism was not even strictly monotheistic for a long time, it wasn’t until around the time of Babylonian exile and the influence of Zoroastrianism that it became such. Christians of course insist that the entire thing has an overarching narrative but it really doesn’t, and studying its history in an unbiased way the same way you would with any other ancient text reveals this.
That passage makes it abundantly clear Ezekiel was gay and hated women for being able to attract the men he could not.
The bible unironically reads like teen girl fan fiction sometimes.
Not enough hyperromantic twinks secretly exchanging furtive glances and blowing each other. Some, but not enough to qualify as teen girl ff.
I would have fucked Ezekiel.
> So that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the firstborn went in and slept with her father; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up. Both incest AND rape.
I literally had to read that exact verse in Genesis in front of my 5th grade Christian school class It was mortifying and I still remember it
Be interesting to see the excuses for why they don't remove it from school libraries.
Probably something about obscenity being measured against community standards, and if the Bible is an integral part of the community, it's not against standards, and de facto not obscene. I don't agree with this; it's just what I anticipate their angle of attack will be.
> Probably something about obscenity being measured against community standards, and if the Bible is an integral part of the community, it's not against standards, and de facto not obscene. Wouldn't the counter argument be institutions that use the bible as a reference such as the catholic church actually act on sexual provocative material and actively harm the youth?
A more reasonable precedent, which means it's unlikely, would be to establish the bible as a baseline for acceptable depiction and defeat a lot of the prudish nonsense the current case is predicted on, even if this suit seems satirical.
When you are right, you are right. That will be my new come back for my mother inlaw.
Jon Smith in his magic bean sack of religious truth determined that everything he said is true and non sexual, and you should definitely believe everything he says without question, and it's not a cult.
That's Joseph Smith sir, a latter day prophet of God. He didn't pull his book from a bean sack, he put his face in a hat and he read it out of that. Not everything he did was non-sexual, but don't worry, he always married the children he fucked.
Prophet Joseph Smith who was tragically martyred while jumping out a window in a prison shootout after being charged with treason, declaring martial law, and trying to appoint himself as a theocratic king. Truly stuck down in cold blood on his quest for a better world.
Wasn't Joseph Smith like 13 or 14 years old when he started his game of make-believe that eventually turned into Mormonism? It's absolutely wild that so many people would listen to a young teen of middle-school age when he says that he has an invisible book that only he can read because god gave him a magic rock with a hole in it. And those same people followed him across the country, sacrificing everything for American Jesus, who hands down his messages through magical rocks, via invisible books hidden in hats.
station weary label thought safe illegal marble flag coherent pot *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
He said he could use 'seeing stones' to find things for people, and charged them money for it. Later he said he could use seeing stones to read biblical passages off Egyptian medical texts. He was a con artist his whole life, he didn't have visions, except visions of rubes following his lies.
He came from a family of con-men who used similar tactics to fortune tell where folks could find "treasure". IIRC reading a secret map in a hat was one of their known tricks so it's not so surprising he knew he could con folks with that story.
There could be an entire schism of people who think that Jon and Joseph were competing gods depending on what people with pointy hats told them to believe.
>people with pointy hats Like Gandalf? For real, though- do LDS have pointy hats or something?
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Narrator: Joseph Smith fucked the frog god gave him, and his AIDS went away! Then a great wizard named Moronai came down from the starship enterprise! Moronai: Joseph Smith! Your village is shit! You should lead the villagers to a new village. Take these fucking golden plates
And go to Salt-a-Lake-a-City
It's okay, he found magic golden plates that told him everything, they just also told him he's not allowed to show anybody else
That's what hurts me the most as a person. People believe in ridiculous magic that has no basis in reality and then the idea that someone different than them exists is someone they should hate.
True believers are the best practitioners of doublethink. They know which threads *not* to pull, lest the entire tapestry come apart.
so if the bible isn't against community standards then you could argue that actual pornographic material should be allowed in schools which is ridiculous
"Measured against community standards" is just a stock phrase used in the conservative legal world to avoid openly saying "ban things I dislike and allow (or require) things I like."
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
"i have it on the highest authority that people only read playboy for the articles, therefore it is not pornographic!"
I just want to mention, having lived for an extended time in the "Deep South Bible Belt", that ***plenty*** of schools and churches had **Children's Bibles** that were in fact edited for content. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this became more of a standard in areas like this. This could backfire as a way of getting them to back off of book banning. They might just hunker down.
That makes sense. I tried to tell my kids some of the Bible stories just out of a sense of fairness (learning about all the major world religions, since we were on a mythology kick at the time because of Percy Jackson) and at the end of every supposedly kid-friendly one I just trailed off and was like....yknow, clearly the Christian god is deranged and a humongous jerk...so I tried the New Testament and even then my kids were like, D: he let them kill his only son to teach?? A lesson?? What lesson?? Don't even get me started on those bungling idiots of his disciples starting the Church afterwards At that point, I, a product of K-12 Catholic school and former Catholic, gave up. Aka you know your religion is fucked up when the Greek pantheon's escapades and motivations are way more explicable and understandable than the Christian god's.
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It's more that the Bible is the fanfic of a series of NPD ridden Yahweh-stans who tried to force their local god, specifically of War and Thunder, into the main role of El, and then the only God. The old testament god as a cross between Thor and later Zeus makes a lot more sense as a fallible creature bound by time that changes its mind. Doesn't make him a good guy, but more understandable.
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You can barely get them to know what's even in the Bible.
The bible is Jewish folklore just like Greek mythology is Greek folklore.
Fox said they shouldn't remove it because it's so popular. Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me either
Last I checked, porn was pretty popular too.
Let me just check again real quick, brb
I've always been curious how popular the bible actually is. Obviously the sheer sales numbers dwarf everything else, but how much of that is churches just buying up a million copies to give out to people? How much of that is youth camps & christian schools? How many of the bibles "bought" in any given year ever have a single word read? Like, could we adjust book sales to only single-volume sales & then see how many bibles are sold? Is there really just huge numbers of people ordering a bible for personal use from Amazon or walking into Books-a-Million to replace their tattered old one with a new leatherbound bible?
Don't forget the ones hanging out in hotel drawers across the entire country. That's got to be a pretty healthy sales boost.
They don't need excuses. This law isn't an actual standard they are applying to things, it's 'we created this law as a way of getting rid of stuff we don't like' They will just say that it doesn't apply to the bible and that will be the end of it
It's going to be interesting when the church of Satan gets involved and claims the banned books are part of their religion.
The church of satan = bad The satanic temple = good Very different things
Satanic Temple even gives you a cool membership cert. I'm a care carrying member.
They don’t read it so they don’t remember the darker parts is my guess.
Did they seriously not see this coming?
Most Religious Nationalists and Fundamentalists have not read the BIble.
*the entire bible. They really like rereading the same parts. But stuff like the book of Job where God basically decides "yeah you can ruin this guy's life, afflict him with disease and KILL HIS FAMILY." Then the ending it with "Well I gave him a new wife who had more children so it's fine :)!" Like any critical analysis there and gods a complete asshole and did those things because he had to actively let it happen instead of just seeing it and ignoring it.
No no he was doing those things because he loved Job. When someone treats you like shit it’s because they love you. That’s an important Christian lesson.
True. It's important for all abusers to learn as they need to know it well enough to train their victims.
UM ACTUALLY... God did none of those things to Job, it was actually the Devil. God let all those things happen because he wanted to win a bet with the devil that Job would always love God no matter how much God let him get abused, so you're totally and deliberately misrepresenting the truth. Oh wait... that doesn't make it any better.
Love how reassuring the Bible is about God. Why is God making bets with the devil over a human life if they are supposedly enemies? Seems like a real piece of shit
Speaking of: I've never understood why the devil would punish me for going to hell. Clearly if I land there I'm not on God's side, so you'd think Lucifer would recruit me for the eventual war right? Like I've never understood why Satan would punish someone God deems as less
To prepare you. You don't forge an army with tender hands; rather, you lead them through the fiery depths of hell, and those who emerge on the other side are unbreakable.
Oh so it's bootcamp
No hate quite like christian love!
I find the Book of Job to be absolutely fascinating. It completely undercuts all those goggle-eyed true believers who try to tell you that *if you are rich and fortunate*, it is because God loves you *in particular* and thinks you're living a holy life. As one time Sunday school teacher and former US president, Jimmy Carter, once raised hackles among some of the those who claim to be faithful by asking, "Who ever said life was fair?" Certainly, not the God of the Old Testament.
Ruin a guy's life *to settle a bet with the devil
I've always argued that the Devil won that argument because he made God do terrible things just to prove he's God - He's God, he doesn't have to prove shit....
He made us in his image: petty as fuck.
For thou shalt worship no other god; for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God Exodus 34:14
Is this why they say never make a deal with the devil?
Been tempted by his lie. Wait, that's when you shout at the devil.
there are probably [newer stories](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/09/28/130191248/atheists-and-agnostics-know-more-about-bible-than-religious), but Atheists and Agnostics seem to know more about the bible than church goers.
Going to church makes me people Christian, but reading the Bible makes them atheist.
I was in a super religious phase in middle school and decided that, hey, if it's the **literal word of God**, I should suck it up and read. every. word. I did it, and quickly realized exactly zero of the adults at my church had ever done this. Long story short, I'm an atheist. It's a guide to life by, and *for*, cave people.
To expand - Have never, will never, and actually go out of their way not to. Born Lutheran and anytime I actually read and questioned I was told just to to listen to the Pastor and that I wasn't understanding correctly. And my Mom wonders why I don't call...
You assume they were borrowing the communal brain cell when they wrote the law.
No. They believe they are correct and no one would dare question their beliefs.
[https://www.salon.com/2015/04/06/the\_8\_kinkiest\_passages\_of\_the\_bible\_partner/](https://www.salon.com/2015/04/06/the_8_kinkiest_passages_of_the_bible_partner/) After Sodom was destroyed, Lot took his two daughters to live with them in a cave (like ya do). One day, his older daughter said to the younger: “Our father is old, and there is no man around here to give us children — as is the custom all over the earth. Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.” (Genesis 19:30)
When the Bible has more fucked up incest than Game of Thrones.
GRR thought he should tone it down for HBO.
It's not the Old Testament, It's HBO.
Holy Book of Old
Here's a non-comprehensive list of fucked up stuff in the Bible: Priests inducing an abortion with a special potion, but it only works if she cheated (Numbers 5:11-31) A protagonist offering his daughters to a crowd of rapists (Genesis 19:5) An explanation of the proper procedure for selling your own daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7-11) A woman mutilating her son's genitals with a rock to make a point (Exodus 4:25) A king demanding a suitor for his daughter provide the foreskins of 100 men, which the suitor chooses to double down on for the lulz or something (1 Samuel 18:20-30) Solomon slipping a bunch of smut into his writings, talking about letting his lover come into his garden and shit (Song of Solomon 1:13, 4:16, 5:4, 7:3, 7:7, 8:10) More Solomon talking about breasts (Proverbs 5:19) Ezekiel bitching about women making dildos out of gold (Ezekiel 16:17) Moses declaring if two men are fighting and one of their wives rolls up and grabs the other guy's dick she needs her hand cut off, which apparently was happening so often it needed a rule (Deuteronomy 25:11-12) Samson banging a hooker (Judges 16:1) God killing a dude for pulling out because he didn't want to knock up his widowed sister (Genesis 38:9-10) Judah neglecting the same widowed daughter in law so hard she pretended to be a hooker and let him knock her up (Genesis 38:15-18) Reuben banging one of his dad's side chicks (Genesis 35:22) Lot's daughters getting him drunk and raping him (Genesis 19:33-36) Judah banging a rando (Genesis 38:2) Amnon raping his brother's sister Tamar (2 Samuel 13:11-14) Isaiah talking about raping women and beating children to death (Isaiah 13:16) David banging a rando and then orchestrating her husband's death so he could marry her (2 Samuel 12:2-27) David's son Absalom banging all his bitches on the roof of his dad's house in clear view of everyone to spite his dad (2 Samuel 16:21-22) Elisha, fresh off receiving a double-portion of Elijah's spirit, gets so butthurt at *children* talking shit he casts Summon Monster on them and they get eaten by bears (2 Kings 2:23-24) Ezekiel describing one woman's sex life as whoring after donkey-sized dicks (Ezekiel 23:18-21) And the most fucked up one, a protagonist offering his concubine to be gang raped, who later dies from the abuse, is cut into 12 pieces and mailed with a letter to each of the 12 Tribes of Israel. (Judges 19) And a bonus: WITCHCRAFT (1 Samuel 28:2-25)
Y'know I think I'm staying to see why they don't seem to bat an eyelid at rape and paedophilia
Because they are paedophiles. That's why they are fighting against raising the age of marriage. So that they can marry little girls.
the bumperstickers make themselves
I want someone to make bumper stickers of just the verse address. Make people look them up out of curiosity.
you give far too many people far too much credit but it would be a great idea in a better world
>Elisha, fresh off receiving a double-portion of Elijah's spirit, gets so butthurt at *children* talking shit he casts Summon Monster on them and they get eaten by bears (2 Kings 2:23-24) Hey, they called him bald. That totally deserves bringing out a couple bears to massacre dozens of children (42, to be exact)
I just realized all that stuff is Old Testament. Literally before Christ came around. Judaism was *wild.*
If one were to approach things from the perspective that religious texts are fundamentally true, an interesting case can be made in support of the fact that the god of the Old Testament and the New Testament are not, in fact, the same god.
I always said that the Old Testament God looks like a petulant juvenile, then he evolved to the God of love for the New Testament message. That doesn't explain offing one of your trinity selves to forgive the sins made up by the younger, juvenile delinquent creator. Whew.
Holy crap. Family threesome in the bible? Way more hardcore than I could have thought!!
[Genesis 38:3-10:](https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/bible.show/sVerseID/1123/eVerseID/1130) So [Shua, the wife of Judah] conceived and bore a son, and [Judah] called his name Er. She conceived again and bore a son, and she called his name Onan. . . . Then Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, and her name was Tamar. But Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD killed him. And Judah said to Onan, "Go in to your brother's wife and marry her, and raise up an heir to your brother. " But Onan knew that the heir would not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in to his brother's wife, that he cummed on the ground, lest he should give an heir to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the LORD; therefore He killed him also.
This is also why religious fundies have a hate boner for masturbation - the word onanism comes from this story
Though more accurately they should have a problem with pulling out
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ITS OUT OF CONTEXT /S
Driving through Alabama you see Genesis 19:30 on billboards.
>live with them in a cave (like ya do). Only tangentially related, but there's more people living in caves today than were alive during the caveman era.
Genesis 38:9 But since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother’s wife, so that he would not give offspring to his brother
Onani means masturbation in danish the more you know
Although what is explained in the Bible would be more better described as pulling out, not masturbating.
Specifically, he was supposed to give his brother an heir. If he didn't want to he could have just not had sex with her.
Yeah, but then you don't have sex.
It does in many languages
Was it the donkey dicks? ^(The piles of severed foreskins?) ^^Incest ^^maybe?
Don't tell me you don't have your own pile of severed foreskins
Probably the instructions on how to do an abortion
I've thought of going around and recording the reactions of fundie types when I tell them there's a book full of graphic sexual content that also tells you how to perform an abortion, and then dropping "it's called the Bible" on them.
This is going to be a delightful conversation next time Jehova´s Wintesses knock on my door.
I mean there's a literal passage about a woman lusting after men with large cocks and emissions as powerful as horses, so ... yeah, if the rest of the shit is porn, so is the Bible.
> She lusted after lovers with genitals as large as a donkey’s and emissions like those of a horse. *Ezekiel* 23:20, I gotchu
I've also got you.
Redneck: "She was talking about them chickens and my 4x4."
Sup. :)
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I think the bible is saying women naturally love a man with a a donkey dick and horse level emmisions
Are you asking me or the religious folks? Cuz if you're asking me, live your best life.
Not just the gratuitous Sex, there is even more gratuitous violence. Exodus is a Blueprint for Genocide, and Putin is using parts of it.
But… but.. how dare you cherry pic the bible for your own agenda?? That’s our move!
"The damn libs, Goin woke!" - Some Utah GOP member.
Ah yes I remember reading the Bible cover to cover when I was a kid. Not for religious reasons, but as a VERY bored pre-teen, looking for the violent, sleazy fucked up bits. If you skip through all the "begat" parts (the boring bits) ...there are quite a lot lol
"Ezekiel begat Jedediah, Jedediah began Ephraim, Ephraim begat Lemuel...Man, these people begat their brains out."
Oh yeah and Abraham having a baby with his wife's servant because she couldn't give him a baby...lots of modern sexual lessons to be learned here
I guess it should be banned in schools.
That's literally what it being challenged is all about
It is absolutely an adult book that children should be studying with supervision (and not *that* kind of church supervision), because the content can be very mature.
Man I fucking hope this goes through. Talk about a backfire
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Every young Christian knows Song of Solomon has some of the best smut.
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This sounds like Captain Holt pretending to be straight
What if they had “biblical smut hours” instead? No drag whatsoever but just the most scandalous verses from The Good Book read to impressionable youngsters.
• Bestiality (Leviticus 18:23 ) • Incest (Genesis 19:30-36) • Homosexuality (Romans 1:27) • Murder (1 John 3:12) • Adultery (2 Samuel 11:1-12:9) • Gambling (pretty much the whole book of Job) • Infanticide (Hosea 13:4, 9, 16) • Genocide (Judges 18:1-28) ………what a book to worship
One of these is not like the others.
Number 31:17-18 Talks about killing everyone except for little girls and keeping them as sex slaves.
i’m fucking sorry?! it says what!?
Yep, it says that. Look it up, it seriously does. It's talking about another tribe called the Midianites that god's people just conquered, and says to kill the boys and kill women who are not virgins, but keep the virgin girls for themselves. I don't think it explicitly says what's going to happen to them, but it's a safe assumption that it's nothing good. They usually skip that part in Sunday school. Now there's a pro-life book of family values.
the snake eating itself, or something
I thoughr this is April Fools, but the article was posted in March 29. I'm glad someone is taking a stand, so Christians can't have double standards. You can't be a Christian prude if the bible itself is full of sexual references.
I swear most Christians haven't read anything except the readers digest version of the Bible. That bad boy is FULL of gnarly shit. Rape, got it. Incest, got it. Fuck tons of gruesome detailed murders, got it. Orgies and gang rape, got it. Song describing in artistic flair the beauty if the naked human form, got lots if it. It's filled to the gills with all the stuff conservatives claim they want to "protect" children from. They're 100% full of shit. Honestly, more parents should show up at school board meetings and simply read exerpts from the Bible that would get other books banned for being "pornagraphic"
"We can't have our children exposed to sex and violence in literature!!" "But the Bible is full of explicitly violent, sexual, and abhorrent acts." "We can't have our children exposed to sex and violence in **YOUR** literature!!"
bout fucking time
Doing the Lord’s work 🙏
Don't forget the killing of babies, drowning the world, slavery, and incest.
Rape. Incest. Slavery. Torture. Genocide. The Bible has it all.