Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Evangelical Christians who say they take the Bible literally, do not

H/T to Atheist Jew for this one:

Evangelical Christians who say they take the Bible literally do not take the Bible and what their "god said" literally. They twist and turn the meaning to whatever they want it to be. The t-shirts in the video that the woman is selling should say "what I want to believe my god said."


For instance, most Christians do not take the book of Leviticus literally even though it contains specific direction as what to do with smart-mouthed children (stone them to death), adulterers (stone them to death), etc. Thank human goodness and the laws of civilized countries, these things "god said" are ignored or written off as "that was just meant for the society in which it was written." My question to believers then is "so your god chose only one era in time to send his messages for people to write down to pertain to that one era in time and nothing before and after?"

Christians, THINK about that. Your god communicates in "one era" in all of time, and to an ignorant and superstitious era at that, but fails to communicate in our advanced era with all of our scientific equipment and laboratories. And we are supposed to simply believe in a god of ancient men, from ancient times (but never mind all those other gods from ancient days, and those other ancient texts...those aren't real.)

Hindus have ancient texts, Muslims have ancient texts, ancient texts and writings are written about the Greek gods, the Egyptian gods. Does that make their gods real? So why would an ancient book make your god any more real than their's? It's all a matter on what you choose to believe.

6 comments:

jhbowden said...

In the OT, public stoning seems to what the deity recommends most to humanity to punish its petty offenses.

God's a total badass that takes no prisoners in the OT, and a total pussy that loves his enemies in the NT. It doesn't make any sense.

Tommykey said...

Well, the way I understand it as the apologetics describe it, all of those commandments were for the nation of Israel, until god's plan for Israel was fulfilled to pave the way for Jesus.

Of course, what really happened was that Jews during the time of the Romans were proselytizing, but the strict requirements of the faith made it hard to deal with Gentiles, so somebody must have thought "We'll find some way to keep the same god but wipe out all of those burdensome kosher laws and stuff like that to make the religion spread more easily!" And that's how Christianity came about.

Stardust said...

God's a total badass that takes no prisoners in the OT, and a total pussy that loves his enemies in the NT. It doesn't make any sense.

That's because multiple humans wrote the books of the Bible and the books that were included were chosen by humans. They want to scare the crap out of people that God is a big murderous prick who likes to screw with people, but Jeebus is like the calm and peace-loving mediator...like good cop, bad cop. It's all so screwy.

Joe said...

I would ask my first wife about Leviticus and she wouldn't have much to say. And the part about having remarried sex and adultery. I've yet to see a Christan who doesn't cherry pick out of the Bible.

Stardust said...

Joe, I have had fundies who think divorce and remarriage is fine in their god's eyes because "God wouldn't want me in an unhappy marriage". I was like...HUH? That is not what the Bible says. They change things to suit themselves...(but it's they will tell you that the Bible is the literal word of god when it suits them, then say it means something else when they need it to mean something else.)

Andrea said...

Very good points, all. I know this family who tries to keep the Torah and everything, and they so badly want to be Jewish that they're even having a bar mitzvah for their son. When I heard that, I thought "Um, you're not Jewish."

They say we're still supposed to follow "the Law" to be blessed or something, but I don't know what they say about all the stonings and such.