Really? Because I would think that doing so would nicely kill a lot of the Prosperity Gospel racism that has no place in it.
Rycan
Well, people have spent centuries perfecting the art of construing the books of the Bible to support whatever they damn well want them to support. Of course, it does help that the books themselves have contradictory teachings.
C.T Phipps
Very true. I remember when I pointed out Jesus hated wealthy people and a guy I knew freaked the hell out about it.
Exarch
Yeah I know a lot of wealthy christians who go through mental gymnastics about the camel through the eye of the needle bit
Pilgrim
Evangelical Christians have come up with the solution for that. It’s called “Bible Study” which, as you might expect is less studying the bible and more about indoctrinating people on the “proper” way to interpret it.
thejeff
To be fair, that’s basically what all churches do. No one just sits kids down with the Bible and says “Just figure it out”. Some may try for a less heavy-handed approach, but in the end they’re still using the Bible to teach their own doctrine, their own interpretation.
I’m not trying to disagree with you–my experience is that is what is done.
But I am someone who leads Bible studies for adults. I ask people to confront their own assumptions and biases, ignore official doctrine and see if the text agrees or disagrees with it, and consider other interpretations. And this is done without judgment. People are surprisingly un-indoctrinated when you let them speak their own thoughts.
The idea of Bible study as indoctrination is probably why there are some people at my church not very happy with my studies. Luckily there’s almost nobody who wants to teach Religious Ed, so I’ll probably be corrupting the children sometime soon.
The Phule
Quakers believe that the only true method to find god is to read the fucking bible, and decide for yourself. Never trust someone else’s reading.
Usarnavon
Don’t know about churches, but in synagogues the rabbi will try to get everyone to disagree with each other and find multiple ways to interpret each reading. I’ve had my rabbi get into arguments with himself just because everyone was quietly going along with his interpretation, and you’re not participating if you don’t disagree with anyone.
Worth noting that there’s not really any such thing as a Quaker priesthood. There is essentially no organized institution that needs to maintain power over its membership to persist – it’s among the most decentralized versions of Christianity out there.
To a lesser extent, the same can be said of Judaism – there have been no Jewish priests for several thousand years. Rabbis are explicitly NOT priests – the word means ‘teacher – though some branches of Judaism blur the distinction more than others.
K^2
Doesn’t help that most translations are kind of garbage. KJV in particular is a dumpster fire. Comparing it to Vulgate makes it clear that the translators didn’t actually know Latin. Not that Vulgate is great to begin with. So if you don’t like implications of translation of one passage, you can probably find another passage that makes completely different kind of sense, because who ever heard of keeping things consistent?
TParadox
I think people hold on to KJV for the same reason there was so much resistance to translating into common languages. If it’s not everyday language, it feels holier.
I’m pretty sure it’s KJV that mangled the proverb we know as “train up a child in the way that he should go and he will not turn from it”, and even though modern translators know it’s more like “if you let a child do whatever they want, when they grow up nobody will be able to control them”, but many feel they have to leave the bad translation meaning because it’s so well known that people would treat them like the Wicked Bible (forgot the “not” in “thou shalt not commit adultery”) if they used a more accurate meaning.
Andrew_C
“Spare the rod and and spoil the child”? That passage?
KryssLaBryn
You mean, “[You should] spare the rod and spoil the child”? That one? XD
I know it’s more usually taken to mean “[If you] spare the rod [then you will] […] spoil the child,” but I would like to point out that the latter reading, rather than simply assuming that one understands that the statement is a direct command, instead forces one to lose or change the “and” in order to force that interpretation to make grammatical sense.
It’s obviously been grievously misinterpreted for a long while. 😉
thejeff
Plus, while it’s lousy as a translation, in many places it’s really beautiful as writing.
There are good modern translations out there though, that work from current scholarship. There is that streak of fundamentalist churches that cling to the KJV though.
drs
I am skeptical of “didn’t actually know Latin”, given the important of Latin in Europe.
“Didn’t know Greek and Hebrew well” is both more plausible and more relevant, since the KJV committees went to the Greek and Hebrew sources, rather than translating the Vulgate into English.
drs
People who turn atheist due to reading the Bible cover to cover are indeed unlikely to support Prosperity Gospel.
Roborat
Which is precisely why they don’t actually read the Bible.
That’s exactly what happened to me. I read the bible start-to-finish on a 9h flight from Washington to Rome back in 2004 and I remember exclaiming “man what a load of rubbish” out loud when I finished, sending the 60 year old white protestant lady sitting next to me straight into pearl clutching mode… Good times.
I thought the code word was arugula, because you can’t expect anyone to believe people eat that.
Reltzik
We can have more than one code word!
OldFart
TRIGGERED VEGAN WARNING
Arioch, have you never tasted arugula? It’s yummy. I have put it in tacos and in burgers. I have eaten it by the handfuls out of the container. Maybe you’re a supertaster, which means a lot of things taste way more bitter to you than to most people. Can you eat brocolli? If you’re a supertaster that stuff will be VILE.
Seriously, what’s the deal with kale hate as well? I hate to prep it, but I think it’s tasty. Hate how it gets between my teeth though.
He Who Abides
I’m no vegan, but I use arugula in salads more often than not. It’s awesome.
Bridgebrain
Kale got the same treatment as brussel sprouts, where lots of people were fed improperly prepared variants and decided it was terrible evermore.
Sliced thick on salad it’s too thick to chew, put too much into a shake and its too pulpy. Sliced and sauteed in butter, or dried with olive oil and salt however, it’s great.
For arugula, it’s an entirely different problem: the american vegetables for the non-vegetarian have been aimed at providing the least flavor possible for so long that people take a bite, go “it’s bitter and tastes like pepper” when they’re expecting iceburg lettuce.
KryssLaBryn
My German dad taught us a fantastic way to prepare kale. You start with I guess about a can of kale (you can make it from fresh or frozen too if you prefer, but then I have no idea of the amounts to use but you will need to cook it until it’s tender and probably also add salt), drain it, and add it to a big stewpot. Add a rasher or two of bacon, chopped already-boiled potatoes (great way to use up leftovers from the night before; Dad would make extra just for the kale the next day), and one to two farmer’s sausages per person. You can put the sausages in whole, but I like to slice them up so they distribute more evenly.
Heat the whole thing up (you may need to add some salt) and let it simmer a little bit until the sausages are warmed through, and serve it up in a big bowl. Absolutely delicious, just a big warm sausage-and-bacony bowl of savoury goodness, and the perfect thing for a cold day. Also it reheats well–assuming you have any left over.
And now I wish I could actually get canned kale and farmer’s sausage here in Nova Scotia, because I’ve made myself hungry. 🙁 You can substitute kielbasa in a pinch but it really isn’t the same, and I can’t find the canned stuff here, either. 🙁 Unfortunately you only really have ready access to German ingredients in Western Canada. *cries in German*
That sounds like the way my Mom prepared spinach, only without the meat. Rinse it, boil the piss out of it, and serve it as a side dish instead of green beans, peas, or whole-kernel corn.
DrunkenNordmann
Kale with meat and potatoes is a traditional dish in North Germany. Just google “Grünkohlessen” (substitute the ü with ue in case you’re lacking umlauts).
Michael Lanting
Sounds like our Stamppot Boerenkool. Assuming we’re speaking curly kale here, and not one of the many other kinds.
Peter Huppertz
With spekkies and rookworst, of course.
Little smile
As a German i might add…while we have a few kale dishes.
There are alot of Germans who actually hate that stuff.
Same goes for “Sauerkraut”
– that all germans eat that stuff is actually a myth.
Yeah, it’s great once you add [17 flavourful ingredients] and only eat a little bit of it as a side!
DrunkenNordmann
You don’t need a lot of ingredients. Just a bit of salt – heck, you might not even need the salt depending on the meat you’re putting in the pot.
khn0
I prefer to steam it, without meat. And then it’s tasty. But ofc, like all vegetables and fruits, the taste clearly depends of where and how it grew.
Like tomatoes.
I can’t eat a supermarket tomato since I’ve eaten the good ones, the one that doesn’t taste like – fridge.
drs
There are a lot of meh tomatoes out there, but putting your tomatoes in the fridge is itself a mistake.
khn0
I don’t. That’s the problem, when tomatoes that weren’t even in a fridge taste like a mix of freon and plastic, don’t age, but smell of ripe tomatoes.
Maja!
I really like it raw in salads. Like, cut it finely and leave it for a couple of hours with a bit of sugar and salt and then mix with, for example, thin apple slices, dry cranberries, and cut hazel nuts.
Put the kale on a pot with water, a kangaroo tail, pimiento, sweet paprika, garlic, long pepper, and a stock cube. Cover with a sheet of slate, and stew gently until the slat is soft.
Then eat the slate.
clif
It’s rare you meet a kale lover who is such a connoisseur.
Khyrin
Huh. That’s the recipe I was given for Galah.
Agemegos
It’s a basic cooking technique for bush tucker. Works on everything from cockatoos to bunya nuts.
I feel as though Joyce hasn’t actually learned much about atheism or her other alternatives, despite all the time she has had to do so. Which also makes me wonder, what were people’s assumptions about atheism/agnosticism/other before you really learned about?
“Agnostics are just lazy atheists”- a community reference I took to believe as fact as a child.
Also, that atheists had moral objections to the bible or god’s various acts of destruction (which I totally got at age 5) instead of not believing in the afterlife (which I didn’t get, because so bleak)- I sorta conflated it with Antitheism
I still have moral objections to a lot of the Bible. I’m actually in a lengthy (and respectful, yay!) combox discussion about that now. That’s in addition to not believing it’s real.
Most Christians I meet are actually decent people, so the OT atrocities bother them.
Viktoria
Abraham and Isaac and the fake-out sacrifice is the moral event horizon for me. Genocide, sure, whatever, the flood’s a metaphor. “Obedience is more important than your own moral judgment”? Yeah, that makes me have to take a day to cool off after I read it.
StClair
“hardened Pharaoh’s heart” – “hold on, hold on, I know it’s messing with free will but I’m not done fucking Egypt over yet.”
C.T Phipps
I remember a weird conversation about Abraham and Isaac:
Friend: I can’t believe you believe in this stuff. Abraham and Isaac is a story of pure evil.
Me: What do you mean?
Friend: God asked Abraham to kill his own son to prove his loyalty.
Me: Yeah, it’s a prohibition against human sacrifice.
Friend: Wait, what?
Me: What do YOU think it’s about?
Friend: Blind unblinking loyalty.
Me: Uh, no, it’s about telling people the Hebrew God doesn’t engage in mass murder of your children.
Friend: Why would they have to do that?
Me: Uh, because that literally was an incredibly common religious practice. Look at Carthage and every other culture of the region at the time.
Friend: I feel like we have different perspectives on this.
Me: Yeah, I’m studying to be an anthropologist.
Wraithy2773
…that is legitly fascinating.
And yeah, it’s something that religious folk need to come to terms with regarding the Bible (and other such religious texts): They were written and edited by people to address the issues *of the time*. If you strip it of that context, the stories lose their original meanings.
My personal favorite is the parable of the Good Samaritan. These days it’s a simple “it’s awesome to help people out” thing. But in the original context, Samaritans were a rival religious offshoot of Judaism, and hated by the people that Jesus was talking to. The parable’s really about contrasting two purportedly upstanding individuals who ignored the man in need of help, and the “hated enemy” who does the kind thing… and that’s a factor that’s easy to lose when, these days, “Samaritan” hardly needs the “Good” said anymore to imply it.
C.T Phipps
Very good point about the Samaritan Parable. Literalism doesn’t benefit anyone, especially when people are talking in parable in the first place.
thejeff
Yeah, that’s one of the things about a lot of the Bible, especially the Old Testament: It makes far more sense read as a history of the cultural evolution of the people and the religion than it does as the unchanging Word of a perfect moral being.
“Here is a fable about why we don’t do human sacrifice, unlike those other religions” vs “It would absolutely be right to murder your children if God wanted it like He used to, but luckily he doesn’t anymore.”
Viktoria
See, if the point is “don’t sacrifice your kids to God”, then the way you show that is either by having Abraham punished for trying or by having him rewarded for refusing.
“Sacrifice your kids to me” “Okay” “Psych, but since you listened, here’s a reward, never actually sacrifice your kids” doesn’t actually convey “don’t sacrifice kids”, it conveys “do whatever God says, anything he tells you to do will work out fine in the end”.
325 thoughts on “Seamlessly”
Ana Chronistic
“I was now years old when I realised Christianity made me atheist”
Dumbing of Age Book 11: Atheist Coven
drs
“Actually reading the Bible” is a common reason given for turning atheist.
C.T Phipps
Really? Because I would think that doing so would nicely kill a lot of the Prosperity Gospel racism that has no place in it.
Rycan
Well, people have spent centuries perfecting the art of construing the books of the Bible to support whatever they damn well want them to support. Of course, it does help that the books themselves have contradictory teachings.
C.T Phipps
Very true. I remember when I pointed out Jesus hated wealthy people and a guy I knew freaked the hell out about it.
Exarch
Yeah I know a lot of wealthy christians who go through mental gymnastics about the camel through the eye of the needle bit
Pilgrim
Evangelical Christians have come up with the solution for that. It’s called “Bible Study” which, as you might expect is less studying the bible and more about indoctrinating people on the “proper” way to interpret it.
thejeff
To be fair, that’s basically what all churches do. No one just sits kids down with the Bible and says “Just figure it out”. Some may try for a less heavy-handed approach, but in the end they’re still using the Bible to teach their own doctrine, their own interpretation.
Griswold
I’m not trying to disagree with you–my experience is that is what is done.
But I am someone who leads Bible studies for adults. I ask people to confront their own assumptions and biases, ignore official doctrine and see if the text agrees or disagrees with it, and consider other interpretations. And this is done without judgment. People are surprisingly un-indoctrinated when you let them speak their own thoughts.
The idea of Bible study as indoctrination is probably why there are some people at my church not very happy with my studies. Luckily there’s almost nobody who wants to teach Religious Ed, so I’ll probably be corrupting the children sometime soon.
The Phule
Quakers believe that the only true method to find god is to read the fucking bible, and decide for yourself. Never trust someone else’s reading.
Usarnavon
Don’t know about churches, but in synagogues the rabbi will try to get everyone to disagree with each other and find multiple ways to interpret each reading. I’ve had my rabbi get into arguments with himself just because everyone was quietly going along with his interpretation, and you’re not participating if you don’t disagree with anyone.
Taellosse
Worth noting that there’s not really any such thing as a Quaker priesthood. There is essentially no organized institution that needs to maintain power over its membership to persist – it’s among the most decentralized versions of Christianity out there.
To a lesser extent, the same can be said of Judaism – there have been no Jewish priests for several thousand years. Rabbis are explicitly NOT priests – the word means ‘teacher – though some branches of Judaism blur the distinction more than others.
K^2
Doesn’t help that most translations are kind of garbage. KJV in particular is a dumpster fire. Comparing it to Vulgate makes it clear that the translators didn’t actually know Latin. Not that Vulgate is great to begin with. So if you don’t like implications of translation of one passage, you can probably find another passage that makes completely different kind of sense, because who ever heard of keeping things consistent?
TParadox
I think people hold on to KJV for the same reason there was so much resistance to translating into common languages. If it’s not everyday language, it feels holier.
I’m pretty sure it’s KJV that mangled the proverb we know as “train up a child in the way that he should go and he will not turn from it”, and even though modern translators know it’s more like “if you let a child do whatever they want, when they grow up nobody will be able to control them”, but many feel they have to leave the bad translation meaning because it’s so well known that people would treat them like the Wicked Bible (forgot the “not” in “thou shalt not commit adultery”) if they used a more accurate meaning.
Andrew_C
“Spare the rod and and spoil the child”? That passage?
KryssLaBryn
You mean, “[You should] spare the rod and spoil the child”? That one? XD
I know it’s more usually taken to mean “[If you] spare the rod [then you will] […] spoil the child,” but I would like to point out that the latter reading, rather than simply assuming that one understands that the statement is a direct command, instead forces one to lose or change the “and” in order to force that interpretation to make grammatical sense.
It’s obviously been grievously misinterpreted for a long while. 😉
thejeff
Plus, while it’s lousy as a translation, in many places it’s really beautiful as writing.
There are good modern translations out there though, that work from current scholarship. There is that streak of fundamentalist churches that cling to the KJV though.
drs
I am skeptical of “didn’t actually know Latin”, given the important of Latin in Europe.
“Didn’t know Greek and Hebrew well” is both more plausible and more relevant, since the KJV committees went to the Greek and Hebrew sources, rather than translating the Vulgate into English.
drs
People who turn atheist due to reading the Bible cover to cover are indeed unlikely to support Prosperity Gospel.
Roborat
Which is precisely why they don’t actually read the Bible.
Wingsofwrath
That’s exactly what happened to me. I read the bible start-to-finish on a 9h flight from Washington to Rome back in 2004 and I remember exclaiming “man what a load of rubbish” out loud when I finished, sending the 60 year old white protestant lady sitting next to me straight into pearl clutching mode… Good times.
Reaver
Fortnight Athiest coven GO!
-DABS-
…I’ll show myself out
Slartibeast Button, BIA
“Atheist Coven” is the name of my next metal band.
Doctor_Who
Skip right over atheism, watching Hymmel (or his real life equivalent Psalty) could convert people to Satan worship.
And Joyce, we know you were only into it because of that kid in the mouse suit.
I want some contrived offscreen shenanigans to result in Walky walking in the door in a mouse costume for some reason, just to see Joyce react.
Bicycle Bill
That was going to be Walky’s Halloween costume……
Damn you, Willis, for skipping over Halloween!!
clif
You have achieved the impossible and made me want DOA: Halloween even more.
adam Black
this makes me sad. Couldnt we have just had Halloween- thanksgiving – Hanukkah and New years eve ?
Captain Oblivious
It’s all part of the plan: DOA Book X: Bonus Content – All the shit you missed during the timeskip.
Nono
Look I’m with Joyce.
Chicken fingers beat kale any day.
Kyrik Michalowski
If eating kale is an atheist thing then I must have missed the memo, because I survive off of chicken fingers.
Reltzik
Kale is just our code-word for babies.
Arioch
I thought the code word was arugula, because you can’t expect anyone to believe people eat that.
Reltzik
We can have more than one code word!
OldFart
TRIGGERED VEGAN WARNING
Arioch, have you never tasted arugula? It’s yummy. I have put it in tacos and in burgers. I have eaten it by the handfuls out of the container. Maybe you’re a supertaster, which means a lot of things taste way more bitter to you than to most people. Can you eat brocolli? If you’re a supertaster that stuff will be VILE.
Seriously, what’s the deal with kale hate as well? I hate to prep it, but I think it’s tasty. Hate how it gets between my teeth though.
He Who Abides
I’m no vegan, but I use arugula in salads more often than not. It’s awesome.
Bridgebrain
Kale got the same treatment as brussel sprouts, where lots of people were fed improperly prepared variants and decided it was terrible evermore.
Sliced thick on salad it’s too thick to chew, put too much into a shake and its too pulpy. Sliced and sauteed in butter, or dried with olive oil and salt however, it’s great.
For arugula, it’s an entirely different problem: the american vegetables for the non-vegetarian have been aimed at providing the least flavor possible for so long that people take a bite, go “it’s bitter and tastes like pepper” when they’re expecting iceburg lettuce.
KryssLaBryn
My German dad taught us a fantastic way to prepare kale. You start with I guess about a can of kale (you can make it from fresh or frozen too if you prefer, but then I have no idea of the amounts to use but you will need to cook it until it’s tender and probably also add salt), drain it, and add it to a big stewpot. Add a rasher or two of bacon, chopped already-boiled potatoes (great way to use up leftovers from the night before; Dad would make extra just for the kale the next day), and one to two farmer’s sausages per person. You can put the sausages in whole, but I like to slice them up so they distribute more evenly.
Heat the whole thing up (you may need to add some salt) and let it simmer a little bit until the sausages are warmed through, and serve it up in a big bowl. Absolutely delicious, just a big warm sausage-and-bacony bowl of savoury goodness, and the perfect thing for a cold day. Also it reheats well–assuming you have any left over.
And now I wish I could actually get canned kale and farmer’s sausage here in Nova Scotia, because I’ve made myself hungry. 🙁 You can substitute kielbasa in a pinch but it really isn’t the same, and I can’t find the canned stuff here, either. 🙁 Unfortunately you only really have ready access to German ingredients in Western Canada. *cries in German*
Roborat
So you are the reason all those chickens are running around unable to pick up things.
DrunkenNordmann
That just means you haven’t prepared the kale properly. Put it in a big pot with meat, cook the shit out of it, serve with potatoes.
Bicycle Bill
That sounds like the way my Mom prepared spinach, only without the meat. Rinse it, boil the piss out of it, and serve it as a side dish instead of green beans, peas, or whole-kernel corn.
DrunkenNordmann
Kale with meat and potatoes is a traditional dish in North Germany. Just google “Grünkohlessen” (substitute the ü with ue in case you’re lacking umlauts).
Michael Lanting
Sounds like our Stamppot Boerenkool. Assuming we’re speaking curly kale here, and not one of the many other kinds.
Peter Huppertz
With spekkies and rookworst, of course.
Little smile
As a German i might add…while we have a few kale dishes.
There are alot of Germans who actually hate that stuff.
Same goes for “Sauerkraut”
– that all germans eat that stuff is actually a myth.
Delicious Taffy
Yeah, it’s great once you add [17 flavourful ingredients] and only eat a little bit of it as a side!
DrunkenNordmann
You don’t need a lot of ingredients. Just a bit of salt – heck, you might not even need the salt depending on the meat you’re putting in the pot.
khn0
I prefer to steam it, without meat. And then it’s tasty. But ofc, like all vegetables and fruits, the taste clearly depends of where and how it grew.
Like tomatoes.
I can’t eat a supermarket tomato since I’ve eaten the good ones, the one that doesn’t taste like – fridge.
drs
There are a lot of meh tomatoes out there, but putting your tomatoes in the fridge is itself a mistake.
khn0
I don’t. That’s the problem, when tomatoes that weren’t even in a fridge taste like a mix of freon and plastic, don’t age, but smell of ripe tomatoes.
Maja!
I really like it raw in salads. Like, cut it finely and leave it for a couple of hours with a bit of sugar and salt and then mix with, for example, thin apple slices, dry cranberries, and cut hazel nuts.
Agemegos
Put the kale on a pot with water, a kangaroo tail, pimiento, sweet paprika, garlic, long pepper, and a stock cube. Cover with a sheet of slate, and stew gently until the slat is soft.
Then eat the slate.
clif
It’s rare you meet a kale lover who is such a connoisseur.
Khyrin
Huh. That’s the recipe I was given for Galah.
Agemegos
It’s a basic cooking technique for bush tucker. Works on everything from cockatoos to bunya nuts.
Geneseepaws
I am Gene C’Pause. And I second this message.
And add red kiddely beans to the potatoes. Also after the first frost Kale gets sweet tasting.
KryssLaBryn
Yup!! Bitter if you pick it too soon; but you can toss it in the freezer overnight to fix that.
Roborat
And pick out the kale and throw it away.
KryssLaBryn
Yasssss!! Use bacon and farmer’s sausage; soooo good!!
BBCC
Agreed.
Illithid
I’m totally the atheist Joyce’s church imagines. But kale is basically a tougher version of grass clippings.
clif
Don’t mind me. I’m still trying to figure out why Edamame tastes so much better than soybeans.
BigDogLittleCat
Fresh edamame. Dried edamame tastes like something Joyce would refer to only by its first letter. Not sure what that would be, but it’s bad.
Captain Oblivious
Probably the (almost) obscene amount of salt?
mrnoidea
That’s why you have both with lots of ranch dressing.
Kyrik Michalowski
I feel as though Joyce hasn’t actually learned much about atheism or her other alternatives, despite all the time she has had to do so. Which also makes me wonder, what were people’s assumptions about atheism/agnosticism/other before you really learned about?
Diner Kinetic
“Agnostics are just lazy atheists”- a community reference I took to believe as fact as a child.
Also, that atheists had moral objections to the bible or god’s various acts of destruction (which I totally got at age 5) instead of not believing in the afterlife (which I didn’t get, because so bleak)- I sorta conflated it with Antitheism
Illithid
I still have moral objections to a lot of the Bible. I’m actually in a lengthy (and respectful, yay!) combox discussion about that now. That’s in addition to not believing it’s real.
Most Christians I meet are actually decent people, so the OT atrocities bother them.
Viktoria
Abraham and Isaac and the fake-out sacrifice is the moral event horizon for me. Genocide, sure, whatever, the flood’s a metaphor. “Obedience is more important than your own moral judgment”? Yeah, that makes me have to take a day to cool off after I read it.
StClair
“hardened Pharaoh’s heart” – “hold on, hold on, I know it’s messing with free will but I’m not done fucking Egypt over yet.”
C.T Phipps
I remember a weird conversation about Abraham and Isaac:
Friend: I can’t believe you believe in this stuff. Abraham and Isaac is a story of pure evil.
Me: What do you mean?
Friend: God asked Abraham to kill his own son to prove his loyalty.
Me: Yeah, it’s a prohibition against human sacrifice.
Friend: Wait, what?
Me: What do YOU think it’s about?
Friend: Blind unblinking loyalty.
Me: Uh, no, it’s about telling people the Hebrew God doesn’t engage in mass murder of your children.
Friend: Why would they have to do that?
Me: Uh, because that literally was an incredibly common religious practice. Look at Carthage and every other culture of the region at the time.
Friend: I feel like we have different perspectives on this.
Me: Yeah, I’m studying to be an anthropologist.
Wraithy2773
…that is legitly fascinating.
And yeah, it’s something that religious folk need to come to terms with regarding the Bible (and other such religious texts): They were written and edited by people to address the issues *of the time*. If you strip it of that context, the stories lose their original meanings.
My personal favorite is the parable of the Good Samaritan. These days it’s a simple “it’s awesome to help people out” thing. But in the original context, Samaritans were a rival religious offshoot of Judaism, and hated by the people that Jesus was talking to. The parable’s really about contrasting two purportedly upstanding individuals who ignored the man in need of help, and the “hated enemy” who does the kind thing… and that’s a factor that’s easy to lose when, these days, “Samaritan” hardly needs the “Good” said anymore to imply it.
C.T Phipps
Very good point about the Samaritan Parable. Literalism doesn’t benefit anyone, especially when people are talking in parable in the first place.
thejeff
Yeah, that’s one of the things about a lot of the Bible, especially the Old Testament: It makes far more sense read as a history of the cultural evolution of the people and the religion than it does as the unchanging Word of a perfect moral being.
“Here is a fable about why we don’t do human sacrifice, unlike those other religions” vs “It would absolutely be right to murder your children if God wanted it like He used to, but luckily he doesn’t anymore.”
Viktoria
See, if the point is “don’t sacrifice your kids to God”, then the way you show that is either by having Abraham punished for trying or by having him rewarded for refusing.
“Sacrifice your kids to me” “Okay” “Psych, but since you listened, here’s a reward, never actually sacrifice your kids” doesn’t actually convey “don’t sacrifice kids”, it conveys “do whatever God says, anything he tells you to do will work out fine in the end”.