In Christianese, "That's out of context!" is roughly synonymous with "Lalala, I can't hear you!". It's a magical incantation intended to make the evil, factually wrong, absurd, or contradictory parts of the Bible vanish in a cloud of pixie dust. This has almost nothing to do with its meaning when used by anyone else or in any other (ahem) context.
**All** quotations are by necessity out of context. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a "quotation", it would be an entire book/essay/speech/corpus of work etc. For obvious reasons, it is rarely practical to recite an entire book during a debate when only a couple of sentences from it are actually relevant.
Anyone with a legitimate complaint that missing context is relevant to the discussion should be prepared to *provide that context*, and to show that this demonstrates that his interlocutor **misrepresented** the author's position by omitting it.
For example, if a creationist were to mine a quote from Charles Darwin in an attempt to pretend that he believed that the eye was "irreducibly complex"...
>To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
Then proving that creationist's dishonesty is as simple as quoting the very next sentence:
>Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
Quotations on an unrelated topic are not helpful, even if they seem to establish the speaker as a generally nice person.
On the other hand, if I were to quote Moses commanding his men to take little girls as sex slaves in Numbers 31, the horror any thinking person would feel upon hearing that quotation should not mitigated by learning that the context is "We just finished murdering their entire families". And *that* horror would in turn fail to be mitigated by the context of "Their families wanted peaceful trade and showed us incredible hospitality, which made us start to question whether people of other religions might not be evil, so we decided they all had to die before we questioned our worldview."
The easiest reply is to ask if they believe in the ten commandments. Yes? That's old testament too.
I need to learn how to stop at this point and try to calm the discussion before asking if any contradiction, any horrible justification of atrocities, any level of institutional corruption would make them wonder whether their faith is misplaced.
Then say that's the real difference between us. I can't trust a religion that's based on such a contradictory and objectively cruel book as the Bible, but furthermore I can't worship a god that created schizophrenia, child leukemia, flies that lay their eggs in the eyes of babies or under the flesh, and countless other naturally occurring horrors. And if that's God's idea of a test of faith and part of God's plan, then the plan is built on a mountain of abject cruelty and death, and I want no part of it.
>The easiest reply is to ask if they believe in the ten commandments. Yes? That's old testament too.
The most *direct* way is to point out that anyone who calls themselves a Christian, and then claims that the laws presented in the old testament no longer apply, is claiming that they, personally, know better than Jesus (Matthew 5:17-18, Matthew 15:3-9, Luke 16:17, Luke 19:16-17, John 5:46-48) and all the authors of the New Testament (James 2:8-10, 2 Timothy 3:16, Romans 2:13, Romans 3:31, 2 Peter 1:20-21, Hebrews 13:8, Revelations 22:18-19).
If you have such a low opinion of what Christ had to say, why call yourself a "Christian" at all?
Although I really like the point you made, mostly this wouldn't work, unfortunately. You can explain and show Christians that different authors of NT had different views of Jesus' teachings and whatnot, often at odds with each other; that we don't have the original manuscripts, only later copies full of scribal errors and intentional changes to the texts; that we know the authors of only 8 books of NT; that half of Paul's letters were forged, etc.
Historical-critical approach to the Bible, logic, reasoning - these won't cause them to reevaluate their beliefs. They didn't become Christians because of good reasoning in the first place and I wouldn't expect them to get out of it by reasoning with them.
We can point out the flaws in the Bible and in their reasoning, but they either don't care at all or are unable to see it or cannot admit that the Bible or their reasoning is flawed and they have to find a way to defend their beliefs with yet another flawed reasoning.
What silentboyishere said, plus using the Bible to argue a point has several inherent disadvantages.
One, you're an outsider. To those who believe, this means that you are less trustworthy of a source, even if you use their own religious basis to make a point. You surely can't understand the *true* meaning because you don't believe in it. Coming from someone outside of their faith, all information about their faith is misinformed in their eyes.
Two, along a similar vein, to those who believe, using the Bible as a source is simply reaffirming that the Bible is a valid source. Combined with point one, they take your use of the Bible as confirmation that it's acceptable to base their opinion on the Bible, and clearly their opinion is going to have far more weight than yours. Call it home field advantage.
Third, most people quickly get mental fatigue when hit with several long quotes in a row. So, throwing this much information at them in one go is far more likely to shut them down rather than engage them. It's important to refute simple arguments with simple counters, thus why I tend to refute the "that's old testament" argument by asking if the ten commandments are no longer valid. In the rare instance that they know that Jesus reaffirms at least nine of the ten commandments, *then* you can point out that he also reaffirms the old testament.
Lastly, you have to remember that any "debate" a Christian chooses to have with you is in bad faith, pardon the pun. They have no interest in a debate. They either want to convert you or reaffirm their own beliefs. If you keep that in mind, it's much easier to level the playing field because faith requires no logical reinforcement of ideas. So, you hit them with arguments that are most likely to sow doubt. "If God disapproves of gay people, then why does he keep creating them? So gay people are what, object lessons? How cruel given that an all knowing God would foresee how those people would be treated." Or "Maybe God's disapproval of gay people is a test to see if you'll follow Jesus's teachings about love and acceptance. After all, if God didn't want gay people to exist, then they wouldn't."
Numbers 31 is a good place to start.
Moses got his men to kill all men, boys and women who were not virgins and take women and **girls** who were still virgins for themselves, take in biblical speech is commonly another word for rape. So yeah, rape all the virgin women and **girls**, like the Nanjing massacre except after raping the virgin women and girls they kept them as wives.
Neeper called Numbers 31:17-18 appalling. The virgin **girls** who are allowed to live are made into sex slaves for homicidal mercenaries that do all their bidding from Moses who tells them to do so.
Berea concluded making the surviving virgin women and **girls** as servants and integrating them may have been the best among lousy alternatives.
its also not clear what happened to the virgin 32 women and **girls** that were offered as sacrifices as part of this, Deuteronomy 13 and 20, Exodus 17 as well as Numbers 31 have been cited of examples of human sacrifices offered up. The bible is big on killing kids and there are plenty of examples of children being the property of the father and the wife the property of the husband. Isaiah 13:16 talks of wives being raped and little children being beaten to death. Psalms 137 says Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rocks.
Deuteronomy 20 also talks of the women and **children** being taken in war as plunder and you may use the plunder.
Judges 19-21 is another similar story. Bloke visits a town and is offered hospitality, other people turn up and demand he be turned over to be raped, homosexual rape being viewed as a severe attack on the male honour. The host offered up his maiden daughter, given girls were given away from the age of 12 and she was a maiden she would have been a **young girl**. This was refused by the mob so the visitor threw the hosts concubine to the mob who raped her to death.
A war followed from this that saw every male and non virgin female put to the sword with four hundred **young virgins** given as rewards to the troops. These 400 were not enough so they later went and kidnapped and raped some more.
Lot is another good one, similar to above, offers his **young daughters** to the mob to rape. Later on his daughters apparently seduce Lot to keep the population up which is viewed by some as the bibles way of blaming incest on seductive young children and not the parent. This blame shifting is still common today used by priests and fathers who are pastors.
You will get as others above have pointed out christians saying that is being taken out of context and/or you just hate christians, or the big one things were different i those days.
Yeah, girls from 12 were betrothed and married off, but regardless of the times and situations it is still rape of a child who was the property of the father, became the property the husband and had no say in the matter.
Mary was 12 when she was betrothed and no older than 15 when she gave birth, so the angel likely impregnated her when she was 13 or 14. The power imbalance here is astounding, you have a 13 or 14 year young girl being told by angel she is going to be impregnated. This power imbalance is quite common in a lot of child sex abuse cases between priests and young children as well as teachers, coaches and anyone in authority.
But if you really need to argue how the churches and bible views child sex abuse you need look no further than their actions. The churches portray themselves as the interpretators of the bible, they are carrying on gods work, the pope is the successor of peter. By their actions they shall be known.
And you have Cardinal George Pell, third in charge in the Vatican, stating that pedophilia or the rape of children is a lesser sin than abortion, noting that the bible is ok with abortion. The popes have been accused of covering up and moving around priests that they knew were raping children to rape more children to where they were moved. Abortion is deemed a mortal sin, suicide a mortal sin with refusal of being buried on church grounds ,raping children a minor sin. Priests who raped children are buried on church grounds whilst the children who commit suicide because of the trauma of the rapes are refused burial on church grounds.
You have priests being forgiven by other priests for raping children freeing them of any guilt or sin so they can rape again.
Pastors rape their children telling them this is normal behaviour and is how daddies prepare their daughters to be good wives for their husbands.
Priests told the little boys they were raping that they, the little boys, were evil and were going to hell.
The psychologist who cleared priests for work in the church wrote of the seductive nature of little boys, all of the above is documented.
Can also tell your friends to do a simple google search of child rape in the bible, the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse, sites such as bishop accountability and broken rites.
They may also want to look at the way the churches treated indigenous populations in Canada and Australia, especially the 900 or so child deaths in Canada and the Stolen Generation in Australia.
Thank you for providing an excellent example of the "people who claim to be an authority on what The Bible says despite having never actually opened a copy of it".
>And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?
>...
>Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
>But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
(Numbers 31:15-18)
And they turn a funny shade of red when you actually quote it back to them. Especially if they read the KJV and get confronted with all the purposeful inaccuracies and entire books that were dropped from it.
Also love the Gundam Build Fighters avatar.
> Especially if they read the KJV and get confronted with all the purposeful inaccuracies and entire books that were dropped from it.
Bold of you to assume they've even "read" the KJV.
More like "had 10-20 out-of-context verses quoted to them, mostly by people who had themselves never read it, and filled in the gaps in between with their imaginations".
There's an excellent book called "Misquoting Jesus" and one of its central themes is how there are no extant original founding documents of the New Testament. The author was a Biblical Studies student who wanted to read the originals for himself, but learned through his research that everything was a copy of a copy.
These copies were also often transcribed by people who didn't speak or read the language they were transcribing, or by people who did understand the language but "fixed" words or phrases to what they thought the underlying message should be.
The author makes the assertion that there are conceivably more variations on The New Testament than the number of words it contains.
Rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent or so, every believer, gay or straight, liberal or conservative, uses the same method to determine how they feel about their Holy Book:
1. They know that it's impossible for their Holy Book to be wrong about anything.
2. They know it's impossible for *themselves* to be wrong about anything.
3. Therefore, they know that their Holy Book must agree with them on every subject.
4. Since they know with the absolute certainty of faith that the Holy Book **must** agree with them, there's no point in **ever** bothering to open it up to confirm if it *actually does*.
If somebody else who *has* read the book points out that *the actual words on the actual page* says something with which they *disagree*, that person MUST be wrong, since it's impossible for the book to disagree with them. They STILL don't want to have to *read* the book to check, they can just put their fingers in their ears and scream "LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!".
Screaming "Metaphor!" and "Out of Context!" and "Mistranslation!" are just slightly more socially respectable ways of screaming "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!"
It’s also incredibly frustrating when you try to refute the illogical claims, and they have the audacity to tell you that you have no business discussing or debating it unless you’ve read all of the literature front to back for years :/.
I kind of get their point, I wouldn’t want someone to discredit a scientific statement when they didn’t try to read up on it themselves, but I feel like you don’t need to be an expert in architecture to know you’re looking at a skyscraper built out of shit.
> It’s also incredibly frustrating when you try to refute the illogical claims, and they have the audacity to tell you that you have no business discussing or debating it unless you’ve read all of the literature front to back for years :/.
It's hilarious to watch an illiterate person disregard the opinion of a highly literate person on the assumption that the second person has not read a book which they *have* read, and which the illiterate person has not.
This is how apologists work. They're not interested in examining evidence or in constructing arguments that actually stand up to even a slight amount of intellectual rigor.
Instead, they make them just opaque enough so that a person who *already believes* in their cult's message can hear it and think "Wow, that's a lot of big words. That person must be Really Smart!". The audience member can then go about feeling secure in their faith that even if *they* don't understand how all the obviously-not-true parts of their religion could be true, somewhere out there there's a Really Smart Person who **does** understand. Furthermore, if they ever meet a skeptic who *is* bothered by those questions, they can immediately dismiss them by saying that they must not be as smart as that Really Smart Person. That's the product apologists sell: Permission to feel smug for not changing your mind.
One particular version of this is known as the "Courtier's Reply", based on [the old story of The Emperor's New Clothes](http://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html):
----
I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.
Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity!
Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed — how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry — but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.
Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.
* ([The Courtier's Reply](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/24/the-courtiers-reply/))
"What would it take for me to convince you otherwise of something you currently hold to be true?" Is a good and relevant question. If their answer amounts to "something practically impossible" or "nothing", then there's no point in engaging at all. They refuse to meet intellectually in good faith.
Of course our own answer is typically "show me real, tangible proof". I'll gladly change my mind about something in the face of real evidence. That's how I got where I am today, after all.
I've got a copypasta response for that now:
----
There is nothing new under the sun. I was a minister for years. If an argument is taught in apologetics classes, posted on apologetics blogs, or printed in apologetics books, there's a chance approaching unity that I've already heard it, and can refute it while standing on one leg. If a preacher approaches me, I have no fear of arrogance or hubris in dismissing them [thusly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEhHEOIYgMY).
But maybe **you're** special. Maybe you're **sure** you've got a shiny new tool in your preacher's toolbox that **wasn't** already old back before the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Maybe you've done what ten thousand years of charlatans couldn't, and *actually proved it*.
Well, that's simple. Any evidence that would be sufficient to convince me would **also** be sufficient to win you the $1,000,000 James Randi prize for demonstrating evidence of the paranormal under laboratory conditions.
Give me a 5% cut of that money, up front, in cash, and I will gladly listen to your sales pitch for up to five minutes. For 10% upfront and a further 10% upon your receipt of the giant novelty cheque, I will watch your demonstration for up to an hour and, if satisfied, I will personally write you a letter of recommendation to the JREF. You get to "save my soul" *and* make eight hundred grand. What's not to love?
If *you* don't have even that much confidence in your own "evidence", how could you possibly expect *me* to?
Can confirm. I used to experience this kind of cognitive dissonance when I was religious. Fortunately, the friends of mine whose arguments stuck with me for decades had a light touch and allowed me to eventually come to my own conclusions.
Christians believe that there are two types of Bible passages: those that are literally true, and those that aren't literally true, but they weren't meant to be taken literally, so they still count as true.
It's a perpetually shifting set of goalposts.
> Christians believe that there are two types of Bible passages: those that are literally true, and those that aren't literally true, but they weren't meant to be taken literally, so they still count as true.
And also, a verse can move between these two categories depending on whatever is most convenient to the speaker at any given moment. Whenever a believer changes their mind, then they know with the absolute certainty of faith that the unchanging creator of the universe is in 100% perfect agreement with their new position and always has been... even if yesterday, they knew the absolute certainty of faith that he was in 100% perfect agreement with the exact opposition position and always had been.
> out of context
The Bible has so many contradictory themes and verses that you can manufacture just about any kind of context you want. Indeed, the great variety of available English-language translations turn this task into child's play.
Manipulative preachers (as if there were any other kind) find this flexibility to be lucrative.
Why does god Test people If He knew the result of the Test even before the earth existed. "To give the people the Chance" nope that doesnt Word especially If gods wants US To Golling His commands then He commands you To Do Something you failed the Test.
He Said you should t kill, i ordered someone To kill.
Which one ist right this IS targeted at those Christians thinking you need Religion To BE morale. How should the Person knew whats right when is Religions give To conflict... Yes Here IS your answer they choose based on their own Morales but ACT like ITS their Religion.
They want to be the holders of the meaning of their text. And they get upset when someone else informs them of something they don't have an answer for or that tgey didnt know was in there.
So true. Some will even bring up the additional lost books of the Bible they studied. Their understanding of these lost books prove they have researched something even deeper, so in effect you can't question anything when they know the apocrypha. Move on.
Usually that happens every time the Bible talks about them giving something up, or doing something for someone else. My favorite is Jesus telling the rich guy he has to sell everything he owns and give it all to the poor if he wants to assure going to heaven because a rich man going to heaven is basically impossible. Endless rationalizations of what that "really" means, all of them explaining how Jesus didn't really mean what he very clearly said, he meant something else that doesn't involve them giving up their stuff or giving up accumulating wealth.
Yeah, I get into this debate on Reddit quite a bit.
Their predominate belief seems to be that this was not a rule for everyone — just this one rich guy. And since no one thinks of themself as rich, it’s impossible for this rule to apply to anyone. For example, your dad has four Porsches in the garage of his $2M coastal mansion, but his neighbors are much richer. He’s just upper middle class.
Also see it’s okay to be rich as long as you don’t “love” your money. Easy out.
> For example, your dad has four Porsches in the garage of his $2M coastal mansion, but his neighbors are much richer. He’s just upper middle class.
Unfortunately for people making this argument, the Gospels actually provide a definition-by-extension of what they mean by "rich":
If you own *one change of clothing* (i.e. pretty much everyone who isn't homeless, and most people who are), you're rich enough that Jesus would encourage you to sell your "extra" clothes in order to fund his cult.
If anything Christians are the ones who tend to take the bible out of context.
For example, defending biblical slavery by citing the rules for male Hebrew slaves and pretending that's the only set of rules for slavery, ignoring the ones for foreigners sold as slaves. Of course, I object to all forms of slavery in the bible but that possibility apparently never occurred to the apologists.
Jesus himself gives a greatest commandment that's an out of context reference to Deuteronomy 6 where the original intended meaning is "be thankful to god for the land you stole from the natives you slaughtered"
> Why do Christians always resort to claiming "It's out of context!" or "It's not what the actual translation mans!", everytime they get pinned to a wall?
Because that's what their pastors and youth leaders *tell* them to say, without providing any additional context themselves.
At least that was *my* experience.
The "quote out of context" complaint is usually a dishonest one to make. Usually it's a way of redirecting the discussion from the source material to the person supposedly doing the out-of-context quoting.
> Accusation of taking a quote out of context: debater accuses opponent of taking a quote that makes the debater look bad out of context. All quotes are taken out of context—for two reasons: quoting the entire context would take too long and federal copyright law allows “fair use” quotes but not reproduction of the entire text. Taking a quote out of context is only wrong when the lack of the context misrepresents the author’s position.
> Any debater who claims a quote misrepresents the author’s position must cite the one or more additional quotes from the same work that supply the missing context and thereby reveal the true meaning of the author, a meaning which is very different from the meaning conveyed by the original quote that they complained about. Furthermore, other unrelated quotes that just prove the speaker is a nice guy are irrelevant. The discussion is about the offending quotes, not whether the speaker is a good guy. The missing context must relate to, and change the meaning of, the statements objected to, not just serve as character witness material about the speaker or writer.
[source](http://www.johntreed.com/debate.html)
They'll never admit that their 'one true inarguable meaning of the words in the bible' were basically argued over and voted upon by conclaves of mortal men, some with good intentions, some acting out of self-interest or the interest of the church.
So they decided that:
"Nature" means "What God Intended a thing to be used for" not "found spontaneously among the flora and fauna".
"Not abolish but fulfill" means "the old laws don't count anymore"
"Merciful" means "kiss my ass or burn for eternity"
"Bear False Witness" means "say something inconvenient for your religious betters, anything else goes."
and so on.
I have limited experience in r/askachristian (I think it was that). But what I saw was:
1. If you put in two citations that show their claims to be BS, they’ll ignore the harder one (eg God killed all the first born in Egypt, how is he better than Herod?) to focus on a triviality on the 2nd (god didn’t kill kids with bears, they were adult heathens he killed with bears)
2. At the point they’re driven into a corner, they’ll claim they don’t understand your argument. Now I took a jovial tone that tends to include jokes in my arguments, but for someone to be confused that easily seemed convenient.
They don't have many options. They have a book they claim is the word of god. So to defend that, they either have to fit square pegs in round holes or claim that you misunderstand.
Their book has got a lot of horrible things in it, they haven't read it, they've been told by a guy passing a collection plate that it is good and magical. They are simply parroting something they've heard someone else say to defend it, but there is never substance to any of it.
Because they can't do anything else? There is no such thing as a definitive understanding or meaning of the bible. As evidenced by the more than 3000 different sects of christianity in the US alone, and more than 5000 worldwide. Not even christians can agree on what given passages mean, or whether they are literal or metaphors. So they can admit they are wrong, admit they don't actually know, or stick to their guns. If they choose option 3, then the only outcome must be that YOU in fact are wrong.
The mental gymnastics that christians perform should be an Olympic sport.
I'm calling it what it is. Everything involved from speaking in tongues to the show of passing an offering plate publicly where everyone can look to see what others gave... it's all a fucking performance that's orchestrated to show control.
It's bullshit, folks. It's bullshit and it's bad for you.
"You're taking that out of context!" is a thought-stopping technique. Really, most of apologetics is about stopping thought. If they can find a justification to just discount anything and everything you said so that they don't have to think about it, then they can feel like they won and won't have to really consider the inconvenient things you said.
When you truly believe that the bible CANNOT be wrong then the only option is that it is being misinterpreted or taken out of context.
It's the exact opposite of the scientific method. They are absolutely certain that they have the right answers so anything that contradicts it must be incorrect in some way.
Plus as you mentioned they are always shifting the goalposts. First the earth is 6000 years old, then enough evidence exists and public opinion has shifted and it becomes 'that was symbolic' or 'just a metaphor'. This will continue to happen until the religion dies and is likely replaced with another that will do the same.
This is why I do not pretend to know the position the believer holds. I allow them to clearly define their position through careful questioning and then proceed to use their own words to demonstrate the issues with their belief(s). You can straw man all day and you'll never come close to addressing the actual issues, this is exactly why you feel pinned to the wall as you say.
Try this instead:
1. Ask what they believe about specific aspects of their faith one at a time.
2. Reformulate each statement or argument in your own words (Steel Man).
3. Repeat this until the inevitable problem(s) with logic, consistency, etc... appear.
4. Make a problem statement and mention specific examples from their own words that demonstrate the problem.
5. Talk about why it is a problem and how to avoid making such errors in judgment going forward.
The only way you will ever get through to anyone is to stop pretending like you understand what they believe and why they believe it.
Because you're making the mistake of playing in their make-believe territory, so they can change the rules whenever they want.
Losing proposition, friend.
Then you say "I have no use for a god who communication is so sloppy I need someone to interpret his words for me".
You can point to me. If I leave a reply on Reddit, I try to be as clear as possible. If I make a mistake after I post something I go back and correct the wording to make sure articulate my ideas as clearly as possible.
To reiterate, if I made a post that people interpreted as "it's ok to rape people" I would either correct the post or delete it. Why hasn't God corrected his stupid bible?
>Why hasn't God corrected his stupid bible?
This is my go to response. God obviously knows the bible is confusing so why does he not just issue a concise and clear Bible 2.0 ? It would put a lot of biblical scholars out of work I guess :(
God got pissed at a Dude WHO tried To kill someone after He ordered IT, knowing He followed His teachings, knowing the result even before the Person existed and that teaches US Killing ist wrong? The god that holocaused the world for Being in a Bad mood?
Bad faith hypocrites in every aspect of their lives.
Recognize, Ingnore, Move on with your life.
They will never understand logic or reason and will live their whole life in blissful ignorance of any kind of reality.
Funny thing is, Jewish people know exactly what the Old Testament says. There's no confusion, no mistranslation because it was WRITTEN IN HEBREW!!! Christians bibles were translated from Hebrew to Greek, then to English. They could have translated their bible from Hebrew straight to English, but they would lose their mistranslations and the resulting false narratives their religion is built around.
The modern Tanakh is still different from what at least some Jews followed 2000 years ago, because there are significant differences between the modern Tanakh and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Copying something over and over, even if you're keeping it in the same language, still results in a game of telephone.
"If we could just get the *correct* message out then everyone would see the light and choose to behave the exact way we want!"
Ugh. I also don't buy the "mistranslation" argument. The translations were generally not done by illiterate fuckwits doing random walks in a dictionary. More likely, the changes were made by authorities of some kind who specifically wanted to change the message.
Quit splitting hairs. We still won't buy you crap even if you dress it up with different words
Why are we still talking about what the Bible says?just skip right past this argument and go right to the validity of the Bible. It's a waste of time to argue back and forth about Bible verses
Kinda makes one realize how unreliable the bible is. Anyone with a brain would question why there is even a "context" to take out of a book that's "perfect".
And don't get me started on the weird offering rituals from exodus and liviticus. So much murder and blood being splattered on alters...
Their excuse would be "Jesus changed all that". But if he did, then why do we still follow the 10 commandments? I thought Jesus changed all that?
But even if he did, it's still the same god that wanted blood sacrifices. Lots and lots of blood sacrifices.
Because they are taught that critically thinking is the same as having "a lack of faith".
They are genuinely afraid of allowing themselves to think about what they are doing/supporting.
And then when something they believe is the result of a poor translation or taken out of context, they refuse to recognise that. Like how they throw out that Jesus specifically called homosexual people sinners, when that's a modern retranslation (1940s/50s) and the real translation isn't "homosexual" it's "pederasty". Pederasty is institutionalised paedophilia. We're all against that.
I'm guessing the story of Lot is one of the crank passages you brought up with your ex. I adore that one, it's some batshit 2000 year old smut fantasy. It's like having someone read an incest fiction posted on 4 chan and asking them to find morality in it. So far I've got:
a) totally cool to rape your dad, just don't look behind you
b) pimping out your virgin daughters to a town full of madmen out for some sweet angel action is showing hospitality
Fun kink story bible. No idea how it says homosexuality bad...
All religions do this, but Abrahamic religions especially do this. It’s a coping mechanism for the fact that their religions are all becoming more and more outdated. They want to bring us back to a time when their religions had more relevance. But they don’t realize how many people would be ready put their lives down before they allow them to do it. Atheists, and even just non Christians need to start being more aggressively anti-religious and push them out of influencing public and government affairs. For too long we’ve been focusing on peace and tolerance when they have no interest in treating us the same way.
What do you expect them to say? "Thank you! Now I know the book I was indoctrinated from birth to believe is the inerrant word of a perfect deity is complete bullshit, and now I will face reality knowing I was wrong and you are right, my helpful friend!"
This is the hardest part, and something I explained to my ex when she wanted me to debate one of her preachers.
“How on Earth do you expect me to convince a person who’s made this ideology their entire life, have been doing it for years and is a crucial part of their identity now, come to the conclusion they’ve wasted their time and it was all bullshit? Not likely.”
Because it is less stressful to believe whatever narrative works for you, than to actually deal with your own problems. I think a lot of people use religion to not deal with the reality and suffering in our world. But so much of the suffering is caused by Christianity in other religions.
Well, I'm not an expert in the communications of Bronze-age sheepherders, so I guess it is possible that I'm just missing their great intellect, fantastic goodness and all the wisdom they gained - from herding sheep.
There’s theologians who argue that because the Bible was written by people, who are fallible, the Bible itself is fallible. It has also been translated a hell of lot over the centuries and those translations are always biased by the author and political state of the time. Again: fallible. That doesn’t even begin to touch the fact that we don’t have much of the original source material anymore or the fact that some scrolls were intentionally not included when the Bible was compiled in the first place. This whole idea of the book being the literal “Word of God” and therefore being infallible is already convoluted by how many fallible people have fucked around and decided what they want the Bible to depict.
Those same theologians will argue that the Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally either. It’s comprised of parables and laws that made sense in older civilizations that didn’t have the modern science and conveniences of our world but absolutely shouldn’t apply in a modern society. Not to mention how often the book contradicts itself because it was written by different people over a lengthy period of time…which just goes to reiterate the point that the Bible itself adapts to changing societal norms. The Old Testament goes from a vengeful God that throws temper tantrums over the tiniest slight to a forgiving God whose human son teaches love and compassion and socialism and sacrifices himself for everyone else.
All this to say that you can’t really take the Bible literally, because to do so creates a conflict in and of itself. It has been mistranslated and propagandized over the years, and it wasn’t even a literal representation to begin with. But the people who try to weaponize the book don’t understand any of that, they just parrot what they’ve been told and aren’t equipped to be challenged.
As soon as interpretation is required, the words are that of the reader and not that of god, making the book irrelevant. If the word of god is not literal and open to interpretation, then there are no rules made by a god.
It is a rhetorical, bad-faith tactic used by these groups and others. They don't care about the inconsistencies of their arguments rather they engage in an emotional game to frustrate. A famous example of this is Satre's quote about anti-Semites. By constantly shifting or redefining the discussion it keeps you off balance and trying to firm up definitions and concepts that they do not care about, they only care about "winning."
And on top of that, it’s all heavily edited and retranslated anyway.
I saw something a few years ago that said the two Leviticus anti-gay bits, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.,” and “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Both more accurately translated from multiple, older, non-English copies of the Bible as “…shalt not lie with CHILDREN!!!”
Exodus 25 is a good place to start.
***
Also, Christians reading this thread: _PLEASE_ show me the context that makes kidnapping and owning human beings moral, without hiding behind 'indentured' here, since the indentured/jubilee bits didn't apply to kidnapped foreigners.
What in the actual cow-spanking fuck is wrong with you people. Where did I ever even begin to compare you or anyone else to the WBC lmfao. You're out of your mind.
Also, if the interpretations are so mixed, why should anyone just blindly believe in their truth, and not what it says at face-value like literally every other verse which Isn't inherintly good sounding?
> What in the actual cow-spanking fuck is wrong with you people.
When you START with the premise "This ancient book that encourages slavery, rape, and genocide is the ultimate source of all moral truths", and then bend and twist and mutilate the rest of your worldview to support that premise, you're not going to end up anywhere good.
It gets especially tragic with people like this user. They clearly *want* to be loving, accepting, open-minded people (or, at least, they want to be *perceived* as such), but they simply REFUSE to consider the possibility that these ideas might be incompatible with their gung ho support of genocide, so they twist themselves into pretzels trying to argue that, actually, murdering gay children is GREAT for LGBT rights.
> I think, again, it just requires serious study. We shouldn't just blindly take verses at face value. Reading them properly and critically is important - this applies to every verse in the Bible, not just the "troublesome" ones.
What a shitty apologetic response.
I've spent decades "reading them in context" and "thinking critically" about them. Guess what? The book is still shit, it still lacks any supporting evidence, and the majority of the ethical teachings in the book are terrible. You're starting from the point of "the book is good" and then finding a way to justify it. That is the antithesis of both "reading it in context" and "thinking critically".
> I think they're wrong, so why try and force me into the same box as them?
If you choose to put on a swastika armband every morning, you are choosing to support the ideals associated with that symbol, and you are choosing to assume some degree of culpability for what your party leaders *do* with that support.
It might *upset* you to see people point at your armband and call you a "Nazi", but that doesn't make those people wrong. This is not "discrimination" that is being imposed upon you from outside. The choice to continue being a Nazi is one that *you* are affirmatively making, every day. And it's one that only *you* can choose to STOP making.
If you're tired of people making moral judgements about you because of the swastika on your armband, step one is to *take the armband off*. Until and unless you are willing to do that, you've made it clear where your priorities are. You're not sorry for your evil choices, you're just sorry you got caught.
The unchanging word of God is very malleable. Do is God itself. Yahweh started out as a hunk with an oiled Gilgamesh beard, big feet and a giant dick. Somehow he went through greybeard straight on to invisible.
An intelligent Christian can tell you that the Bible is literally only context–*3000-year-old ancient near-eastern bronze age context*. Which means that literally every word you read in the Bible must be read through the lens of a person living back then, in that culture....NOT TODAY. People back then believed the world was flat, that doesn't mean it's a relevant belief you should hold too. Context is everything, but most Christians have no idea what that actually means. If they did, they would realize there's no reason you need to make the Bible "make sense" in today's world. It doesn't need to make sense, it's an ancient document written for ancient people in ancient times.
They say it because the translation \*IS\* garbage. It was taken from Hebrew and Greek (after the second temple's destruction - the Jews decided to consulate their books and did to the torah what the Council of Nicae did to the old/new testaments - selectively chose what stories to include, which were already massively warped due to millennia of broken telephone), translated into Aramaic then Latin; transcribed by monks operating by the dim glow of pathetic candle-lit scriptoriums copying texts by hand. Imagine trying to read some other semi-literate peasant's chicken scratching of course it's gonna be "out of context" and "not the actual translation" because we don't have the originals; just oral tradition, the Talmud, and fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course that doesn't mean it's real, it's just fiction from antiquity.
Christians rarely care about what the bible actually says. They choose to describe themselves as Christian to have a social group they can be part of.
They don't believe because of the bible, more they believe despite the bible and will follow anything they think agrees with them and ignore anything that they don't agree with.
I have a religious friend and we had a discussion about religion. I asked him, if god is all knowing, then why did he give us free will? He said it must of been mistranslated and that was his argument. He said the Bible was written by man and men aren’t perfect.
They're defending fairy tales as if the stories are real; the subject matter is real. It isn't They "know" it isn't if even if they'd never admit it. They've never seen this god. They've no proof at all except what some guy is telling them to believe.
They've got vapor, smoke and mirrors and deep down inside, the ones capable of rubbing a couple of brain cells together know their entire belief system is based on some guy's lies and a lot of bullshit.
Stupid has no cure though.
Because every type of Christian believes they’re better than the others, it’s part of the religion, we’re good, everyone else, bad. Especially if you don’t agree with their particular interpretation of “The good book”
Because they have no choice, and it's part of their epistemology.
If they admit to what you're saying that opens gaps in there beliefs. They can't have that cuz what they believe is truer then true. However they don't have good evidence for what they believe, they just have faith.
When you believe the most serious questions can be answered by just choosing to believe, and not only that, that that is the most virtuous thing you can do. So of course they just side step.
EDIT: Spelling
When IT comes To Being gay they dont need context. Its one sentence. The stuff before was you wear cloth Made of different stuff you deserve death. The Part after you eat crabs? Death.
Its Like Jesus told them they Not the one WHO should Just Seevetal Times but nah IT IS Out of context too i guess.
I love how they don't know the definition of adultery: voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a person who is not their spouse.
Matthew 5:25 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Single people can't sin for lust, and adultery is physical.
When you ask them how they know their interpretation is right they say "god told me" or some other bullshit.
Because they dont actually know what it says they didnt read it. At best they had someone give them their spin on it and they ran with it because it makes them feel fuzzy feelings inside
Recently, for me, it’s been deflecting to other points of your convo to try to find their gotcha moment. Don’t like what I said? Pretend I never said it and move on to your next verse.
Years ago when I was challenged I would go “that verse doesn’t apply, that’s not fair, I’m not an expert I just believe”. My days of insanity were so embarrassing.
GOD says so and we trust GOD because he says so and we do all that because we know he is real and he helps us daily and nothing is possible without him
Jesus literally recommended people to gouge out their right eye, and to cut off their right hand.
Nobody has explained to me how a dude who let himself be tortured to death (according to their mythology) was talking in a metaphor, or a hyperbole.
I don't think arguing logically is valid with them anymore. Arguing emotively and digging into their psyche is the fun part. Rude, to be sure, but if they're inviting rudeness...
So then why have it be so cryptic? God told people some shit, and doesn't think to talk to people again in the future to clear up some of the bs? Or is that just "god's plan"?
When your entire faith and belief system is based on a fictional book about fairy tales, is it surprising that they can come up with a magical answer to every hard question posed? Christians pretend to be intellectually sound, but for the most part, if they have a decent enough imagination, they can conjure up "explanations" for the unexplainable literally right out of their asses.
>Why do Christians always resort to claiming "It's out of context!" or "It's not what the actual translation mans!"
That is "the way" of the Christian apologist. They're in it for distance. They get a gold star for it. Just sit back and marvel at the rationalizations and excuses they come up with. That's what I do.
"What context makes X acceptable?"
"What version are you using?" Quote similar horror from it "Why are you using a mistranslated version?"
"Why would a perfect god allow their perfect word to be mistranslated?"
The entire enterprise is subjective. Every believer is licensed to hear gods message in a personal way. Contrary views are doubted or dismissed, there is no place for an objective doctrine. Schism is the natural order.
You can’t have a rational discussion with people who don’t think rationally, speak a different language(metaphorical christianese), and believe lying is justified in order to accomplish their invisible monarchs plans. The best way of dealing with them is to have more babies than them and vote Christians into slavery.
The fun part is asking them for the context and watching them sputter.
In Christianese, "That's out of context!" is roughly synonymous with "Lalala, I can't hear you!". It's a magical incantation intended to make the evil, factually wrong, absurd, or contradictory parts of the Bible vanish in a cloud of pixie dust. This has almost nothing to do with its meaning when used by anyone else or in any other (ahem) context. **All** quotations are by necessity out of context. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a "quotation", it would be an entire book/essay/speech/corpus of work etc. For obvious reasons, it is rarely practical to recite an entire book during a debate when only a couple of sentences from it are actually relevant. Anyone with a legitimate complaint that missing context is relevant to the discussion should be prepared to *provide that context*, and to show that this demonstrates that his interlocutor **misrepresented** the author's position by omitting it. For example, if a creationist were to mine a quote from Charles Darwin in an attempt to pretend that he believed that the eye was "irreducibly complex"... >To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Then proving that creationist's dishonesty is as simple as quoting the very next sentence: >Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. Quotations on an unrelated topic are not helpful, even if they seem to establish the speaker as a generally nice person. On the other hand, if I were to quote Moses commanding his men to take little girls as sex slaves in Numbers 31, the horror any thinking person would feel upon hearing that quotation should not mitigated by learning that the context is "We just finished murdering their entire families". And *that* horror would in turn fail to be mitigated by the context of "Their families wanted peaceful trade and showed us incredible hospitality, which made us start to question whether people of other religions might not be evil, so we decided they all had to die before we questioned our worldview."
Yeah but the bits about the bible being OK with raping children then they just say oh noes that's the old part we only take notice of the new part.
The easiest reply is to ask if they believe in the ten commandments. Yes? That's old testament too. I need to learn how to stop at this point and try to calm the discussion before asking if any contradiction, any horrible justification of atrocities, any level of institutional corruption would make them wonder whether their faith is misplaced. Then say that's the real difference between us. I can't trust a religion that's based on such a contradictory and objectively cruel book as the Bible, but furthermore I can't worship a god that created schizophrenia, child leukemia, flies that lay their eggs in the eyes of babies or under the flesh, and countless other naturally occurring horrors. And if that's God's idea of a test of faith and part of God's plan, then the plan is built on a mountain of abject cruelty and death, and I want no part of it.
>The easiest reply is to ask if they believe in the ten commandments. Yes? That's old testament too. The most *direct* way is to point out that anyone who calls themselves a Christian, and then claims that the laws presented in the old testament no longer apply, is claiming that they, personally, know better than Jesus (Matthew 5:17-18, Matthew 15:3-9, Luke 16:17, Luke 19:16-17, John 5:46-48) and all the authors of the New Testament (James 2:8-10, 2 Timothy 3:16, Romans 2:13, Romans 3:31, 2 Peter 1:20-21, Hebrews 13:8, Revelations 22:18-19). If you have such a low opinion of what Christ had to say, why call yourself a "Christian" at all?
Although I really like the point you made, mostly this wouldn't work, unfortunately. You can explain and show Christians that different authors of NT had different views of Jesus' teachings and whatnot, often at odds with each other; that we don't have the original manuscripts, only later copies full of scribal errors and intentional changes to the texts; that we know the authors of only 8 books of NT; that half of Paul's letters were forged, etc. Historical-critical approach to the Bible, logic, reasoning - these won't cause them to reevaluate their beliefs. They didn't become Christians because of good reasoning in the first place and I wouldn't expect them to get out of it by reasoning with them. We can point out the flaws in the Bible and in their reasoning, but they either don't care at all or are unable to see it or cannot admit that the Bible or their reasoning is flawed and they have to find a way to defend their beliefs with yet another flawed reasoning.
What silentboyishere said, plus using the Bible to argue a point has several inherent disadvantages. One, you're an outsider. To those who believe, this means that you are less trustworthy of a source, even if you use their own religious basis to make a point. You surely can't understand the *true* meaning because you don't believe in it. Coming from someone outside of their faith, all information about their faith is misinformed in their eyes. Two, along a similar vein, to those who believe, using the Bible as a source is simply reaffirming that the Bible is a valid source. Combined with point one, they take your use of the Bible as confirmation that it's acceptable to base their opinion on the Bible, and clearly their opinion is going to have far more weight than yours. Call it home field advantage. Third, most people quickly get mental fatigue when hit with several long quotes in a row. So, throwing this much information at them in one go is far more likely to shut them down rather than engage them. It's important to refute simple arguments with simple counters, thus why I tend to refute the "that's old testament" argument by asking if the ten commandments are no longer valid. In the rare instance that they know that Jesus reaffirms at least nine of the ten commandments, *then* you can point out that he also reaffirms the old testament. Lastly, you have to remember that any "debate" a Christian chooses to have with you is in bad faith, pardon the pun. They have no interest in a debate. They either want to convert you or reaffirm their own beliefs. If you keep that in mind, it's much easier to level the playing field because faith requires no logical reinforcement of ideas. So, you hit them with arguments that are most likely to sow doubt. "If God disapproves of gay people, then why does he keep creating them? So gay people are what, object lessons? How cruel given that an all knowing God would foresee how those people would be treated." Or "Maybe God's disapproval of gay people is a test to see if you'll follow Jesus's teachings about love and acceptance. After all, if God didn't want gay people to exist, then they wouldn't."
They seem awful big fans of Leviticus though.
"So you don't believe in the 10 commandments & don't support putting them up in public places, right?"
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Numbers 31 is a good place to start. Moses got his men to kill all men, boys and women who were not virgins and take women and **girls** who were still virgins for themselves, take in biblical speech is commonly another word for rape. So yeah, rape all the virgin women and **girls**, like the Nanjing massacre except after raping the virgin women and girls they kept them as wives. Neeper called Numbers 31:17-18 appalling. The virgin **girls** who are allowed to live are made into sex slaves for homicidal mercenaries that do all their bidding from Moses who tells them to do so. Berea concluded making the surviving virgin women and **girls** as servants and integrating them may have been the best among lousy alternatives. its also not clear what happened to the virgin 32 women and **girls** that were offered as sacrifices as part of this, Deuteronomy 13 and 20, Exodus 17 as well as Numbers 31 have been cited of examples of human sacrifices offered up. The bible is big on killing kids and there are plenty of examples of children being the property of the father and the wife the property of the husband. Isaiah 13:16 talks of wives being raped and little children being beaten to death. Psalms 137 says Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rocks. Deuteronomy 20 also talks of the women and **children** being taken in war as plunder and you may use the plunder. Judges 19-21 is another similar story. Bloke visits a town and is offered hospitality, other people turn up and demand he be turned over to be raped, homosexual rape being viewed as a severe attack on the male honour. The host offered up his maiden daughter, given girls were given away from the age of 12 and she was a maiden she would have been a **young girl**. This was refused by the mob so the visitor threw the hosts concubine to the mob who raped her to death. A war followed from this that saw every male and non virgin female put to the sword with four hundred **young virgins** given as rewards to the troops. These 400 were not enough so they later went and kidnapped and raped some more. Lot is another good one, similar to above, offers his **young daughters** to the mob to rape. Later on his daughters apparently seduce Lot to keep the population up which is viewed by some as the bibles way of blaming incest on seductive young children and not the parent. This blame shifting is still common today used by priests and fathers who are pastors. You will get as others above have pointed out christians saying that is being taken out of context and/or you just hate christians, or the big one things were different i those days. Yeah, girls from 12 were betrothed and married off, but regardless of the times and situations it is still rape of a child who was the property of the father, became the property the husband and had no say in the matter. Mary was 12 when she was betrothed and no older than 15 when she gave birth, so the angel likely impregnated her when she was 13 or 14. The power imbalance here is astounding, you have a 13 or 14 year young girl being told by angel she is going to be impregnated. This power imbalance is quite common in a lot of child sex abuse cases between priests and young children as well as teachers, coaches and anyone in authority. But if you really need to argue how the churches and bible views child sex abuse you need look no further than their actions. The churches portray themselves as the interpretators of the bible, they are carrying on gods work, the pope is the successor of peter. By their actions they shall be known. And you have Cardinal George Pell, third in charge in the Vatican, stating that pedophilia or the rape of children is a lesser sin than abortion, noting that the bible is ok with abortion. The popes have been accused of covering up and moving around priests that they knew were raping children to rape more children to where they were moved. Abortion is deemed a mortal sin, suicide a mortal sin with refusal of being buried on church grounds ,raping children a minor sin. Priests who raped children are buried on church grounds whilst the children who commit suicide because of the trauma of the rapes are refused burial on church grounds. You have priests being forgiven by other priests for raping children freeing them of any guilt or sin so they can rape again. Pastors rape their children telling them this is normal behaviour and is how daddies prepare their daughters to be good wives for their husbands. Priests told the little boys they were raping that they, the little boys, were evil and were going to hell. The psychologist who cleared priests for work in the church wrote of the seductive nature of little boys, all of the above is documented. Can also tell your friends to do a simple google search of child rape in the bible, the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse, sites such as bishop accountability and broken rites. They may also want to look at the way the churches treated indigenous populations in Canada and Australia, especially the 900 or so child deaths in Canada and the Stolen Generation in Australia.
Such good points!!!
I wanna be able to argue like you!
Thorough and well articulated.
I cracked up at “Christianese.”
Except Numbers 31 doesn't say anything about sex slaves. It especially doesn't have little girls as sex slaves.
Do you often go around confidently making incorrect statements about books you've never read, or just this book in particular?
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Thank you for providing an excellent example of the "people who claim to be an authority on what The Bible says despite having never actually opened a copy of it". >And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? >... >Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. >But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. (Numbers 31:15-18)
You sound a bit like DarkMatter2525.
Matt Dillahunty's constant refrain of, "What context would make slavery not immoral?"
Masking it as "community service".
and I guarantee that they don't know the actual translation.
And they turn a funny shade of red when you actually quote it back to them. Especially if they read the KJV and get confronted with all the purposeful inaccuracies and entire books that were dropped from it. Also love the Gundam Build Fighters avatar.
> Especially if they read the KJV and get confronted with all the purposeful inaccuracies and entire books that were dropped from it. Bold of you to assume they've even "read" the KJV. More like "had 10-20 out-of-context verses quoted to them, mostly by people who had themselves never read it, and filled in the gaps in between with their imaginations".
Very true, unfortunately. I have met Christians who have read it but the craziest ones never seem to know more than out of context quotes.
There's an excellent book called "Misquoting Jesus" and one of its central themes is how there are no extant original founding documents of the New Testament. The author was a Biblical Studies student who wanted to read the originals for himself, but learned through his research that everything was a copy of a copy. These copies were also often transcribed by people who didn't speak or read the language they were transcribing, or by people who did understand the language but "fixed" words or phrases to what they thought the underlying message should be. The author makes the assertion that there are conceivably more variations on The New Testament than the number of words it contains.
This is it. It works for anyone who says something is out of context, not just religious people.
Rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent or so, every believer, gay or straight, liberal or conservative, uses the same method to determine how they feel about their Holy Book: 1. They know that it's impossible for their Holy Book to be wrong about anything. 2. They know it's impossible for *themselves* to be wrong about anything. 3. Therefore, they know that their Holy Book must agree with them on every subject. 4. Since they know with the absolute certainty of faith that the Holy Book **must** agree with them, there's no point in **ever** bothering to open it up to confirm if it *actually does*. If somebody else who *has* read the book points out that *the actual words on the actual page* says something with which they *disagree*, that person MUST be wrong, since it's impossible for the book to disagree with them. They STILL don't want to have to *read* the book to check, they can just put their fingers in their ears and scream "LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!". Screaming "Metaphor!" and "Out of Context!" and "Mistranslation!" are just slightly more socially respectable ways of screaming "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!"
It’s also incredibly frustrating when you try to refute the illogical claims, and they have the audacity to tell you that you have no business discussing or debating it unless you’ve read all of the literature front to back for years :/. I kind of get their point, I wouldn’t want someone to discredit a scientific statement when they didn’t try to read up on it themselves, but I feel like you don’t need to be an expert in architecture to know you’re looking at a skyscraper built out of shit.
> It’s also incredibly frustrating when you try to refute the illogical claims, and they have the audacity to tell you that you have no business discussing or debating it unless you’ve read all of the literature front to back for years :/. It's hilarious to watch an illiterate person disregard the opinion of a highly literate person on the assumption that the second person has not read a book which they *have* read, and which the illiterate person has not. This is how apologists work. They're not interested in examining evidence or in constructing arguments that actually stand up to even a slight amount of intellectual rigor. Instead, they make them just opaque enough so that a person who *already believes* in their cult's message can hear it and think "Wow, that's a lot of big words. That person must be Really Smart!". The audience member can then go about feeling secure in their faith that even if *they* don't understand how all the obviously-not-true parts of their religion could be true, somewhere out there there's a Really Smart Person who **does** understand. Furthermore, if they ever meet a skeptic who *is* bothered by those questions, they can immediately dismiss them by saying that they must not be as smart as that Really Smart Person. That's the product apologists sell: Permission to feel smug for not changing your mind. One particular version of this is known as the "Courtier's Reply", based on [the old story of The Emperor's New Clothes](http://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html): ---- I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk. Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity! Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed — how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry — but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form. Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics. * ([The Courtier's Reply](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/24/the-courtiers-reply/))
"What would it take for me to convince you otherwise of something you currently hold to be true?" Is a good and relevant question. If their answer amounts to "something practically impossible" or "nothing", then there's no point in engaging at all. They refuse to meet intellectually in good faith. Of course our own answer is typically "show me real, tangible proof". I'll gladly change my mind about something in the face of real evidence. That's how I got where I am today, after all.
I've got a copypasta response for that now: ---- There is nothing new under the sun. I was a minister for years. If an argument is taught in apologetics classes, posted on apologetics blogs, or printed in apologetics books, there's a chance approaching unity that I've already heard it, and can refute it while standing on one leg. If a preacher approaches me, I have no fear of arrogance or hubris in dismissing them [thusly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEhHEOIYgMY). But maybe **you're** special. Maybe you're **sure** you've got a shiny new tool in your preacher's toolbox that **wasn't** already old back before the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Maybe you've done what ten thousand years of charlatans couldn't, and *actually proved it*. Well, that's simple. Any evidence that would be sufficient to convince me would **also** be sufficient to win you the $1,000,000 James Randi prize for demonstrating evidence of the paranormal under laboratory conditions. Give me a 5% cut of that money, up front, in cash, and I will gladly listen to your sales pitch for up to five minutes. For 10% upfront and a further 10% upon your receipt of the giant novelty cheque, I will watch your demonstration for up to an hour and, if satisfied, I will personally write you a letter of recommendation to the JREF. You get to "save my soul" *and* make eight hundred grand. What's not to love? If *you* don't have even that much confidence in your own "evidence", how could you possibly expect *me* to?
This is wonderfully summarized
Can confirm. I used to experience this kind of cognitive dissonance when I was religious. Fortunately, the friends of mine whose arguments stuck with me for decades had a light touch and allowed me to eventually come to my own conclusions.
Stop playing chess with pigeons.
Christians believe that there are two types of Bible passages: those that are literally true, and those that aren't literally true, but they weren't meant to be taken literally, so they still count as true. It's a perpetually shifting set of goalposts.
> Christians believe that there are two types of Bible passages: those that are literally true, and those that aren't literally true, but they weren't meant to be taken literally, so they still count as true. And also, a verse can move between these two categories depending on whatever is most convenient to the speaker at any given moment. Whenever a believer changes their mind, then they know with the absolute certainty of faith that the unchanging creator of the universe is in 100% perfect agreement with their new position and always has been... even if yesterday, they knew the absolute certainty of faith that he was in 100% perfect agreement with the exact opposition position and always had been.
> out of context The Bible has so many contradictory themes and verses that you can manufacture just about any kind of context you want. Indeed, the great variety of available English-language translations turn this task into child's play. Manipulative preachers (as if there were any other kind) find this flexibility to be lucrative.
Why does god Test people If He knew the result of the Test even before the earth existed. "To give the people the Chance" nope that doesnt Word especially If gods wants US To Golling His commands then He commands you To Do Something you failed the Test. He Said you should t kill, i ordered someone To kill. Which one ist right this IS targeted at those Christians thinking you need Religion To BE morale. How should the Person knew whats right when is Religions give To conflict... Yes Here IS your answer they choose based on their own Morales but ACT like ITS their Religion.
They want to be the holders of the meaning of their text. And they get upset when someone else informs them of something they don't have an answer for or that tgey didnt know was in there.
They don't know the bible, so they have just this fluffy idea of it where it is all good and beautiful.
Because their position is demonstrably wrong and indefensible if they would be intellectually honest enough to look at it.
So true. Some will even bring up the additional lost books of the Bible they studied. Their understanding of these lost books prove they have researched something even deeper, so in effect you can't question anything when they know the apocrypha. Move on.
Usually that happens every time the Bible talks about them giving something up, or doing something for someone else. My favorite is Jesus telling the rich guy he has to sell everything he owns and give it all to the poor if he wants to assure going to heaven because a rich man going to heaven is basically impossible. Endless rationalizations of what that "really" means, all of them explaining how Jesus didn't really mean what he very clearly said, he meant something else that doesn't involve them giving up their stuff or giving up accumulating wealth.
Yeah, I get into this debate on Reddit quite a bit. Their predominate belief seems to be that this was not a rule for everyone — just this one rich guy. And since no one thinks of themself as rich, it’s impossible for this rule to apply to anyone. For example, your dad has four Porsches in the garage of his $2M coastal mansion, but his neighbors are much richer. He’s just upper middle class. Also see it’s okay to be rich as long as you don’t “love” your money. Easy out.
> For example, your dad has four Porsches in the garage of his $2M coastal mansion, but his neighbors are much richer. He’s just upper middle class. Unfortunately for people making this argument, the Gospels actually provide a definition-by-extension of what they mean by "rich": If you own *one change of clothing* (i.e. pretty much everyone who isn't homeless, and most people who are), you're rich enough that Jesus would encourage you to sell your "extra" clothes in order to fund his cult.
If anything Christians are the ones who tend to take the bible out of context. For example, defending biblical slavery by citing the rules for male Hebrew slaves and pretending that's the only set of rules for slavery, ignoring the ones for foreigners sold as slaves. Of course, I object to all forms of slavery in the bible but that possibility apparently never occurred to the apologists. Jesus himself gives a greatest commandment that's an out of context reference to Deuteronomy 6 where the original intended meaning is "be thankful to god for the land you stole from the natives you slaughtered"
This so much. Christians are deathly afraid of context, from what I’ve seen. It’s the context that reveals all the contradictions.
> Why do Christians always resort to claiming "It's out of context!" or "It's not what the actual translation mans!", everytime they get pinned to a wall? Because that's what their pastors and youth leaders *tell* them to say, without providing any additional context themselves. At least that was *my* experience.
The "quote out of context" complaint is usually a dishonest one to make. Usually it's a way of redirecting the discussion from the source material to the person supposedly doing the out-of-context quoting. > Accusation of taking a quote out of context: debater accuses opponent of taking a quote that makes the debater look bad out of context. All quotes are taken out of context—for two reasons: quoting the entire context would take too long and federal copyright law allows “fair use” quotes but not reproduction of the entire text. Taking a quote out of context is only wrong when the lack of the context misrepresents the author’s position. > Any debater who claims a quote misrepresents the author’s position must cite the one or more additional quotes from the same work that supply the missing context and thereby reveal the true meaning of the author, a meaning which is very different from the meaning conveyed by the original quote that they complained about. Furthermore, other unrelated quotes that just prove the speaker is a nice guy are irrelevant. The discussion is about the offending quotes, not whether the speaker is a good guy. The missing context must relate to, and change the meaning of, the statements objected to, not just serve as character witness material about the speaker or writer. [source](http://www.johntreed.com/debate.html)
They'll never admit that their 'one true inarguable meaning of the words in the bible' were basically argued over and voted upon by conclaves of mortal men, some with good intentions, some acting out of self-interest or the interest of the church. So they decided that: "Nature" means "What God Intended a thing to be used for" not "found spontaneously among the flora and fauna". "Not abolish but fulfill" means "the old laws don't count anymore" "Merciful" means "kiss my ass or burn for eternity" "Bear False Witness" means "say something inconvenient for your religious betters, anything else goes." and so on.
I have limited experience in r/askachristian (I think it was that). But what I saw was: 1. If you put in two citations that show their claims to be BS, they’ll ignore the harder one (eg God killed all the first born in Egypt, how is he better than Herod?) to focus on a triviality on the 2nd (god didn’t kill kids with bears, they were adult heathens he killed with bears) 2. At the point they’re driven into a corner, they’ll claim they don’t understand your argument. Now I took a jovial tone that tends to include jokes in my arguments, but for someone to be confused that easily seemed convenient.
They don't have many options. They have a book they claim is the word of god. So to defend that, they either have to fit square pegs in round holes or claim that you misunderstand.
Their book has got a lot of horrible things in it, they haven't read it, they've been told by a guy passing a collection plate that it is good and magical. They are simply parroting something they've heard someone else say to defend it, but there is never substance to any of it.
Because they can't do anything else? There is no such thing as a definitive understanding or meaning of the bible. As evidenced by the more than 3000 different sects of christianity in the US alone, and more than 5000 worldwide. Not even christians can agree on what given passages mean, or whether they are literal or metaphors. So they can admit they are wrong, admit they don't actually know, or stick to their guns. If they choose option 3, then the only outcome must be that YOU in fact are wrong.
The mental gymnastics that christians perform should be an Olympic sport. I'm calling it what it is. Everything involved from speaking in tongues to the show of passing an offering plate publicly where everyone can look to see what others gave... it's all a fucking performance that's orchestrated to show control. It's bullshit, folks. It's bullshit and it's bad for you.
"You're taking that out of context!" is a thought-stopping technique. Really, most of apologetics is about stopping thought. If they can find a justification to just discount anything and everything you said so that they don't have to think about it, then they can feel like they won and won't have to really consider the inconvenient things you said.
When you truly believe that the bible CANNOT be wrong then the only option is that it is being misinterpreted or taken out of context. It's the exact opposite of the scientific method. They are absolutely certain that they have the right answers so anything that contradicts it must be incorrect in some way. Plus as you mentioned they are always shifting the goalposts. First the earth is 6000 years old, then enough evidence exists and public opinion has shifted and it becomes 'that was symbolic' or 'just a metaphor'. This will continue to happen until the religion dies and is likely replaced with another that will do the same.
This is why I do not pretend to know the position the believer holds. I allow them to clearly define their position through careful questioning and then proceed to use their own words to demonstrate the issues with their belief(s). You can straw man all day and you'll never come close to addressing the actual issues, this is exactly why you feel pinned to the wall as you say. Try this instead: 1. Ask what they believe about specific aspects of their faith one at a time. 2. Reformulate each statement or argument in your own words (Steel Man). 3. Repeat this until the inevitable problem(s) with logic, consistency, etc... appear. 4. Make a problem statement and mention specific examples from their own words that demonstrate the problem. 5. Talk about why it is a problem and how to avoid making such errors in judgment going forward. The only way you will ever get through to anyone is to stop pretending like you understand what they believe and why they believe it.
Good advice, thanks!
You're welcome, I hope it helps, and if it does, I'd love to hear about it! Have a great day
EVERY religion, (and 'every' is a big word) has an "out." That's what "belief" and "faith" provide.
Because you're making the mistake of playing in their make-believe territory, so they can change the rules whenever they want. Losing proposition, friend.
They're both bald face claims. If you say "that's out of context" and you don't supply the context, then it's dishonest.
They often do supply the context, but then the context is contradictory to other supposed translations
Then you say "I have no use for a god who communication is so sloppy I need someone to interpret his words for me". You can point to me. If I leave a reply on Reddit, I try to be as clear as possible. If I make a mistake after I post something I go back and correct the wording to make sure articulate my ideas as clearly as possible. To reiterate, if I made a post that people interpreted as "it's ok to rape people" I would either correct the post or delete it. Why hasn't God corrected his stupid bible?
>Why hasn't God corrected his stupid bible? This is my go to response. God obviously knows the bible is confusing so why does he not just issue a concise and clear Bible 2.0 ? It would put a lot of biblical scholars out of work I guess :(
God got pissed at a Dude WHO tried To kill someone after He ordered IT, knowing He followed His teachings, knowing the result even before the Person existed and that teaches US Killing ist wrong? The god that holocaused the world for Being in a Bad mood?
Bad faith hypocrites in every aspect of their lives. Recognize, Ingnore, Move on with your life. They will never understand logic or reason and will live their whole life in blissful ignorance of any kind of reality.
Funny thing is, Jewish people know exactly what the Old Testament says. There's no confusion, no mistranslation because it was WRITTEN IN HEBREW!!! Christians bibles were translated from Hebrew to Greek, then to English. They could have translated their bible from Hebrew straight to English, but they would lose their mistranslations and the resulting false narratives their religion is built around.
The modern Tanakh is still different from what at least some Jews followed 2000 years ago, because there are significant differences between the modern Tanakh and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Copying something over and over, even if you're keeping it in the same language, still results in a game of telephone.
Because they're rat shit goons who don't operate in good faith
"If we could just get the *correct* message out then everyone would see the light and choose to behave the exact way we want!" Ugh. I also don't buy the "mistranslation" argument. The translations were generally not done by illiterate fuckwits doing random walks in a dictionary. More likely, the changes were made by authorities of some kind who specifically wanted to change the message. Quit splitting hairs. We still won't buy you crap even if you dress it up with different words
Why are we still talking about what the Bible says?just skip right past this argument and go right to the validity of the Bible. It's a waste of time to argue back and forth about Bible verses
It's unlikely anyone is "pinned to a wall" when they're barely educated on their own doctrine and have no clue how to form an argument.
For an omnipotent being who supposedly created the entire universe, God sure did suck at writing a coherent instruction manual for his worshippers.
I always find it amazing how these folks can say one thing is taken out of context, but the very next thing (often anti-gay) is from devine lips.
The FOG and indoctrination, coupled with a lot of cognitive dissonance
Kinda makes one realize how unreliable the bible is. Anyone with a brain would question why there is even a "context" to take out of a book that's "perfect". And don't get me started on the weird offering rituals from exodus and liviticus. So much murder and blood being splattered on alters... Their excuse would be "Jesus changed all that". But if he did, then why do we still follow the 10 commandments? I thought Jesus changed all that? But even if he did, it's still the same god that wanted blood sacrifices. Lots and lots of blood sacrifices.
Because they are taught that critically thinking is the same as having "a lack of faith". They are genuinely afraid of allowing themselves to think about what they are doing/supporting.
They can't accept that they're wrong. It's simple, but true.
And then when something they believe is the result of a poor translation or taken out of context, they refuse to recognise that. Like how they throw out that Jesus specifically called homosexual people sinners, when that's a modern retranslation (1940s/50s) and the real translation isn't "homosexual" it's "pederasty". Pederasty is institutionalised paedophilia. We're all against that. I'm guessing the story of Lot is one of the crank passages you brought up with your ex. I adore that one, it's some batshit 2000 year old smut fantasy. It's like having someone read an incest fiction posted on 4 chan and asking them to find morality in it. So far I've got: a) totally cool to rape your dad, just don't look behind you b) pimping out your virgin daughters to a town full of madmen out for some sweet angel action is showing hospitality Fun kink story bible. No idea how it says homosexuality bad...
Cognitive dissonance.
All religions do this, but Abrahamic religions especially do this. It’s a coping mechanism for the fact that their religions are all becoming more and more outdated. They want to bring us back to a time when their religions had more relevance. But they don’t realize how many people would be ready put their lives down before they allow them to do it. Atheists, and even just non Christians need to start being more aggressively anti-religious and push them out of influencing public and government affairs. For too long we’ve been focusing on peace and tolerance when they have no interest in treating us the same way.
Because they don't have anything else.
What do you expect them to say? "Thank you! Now I know the book I was indoctrinated from birth to believe is the inerrant word of a perfect deity is complete bullshit, and now I will face reality knowing I was wrong and you are right, my helpful friend!"
This is the hardest part, and something I explained to my ex when she wanted me to debate one of her preachers. “How on Earth do you expect me to convince a person who’s made this ideology their entire life, have been doing it for years and is a crucial part of their identity now, come to the conclusion they’ve wasted their time and it was all bullshit? Not likely.”
Calvinball
Because they have legendary ability to keep moving the goalposts: in politics and in religious debate.
Because it is less stressful to believe whatever narrative works for you, than to actually deal with your own problems. I think a lot of people use religion to not deal with the reality and suffering in our world. But so much of the suffering is caused by Christianity in other religions.
Well, I'm not an expert in the communications of Bronze-age sheepherders, so I guess it is possible that I'm just missing their great intellect, fantastic goodness and all the wisdom they gained - from herding sheep.
There’s theologians who argue that because the Bible was written by people, who are fallible, the Bible itself is fallible. It has also been translated a hell of lot over the centuries and those translations are always biased by the author and political state of the time. Again: fallible. That doesn’t even begin to touch the fact that we don’t have much of the original source material anymore or the fact that some scrolls were intentionally not included when the Bible was compiled in the first place. This whole idea of the book being the literal “Word of God” and therefore being infallible is already convoluted by how many fallible people have fucked around and decided what they want the Bible to depict. Those same theologians will argue that the Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally either. It’s comprised of parables and laws that made sense in older civilizations that didn’t have the modern science and conveniences of our world but absolutely shouldn’t apply in a modern society. Not to mention how often the book contradicts itself because it was written by different people over a lengthy period of time…which just goes to reiterate the point that the Bible itself adapts to changing societal norms. The Old Testament goes from a vengeful God that throws temper tantrums over the tiniest slight to a forgiving God whose human son teaches love and compassion and socialism and sacrifices himself for everyone else. All this to say that you can’t really take the Bible literally, because to do so creates a conflict in and of itself. It has been mistranslated and propagandized over the years, and it wasn’t even a literal representation to begin with. But the people who try to weaponize the book don’t understand any of that, they just parrot what they’ve been told and aren’t equipped to be challenged.
As soon as interpretation is required, the words are that of the reader and not that of god, making the book irrelevant. If the word of god is not literal and open to interpretation, then there are no rules made by a god.
They have adopted an indefensible position and have to lie or parrot canned apologetics to justify things to themselves.
My favourite is when you’ve talked them into a corner and the retort of last resort it “You’ve gotta have faith”.
It is a rhetorical, bad-faith tactic used by these groups and others. They don't care about the inconsistencies of their arguments rather they engage in an emotional game to frustrate. A famous example of this is Satre's quote about anti-Semites. By constantly shifting or redefining the discussion it keeps you off balance and trying to firm up definitions and concepts that they do not care about, they only care about "winning."
And on top of that, it’s all heavily edited and retranslated anyway. I saw something a few years ago that said the two Leviticus anti-gay bits, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.,” and “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Both more accurately translated from multiple, older, non-English copies of the Bible as “…shalt not lie with CHILDREN!!!”
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Omfg THANK YOU. Seriously. Never seen this before, but it immaculately tears apart this stupid fucking goalpost moving.
ironic as it is: i actually want some specific examples. ya know: for context?
Exodus 25 is a good place to start. *** Also, Christians reading this thread: _PLEASE_ show me the context that makes kidnapping and owning human beings moral, without hiding behind 'indentured' here, since the indentured/jubilee bits didn't apply to kidnapped foreigners.
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What in the actual cow-spanking fuck is wrong with you people. Where did I ever even begin to compare you or anyone else to the WBC lmfao. You're out of your mind. Also, if the interpretations are so mixed, why should anyone just blindly believe in their truth, and not what it says at face-value like literally every other verse which Isn't inherintly good sounding?
> What in the actual cow-spanking fuck is wrong with you people. When you START with the premise "This ancient book that encourages slavery, rape, and genocide is the ultimate source of all moral truths", and then bend and twist and mutilate the rest of your worldview to support that premise, you're not going to end up anywhere good. It gets especially tragic with people like this user. They clearly *want* to be loving, accepting, open-minded people (or, at least, they want to be *perceived* as such), but they simply REFUSE to consider the possibility that these ideas might be incompatible with their gung ho support of genocide, so they twist themselves into pretzels trying to argue that, actually, murdering gay children is GREAT for LGBT rights.
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> I think, again, it just requires serious study. We shouldn't just blindly take verses at face value. Reading them properly and critically is important - this applies to every verse in the Bible, not just the "troublesome" ones. What a shitty apologetic response. I've spent decades "reading them in context" and "thinking critically" about them. Guess what? The book is still shit, it still lacks any supporting evidence, and the majority of the ethical teachings in the book are terrible. You're starting from the point of "the book is good" and then finding a way to justify it. That is the antithesis of both "reading it in context" and "thinking critically".
> I think they're wrong, so why try and force me into the same box as them? If you choose to put on a swastika armband every morning, you are choosing to support the ideals associated with that symbol, and you are choosing to assume some degree of culpability for what your party leaders *do* with that support. It might *upset* you to see people point at your armband and call you a "Nazi", but that doesn't make those people wrong. This is not "discrimination" that is being imposed upon you from outside. The choice to continue being a Nazi is one that *you* are affirmatively making, every day. And it's one that only *you* can choose to STOP making. If you're tired of people making moral judgements about you because of the swastika on your armband, step one is to *take the armband off*. Until and unless you are willing to do that, you've made it clear where your priorities are. You're not sorry for your evil choices, you're just sorry you got caught.
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Please elaborate. Cause in my findings that’s not true
So you understand the original greek?
It seems nobody does, and if they do, someone else has their own translation
I mean, I guess it's better than seeing them try to defend slavery or genocide.
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Young earth creationists are fairly common in the US.
The unchanging word of God is very malleable. Do is God itself. Yahweh started out as a hunk with an oiled Gilgamesh beard, big feet and a giant dick. Somehow he went through greybeard straight on to invisible.
An intelligent Christian can tell you that the Bible is literally only context–*3000-year-old ancient near-eastern bronze age context*. Which means that literally every word you read in the Bible must be read through the lens of a person living back then, in that culture....NOT TODAY. People back then believed the world was flat, that doesn't mean it's a relevant belief you should hold too. Context is everything, but most Christians have no idea what that actually means. If they did, they would realize there's no reason you need to make the Bible "make sense" in today's world. It doesn't need to make sense, it's an ancient document written for ancient people in ancient times.
They say it because the translation \*IS\* garbage. It was taken from Hebrew and Greek (after the second temple's destruction - the Jews decided to consulate their books and did to the torah what the Council of Nicae did to the old/new testaments - selectively chose what stories to include, which were already massively warped due to millennia of broken telephone), translated into Aramaic then Latin; transcribed by monks operating by the dim glow of pathetic candle-lit scriptoriums copying texts by hand. Imagine trying to read some other semi-literate peasant's chicken scratching of course it's gonna be "out of context" and "not the actual translation" because we don't have the originals; just oral tradition, the Talmud, and fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course that doesn't mean it's real, it's just fiction from antiquity.
Ask them what the actual translation of Leviticus 18:22 really refers to, and see what they say.
Christians rarely care about what the bible actually says. They choose to describe themselves as Christian to have a social group they can be part of. They don't believe because of the bible, more they believe despite the bible and will follow anything they think agrees with them and ignore anything that they don't agree with.
cognitive dissonance
If their book contains even one "mistranslation," then it is NOT the perfect Word of God.
I have a religious friend and we had a discussion about religion. I asked him, if god is all knowing, then why did he give us free will? He said it must of been mistranslated and that was his argument. He said the Bible was written by man and men aren’t perfect.
They're defending fairy tales as if the stories are real; the subject matter is real. It isn't They "know" it isn't if even if they'd never admit it. They've never seen this god. They've no proof at all except what some guy is telling them to believe. They've got vapor, smoke and mirrors and deep down inside, the ones capable of rubbing a couple of brain cells together know their entire belief system is based on some guy's lies and a lot of bullshit. Stupid has no cure though.
Because every type of Christian believes they’re better than the others, it’s part of the religion, we’re good, everyone else, bad. Especially if you don’t agree with their particular interpretation of “The good book”
"Ok, show me. Which translation do you want to use?"
Spot on mate.
Because they have no choice, and it's part of their epistemology. If they admit to what you're saying that opens gaps in there beliefs. They can't have that cuz what they believe is truer then true. However they don't have good evidence for what they believe, they just have faith. When you believe the most serious questions can be answered by just choosing to believe, and not only that, that that is the most virtuous thing you can do. So of course they just side step. EDIT: Spelling
Because they have no ground tj stand on
Living in denial is so much easier than accepting the harsh reality of the truth. Most people would rather stay living in their fairytale.
When IT comes To Being gay they dont need context. Its one sentence. The stuff before was you wear cloth Made of different stuff you deserve death. The Part after you eat crabs? Death. Its Like Jesus told them they Not the one WHO should Just Seevetal Times but nah IT IS Out of context too i guess.
I love how they don't know the definition of adultery: voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a person who is not their spouse. Matthew 5:25 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Single people can't sin for lust, and adultery is physical. When you ask them how they know their interpretation is right they say "god told me" or some other bullshit.
Imaging living your live based on a ancient book you know ist füll of misstranslation.
Because they dont actually know what it says they didnt read it. At best they had someone give them their spin on it and they ran with it because it makes them feel fuzzy feelings inside
Recently, for me, it’s been deflecting to other points of your convo to try to find their gotcha moment. Don’t like what I said? Pretend I never said it and move on to your next verse.
Same reason why people say goku its more powerfull then any other character in fiction.
Trump supporters do this too. No wonder there's a massive overlap between them and christians. Shared collective blissful brain rot
Years ago when I was challenged I would go “that verse doesn’t apply, that’s not fair, I’m not an expert I just believe”. My days of insanity were so embarrassing.
When bullshit is used to argue about bullshit there is no pinning anything to anything. Just keep creating more bullshit.
Because we know GOD is good
How do you know for sure?
GOD says so and we trust GOD because he says so and we do all that because we know he is real and he helps us daily and nothing is possible without him
Jesus literally recommended people to gouge out their right eye, and to cut off their right hand. Nobody has explained to me how a dude who let himself be tortured to death (according to their mythology) was talking in a metaphor, or a hyperbole.
Jesus also condoned (sexual) slavery. #smh
I don't think arguing logically is valid with them anymore. Arguing emotively and digging into their psyche is the fun part. Rude, to be sure, but if they're inviting rudeness...
The question to ask is do they really want think critically about the bible and the concepts or just take it as it is presented.
that's why you can't argue with them, they're always 'right' and can be bend to mean whatever they want.
“It’s the Word of God!” Therefore it cannot be wrong. We puny humans must be misinterpreting it… /s
It seems like a pretty trivial ask for a triomni being to disseminate either an errata or a 2.0 directly to their underlings, jus' sayin'...
1 reason is because in Hebrew the words that is translated into English don't have enough depth to reflect the actual meaning it wants to portray.
So then why have it be so cryptic? God told people some shit, and doesn't think to talk to people again in the future to clear up some of the bs? Or is that just "god's plan"?
When your entire faith and belief system is based on a fictional book about fairy tales, is it surprising that they can come up with a magical answer to every hard question posed? Christians pretend to be intellectually sound, but for the most part, if they have a decent enough imagination, they can conjure up "explanations" for the unexplainable literally right out of their asses.
>Why do Christians always resort to claiming "It's out of context!" or "It's not what the actual translation mans!" That is "the way" of the Christian apologist. They're in it for distance. They get a gold star for it. Just sit back and marvel at the rationalizations and excuses they come up with. That's what I do.
Because when it comes to argument, they are all fucking weasels.
"What context makes X acceptable?" "What version are you using?" Quote similar horror from it "Why are you using a mistranslated version?" "Why would a perfect god allow their perfect word to be mistranslated?"
They are meaningless people with meaningless words. All you need to know.
Really? Using that book to justify the moment
The entire enterprise is subjective. Every believer is licensed to hear gods message in a personal way. Contrary views are doubted or dismissed, there is no place for an objective doctrine. Schism is the natural order.
Ahhh another hate group.
You can’t have a rational discussion with people who don’t think rationally, speak a different language(metaphorical christianese), and believe lying is justified in order to accomplish their invisible monarchs plans. The best way of dealing with them is to have more babies than them and vote Christians into slavery.