The Bible is not just a long list of rules. Any random page probably has less than a 5% chance of containing any particular thing to "follow". The chance of landing on a page with an illegal commandment is next to none.
Yeah, quite a bit of the Bible would get you landed in jail so let's not act like the idea of Bible charades roulette isn't funny as fuck. If nothing else it's a fresh new way to highlight the hypocrisy of scripture in modern society.
What does this mean though? How does just reading some random story get you put in jail? It’s like you read their comment and them completely ignored everything it said.
you're arguing in bad faith about a bad faith
How is that arguing in bad faith. You just made a rather witty hut ultimately meaningless reply to my comment. You said “Yeah, quite a bit of the Bible would get you landed in jail”, but the comment you were replying to talked about how this point wasn’t true. And your reply to their comment was essentially: Yeah whatever, but here’s what you just disproved but I’ve restated it.
How is that a reply that makes any sense?
The op premise isn't to just read the story is it?
So you would read some random story and just act it out as written? Say I turn to the story of Job in the bible, what am I supposed to act out there? Am I supposed to pretend to be Satan and destroy the fuck out of Job? Am I supposed to be God and allow someone else to destroy Job’s life? Or am I supposed to be Job and just hope that everything that happened to him also happens to me?
It just doesn’t make sense.
Ephesians 4:29 (New International Version) Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.
You're not helping their needs.
Edit: The words of the Teacher,[a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
Maybe if we read the comment we could find out, but maybe someone else can tell me what it says, and I’ll just blindly believe them instead. Oh and here’s 10% of my paycheck!
The Bible rarely tells you specifically what to do. Most of it is more of a history of the Jewish people, writing down things that happened inside of a religious context.
After all, the book of Numbers is almost entirely just a genealogical list ( namat begat numat, etc ) so unless you guys want me to give birth to 15 generations of human beings it's practically impossible to follow as an instruction.
I mean yeah sure, if you blindly copy things that people were reputed to have historically done in a modern context then you are likely to get into some kind of trouble for that.
Maybe only a few odd stares from your neighbors as you put lambs blood on your door or burn only extra virgin olive oil at the stone altar made of stones that were never worked by human tools in your back yard.
And there's nothing illegal about lusting over big old penises or preaching in Galilee, but many people would find it at best difficult to tell dead people to rise and walk or to fast for 40 days and nights in the desert.
During wheat harvest, Reuben went out into the fields and found some mandrake plants, which he brought to his mother Leah. Rachel said to Leah, "Please give me some of your son's mandrakes."
-Gen 30:14
Umm... what the hell do I do? What's a mandrake?!
Random Verse Generator, who's next?
ETA: I googled
The alkaloids make the plant, in particular the root and leaves, poisonous, via anticholinergic, hallucinogenic, and hypnotic effects.
Yeah, I'm goin' to jail.
Acts 16:3
Paul wanted to take him along on the journey, so he circumcised him because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.
oof, jail it is.
Exodus 35:3 Passage: "Do not light a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day."
Well, not jail at least.
I got Acts 13:10
"You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?"
Wtf am I supposed to do with that information
Sounds like a free pass to me. God hates you already so just fucking have at.
Leviticus 19:21
Passage: The man, however, must bring a ram to the entrance to the tent of meeting for a guilt offering to the LORD.
Sounds like you will have to apologize for problems at work that you cause with livestock.
Psalms 80:3 Passage: Restore us, O God; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.
Guess I have good chances of winning
First one that's am actual command:
Psalms 136:3 Passage: Give thanks to the Lord of lords: His love endures forever.
His love endures forever while your pathetic body crumbles
Isaiah 5:22 Passage: Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks.
God in a night out: I fucking love you guys and I fucking love the bartender!
Bible writers: Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks.
Woe, is me!
When the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?
Ok, I'm fine till winter
It's genocidin' time!
Joshua 9:24 They answered Joshua, "Your servants were clearly told how the LORD your God had commanded his servant Moses to give you the whole land and to wipe out all its inhabitants from before you. So we feared for our lives because of you, and that is why we did this."
1 John 2:17
Passage: The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever
I live to see another day
"Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, "Go at once and select the animals for your families and slaughter the Passover lamb."
Ew, I'm vegan and I don't have a license nor the money for a lamb, so breaking in, stealing and slaughtering a lamb and doing rituals with its carcass publicly apparently?
Where do you need a license to get a damn goat?
Good news! That's not a commandment, it's just part of a story, so there isn't actually anything to follow.
If we're playing a reenactment game instead of a follow-what-the-Bible-tells-you-to-do game, then in context the alternative is that your first born son dies and all you have to do to prevent it is put a little blood on your door for one night. Seems like a trade anyone would readily take. Also, it's not illegal and it's not a ritual. It's just regular old slaughter of an animal like we do thousands/millions of times a day in society.
Like, anything it says or just commandments? Because the Bible is filled with stories of bad people doing things the Bible considers bad.
It is also filled with stories of bad people doing bad things which the Bible considers great. Arguably even more so.
The reason I hate online atheists is because they just make it a personality trait to think that everyone who follows a religion is stupid and that all religion and religious books are bad.
Obviously people don’t read the bible and do everything instructed in it. Christians don’t follow the old testament even though it says not to eat pigs and is a book in their religion.
Recently on this subreddit someone told me that he knew of a very smart scientist who believed in God and then told me that his beliefs are just outside his area of expertise. Later that same person told me that a degree in Theology is a degree in useless make believe or something along those lines. Then what exactly makes someone an expert on religious beliefs. Because according to this person it’s not a theologist and it’s not someone who follows a religion. So from what I can tell, this athiesm poster meant that to be an expert on religion and knowing who or what God may or may not be, is to believe exactly as they believe.
Hypocrisy at it’s finest. Online atheists may have logically sound arguments, a lot of the times their arguments are flawed. I just want to emphasise to anyone who may be reading this, that atheism is a belief like any other, it is not fact, and it is not science, it is a belief. So do not try to force your belief on others or give them an essay on why they are stupid for believing in a god. It just makes you an asshole.
that atheism is a belief like any other, it is not fact, and it is not science, it is a belief.
For me, personally, I have not found or been presented with sufficient evidence to believe in the existence of any sort of deity. I don't consider it a belief so much as a lack of belief until sufficient evidence is provided. Which is a perfectly sensible default position towards any claim, really. My reason for deconverting was due to adopting much more stringent requirements for believing religious claims.
Only science is science. One's thinking and epistemology could be scientific or non-scientific, though. Science depends on using good quality evidence to inform our theories.
Exactly. Calling atheism a belief just like religion is absurd. That's like if I were to say underground lizard people control the government, then branding you a non-lizard-eist for not believing me. It's not a belief system, it's just the logical default when no evidence is presented.
The "atheism is just another belief" talking point is popular in religious circles because it's a little mental game they can play to try and make their lack of evidence equal to someone saying they lack evidence. They frame atheism as an assertion that no gods exist, which is therefore equal to a religious person making the assertion that their god does exist. We know that in reality, lack of belief in something (anything) is passive and the default (I'm not gonna believe that lizard people live in the sewers unless you prove it to me), but they try to frame it as an active claim because then it's just a bunch of people claiming different things.
It's just another form of deceit they wrap around themselves to hide from the fact that they have no actual evidence of the divine existing.
This is a very good point that I completely missed, lack of belief is really a default which is what atheism is, or what agnostic athiesm is.
The chances of any religion on earth being close to correct are unbelievably small if at all. So to follow a religion at all will almost certainly not be following the most truest of truths. My problem is with people who take this fair and reasonable viewpoint, and morph it into hatred for people who do choose to believe in a religion. Sometimes it’s nice to believe in what probably isn’t true, that doesn’t make that person stupid or oblivious.
I really chose a bad term ‘online athiest’, I meant it more like who the term ‘average redditor’ describes vs who the factual average redditor would be. It may be misleading, but I’m not very good at coming up with names for things.
Ultimately my comment was directed at the author of this post, which says to take a book, that is over a thousand years old and do whatever is in it. The author of the post is what I’d call an ‘online athiest’ because they use the guise of athiesm to just post stupid drivel about a book I’m sure they have never read.
My parents would quote the old testament when it was convenient for threatening me as a child.
I’m sorry to hear that your parents would threaten you when you were a child.
Not disagreeing with the thrust that atheists can tend to push their views a bit but technically everyone is a bit of an atheist.
There are maybe 5000 gods currently being believed-in across the globe. A Christian doesn't believe in 4999 of them, an atheist doesn't believe in just one more.
Good comment, maybe it depends how you define pushing views, most religious people I’ve met have maybe spoke about how their personal views affect them but I’ve never met anyone who tried to push their views on me. Maybe I’ve just not met enough people.
Atheist may bother you online, but Theist literally bother you by knocking on your door on a Sunday.
Also most Atheists are Agnostic Atheists.
You hate "online atheists" for throwing all religious people into one group, yet in your opening sentence you do the exact same thing with online atheists.
You then use the example of your interactions with one person online, an environment known to not bring out the best in people, and apply that to an entire group.
And then you call every online atheist a hypocrite... That's kind of hypocritical, don't you think? Very ironic, too.
And I don't even disagree fully with you that some atheist can be an absolute pain, and treat their atheism with the same group mentality as any religion. But being an asshole isn't tied to any religion. That's just a people problem.
Atheism is, however, absolutely not a belief. It is the absence of it. It's the lack of belief, because there is no proof. The same as not believing in fairy tales or Santa. Coming to a conclusion based on evidence, or lack there of, is science, however way you like to spin it. Hell, you can be a spiritual person and still be atheist.
And religion is responsible for some horrible shit too. Let people make a bit fun of it, at least.
"Amen I say to you, the virtuous eschew stylized meme typeface. The wicked useth Papyrus when modern serif fonts suffice."
"And lo, the Lord looked upon the world and saw Avatar, and was wroth with James Cameron, not only for the usage of Papyrus, but also for cheating on Linda Hamilton during the filming of Titanic, and lo, the Lord did manifest a malaise of the mind upon James Cameron, and did make him introduce dumb plot holes like a door not being big enough for two people, and that an element called "unobtainium" was reasonable, but alas, the people did not care, and James Cameron became a billionaire, because people are dumb, just as the Lord intended."
Proverbs 26:4-5
Don't answer the foolish arguments of fools, or you will become as foolish as they are.
I ain't religious, but wisdom comes from anywhere wisdom is found. Don't be a fool, fool.
Deuteronomy 7:15 Passage: The LORD will keep you free from every disease. He will not inflict on you the horrible diseases you knew in Egypt, but he will inflict them on all who hate you.
So I do nothing and just watch, I guess?