That's fair. Annotated/explanatory stuff does exist but the power-brokers tend to downplay or ignore it because that would erode their base. To be honest we could say exactly the same thing about people advocating political points of view, financial decisions, personal health care choices, and just about anything else; and some of those things effect others just as much. I mean if you think about it, except for the difference in time, someone who says the King James Bible trumps all others is just like someone who says Atlas Shrugged trumps all other political theory.
There is nothing in the various laws-related books that says 'thou shalt commit legitimate rape, for some girls doth rape easy'. However there's more than one place where the Israelites were bored and said "God, what should we do?" and God said "bros, here's what you do, this shit is gonna be off the hizzy, okay? You ready for some crazy times? First, you're gonna sneak into Midian. Then you're gonna just kill everybody! It's gonna be fuckin' NUTS, bros! Then take their wives home!" Or maybe the boys of the tribe of Benjamin need some biddies of their very own so God offers up some sweet pick up artist advice. "Go down to Shiloh where the hotties like to dance. Make sure you're carrying a large sword or maybe a spear of some sort. This is what we call 'peacocking'! You'll then want to gently neg them. Say something like 'I know you won't put up much of a fight because your husband and/or father certainly didn't when we killed him!' This will get her hells of interested in you. And if she isn't, it doesn't matter. Make her your wife!" Of course there are places in the OT that strongly condemn rape. Like in Deuteronomy where it says if you rape a married woman you should be put to death and if you rape a virgin you should pay her dad fifty shekels. Fifty fucking shekels! DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY SHEKELS THAT IS? IT IS OVER FORTY NINE OF THEM BUT SOMEWHAT LESS THAN FIFTY ONE OF THEM!!! Also you should marry her and you can't ever divorce her. Man, is there anything worse than having to live with a woman you've raped for the rest of your life? I bet she never lets that one go, am I right, fellahs? Woo. "Honey, can we watch Caananite Pickers?" "No, we will watch Real Housewives of Kinneret." "But I-" "YOU RAPED ME!" "Yes, dear." Can I get a what what? Now has anyone else noticed that meals served on caravans are terrible? Heyoooo! As for disrespectful children This particular procedure is popular enough an Arkansas state house candidate wanted to bring it back! Exodus 21:15 and 17 make it clear that punching your mom is a capital offense, as is cursing out your dad. Then again 16 says that stealing dudes and selling them is also a death sentence, which makes all the stuff about taking wives to be curious. Though it does specify men, not sweet, unwilling temptresses just begging for the sweet love that only an ancient Israelite can offer. Which just goes back to the problem. What in the Mosaic law counts? All of it? None of it? The fun parts? The parts that make sure people treat me with respect but justify my bombing abortion clinics and dragging gay people behind my pickup truck? It's hard to deny that there is hypocrisy there.
In your haste to mock you grossly distort things and are 99% ignorant both of the language of the text and the cultural context of the times. quod erat demonstrandum In v15, the hebrew word NAKAH indicates far more than your punch. "Strike" is the most mild English translation and you've chosen to tame it down further, but a full connotative translation of the word indicates "smite, strike, beat, scourge, kill, slay,attack, attack and destroy, conquer, subjugate, ravage, punish, destroy". With that full content of thought in mind, does v15 order capital punishment for a punch? Your homework assignment is to understand QALAL. Here's a hint: it's what you call "cursing out" from v17 and it doesn't mean anything even remotely approaching your translation. The reality contains far fewer lulz I'm afraid so it won't help your like ratio. Sad face. Extra credit for a comparison of GANAB ("kidnap" in v16) with BAZAZ, SHALAL, and other Hebrew roots used for capturing prisoners/women during war. Lulz goes down again, but hey intelligence goes up. It's a trade off. By the way I didn't go into details on every point you mentioned because I think this sampling shows a 100% fail ratio already, so no need. Who here has denied that? You're pulling a brettmcd by conjuring up claims that don't exist here. It's easy to agree that there should be more clarity in study and easy to say that those moral codes don't apply any more, but it's grossly ignorant and hypocritical to misrepresent them and then claim victory. You're doing exactly what the people you oppose are doing, just from the other side of the spectrum. That must make you uncomfortable.
The problem, shift6, is that the people who use the Bible as a weapon against gay people (or whomever they're trying to subjugate at the moment) don't possess that level of historical understanding. They think it's literally a magic book that somehow was written a thousand years ago yet is relevant to today. They don't understand the history of translation, the cultural context for words, or even how the books were written in the first place.
Oh man, how embarassing for you Bahimiron. I thought your lines of reasoning were familiar and checked a hunch; you've practically copied-and-pasted them from the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. Damn. You aren't even willing to do the legwork to justify your own position? No wonder the grossly misrepresentative hyperbole comes out. Reminds me of people who think Obama is a Kenyan Muslim because they read it on the internet. Yes, so that would be you and I agreeing. You know very well I've bemoaned that over the years including in this very thread.
.... so then it follows that it's fair game to attack the people who believe the words of the Bible are literal truth on those words, right? What I'm trying to say is: If somebody throws out a nasty bit from Leviticus as justification for murdering homosexuals, regardless if they understand the context of that passage or not, then it's completely fair to do what Bahimiron did.
Wow. I, uh, didn't even think I was being particularly nasty, but you went 110% condescending on me, shifty. So. Cool? I honestly wasn't attempting to call you out. Just point where the perception could be/is different. Trust me, I'm trying to be as nice as possible during Secret Santa season, lest I get a box of cool turds for Christmas. 'Tis the meaning. (Secret Santa: Please understand that I do not want a box of hot turds, either. Turds are right out.) And no, I didn't use the Skeptic's Bible, though I will admit that it is possible that those examples immediately came to mind because of having perused it in the past. I took most of my inspiration from those godless hippy radicals at the Bible Gateway. Was my purpose more in pursuit of yucks than facts? Probably. Though I don't think my point was lost, which is that the average guy, your average peer, only knows as much of the surface of the bible as he or she has read. Or, as is probably the case all too often, been told about. Or just developed a gut feeling on. Explaining the context of the original language is probably up there with witchcraft for some of these folks. It's elitest east coast thinkin'. And even if you ignore the 'rape and child murder' things, it still doesn't dismiss the hypocrisy of the guy who holds a sign citing Leviticus as his excuse for hating gays but doesn't do nearly as much about his mildew problems as he should. It's been a while since Hebrew school, so go ahead and explain the deeper meaning behind QABAL. Despite being bitched out, I'm still interested in learning. I double checked at the Hebrew concordance, but didn't come up with anything too enlightening.* Kind of my point. I guess I'm assuming here that the guy in Arkansas who wants to legalize the death penalty for sassy kids doesn't understand the full context of the words in the original language from which his good book was translated. I should have paid more attention to his 'Elohim is a verb!' bumper sticker than I did. And in that I am a failure. Edit: *Oh, QALAL. I wondered where you were coming from. Though I'm still not 100% certain, since I'd learned GANAB could be used to refer to both stealing and rape (or rather can cover either or both.) Which, since it's used in the commandments does actually mean that there is an explicit law against rape, but since it's also used in the description of how to treat females in war is suggestive of some inconstance in God's expectations of his people.
Honestly, I'd like to say yes and agree with you, but I don't. This is important enough of a topic for me that I don't prefer antagonizing sarcasm, intellectual dishonesty, etc. I guess to try and frame that, it would be the same if someone voted for gay marriage by saying "yeah, faggots should be able to marry" or someone talking about rape law saying "sluts and bitches don't deserve their nasty getting ask tore up." Being on the right side of the argument doesn't excuse (to me) that approach. Sorry bad analogy and typing on a difficult phone but there you go. If anything it weakens their side.
Member of my family posted this on their facebook wall: The first comment, from another member of my family, "typica, low class" I should have resisted the urge to respond, because now I'm 8 comments deep and realizing I'm going to have to crawl my way out of a FOX news bubble.
"And you Disrespect AMERICA by not Respecting THE AUTHORITY OF THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF! RESPECT HIS AUTHORITY!"
How much of a load of shit is that video? This is in the description: Did any of that actually happen, beyond the helicopter crash? I thought the identities of SEAL team members were pretty closely protected, not just bandied about on Youtube videos. No?
Man fuck typing on the phone. lol Fair enough, mea culpa. Think of this topic as a trigger for me. The verses, sure, but the "punching" or "cursing out" lines of reasoning didn't come from BG and appear to be highly correlated to SAB. The hypocrisy is, in my view, based on his ignorance of the issues not on his position. It is not hypocritical to say that civic codes are past but moral codes are still in effect. It might be wrong, it might be stupid, it might be outdated, but it isn't hypocritical. I apply precisely the same logic to those in opposition who ask: how can you want to kill the gays but not manage your mildew? Both come from ignorance. QALAL: treat with contempt, bring dishonor, make despicable, make contemptible; essentially the same word used when Jehovah says He will put a curse on the land, etc. The Greek LXX renders this word KAKOLOGON: to speak ill of, deride, abuse verbally. The implication to me is someone who ruins his family reputation through spreading ill will, false statements, etc. And perjury/lying was a pretty gross sin in the Mosaic Law (even being placed in the Ten Commandments) so this hearkens to that. No, in that he is a failure. I'm not the first guy to jump in an defend the politics of the deep south, but Chuck there lost his district 70% to 30%. Fellow Republican asshat Jon Hubbard also lost to his Democratic opponent. The big surprise: both these Republicans lost in a red state that largely flipped back to the Republican side! That should put some perspective on how popular their extremism is even among Conservative Republicans who don't have annotated critical Bibles.
It was well-documented that over 20 of the troops on the plane were SEALs. Anyways, here's the whole clusterfuck for posterity. New rules: Just put these people into a Facebook list called "Right Wing Bubble" and ignore them.
Right, but did this happen? "When the caskets of those who died were brought back to Dover Air Force Base the families collectively asked that President Obama NOT have cameras present. The families wanted to grieve and not be part of a political statement. President Obama could not resist such an appealing Photo Opportunity and lied to the families of fallen war heroes." That sounds like it was spun out of whole cloth. I'd expect we'd have heard about it very loudly for a very long time if it happened as described.
Baby steps, dude. You're not going to counter the mouth-breathing Letter To The Editor types who think this way by appealing to their love of historical lexicography. They don't care. They will happily make up a God who hates homosexuals and black people and, I don't know, non-supply side economists. Whether or not that God is true or not is completely meaningless to them, because they feel like it should be true, so it must be. We create God in our own image, after all. (As an aside, here's a fun little exercise that has gotten me into a pile of trouble in the past: When you meet one of these dumb-ass Christians, ask them if they remember what book of the Bible has the verse "God helps those who help themselves." I've gotten a lot of answers, but never the right one.) So for those people, using their own words against them is 100% fair game. You have to engage on a level they can understand. So to say, "Hey, why are you so hung up on this one passage about homosexuals while missing how much God apparently hates mildew in that same book?" is to at least try to get them to understand how much of the Bible they are cherry-picking. Once THAT happens, then MAYBE you can move on to "Oh, by the way, you know none of the books of the Gospel were written at the time of Christ's life, and none were written by eyewitnesses?" and all that fun stuff. PS: I know you already said that was a bad analogy, but it really is kind of a bad analogy. Getting somebody to admit that "faggots" should be allowed to marry is HUGE. Again, baby steps. PPS: I wrote all that before I saw your response to B, so excuse me if I'm fucking up a man-hug.
There were apparantly a few families like Vaughan's who asked the Pentagon that Obama not come and that there be no press. Whether or not the Pentagon agreed with Obama not coming I don't know, but supposedly they said there wouldn't be press.
Funny personal anecdote of irony: I used to think that. But then (some years ago) got crushed with titles like homophobe on That Other Forum by people for whom baby steps might as well be no steps because "separate but equal". I gradually came around to that point of view. Get in here you big galloot, my arms are open wide.
They came from my tendancy toward flippancy and no one else should be blamed. The problem with that is that the rules on mildew are moral codes, as are the rules on what you should eat and whether or not you should touch ladies while they're having their special time. Or rather they were moral codes and, at least when it comes to orthodox Jews, still are. We might look at it now and say 'well, that was a matter of disease', but for the priests at the time external purity was a reflection of internal purity, so physical cleanliness was spiritual cleanliness. Cleanliness and gay sex do fall under different parts of Leviticus, but it's not a matter of civil vs moral as much as it is a matter of cleanliness vs holy behavior. The holiness code itself is kind of split between A Dummy's Guide to Being an Israelite Priest (AKA Stop Playing That Trumpet, It's Yom Kippur And You Aren't Doing It Right!) and then also who you can and cannot take to the bone zone, but there's also some stuff about cursing your parents (again) and hanging out with wizards. I guess I just have an issue with making a distinction like 'civic codes' vs 'moral codes' when the book itself doesn't make those distinctions. At that point it's once again visiting a cafeteria and deciding 'all this stuff about not getting frisky with other dudes is good, but this other stuff about eating locusts is right out'. BUT! It is absolutely true what you said. In the mosaic covenant there is nothing about rape. In fact, if we assume the broader definition of GANAB, there is a law against rape. However the mitzvot of the mosaic covenant also say to celebrate Yom Kippur, no eating meat and cheese on the same plate, not to mix crops, to tithe to the poor (socialism!) and to put a guard rail around your roof if it is flat. So once again we have the same issue of the guy wearing some straight up shatnez with a short haircut and a tattoo who is holding up a sign that says "IT'S ADAM AND EVE NOT ADAM AND STEVE!" Edit: As I think harder, the provisions against sexual misconduct do fall under the yahareg veal yaavor which puts them on their own plane, up there with idolatry and murder. So. Enh. To a traditional Jew I guess it's not hypocrisy, but I have a hard time hearing it come from the mouth of someone who says every word of the Bible is written by God and it is all Universal Truth and Law. Additionally, this difference isn't from the Bible itself, but has been established by rabbinical scholars in the centuries since it was all written. And also I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the original disagreement, so NEVERMIND! Okay. I definitely get that this is bigger than curse out (once again, yucks) but you're still showing us that this quote indicates that if a kid dishonors his family, it should be okay to stone him to death. My nephew has done just about everything shitty to his mother that I care to imagine, from stealing from her to lying about her to her neighbors to ruining their family's reputation by basically being a druggy, deadbeat dad shithead. Based on this passage I feel like she should be dragging him out to the town elders. Is Jon Hubbard the one who said that Lincoln is a war criminal or is he the one who said that slavery was a blessing? And whichever one he is, did the other one also lose? I want in on the brodown. :( Edit: I got halfway through this and realized I couldn't remember what I was arguing. This should be taken as my concession and offering for everyone to have some strong spirits.
Can we just skip past the theology, which is to knowledge what masturbation is to sex, and skip to the point where we don't take moral pointers from bronze-age shephards?
Oh, shift6, you're doing it wrong: http://nogreaterjoy.org/articles/what-is-the-best-method-of-studying-the-bible/ Ok, I have nothing worthwhile to add to this discussion, I just wanted to throw that link out there because King James Onlyism is amusing.
Well I'm just going to have to Lumberg with you here. I believe the book does make those distinctions even though it doesn't title/bullet point them as we do in modern writing. (shrug) No harm no foul, really. Interesting that you bring that up, one of my wild ideas was to produce a basic-English translation of the New Testament epistles written in the format of modern letters instead of chapter-and-verse Bible stuff. Just to see if that aids a modern reader's understanding. Would be worthwhile to do the same for the OT too. lol yeah. Obviously the sexual mores have changed since we no longer allow banging one's sister-in-law to continue the lineage. As I said before (or meant to say anyway) acknowledging the historical context of the original morals paints in a vastly different light for understanding them, even if one still disagrees or thinks they should/should not be in effect today. Well again, I wasn't advocating agreeing with the law. I was advocating knowing what it said to the community that wrote/read it. I don't know the details, but yeah those two guys are the "stone your kids, expel the Muslims, slavery was a blessing" crowd. Dude, this brodown was for you. This is a silly line of thinking. Bronze-age shepherds had laws against theft and perjury, so should we assume that since such primitive people believed such things we can just skip them? Is it OK if non-shepherding bronze-agers had rules such as the code of Hammurabi? Yeah one of the most risible sub-groups. Some of them actually claim that St. Paul used the King James Bible by some miracle of Jesus the Whovian Timelord or something. Every group has its super-nutters I guess. Explanations are sadly missing in most theology these days. Even a few preachers who I think do a pretty good job in general bristle up a bit when asked questions. How much more those with real tenuous positions?
Actually I think taking our laws from a time when theft could be the difference between literal life and death is silly so yeah, I think we could be safe skipping their ideas on the matter and form new, more advanced, views. Just for giggles do a search for "Obama seal team six form letters" and you'll find OUTRAGE that Obama sent the family members form letters and how great George Bush and Cheney were for personally visiting family members and being there for returning corpses. So yeah: damned if he does; damned if he don't.
The problem with a detailed understanding of various Biblical injunctions, as I see it, is that it gets you no closer to knowing whether they are worth following or not. Some are so obviously true (best not to beat/kill/murder/torture/rape/enslave your mum, okay?) that I suppose you could take them at face value, but they add nothing to our moral understanding, or even, I should think, to pre-Biblical moral understanding. Others are so morally dubious, parochial and unsophisticated that taking them at face value would be disastrous, and they undermine the credibility of the Bible as a source of moral teaching. And others are so ambiguous in their definitions that it's difficult to see what the original moral injunction is at all. In other words having a perfectly sound theological understanding of the Bible does not get you to morality. All your work of deciding what the "bronze-age shepherds" got right and what they didn't is still ahead of you.
Yeah, I came across that while trying to refute the Biden Seal Team Six leak. Such fucking bullshit. Grrr.
No, silly would be debating theology. While primitive has become a pejorative word with rather racist connotations when speaking of people living in the world now whose societal development lacks behind our own I have absolutely no qualms about using it to describe a people thousands of years distant in time. Because that's what they were. Primitive in thought, primitive in societal development, primitive in judicial reasoning, primitive in their moral attitudes. When I say primitive in thought I do not mean that they were less intelligent than people are today, this is a frequent misconception and I feel I need to elaborate on it, I have no reason to believe they were any less intelligent than we are today. I say primitive because they had little in the way on institutions to promote thoughtful reasoning and even less in the way of a preserved body of knowledge of past people's reasoning that they could build on. People don't get new ideas out of thin air, they build on existing ideas and concepts when they make new ones. We have a lot more material to build with, a lot more ideas to take into consideration, than they did. These primitive peoples, feel free to include the Babylonians if you like, have nothing to teach us about matters of law. We've long since examined "an eye for an eye", found it to be an abominable legal concept, and discarded it in favour of laws that better reflect our society, our evolution of thought, and our morals. But all this is a bit of a side-track, I was talking about morality when you seemed to want to talk about law. Not that it changes my argument any, the same principles apply. They have nothing to teach us because most of their basic assumptions lead in directions we have already explored and found lacking.
I don't think primitive is a useful category for culture, as in Western traditions as well as many others it's derived from a relatively faulty and problematic concept historically. You can try to reclaim the word, I guess, but I don't think it's worth the effort when you can easily get your message across without attaching an explanation of what sub-variant of primitiveness you are referencing. "Nothing" to teach us is also an important oversimplification. Morality, ethics, and the legal concepts that enforce them are not fixed in time as right and wrong, and it can be productive to look at how they evolve over time and change in different directions. I don't want to emulate bronze age shepherds, Babylonians, New England Puritans, or 1950s WASPs, but I can learn a great deal from how they approached notions of right and wrong and how taboos were defined in their culture. A lot of times it takes that sort of distance from the subject that early historical models afford to provide us with the critical perspective necessary to look at our own social mores in a way that acknowledges their mutability and how individuals and groups within a society negotiate those changes. It goes without saying that I agree that using the bible as a source for modern legal concepts is on its face an absurd notion; I'm talking about thinking historically not about what should be admissible in court as a relevant precedent or authority. But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
An academic saying "I can learn from the morality of the 1950s" is very different from a politician saying "we can learn from the morality of the 1950s." Just to toss my hat in the nit-picking ring here.
Primitive isn't a term i would use normally, hell, I wasn't even the one who introduced it to the discussion, but I don't think it's inappropriate to use about a bronze-age society five thousand years in the past. I'm not wedded to the terminology though and I'd rather focus on the core issue which is that bronze-age morality does not serve as anything but the most superficial guide to how we should conduct ourselves today. This is not to say that I'm above taking a historical approach to the subject because, as you say, tracking how these concepts change and evolve can teach us a lot about how people approach them in different contexts. But when I say we shouldn't take moral pointers I mean taking these concepts at face value.
Seeing this first sentence as a kind of summary of the rest of what you wrote: I couldn't possibly disagree more. You are essentially saying that there's no value in knowing what something actually says/means before figuring out if it is worthwhile or not; put differently, we can take a position on an issue without even knowing what the issue really is. I can only assume I'm missing your meaning here or something. Either that or you are applying a specific framework to Biblical statements that you don't apply to other ones (for instance, an treatise on social justice by Rawls).
Okay, my two cents (using my anthropology degree). Calling a bronze age people primitive or socially undeveloped is to me like petting a cat backwards. From what we can find from the archeological record, digging stuff up and translating various text, they (Fertile Crescent societies and such) had very rich and complex societies and sets of rules governing everything from societal to religious life. To say that they are somehow less than us modern people is to say the !Kung of South Africa are somehow less than us Americans. They had different values from us sure, but that doesn't make them lesser beings somehow (that's generally what primitive is used to mean and why it's use was frowned upon when I was in school). Sorry, I'll get off my soap box now.
I think that's a misreading of what he's saying. It seems to me he's saying is that the Bible has the same authority as (for instance) Rawls or any other treatise in terms of its value as a code of ethics as written by a human, which is to say that it gets judged on its merits rather than an assumption of supernatural origin. The theological debates are interesting as an intellectual history but largely tangential in assessing its utility. This leaves you with the difficult task of engineering a compromise between modernity and the occasionally monstrous, occasionally obvious, sometimes interesting insights of an ancient text. That's where intellectual history has a much more coherent way of organizing ideas relative to their time than theology and philosophy in terms of assessing their ethical relevance to a person today. The latter two have a lot to offer in terms of the absolute contest of ideas outside of time, but when removed from that academic discourse lead to looney tunes. Ask Ayn Rand about how Aristotle was "right" outside of his own time, and it's easy to see how the same logic does many religious thinkers no favors. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of deep and interesting ideas to be explored in ancient texts and theological writings, but it becomes really problematic and potentially deceptively authoritative when the veneer of academicization is applied to religion without the necessary detachment from the mandate of a god. It's like trying to play the game of reasoned argument while assuming all along that the fundamental rules are above and beyond reason.
You make a good point, and I want to elaborate on it: Our comparison of values is flawed from the start. To start with, there's the problem of outlining what we consider our modern ages values in an age where "legitimate" rape seems to be a worthwhile topic of discussion for millions of people. I think the concept of values as both a phrase and starting point of epistemological study is inherently useless - there's such a diversity of opinion and culture in this day and age, what can we really say our "values" are? We can point to our advances, such as gay marriage, but looking back on the historical record that used to not be a big deal. Our "values", in the particular case of gay marriage, are based on fairly recent (within the last thousand years) history in England of suppression and repression of homosexuality as a practice and a concept. Transplant this conflict to a pre-Roman "middle eastern" society and you get the hypocritical farce of evangelical christians proclaiming their desire for both smaller government and for the government to aid in their repression. This is entirely without getting into the difficulties of forming a basis of "ancient" values. These things are not simply a matter of historical record. They are pieced together, often from individual written works and religious artwork. In the first case, when the authors themselves were all representative of moneyed, leisure-endowed upper class, our framework is already suspect. Throw in obviously biased viewpoints (such emperors writing their memoirs, Josephus justifying his treason), and leaves us with, at best, what a couple of guys thought about the world around them. That's like gauging the "mood" of the internet by surveying a particular selection of blogs. I'm not even going to get into the difficulties inherent in trying to gauge Roman societal mores and class through their wallpaper. If there is any useful study to be done, it really, really should be done at some other level than culture vs. culture. Clearly, this is a topic fit only for reality television.
