Thanks Christians, you can shove that bible right up your collective asses.
You know why? When the Bible was written, crimes against children were considered property crimes against their father. Thou shalt not steal, and thou shalt not covet, both indirectly protect kids about as much as they’re intended to. Which isn’t much.
Interesting take, and not entirely wrong either imo. Though, I think the real reason is simply that such a commandment wasn’t necessary, because it was already implied from the very beginning. God gave Adam and Eve the mandate to care for his creation, and in conjunction with the fact that “Love the Lord your God” is the very first commandment (which means to follow his commandments), respecting the people that God created in his image would have absolutely unquestionable in the mind of the ancient Israelites.
The really hard to accept part is how this respect for what God made included the destruction of what is not of him, which included people. It’s a very alien concept to us today in our culture. The important part is that what you read in the Bible (esp. the Old Testament) cannot be taken at face value. Everything is seeped in historical context that often makes things seem at a glance to be the opposite of what they actually are. The translation from Hebrew and Greek compounds this problem.
TL;DR: If you want to take solace in confirmation bias, it’s not hard to do, and to blame you for doing so would be incredibly hypocritical of me. Remaining truly objective is the most grueling exercise in self-awareness and accepting uncomfortable possibilities anyone could ever undertake.
Interesting perspective. But yeah it seems like they danced all around the subject altogether.
Just as they don’t mention animal abuse, those morals don’t keep people in line.
Indeed, and really there ought to be a few more commandments, such as:
‘Thou shalt not abuse earthly environmental resources beyond necessity’
Or something like that anyways. Really, if there’s only 10 commandments, they should be simplified and boiled down to only a couple or few commandments or so that encapsulate them all, as the late George Carlin presented…
Here’s another one based on the general conversation here:
Thou shalt not exploit or abuse a vulnerable person or creature.
Open to some interpretation, of course. But concise enough to cover the brush strokes if those who are obsessed with the Ten Commandments were to really follow through on implementing them.
I’d replace ‘a vulnerable’ with simply ‘any’, to be more broad about it, almost nobody deserves abuse.
Well, except serial killers, cannibals, leaders that orchestrate genocide, etc. in the worst of the worst fields of evil people. I’m not God, I’ll turn a blind eye to giving them a dose of their own medicine…
The ten commandments are just part of the whole.
They do talk about animal abuse, along with slave prices, death penalty etc.
See Deuteronomy. Very fun read.
When the Bible was written is a very abstract concept covering a large timeframe
The ten commandments are a old testament thing, textually written by Moses as he attempted to copy the ones God had written and that Moses shattered after the golden calf.
Christianity extended the Jewish scripture with the gospels, which include a story where God Himself Slumming As A Human was asked what the most important part of the law was, and Jesus said “love” twice.
If “love everyone as you love yourself” doesn’t lead you to not abusing children, I don’t think any book of good behavior is going to stop you.
The letter J wasn’t even invented until the year 1524AD, so as a logical person, I think it’s all a load of horseshit written by people after the year 1524, not all that long in historical context to the invention of the printing press in 1440, to brainwash and control the masses as they gradually started teaching average people how to read.
Government + Vatican = control of the people…
I share to a certain extent your skepticism towards the good book and religion as a whole. I don’t think your letter j argument holds any water though. The first uses of the letter j were as i’s to make them more legible in handwritten words. And it took time until scribes started using it as a separate letter. The sounds they meant to connote already existed. Julius Caesar was just Iulius Caesar. I agree with you that religion can be used as a tool to control the masses. Just don’t make any logical leaps based on English spelling in particular, which makes no fucking sense to begin with.
I mean, we still have INRI on most crosses right? There are plenty of other reasons to be critical of how Christianity was institutionalized and the Bible assembled but the whole letter J thing doesn’t really hold any water.
My logic is simple…
STOP OBSESSING WITH ANCIENT HISTORY AND LOOK AT WHATS GOING ON TODAY, under the guise of religion…
“Jesus must be a myth because the English J was only invented in the 1500s” may well be the dumbest argument against the historical Jesus that anyone has ever made.
You are of course entirely free to doubt his divinity or the existence of God, but asseting that both the religion founded by his teachings and the 1s century rabbi were invented after Columbus’s voyage is just bad history.
I never said Jesus never existed, but also I have no reason to believe he was any better or worse than any other innocent person murdered by the government of the time.
To obsess about one single person killed by corrupt government over 2000 years ago is to ignore the genocide going on today. ☹️
The significance of Jesus is the movement he spawned. I’m not talking about the Catholic church as it was codified by the Romans a few centuries after his death, but about the movement of Jesus which spread far and wide directly after he died. This movement flourished not by the blade and the authority of oppressive regimes, but because it simply spoke deeply to people, especially the poor and disenfranchised. This kind of thing only happened a handful of times during history.
He was important because he created a blueprint for resistance of the oppressed, in a time where such resistance was a very hard sell because it went so contrary to the norms and cultures.
People and cultures have very different ideas about what constitutes abuse of children. Some cultures would consider it abusive not to cut off parts of their children’s genitals.
What’s your relationship with proverbs 13:24?
I don’t feel bound by any part of the system of violent punishments that Jesus rebuked. Especially not one line which wasn’t even from either listing of the Jewish law in the Torah.
OTOH, there is something to be said for actually teaching children to behave. Using a rod to spank children is a failure of patenting, but so is letting your kid run around the restaurant making a mess because you can’t bear to rebuke them.
(And, again: Proverbs is a pre-Christian work that was incorporated by the gentike Christians when they formalized a canon for the Roman empire.)
So how much child beating is necessary for it to not be hating a child? How much/little is abuse?
Beating children is not an effective way to get them to behave. But people didn’t know that (and still don’t) so they thought/think they need to beat good behaviour into their kids.
Do you want to have a real discussion about morality and religious teaching, or are you just in search of an gotcha quote because you feel the need to reinforce your theocratic nihilism by arguing with a theist on the internet?
I mean I guess you got me, I was being a dick.
I am genuinely interested, but I wasn’t acting like it, I was being needlessly provocative.
I’ve been learning a lot about Christian history but I’m frustrated because it (Christianity) doesn’t really make sense.
I think a good pointer when you want to approach religion from a sane perspective is to treat it as primitive tech. For example, modern people know that you need to separate science from politics from law from history from psychology etc… and have a different system for each. But pre-modern people didn’t necessarily know that, so religious doctrine had to serve several, sometimes incompatible purposes. You look at it and it’s like a shovel that has a hammer on it and part of the hammer can be used as a screwdriver. It makes no sense but at the same time it kinda does and it sure has dug a lot of holes and tightened a lot of screws over millennia.
A comparison of religion to legal systems is both only a sensible comparison to the three Abrahamic religions and incredibly useful for those three. (Other religions such as Buddhism are more starkly personal).
Essentially no Christian, Muslim, or Jew in any century takes the common scripture and reads it like an RPG manual for the game of life. Either they’re laypersons who rely upon the guidance of experts, or they’re the experts and they approach it with the advantage and bias of the years of study it took to become experts. And if those experts are wrong, there is always some authority to correct and rebuke their interpretation.
Ignoring the Protestant schism for a moment, this is exactly how the USA’s legal system works. The body of written law and judicial interpretation are extremely complex and nobody relies only on the plain text of the law when they want to figure out how it affects them. Even the crazy sovereign citizens mostly rely on someone else’s interpretation.
(And “sane” isn’t really a helpful label here. It encourages atheists to think about Christians as if the latter are entirely unpredictable and unreasonable, when it’s much more useful to think of us as mostly rational people who have a philosophical difference with you. More akin to the leftist/progressive/liberal/socialist discussion you can see on Lemmy than a MAGA/non-MAGA encounter.)
Neither in Judaism nor Christianity are the Ten Commandments the only religious rules that exist.
Well 10 commandments are part of Deuteronomy, older than christian religion, and the book was nitpicked by those who institutionalized Christianity.
Even before then. They’re originally listed in Exodus. Fun fact, after the tablet smashing incident when Moses goes back up the mountain to get a new set carved in Exodus 32, several of those listed by god in the process of creating the replacements are different from the first ten. Depending on where you split the clauses, there are as many as 18 commandments between the first and the second sets.
Deuteronomy is a recap, including only the first ten, but also manages get the explanation for the sabbath wrong as compared to previous chapters. Then it goes on to claim “these are the ten commandments and god added no more” which as we just saw is an untruth.
Even in Ye Olde Testament Times, an effort was afoot to deliberately mutate the terms and conditions in order to suit the current authority.
Forgot about that. I usually focus on Deuteronomy as it is really, very “fun”
Depending on where you split the clauses, there are as many as 18 commandments
And here I thought it was fifteen.
“Ye Olde Testament”?
Its not ‘ye’, its ‘þe’, the thorn character, pronounced today as it always was, ‘the’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
So educate yourself, and please drop all that ‘ye’ shit, all articles that reference ye are incorrect. ‘ye’ is a mistranslation itself.
Ight CM, take my upvote and go smoke a joint.
I was obviously being deliberately facetious. Relax.
💩👍
You think the bible was written in English…?
No shit Watson, it was written in Hebrew.
YHWH
No shit, the christian bible is absolute trash. Teaches you how to treat your slaves, can rape women, sell your daughter for foreskins. Daughters get their dad drunk and rape him. People that believe that shit have ZERO place in my life, and I will judge you. You can’t have critical thinking and believe skydaddy is there with a grand plan while children are being raped, people murdered and diseases running rampant. Absolute disgrace of a leader.
If it’s gods will, why the fuck are you praying? Are you telling your God he’s wrong? What was his plan for babies born missing their skin? Was that a punishment for their parents? Why is God hanging out on the field for your favorite team and not helping feed starving, innocent children? If you can answer these questions with a straight face, you’re a terrible human being and deserve to burn for it.
I hope you can find peace and forgive whoever hurt you so bad.
I’m perfectly fine. Hearing about all these “men of God” molesting kids and acting like believing in God makes them better than everyone else is pretty ridiculous.
Damn homie, you wanna go get a beer and watch the world burn?
Shit’s fucked up ain’t it?
“Thou shalt not rape” just didn’t make it onto the top 10 list.
Did they even have a definition of ‘rape’ back in biblical times?
Sorry I’m not exactly a biblical expert, but I refuse to believe that Jesus’ mother Mary was a virgin, someone had to have fucked her over 2000 years ago.
Please mods don’t crucify me for this comment…
Rape is mentioned in Deuteronomy of course.
Or “Thou shalt not own slaves” Instead the bible deity explicitly advocated for it and allows you to beat their ass as long as they don’t die. Bible deity is a piece of shit!
It’s on the 5 that Moses dropped.
That’s why the Republicans want them in classrooms, instead of “love thy neighbour as thyself”. Because that would imply that racism is bad, and that’s something they do not want to hear.
The bible is cherry picked to hell. Christians that actually read their holy book can justify racism, as their deity explicitly advocates for slavery in the bible. Slaves are property and not neighbors in their holy book. The bible is trash, and people should be wiping their asses with it instead.
So, like many people, have completely not understood how this bible and Christianity thing works.
The ten commandments, together with the other laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy, are part of the old covenant. The key thing of Christianity is that Jesus set up a new covenant, replacing the old with the simple formula “love thy neighbor like thyself”. The old ten commandments (at least 4-10) can be seen as an interpretation of that new covenant. Many of the other laws of the Pentateuch, like the slavery laws, not so much.
Then the old testament should just be tosses out. Obsolete. Instead, it’s cherry picked. The bible is complete trash.
I mean, there’s only ten of them. It’s not called God’s Comprehensive List of All 283092893936 Immoral Actions.
“Father, bless me for I have sinned, I did an original sin… I poked a badger with a spoon.” –Eddie Izzard
Technically there was mention about abusing children sexually as a sin, but they changed it to being gay is a sin. Saying the quiet part out loud.
Which commandment is that? Which number, cos neither of those is in any list of the 10 commandments ive ever seen.
Might I suggest 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture
No you might not. I asked a really simple question, you should be able to answer it in one word, or better yet by providing the book, chapter and verse.
Just because it’s not spelled out, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Critique made without a genuine effort to understand the cultural and historical context isn’t worth much.
Very first commandment (as summarized by Jesus) is “Love the Lord your God.” Combine that with the mandate to Adam and Eve to care for God’s creation, and the core tenant of Judaism that loving God implies obedience, and the concept of respecting that of his creation which bears his image becomes immediately obvious.
I don’t give a shit about cultural and historical significance, when today is what counts, and the leaders and oligarchs in charge that supposedly believe in Christian faith are actively committing genocide, bombing schools of children, and they’re entangled in a pedo ring…
If this is what the Bible is all about, ‘fOrgIVe mE faThER fOr i haVe sinNeD’ is all about, then fuckit, burn the bible and start a new belief system that actually makes sense and respects people in general, rather than abusing and killing them en masse and destroying the ‘holy land’.
What’s holy about the land anyways, ancient history, or the bomb craters today?
Sorry, Jesus ain’t coming back to save anyone, people need to put down their arms and go home to serve and protect their families. Jesus didn’t have a gun, and even if he did, he most likely wouldn’t have used it.
Fuckall with war in the name of the invisible man in the sky.
One could say that’s what the New Testament is, and Jesus put a lot of focus on loving others. The two commandments, which the ten are built upon, is pretty comprehensive. But don’t worry, people will find a way to excuse bad behavior if they really want to do it. If it isn’t religion, it will be nationalism, race, culture, which direction the bill of your cap faces, or if the color of your socks match.
My cap always faces forward, as designed to be used, to block sunlight from the eyes. But wait, my socks are different lengths and one is lighter than the other?
Fuck, RUN!!!
The true heathens are the people with their cap on backwards, shading their eyes from the sun with their hands.
Eh, not as much as you’d think. The back of your neck near the brainstem is crucial to temperature regulation. That’s why the go-to advice to alleviate heat stress is putting something cool like a wet towel around your neck. During midday when the sun is highest, keeping the sun off the back of your neck may well keep you cooler than keeping it off your face. Using your hands to shield your eyes occasionally looks a heck of a lot less dumb than keeping your hands up to shield the back of your neck.
Moral of the story, baseball hats are great for watching baseball, where you’re sitting facing one direction the whole time and can orient them accordingly. For general outdoor work, a sun hat with a neck flap is waaayyy better.
Oof, yeah you got a point there, I’ll never understand that.
The only time I tilt my cap is to follow and block the sunlight wherever I happen to be sitting. Backwards is never the answer.
I don’t give a shit about cultural and historical significance
What’s holy about the land anyways?
So do you wanna know or not…?
I don’t care about the cultural and historical significance, but I do understand that many other people do care, and that’s okay with me. At least I ain’t about bombing the area and trying to kill everyone.
But riddle me this, if the land is so holy and sacred, then why are people literally destroying all the culture and history they supposedly care about? Is the ‘holy land’ meant to be a pile of rubble and dead bodies?
I’m not a religious person, but I don’t see that as sacred land at all, I see that as absolute hell, quite the opposite of anything even remotely sacred anymore.
So, I don’t care who lived there thousands of years ago, there’s absolutely no excuse for war, genocide and destruction, period.
Real quick Google, absolutely none of this information vetted so take it with a pinch of salt.
10 commandments written around 1300-1600 BCE. Average life expectancy 20-35 years.
You’re not an adult for very long before you snuff it, and if you wanna have kids you gotta start as early as possible.
Average “life expectancy” in the past is misleading because it is skewed by high rates of infant/child mortality. If you made it to past your first few years, you stood a much better likelihood of reaching old age.
Average life expectancy and common life span doesn’t really correlate. As a simplified example, if half of babies die before their first year, and everyone else lives to 60, average life expectancy would be 30.
Life Expectancy ≠ Reproductive Years
Menopause is unfortunately a thing…
Sure but menopause doesn’t hit at 35 which is when the person I’m responding to thinks most people just died at.
Someone has been burned by Christians it seems
I’ll confirm that for you, particularly the Pentecostals.
They were neighbors of mine within spitting distance, and yet like 2 years before my father passed away, they were trying to talk with me behind his back to acquire his land.
A part of me wanted to burn their fucking house down over that, but I’m better than that. After daddy passed, they acquired the land that I was supposed to inherit (about 1 acre), and threw out all our stuff.
I only got like less than 5% of the stuff I hoped to retrieve. Fuck, they even sold my registered to me motorhome to local meth heads for scrap when I was out of town.
So yeah, to say I was burned by Christians says the least. But it’s water off my back, I seek no revenge, that would just make me worse than them.
☹️
There sounds like there’s a lot missing here, and calling your father “Daddy” is weird.
Daddy refused the term ‘father’, as father is God, so I was forced to call him dad or daddy.
Yes there’s a bit missing here, I’d rather not go over all the abuse I went through.
Please go to therapy
Therapist died like 2 decades ago, what do with no insurance?
How is this the fault of all Christians?
I never said it was the fault of all Christians. Just the fault of Pentecostals and Mormans…
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The higher ed institution I work for is installing them in every classroom per a state law. Smh
Phuck ☹️
I wouldn’t blame you or anyone really if people started printing out and installing a sticker paper banner under such displays that says something like…
“11 - Thou shalt protect the children at all times”
LOL, I did actually link that somewhere in the comments. 👍
Damn bro you really owned em
