8 ms·

This demonstrates the big flaw of Christianity. Even thought there are millions of sincere, loving and friendly Christians around the world, the whole thing is

This demonstrates the big flaw of Christianity. Even thought there are millions of sincere, loving and friendly Christians around the world, the whole thing is based around a book that espouses views that are exactly what you call fundamentalism. Sooner or later someone will be confronted with the fundamentalist ideas about women, non-christians, and sexual diversity (for example), and start spreading the hate ideas contained in parts of that book.

mrfusion 6y ago
Are there clear examples of that in the Bible (New Testament) or is it just how people interpret it? Edit. I’m not challenging or arguing any point. I was genuinely curious.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jazzyb 6y ago
  Women shouldn't speak in church: https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/14-34.htm https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/14-34.htm Homosexuality is unnatural: https://www.biblestudytools.com/romans/1-27.html https://www.biblestudytools.com/romans/1-27.html
  - m0llusk 6y ago
    There are real issues there, but the homosexuality quote is one of the "big eight" anti gay quotes that come up often and turn out to be misunderstood or translation errors that don't hold up to serious scrutiny. Homosexuality as we know it today was not well known or named at the time that text was written, just to start. Searching for the "big eight" helps both with that specifically and the general business of understanding how ancient stories get misunderstood by our modern news clip processing habits.
- kaesar14 6y ago
  Eph 22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Cor 33 For God is not a God of disorder but of peace—as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people. 34 Women[a] should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. Tim 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[a] she must be quiet. I think those constitute clear sexism and/or misogyny?
  - dawg- 6y ago
    There are many different ways to read the bible. Mainly, the bible is not a literal instructional manual unless you are a fundamentalist. And fundamentalists suck. For others, it's a written record of humanity's relationship with God. It's also a collection of writings from a number of different authors and genres - it has history, poetry, letters, and so on. The old testament was written by people thousands of years ago who had an imperfect understanding of God, nature, humans, society, etc. In large part, the story of Jesus demonstrates how we should reject those archaic rules of our ancestors and act according to very simple principles; nonviolence, love for God, and love for all humans.
    - kaesar14 6y ago
      I have no real bone to pick with Christianity. The asking comment was for examples of sexism and misogyny in the Bible which I provided.
  - cat199 6y ago
    Ah yes, the old 'ephesians is mysogyny' out-of-context quote, which always manages to completely omit the lines which follow: Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.1 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 o“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. won't get into the others, i'm quite sure there are cohesive rebukes / contextualization elsewhere
- yonaguska 6y ago
  The New Testament is often mistakenly touted as a "reformation" from the Old Testament, and cherry-picked apart into a more progressive form of Christianity, but, it's not all that different from the Old Testament in actuality. New Testament also defines dress codes for women and re-affirms a patriarchal family heirarchy.
  - AuthorizedCust 6y ago
    > it's not all that different from the Old Testament in actuality Um, have you actually read them? They are miles apart. Can you find me the reams of legal codes or origin stories in the New Testament, for example?
    - sudosteph 6y ago
      Agree completely. While both texts do largely focus on people of Jewish origins, there is not a lot of actual overlap on content. Some of the NT books are seen as prophetical, so that lines up to some degree - but even those read very different. It's not just content that differs either - the literary style of the NT also deviates greatly, since it borrows much more from hellenized culture than the OT. Especially the synoptic gospels. For example, John, was composed using a layered "onion" type narrative structure which was popular in other greek texts. They're even so different, that one form of heresy that was more common back in the day (Gnosticism), would sometimes claim that the OT deity was a false-god (the demiurge), because how else do you explain such a personality change?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Taking the scriptures literally and limiting yourself only to direct recommendations from New Testament (i.e. no backlinking to Old Testament), at the very least, treatment of women in New Testament is pretty old-school patriarchal[0]. It's interesting to observe the ways various Christian groups try to navigate their way around gender roles in their communities. You have a full spectrum here. From some fundamentalist US churches that will take everything super-literally, through groups like Jehovah's Witnesses[1] who sort-of take this literally, but make reasonable exceptions[2], through Catholics in Western countries, where most believers probably haven't even heard or thought about these passages, and any semblance of adhering to them is likely seen as more traditional than religious - all the way to lenient Christian groups that allow women priests. In my experience, all Christianity is like this. Every group in every location[3] has their own specific understanding of which words are to be taken literally, which ones figuratively (and to what degree), and which ones to be completely ignored. -- [0] - E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Timothy_2:12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Timothy_2:12, https://www.openbible.info/topics/head_coverings https://www.openbible.info/topics/head_coverings and related references - literally, women should not teach, not usurp authority of a man, should wear head covering when performing the subset of religious functions they're allowed to, etc. [1] - If I seem to focus on JWs too much in this thread, that's because I spent 20 years being one. [2] - E.g. over at Jehovah's Witnesses, there's a lot that would technically qualify as "praying or prophesising" where women are't required to cover their heads, and men are not required to uncover theirs. Also definition of "cover" is "with a hat or similar", probably not what the authors had in mind. [3] - As I understand it, Catholics in the West and in Africa are essentially two different religions. The former, having lived with it for centuries, ignore or pay lip service to all the rules that the latter obey to the letter.
  - AuthorizedCust 6y ago
    > treatment of women in New Testament is pretty old-school patriarchal It reflects the mores of the times, which were different than ours. People 2000 years from now will certainly look at us and be aghast at some of our norms. My denomination has had woman pastors since the mid 1800s.
- sudosteph 6y ago
  There are, but it's worth noting that they are all quotes from Paul, not Jesus.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    You mean, the same Jesus who appointed only men to be his disciples, while the women in his entourage were servants? It seems that Paul was just putting into words his practice.
    - sudosteph 6y ago
      Funny you mention that! Yes, the four gospels that were canonized by a patriarchal church organization do seem to paint a picture like that. But the Gospel of Thomas, and other ancient "heretical" texts tell a different story, where Jesus explicitly acknowledgd women as equals and Mary as the favorite disciple. So even some very early Christians would disagree with Paul here.
barnesto 6y ago
Why are you singling out Christianity? The same could be said for any of the book based religions.
- coliveira 6y ago
  I know, but the concern about Christianity is that it is a majority religion in the West, with strong political power. This has to be focus at least where I live.
mikepurvis 6y ago
> the whole thing is based around a book that espouses views that are exactly what you call fundamentalism But I think your degree of fundamentalism-ness is defined by your relationship to that book. If you see it as completely inerrant, then yeah, you're instantly in trouble because it can be trivially shown to be in self-conflict. If you're willing to examine the book critically and in context, you do a lot better. Obviously the risk with this is that those doing that interpretation are entrusted with a lot of power over what people believe. But I think there's a middle ground here between the medieval Catholicism that the reformation reacted against (where the Word is obscured to the point that even the secondary texts like the liturgies weren't given in the vernacular) and the rugged individualism of modern evangelicals (where it's Bible-or-bust and writers like Rob Bell are excommunicated for daring to suggest that universalism might actually be consistent with the character of Jesus). I would see this wide middle ground as a place where we agree on a very short list of actual fundamentals (something like the Nicene Creed, basically), and other than that people are free to study and believe what they want, as long as it isn't hurting others.
- coliveira 6y ago
  > If you're willing to examine the book critically and in context, you do a lot better. Yeah, but in that case you have to concede that the Bible is not miraculous inspired, so why is it any better than other books such as the Vedas or the Iliad? This is the whole problem in the foundation of religion. It also shows the blindsight of progressive Christians: they're following a religion that at the foundation goes against things they believe. For example, new testament writers say that Jesus came to save from the sin of Adam, but if no Adam and Eve existed, the explanation does't work anymore.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    I don't think a literal Adam is necessary for the "sin of Adam" to be a thing, particularly if you're in a mindset already where the purpose of Christ's time on Earth was to establish a kingdom, rather than just to deliver some pleasant homilies and maybe troll a few pharisees on the way to his real intention, which was dying and being resurrected. In any case, the Bible can absolutely be miraculously inspired and still be subject to critical examination. Looking at the history of how the individual books have been studied, translated, and selected, it's obvious that the text itself had always been very much interwoven with academia and tradition.
tdozi 6y ago
I would posit that the most fundamental idea in the Bible is that humanity has fundamentally continued to be selfish and prideful while God has continually chosen to extend grace and keep his promises to people (mainly covered in the Old Testament). He dis this to the ultimate extent by living with us and dying on the cross so that all of the promises could be fulfilled once and for all (new testament). It is exactly the selfish and prideful that decide to leverage select words/passages/ideas out of context for their own power over others rather than their inward correction of self. Lastly, I’d add that many of the passages/letters written were to the audience of CHRISTIANS. I bible doesn’t really demand that non-Christians apply any of this to their lives until the first foundational stone is set. Paul even writes to this effect in 1st Corinthians.
prewett 6y ago
The fundamentalist interpretation is only one way to read the biblical text, and it tends to ignore the context the text was written for. Women: Jesus' ministry was financially supported by women. Jesus explicitly did not condemn the woman caught in adultery like the Pharisees did although he did not condone her conduct, either. Jesus taught to women (e.g. Mary, Martha's sister) while the rabbis forbid it; one rabbi said he would rather burn the Torah than teach to a woman, and the Torah was so sacred that they put old unusable Torah scrolls in the walls of the synagogue rather than the trash. A woman dealing in purple cloth hosted one of the early churches (and probably led it after Paul left). A woman is mentioned with the title apostle. Homosexuality: nowhere does the Bible hate homosexuals. It says that it is a harmful behavior and is not to be tolerated in God's people because it leads to death. It is not "hate" to consider someone's behavior unhealthy, or even to disapprove of someone's behavior. We don't "hate" thieves because we disapprove of thievery. In fact, most people hate thievery and think it is so harmful to society that it should be repressed, but it does not mean we must hate thieves. American LGBTQetc seem to require love to look like complete acceptance and consider anything else as "intolerance", but that is a false dichotomy.
- lalaland1125 6y ago
  Jesus might not have been anti-women, but the New Testament certainly is. > A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
  - unpolloloco 6y ago
    In particular, Paul (one of the writers) was - take that as you will. Overall, it's generally extremely progressive (for its time and context!).
    - lalaland1125 6y ago
      > for its time and context!. The problem is that people are applying the morality of the Bible in the modern era when it's clearly outdated. Biblical morality is clearly not correct now on a number of issues (divorce, gay rights, etc, etc).

mrfusion 6y ago

Are there clear examples of that in the Bible (New Testament) or is it just how people interpret it? Edit. I’m not challenging or arguing any point. I was genuinely curious.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jazzyb 6y ago
Women shouldn't speak in church: https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/14-34.htm https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/14-34.htm Homosexuality is unnatural: https://www.biblestudytools.com/romans/1-27.html https://www.biblestudytools.com/romans/1-27.html
- m0llusk 6y ago
  There are real issues there, but the homosexuality quote is one of the "big eight" anti gay quotes that come up often and turn out to be misunderstood or translation errors that don't hold up to serious scrutiny. Homosexuality as we know it today was not well known or named at the time that text was written, just to start. Searching for the "big eight" helps both with that specifically and the general business of understanding how ancient stories get misunderstood by our modern news clip processing habits.
kaesar14 6y ago
Eph 22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Cor 33 For God is not a God of disorder but of peace—as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people. 34 Women[a] should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. Tim 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[a] she must be quiet. I think those constitute clear sexism and/or misogyny?
- dawg- 6y ago
  There are many different ways to read the bible. Mainly, the bible is not a literal instructional manual unless you are a fundamentalist. And fundamentalists suck. For others, it's a written record of humanity's relationship with God. It's also a collection of writings from a number of different authors and genres - it has history, poetry, letters, and so on. The old testament was written by people thousands of years ago who had an imperfect understanding of God, nature, humans, society, etc. In large part, the story of Jesus demonstrates how we should reject those archaic rules of our ancestors and act according to very simple principles; nonviolence, love for God, and love for all humans.
  - kaesar14 6y ago
    I have no real bone to pick with Christianity. The asking comment was for examples of sexism and misogyny in the Bible which I provided.
- cat199 6y ago
  Ah yes, the old 'ephesians is mysogyny' out-of-context quote, which always manages to completely omit the lines which follow: Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.1 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 o“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. won't get into the others, i'm quite sure there are cohesive rebukes / contextualization elsewhere
yonaguska 6y ago
The New Testament is often mistakenly touted as a "reformation" from the Old Testament, and cherry-picked apart into a more progressive form of Christianity, but, it's not all that different from the Old Testament in actuality. New Testament also defines dress codes for women and re-affirms a patriarchal family heirarchy.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  > it's not all that different from the Old Testament in actuality Um, have you actually read them? They are miles apart. Can you find me the reams of legal codes or origin stories in the New Testament, for example?
  - sudosteph 6y ago
    Agree completely. While both texts do largely focus on people of Jewish origins, there is not a lot of actual overlap on content. Some of the NT books are seen as prophetical, so that lines up to some degree - but even those read very different. It's not just content that differs either - the literary style of the NT also deviates greatly, since it borrows much more from hellenized culture than the OT. Especially the synoptic gospels. For example, John, was composed using a layered "onion" type narrative structure which was popular in other greek texts. They're even so different, that one form of heresy that was more common back in the day (Gnosticism), would sometimes claim that the OT deity was a false-god (the demiurge), because how else do you explain such a personality change?
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Taking the scriptures literally and limiting yourself only to direct recommendations from New Testament (i.e. no backlinking to Old Testament), at the very least, treatment of women in New Testament is pretty old-school patriarchal[0]. It's interesting to observe the ways various Christian groups try to navigate their way around gender roles in their communities. You have a full spectrum here. From some fundamentalist US churches that will take everything super-literally, through groups like Jehovah's Witnesses[1] who sort-of take this literally, but make reasonable exceptions[2], through Catholics in Western countries, where most believers probably haven't even heard or thought about these passages, and any semblance of adhering to them is likely seen as more traditional than religious - all the way to lenient Christian groups that allow women priests. In my experience, all Christianity is like this. Every group in every location[3] has their own specific understanding of which words are to be taken literally, which ones figuratively (and to what degree), and which ones to be completely ignored. -- [0] - E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Timothy_2:12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Timothy_2:12, https://www.openbible.info/topics/head_coverings https://www.openbible.info/topics/head_coverings and related references - literally, women should not teach, not usurp authority of a man, should wear head covering when performing the subset of religious functions they're allowed to, etc. [1] - If I seem to focus on JWs too much in this thread, that's because I spent 20 years being one. [2] - E.g. over at Jehovah's Witnesses, there's a lot that would technically qualify as "praying or prophesising" where women are't required to cover their heads, and men are not required to uncover theirs. Also definition of "cover" is "with a hat or similar", probably not what the authors had in mind. [3] - As I understand it, Catholics in the West and in Africa are essentially two different religions. The former, having lived with it for centuries, ignore or pay lip service to all the rules that the latter obey to the letter.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  > treatment of women in New Testament is pretty old-school patriarchal It reflects the mores of the times, which were different than ours. People 2000 years from now will certainly look at us and be aghast at some of our norms. My denomination has had woman pastors since the mid 1800s.
sudosteph 6y ago
There are, but it's worth noting that they are all quotes from Paul, not Jesus.
- coliveira 6y ago
  You mean, the same Jesus who appointed only men to be his disciples, while the women in his entourage were servants? It seems that Paul was just putting into words his practice.
  - sudosteph 6y ago
    Funny you mention that! Yes, the four gospels that were canonized by a patriarchal church organization do seem to paint a picture like that. But the Gospel of Thomas, and other ancient "heretical" texts tell a different story, where Jesus explicitly acknowledgd women as equals and Mary as the favorite disciple. So even some very early Christians would disagree with Paul here.

barnesto 6y ago

Why are you singling out Christianity? The same could be said for any of the book based religions.

coliveira 6y ago
I know, but the concern about Christianity is that it is a majority religion in the West, with strong political power. This has to be focus at least where I live.

mikepurvis 6y ago

> the whole thing is based around a book that espouses views that are exactly what you call fundamentalism But I think your degree of fundamentalism-ness is defined by your relationship to that book. If you see it as completely inerrant, then yeah, you're instantly in trouble because it can be trivially shown to be in self-conflict. If you're willing to examine the book critically and in context, you do a lot better. Obviously the risk with this is that those doing that interpretation are entrusted with a lot of power over what people believe. But I think there's a middle ground here between the medieval Catholicism that the reformation reacted against (where the Word is obscured to the point that even the secondary texts like the liturgies weren't given in the vernacular) and the rugged individualism of modern evangelicals (where it's Bible-or-bust and writers like Rob Bell are excommunicated for daring to suggest that universalism might actually be consistent with the character of Jesus). I would see this wide middle ground as a place where we agree on a very short list of actual fundamentals (something like the Nicene Creed, basically), and other than that people are free to study and believe what they want, as long as it isn't hurting others.

coliveira 6y ago
> If you're willing to examine the book critically and in context, you do a lot better. Yeah, but in that case you have to concede that the Bible is not miraculous inspired, so why is it any better than other books such as the Vedas or the Iliad? This is the whole problem in the foundation of religion. It also shows the blindsight of progressive Christians: they're following a religion that at the foundation goes against things they believe. For example, new testament writers say that Jesus came to save from the sin of Adam, but if no Adam and Eve existed, the explanation does't work anymore.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I don't think a literal Adam is necessary for the "sin of Adam" to be a thing, particularly if you're in a mindset already where the purpose of Christ's time on Earth was to establish a kingdom, rather than just to deliver some pleasant homilies and maybe troll a few pharisees on the way to his real intention, which was dying and being resurrected. In any case, the Bible can absolutely be miraculously inspired and still be subject to critical examination. Looking at the history of how the individual books have been studied, translated, and selected, it's obvious that the text itself had always been very much interwoven with academia and tradition.

tdozi 6y ago

I would posit that the most fundamental idea in the Bible is that humanity has fundamentally continued to be selfish and prideful while God has continually chosen to extend grace and keep his promises to people (mainly covered in the Old Testament). He dis this to the ultimate extent by living with us and dying on the cross so that all of the promises could be fulfilled once and for all (new testament). It is exactly the selfish and prideful that decide to leverage select words/passages/ideas out of context for their own power over others rather than their inward correction of self. Lastly, I’d add that many of the passages/letters written were to the audience of CHRISTIANS. I bible doesn’t really demand that non-Christians apply any of this to their lives until the first foundational stone is set. Paul even writes to this effect in 1st Corinthians.

prewett 6y ago

The fundamentalist interpretation is only one way to read the biblical text, and it tends to ignore the context the text was written for. Women: Jesus' ministry was financially supported by women. Jesus explicitly did not condemn the woman caught in adultery like the Pharisees did although he did not condone her conduct, either. Jesus taught to women (e.g. Mary, Martha's sister) while the rabbis forbid it; one rabbi said he would rather burn the Torah than teach to a woman, and the Torah was so sacred that they put old unusable Torah scrolls in the walls of the synagogue rather than the trash. A woman dealing in purple cloth hosted one of the early churches (and probably led it after Paul left). A woman is mentioned with the title apostle. Homosexuality: nowhere does the Bible hate homosexuals. It says that it is a harmful behavior and is not to be tolerated in God's people because it leads to death. It is not "hate" to consider someone's behavior unhealthy, or even to disapprove of someone's behavior. We don't "hate" thieves because we disapprove of thievery. In fact, most people hate thievery and think it is so harmful to society that it should be repressed, but it does not mean we must hate thieves. American LGBTQetc seem to require love to look like complete acceptance and consider anything else as "intolerance", but that is a false dichotomy.

lalaland1125 6y ago
Jesus might not have been anti-women, but the New Testament certainly is. > A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
- unpolloloco 6y ago
  In particular, Paul (one of the writers) was - take that as you will. Overall, it's generally extremely progressive (for its time and context!).
  - lalaland1125 6y ago
    > for its time and context!. The problem is that people are applying the morality of the Bible in the modern era when it's clearly outdated. Biblical morality is clearly not correct now on a number of issues (divorce, gay rights, etc, etc).