Disturbing Passages in Holy Books

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I think all the religions and their holy books has that one or couple of issues that even the followers of themselves (even the most fundy) admit to struggling to accept or understand.

2 Corinthians 4:4 (New Living Trns.)

Matthew 5:27-32

Those are both disturbing passages. I don’t think we talked about the scripture in 2 Corinthians. It definitely reads gaslighty. My religion was especially fond of it. If we had valid doubts or concerns, we were taught to believe that we were just being blinded by Satan because the Bible can’t be wrong.

Nothing should be above scrutiny - not religious beliefs and certainly not holy books.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 30 Mar 2024, 8:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

^^^ My religion taught that the Earth might’ve been around for “millions” of years because the creation days in Genesis may have been figurative, but they thought that humans were created 6,000 years ago. If they’re going to be that nutty, they should’ve just gone all the way and claimed that the universe was created in 6 days. Disappointing. As a homeschooler, I wasn’t allowed to learn about evolution and didn’t do so until I was an adult. I should make a thread on my experience as a homeschooler one of these days. It was shockingly bad. It’s concerning that so many fundamentalists choose to homeschool their kids. Ignorance becomes a family tradition in a very real sense.

I certainly agree about the turn the other cheek stuff. It’s likely caused a lot of harm overall. Being conditioned to be passive sheep can probably lead to and keep people in abusive situations. That may have been some of my problem actually. It’s hard to say.

Considering all the harmful, unsound advice that’s in the Bible (including using rods on children), God seems to have been as ignorant as the people in the times and locations the Bible was written. Hmmm…

IME, the people who are loudest about pushing the notion that you can’t be a good person without accepting their religion often have questionable morals themselves. Without religion, morality is a simple thing. With my former religion, it was all about rules and judgment. They cast judgment on and encourage folks to disown family members who are LGBTQ+ which I find deeply immoral. Obviously, morality is a subjective thing, but so many fundamentalists fail to realize that you don’t need to believe in a god or holy book to care about morality and ethics. Morality to me is rooted in humanism.

Yes they assigned some strange traits to their supposed deity. It seems to me they had no idea of the notion that morality is about minimising harm.


I've probably said before that when the supposed divine rules deviate from humanist harm-reduction morality, people are going to get harmed. Is that what their benevolent Lord wants? Scripture is supposed to be the divine rule-book, and this thread has cited many examples of that deviation. Scripture indeed calls gayness an "abomination," but doesn't explain what's supposed to be the harm in such a sexual orientation. Longwinded as scripture is, it omits a lot of salient detail like that.

Meanwhile I've been looking at a few theists' answers to the "good atheist" problem:

https://creation.com/can-people-be-good-without-god
When we trust in Jesus for salvation, God reconciles us to Himself. One consequence of this is we become able to do good deeds, because God, the source of all goodness, enables us. Yet we remain completely dependent on Him: Jesus says, “apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
So yes, atheists can do what we would consider to be good deeds, but from a standard of divine perfection, none of us can measure up. Christians are only capable of doing deeds God considers good because of our status “in Christ” which means Christ’s goodness is credited to us and He enables us to do good deeds.

What they seem to be saying is that following God enables the follower to do good deeds, but in the same breath they admit that as atheists they were never disabled from that quality in the first place. Even though they cite Jesus as saying "Apart from me, you can do nothing." Muddled or what?

Another one:

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/onlin ... ief-in-god
....denying God’s existence results in an insufficient explanation for moral obligation. How can the moral law be binding if there is no moral lawgiver behind it that surpasses human authority? The answer is that it cannot.

The theory that morality is a human group survival thing explains it quite well to me. As for it being binding, we have secular laws that often surpass scriptural rules in their attention to harm reduction, and even theists are ultimately free to break the rules, and frequently do. But that's OK as long as they repent. Like I'm never sorry when I find I've done harm.

What bothers me a lot is the theists' absurd notion that you can behave as kindly as any theist for your whole life but as far as their supposed deity is concerned (or perhaps more accurately, as far as THEY are concerned), it counts for nothing unless you're also a theist. And it also has to be THEIR brand of theism.

It is odd that people claim they are cool with different sorts of people and beliefs but according to their God and holy text, there behavior will send them to everlasting torment unless they reject the behavior and repent from it.

Matthew 2:13-16:

It’s a pity God couldn’t have warned the parents of the many other babies and toddlers who had been killed or at least prevented their deaths in some way. I suppose it’s the sort of sh***y behavior one would expect from Yahweh. In all seriousness, the writer of Matthew was clearly inspired by the situation in the story surrounding Moses in the Old Testament.

I always thought Mary was a tragic figure - not a blessed one. When God knocks her up, she does not have informed consent. If some judgmental deity asked me if I wanted to be impregnated as a virgin with a kid that would be tortured to death, I’d say: “f**k no!” Seeing one’s kid suffer is awful. I can’t imagine watching them die in the way Jesus does.

The earliest gospel - Mark - doesn’t allude to Mary getting impregnated at all, but here’s how it plays out in the following gospels (earliest to latest).

Matthew 1:18:

In the previous verses, the writer of Matthew gives the genealogy of Jesus through Joseph which is silly for obvious reasons. Anyway, the quoted verse says that she was “found to be pregnant.” It doesn’t reference an angel appearing to her at all although one does appear to Joseph who was thinking about breaking up with her when he found out she was pregnant.

In the account in Luke 1:26-38, an angel appears to Mary and tells her what’s going to happen, leaving out crucial details. Mary does express willingness to obey at the end, but her ability to consent under the circumstances seems questionable to say the least - power imbalance, uninformed, and probably other stuff.


The book of John, which was written last, doesn’t allude to Jesus’ birth at all. The writer preferred a more spiritual take of the story.

Much of the reason why a couple of the writers made Jesus be born of a virgin was related to preexisting legends and also Isaiah 7:14.

The NRSV:

The NIV:

Apparently, the more accurate translation is “young woman,” but it continues to be mistranslated in some popular translations of the Bible due to tradition and to make it fit better with the New Testament - to make it seem like Bible prophecy was being fulfilled.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_7:14

At any rate, I find the account of Mary disturbing as it is described in some of the gospels. (Jesus’ death is problematic too, but that has already been discussed in this thread.) Mary is not depicted as a particularly strong or important female character in the Bible. She was primarily a good woman who God “blessed” by impregnating. After giving birth to Jesus, the focus is on the supposed exploits of Jesus and his BFFs. Later Christian thinkers exalted Mary because it made logical sense to them to do so, but it’s not well-supported by scripture.

Here's a story that was cut from The Bible: The flying head of John the Baptist.

After John was beheaded, his severed head flew around the world for 15 years calling out King Herod the entire time.

^


More evidence of God’s shallowness/pettiness:

Leviticus 21:16-24 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 17 “Speak to Aaron and say: No one of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the food of his God. 18 Indeed, no one who has a blemish shall draw near, one who is blind or lame, or one who is mutilated or deformed, 19 or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, 20 or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a defect in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles. 21 No descendant of Aaron the priest who has a blemish shall come near to offer the Lord’s offerings by fire; since he has a blemish, he shall not come near to offer the food of his God. 22 He may eat the food of his God, of the most holy as well as of the holy. 23 But he shall not come near the curtain or approach the altar because he has a blemish, that he may not profane my sanctuaries, for I am the Lord; I sanctify them.” 24 Thus Moses spoke to Aaron and to his sons and to all the Israelites.

I don’t think I ever noticed YHWH discriminating against little people in the Bible although I certainly read this passage before. Well, I used to skim the unpleasant bits sometimes when I was a believer, so maybe that’s it.

I was in a great holiday destination for only one day and got dragged to church

The pastor: "If you disagree with part of the bible your the one who needs to change"

^ Yes! I heard that constantly when I was growing up. It’s so gaslighty, and it leads to real world problems sometimes.

These "holy" books have seen more rewrites and edits than a Star Wars screenplay.

They belong in the sci-fi fiction section, along with the great works of L. Ron Hubbard.

^ I need to get around to reading some of his work one of these days.


I posted this elsewhere, but I figured that it belongs here. I’m still a bit flabbergasted that people are still citing the Bible to support the current genocide in Palestine, especially considering the horrific stuff that’s in the Bible including in the same books as the ones people are quoting from.

Deuteronomy 20:10-18 When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. 11 If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. 12 But if it does not accept your terms of peace and makes war against you, then you shall besiege it, 13 and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. 14 You may, however, take as your plunder the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. 15 Thus you shall treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of these nations here. 16 But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. 17 Indeed, you shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded, 18 so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods and you thus sin against the Lord your God.

^ I guess the “abhorrent things” YHWH encourages are a-okay.

Since Magic Sky Daddy is the adjudicator of morality, by definition the things he approves of can't be abhorrent, but remember, moral relativity is a problem created by liberal morality, not by the arbitrary definitions of a bunch of bronze age goatfuckers and their faery godfather.

Yeah, they often go with “God’s morality is inherently perfect” for that reason, and “if you question things, you should keep in mind that it’s impossible for imperfect humans to understand the Perfect Wisdom [or whatever] of God.” I still don’t understand how some people, including some very smart people, can happily turn off critical thought in that way and not have an internal struggle. It’s chilling because it would probably be easy to convince some of them that stoning is a good idea because the supreme as*hole in the sky endorses it repeatedly, especially in Deuteronomy. Well, what some of them are currently justifying is just as horrific and just as supported by scripture.

Might as well have been the manual for Islamic Jihad that you were quoting. I'm sure a lot of religions are based on this cut-and-pasted philosophy. It probably goes back all the way to some cave drawings that translate to "Ogg kill Ugg in cave next door, take spear and woman, him worship mammoth not bear!"

In sci-fi terms, it aligns more with Heinlein.