The Gaming Den

Okay, you know what, fuck it. Time to go full on dennizen. I've tried being polite, I've tried being visible. But you have proven to be so goddamn stupid that maybe a dose of trollman medicine is what's needed.

Marriage is older than the religion.

Religion is at least 30,000 years old, in prototypical "pro active worship" form. Marriage as a concept can be at best placed to the beginning of the agricultural age, by which point religion had been well established. We can trace organized religion to at least the Akkadians, as in 5000 B.C.E. There is no, and I repeat no, historical examples of marriage originating out of anything but a religious context. The only times its out of a secular source is when a society carries over religious institutions after secularization, such as revolutionary France or the Soviet Union. So yeah, stupid fuckery #1.

The latin words Christians borrowed ~1300 to rename this very old institution are also older than the religion (and also basically mean 'to marry').

The first use of the english word marry is in 1400. The latin verb maritare, stemming from marito/maritus "of or relating to marriage" is from OLD LATIN YOU FUCKING MORON. As in "at least 400 bc if not earlier". AND THE WORD EXISTS IN PROTO EUROPEAN AS SNEUBHO, NOT MARRY. MARRY IS A LATIN WORD, IN A LATIN CONTEXT. Stupid fuckery #2

Christianity just continued the Roman institution of owning one woman at a time, and then post-enlightenment a bunch of anticlericals, atheists, and other unsavory radicals started pushing the notion that maybe owning women was not okay and marriage should be a matter of choice and love instead of ownership.

Cute, apparently someone reads tumblr. That's not how marriage worked. Marriage was primarily there for inheritance and the passing down of names. Christianity was actually the religion to push the love/respect aspect of marriage to the forefront, away from the Roman owning thing. Its one of the reasons why Christianity first grew in popularity primarily amongst slaves and women, only later really expanding to men. The whole "wife submit to your husband thing" is in large part due to a huge fucking lack of context, which unfortunately serves idiots on both the left and the right. Ephesians 5: 21-33 is about mutual sacrifice within the married relationship. Its why it begins with "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.". Wives are supposed to respect and trust their husbands. Husbands are supposed to sacrifice for and support their wives (in the old context this means lay down your life, defend, in the modern context it's interpreted primarily as helping your wife and ensuring that she is not the sole carrier of the burden of work). Yes, the Roman's had a fucking stupid system of pater familias and were a culture of extreme misogyny, but the religious institution of marriage was not intended to be one of ownership. Stupid fuckery #3

If anyone gets to claim rights on the modern marriage by virtue of reinvention, it's feminists who decided they didn't want men telling them what to do with their hearts and vaginas.

Ugh, if I wanted to read tumblr I'd go read tumblr. Or cut myself, which would probably be more productive. In ways feminists were able to change some things within modern marriage, mostly in criminalizing shit that was considered bad by the religious views of marriage to begin with. In reality, Feminists had more impact on unmarried women than married women, mostly thanks to increased visibility in the workplace (which was a trend that actually had begun in the 1940's and was primarily thanks to the world wars and the wiping out of a generation of men on the European continent) and the rise of easy access to abortion. So only semi stupid fuckery this time, but still stupid. #3.5

On marriage and civil unions:

And here's where it gets really annoying. If you had read my post, the civil unions I was talking about were federally and state recognized legal partnerships with all the benefits of "marriage" which IS A STUPID TERM WHICH SHOULDN'T BE FUCKING USED IN A SECULAR CONTEXT TO BEGIN WITH. When most people talk about civil unions, and when they talk about supporting them, they are talking about non religious bonds with all the same benefits as a marriage. We're not talking about people who want lesser bonds for homosexuals, we're talking about people who don't feel like its appropriate to use a religious term for a non religious bond. Its why the primary reason why people tend to say they are against gay marriage is because they feel like it may force churches to sanction things that are against their teachings, or that the feel the government is rewriting what a religious term means. A sizeable chunk of people, especially in the midwest in South, aren't necessarily against gay marriage out of homophobia, but out of fear of secular encroachment. Which is why I suggested we revamp the fuck out of the term marriage and civil union and reestablish the religious and secular notions of what a marriage and a civil union is. If you did that than a lot of the controversy would go away. There'd still be homophobes, but you wouldn't have anywhere near the conflict.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:What if he's a religious fundamentalist who feels he has a responsibility to save people who aren't abhorrent monsters, but considers prostitutes abhorrent monsters?

Then he's a moron who isn't practicing in accords with his religion. Christianity, which is what we're mostly talking about here, teaches people to love everyone equally. This whole evangelical bullshit about hating gays or whores goes against the very fundamentals of what Jesus taught. So a Christian would still consider that man a monster, because denying someone life saving treatment, let alone murdering someone, goes against the first rule "love thy neighbor as thy self". You may not approve of someone being a whore, but that gives you no right not to treat them like a human being. The man's evil by any context.

TheNotoriousAMP wrote:Then he's a moron who isn't practicing in accords with his religion. Christianity, which is what we're mostly talking about here, teaches people to love everyone equally.

Wow, are you unironically going off on how Christianity is a bastion of tolerance? Because... that's not the case and it never has been.

NotoriousAMP wrote:Religion is at least 30,000 years old, in prototypical "pro active worship" form. Marriage as a concept can be at best placed to the beginning of the agricultural age, by which point religion had been well established.

If you don't know that the word 'the' is used as a specifier for a specific thing, you will continue to embarrass yourself in public as you have just now. Indeed, the very next sentence says Christians, but honestly the context of Christian fundamentalists defending marriage on the basis that its "theirs" makes it pretty fucking obvious that "the religion" means Christianity. And the fact that mesopotamians had religion and a functional analogue for marriage is actually evidence against the Christian claim that marriage is their religious ritual and they get to define it. So thank you for being such a complete and total dumbass that you would loudly and argumentatively regurgitate my argument back to me on a silver fucking platter with specific concessions of evidence that support me. Good fucking job.

NotoriousAMP wrote:The first use of the english word marry is in 1400. The latin verb maritare, stemming from marito/maritus "of or relating to marriage" is from OLD LATIN YOU FUCKING MORON. As in "at least 400 bc if not earlier". AND THE WORD EXISTS IN PROTO EUROPEAN AS SNEUBHO, NOT MARRY. MARRY IS A LATIN WORD, IN A LATIN CONTEXT. Stupid fuckery #2

Holy shit, you did it again. In response to someone arguing that the supposably Christian concept and etymology of marriage dates back to Roman equivalents, you... admit that the concept existed in Rome and Christians derived the modern terms for those words from the Roman words for those concepts. You are the fucking worst at arguing on the internet. People who pound on keyboards to create incoherent gibberish do a better job, because they shoot themself in the foot less.

NotoriousAMP wrote:Cute, apparently someone reads tumblr. That's not how marriage worked. Marriage was primarily there for inheritance and the passing down of names. Christianity was actually the religion to push the love/respect aspect of marriage to the forefront, away from the Roman owning thing. Its one of the reasons why Christianity first grew in popularity primarily amongst slaves and women, only later really expanding to men. The whole "wife submit to your husband thing" is in large part due to a huge fucking lack of context, which unfortunately serves idiots on both the left and the right. Ephesians 5: 21-33 is about mutual sacrifice within the married relationship. Its why it begins with "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.". Wives are supposed to respect and trust their husbands. Husbands are supposed to sacrifice for and support their wives (in the old context this means lay down your life, defend, in the modern context it's interpreted primarily as helping your wife and ensuring that she is not the sole carrier of the burden of work).

Firstly; accusing everyone with a vaguely egalitarian agenda of being a tumblrite is something shit-tier conservatives do in order to avoid engaging on legitimate discussions about equality. For someone who identifies as on the liberal side of things, you are turning out to be hilariously full of conservative memes.

Secondly; you are fucking wrong and a fucking liar. You stopped reading at Ephesians 5: 21. Ephesians 5: 22-24 is "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit everything to their husbands." Ephesians 5: 25-33 is about husbands loving their wives, but the New Testament is unambiguous about its one-sided demands for the obedience of wives to their husbands. Ephesians is seriously one of the parts people point to when they want to remind everyone that the New Testament is backwards as fuck in its consideration for women's rights.

NotoriousAMP wrote:In ways feminists were able to change some things within modern marriage, mostly in criminalizing shit that was considered bad by the religious views of marriage to begin with.

This is just a fucking lie. A straight-up fucking lie. You're not going to No True Scotsman your way out of denouncing the systematic discrimination against women sponsored by religious authorities and institutions that was happening right up until the nineteen fucking hundreds (and let's be honest, still is in its own subtle ways). Anyone claiming that Christianity has been on the side of women and has always been on the side of women is the scum of the earth. You can separate yourself from the 'sins' of Christians past, because they are not your sins and you bear no responsibility for them, but to pretend they did not happen is completely unacceptable for any decent person to do.

DSMatticus wrote:If you don't know that the word 'the' is used as a specifier for a specific thing, you will continue to embarrass yourself in public as you have just now. Indeed, the very next sentence says Christians, but honestly the context of Christian fundamentalists defending marriage on the basis that its "theirs" makes it pretty fucking obvious that "the religion" means Christianity. And the fact that mesopotamians had religion and a functional analogue for marriage is actually evidence against the Christian claim that marriage is their religious ritual and they get to define it. So thank you for being such a complete and total dumbass that you would loudly and argumentatively regurgitate my argument back to me on a silver fucking platter with specific concessions of evidence that support me. Good fucking job.

It was deliberate, because you were skewing the conversation from "marriage is religious" to "marriage is specifically christian". You're goddamn title of the post was: On the Religious Nature of Marriage. I agree that marriage is not a specifically Christian rite, but it is a religious one, which is kinda why I passed over the the, because the original argument thread was not whether or not marriage was Christian, but whether or not it was religious. You were going to sidetrack the issue. The people who are for civil unions but against gay marriage are, if you get to the root of the matter, arguing over the religious origin of marriage.. It's why they aren't arguing that Muslim marriage doesn't count or Hindu marriage doesn't count. The whole argument from the start was about whether or not marriage was a religious, not a specifically Christian institution, but a religious one. That's the whole point behind the controversy, whether marriage stems from a religious sacrament/rite/act, which in almost all societies, even in more ancestor worship based ones, it is, or whether or not it has as its root the purely secular matter of joining a man and a woman. Marriage as a concept is religious, which is why I was suggesting changing all of the state recognized bonds, straight or same sex, into civil unions, since that is what the state recognized bonds are.

Holy shit, you did it again. In response to someone arguing that the supposably Christian concept and etymology of marriage dates back to Roman equivalents, you... admit that the concept existed in Rome and Christians derived the modern terms for those words from the Roman words for those concepts. You are the fucking worst at arguing on the internet. People who pound on keyboards to create incoherent gibberish do a better job, because they shoot themself in the foot less.

And once again you are trying to sidetrack the issue:

The latin words Christians borrowed ~1300 to rename this very old institution are also older than the religion (and also basically mean 'to marry').

.

You were trying to present Christian marriage as a morphing of an old institution which lacked religious roots. And it means directly "to marry". The word to marry is at least 2400 years old and the meaning hasn't changed since then. Your whole argument stems from an idea that marriage is a fluid idea without specifically religious roots, which it doesn't. Marriage hasn't really changed in concept since the start, barring the removal of polygamy, which never even existed in the direct root of what our western concept of marriage stems from. While your misdirect is admirable, it still ignores the fact that your original argument was wrong.

Firstly; accusing everyone with a vaguely egalitarian agenda of being a tumblrite is something shit-tier conservatives do in order to avoid engaging on legitimate discussions about equality. For someone who identifies as on the liberal side of things, you are turning out to be hilariously full of conservative memes.

It's because you have an irritatingly poor knowledge of the history of marriage and the relationship between man and woman, as well as the history of Christianity. If you actually look at the marriage itself, the industrial age is what fucks up city marriages. In the countryside you actually see a relatively more equal, though far from perfect, division of power, in large part because everyone was crucial on the farm. The tumblr comment was mostly because that sort of shrill "dark ages" shit is the kind of stuff I'm used to hearing on Tumblr, and while there is some truth to it, it lacks a fuller view of what life was actually like. It's like arguing that everyone was sexually repressed during a time where sexual manuals, written by monks mind you, were arguing that the female orgasm was a crucial part of impregnation and sex.

Secondly; you are fucking wrong and a fucking liar. You stopped reading at Ephesians 5: 21. Ephesians 5: 22-24 is "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit everything to their husbands." Ephesians 5: 25-33 is about husbands loving their wives, but the New Testament is unambiguous about its one-sided demands for the obedience of wives to their husbands. Ephesians is seriously one of the parts people point to when they want to remind everyone that the New Testament is backwards as fuck in its consideration for women's rights.

And you go forth and put forward the exact lack of context which I was commenting on. The New Testament is far from a text demanding one sided obediance. It demands that both people submit to each other that they combine and become one flesh. That a husband loves his wife like he loves himself (a deliberate parallel to "love thy neighbor as thy loveth thyself), which means treat her like you would treat yourself. It asks wives to respect their husbands and husbands to defend and support their wives. Which is why they mention both mutual (21) and wifely (23) submitting. The husband is to be the head of the household, yes, this is the early AD's we are talking about, but both people are supposed to support and respect each other unconditionally. The husband doesn't have a magical right to order his wife around. It's why I specifically mentioned the context of the passage and why both the extreme right (wives are slaves to husband) and left (Christianity is like, totally evil man) love to quote it without actually understanding what it means.

This is just a fucking lie. A straight-up fucking lie. You're not going to No True Scotsman your way out of denouncing the systematic discrimination against women sponsored by religious authorities and institutions that was happening right up until the nineteen fucking hundreds (and let's be honest, still is in its own subtle ways). Anyone claiming that Christianity has been on the side of women and has always been on the side of women is the scum of the earth. You can separate yourself from the 'sins' of Christians past, because they are not your sins and you bear no responsibility for them, but to pretend they did not happen is completely unacceptable for any decent person to do.

Of course they fucking happened, its why I have always mentioned "Christianity" and not "Christians". Christianity the religion teaches, and for a long time in the early years before it became a dominant sect and got merged with more traditional beliefs, practiced relatively strong equality between the sexes. Its why women were very present in the early Church leadership and why it was they, and the slaves, who were the original converts. However, as time goes on and it becomes normalized we see exactly what you described. Its fucked up, yes, but the whole point I was trying to make is that it's fundamentally Unchristian. The same goes for the point about tolerance, secular governments and the church may for a long time not have practiced it, but the religion itself and the New Testament demand tolerance for others.

Times have changed and the Catholic and Episcopalian churches (fuck the evangelicals, seriously, fuck them hard) are both much closer to the original passages in terms of practicing. Its like saying that the New Testament supports slavery because selective passages and interpretations were used to tell slaves that they should obey their masters.

Look, I get where you're coming from, but your entire response centered around changing what your original points where. Marriage, though not originally christian, is originally religious and centered around the male/female breeding pair, if you will. To repeat, its why a lot of our ideas about it needs to be revamped. Domestic partnerships and civil unions should be what the government gives out.

NotoriousAMP wrote:It was deliberate, because you were skewing the conversation from "marriage is religious" to "marriage is specifically christian". You're goddamn title of the post was: On the Religious Nature of Marriage. I agree that marriage is not a specifically Christian rite, but it is a religious one, which is kinda why I passed over the the, because the original argument thread was not whether or not marriage was Christian, but whether or not it was religious. You were going to sidetrack the issue. The people who are for civil unions but against gay marriage are, if you get to the root of the matter, arguing over the religious origin of marriage.. It's why they aren't arguing that Muslim marriage doesn't count or Hindu marriage doesn't count. The whole argument from the start was about whether or not marriage was a religious, not a specifically Christian institution, but a religious one. That's the whole point behind the controversy, whether marriage stems from a religious sacrament/rite/act, which in almost all societies, even in more ancestor worship based ones, it is, or whether or not it has as its root the purely secular matter of joining a man and a woman. Marriage as a concept is religious, which is why I was suggesting changing all of the state recognized bonds, straight or same sex, into civil unions, since that is what the state recognized bonds are.

I have never seen anyone grasp at straws so desperately in my life.

You are honestly telling us you think Christians are 'defending' marriage from homosexuality because they want it to remain a non-specifically religious, non-secular institution. That is not fucking true and Christian fundamentalists actually pushback against homosexual marriage citing the fucking biblical definition of marriage and biblical condemnations of homosexuals. You are completely fucking out of touch with what the people you are defending actually say they want.

Beyond that, the Church of Sweden has been performing same-sex marriages (not unions) for almost five years. If your argument is that the goal is to defend marriage from being rendered secular and same-sex marriage is strictly a secular matter, then you are simply fucking wrong. There are religious denominations who right now consider same-sex marriage a religious ritual and will perform it. And on the flip side, atheists get married all the fucking time and no one complains. You are full of shit.

NotoriousAMP wrote:You were trying to present Christian marriage as a morphing of an old institution which lacked religious roots.

...
Your whole argument stems from an idea that marriage is a fluid idea without specifically religious roots, which it doesn't.

No, I am showing that marriage is not Christian. But even then, the religious elements surrounding marriage are so fluid as to call marriage religious (let alone Christian) in nature is inane and stupid. It's a legal procedure that exists for the purpose of handling property that happens to be accompanied by a celebration, and the fact that this legal procedure has survived under wildly different religious systems is evidence of the non-secular nature of marriage. You may as well be arguing that law is religious because systems of law have survived under many wildly different religious systems. It's fucking stupid, and you should feel stupid.

NotoriousAMP wrote: And you go forth and put forward the exact lack of context which I was commenting on. The New Testament is far from a text demanding one sided obediance. It demands that both people submit to each other that they combine and become one flesh.

It's the fucking bible wrote: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.

It's the fucking bible wrote:25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing[a] her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body. 31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Hey, fuckwit. Those are not symmetrical. The burden of obedience is only made upon women. No such burden is placed upon men. But you know what, here you fucking go:

Timothy 2:12 wrote:I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.

This is the part where you shut up.

TheNotoriousAMP wrote:Its fucked up, yes, but the whole point I was trying to make is that it's fundamentally Unchristian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

TheNotoriousAMP wrote:Its like saying that the New Testament supports slavery because selective passages and interpretations were used to tell slaves that they should obey their masters.

What the fuck? Yes, if your religious text places a burden upon slaves to obey masters, it is suggesting that men have a legitimate right to own and demand obedience from one another. Do you know what the right to own and demand obedience from another is called? Slavery. The bible just fucking does support slavery. And in the same way that it asks husbands to be loving and kind rulers over their wives, it suggests owners should be loving and kind rulers over their slaves. But so fucking what? It is still promoting the inequality of men and women and it is still promoting the ownership of your fellow man, things which are considered morally abhorrent today. Surprise: a book written 2000 years ago is morally backwards. Gasp.

I have stumbled upon a gold mine of stupidity here. You are seriously trying to defend the bible as written. What the fuck?

Yeah the Bible supporting slavery is a clad-iron thing, apologists don't even deny it like they used to. The defense used to be that slavery rules were only in the Old Testament and the the New Testament was a blank slate. But that's been largely abandoned now because it would contradict Jesus claiming that all the old rules hold true and that not a jot or tittle of the old scripture is something he's there to undermine.

The more current apologist argument on Slavery relies on cultural relativism. It says that cultures needed time to "grow up" so to speak and that God couldn't just start out with "No slaves" but rather settled for telling people to treat their slaves well because that was the best he could with the society of the time. Because slavery was accepted then even though it's not now. The funny thing about that argument is that it is based on the foundational belief of temporal cultural relativism as outlined in Nietzsche's "The Genealogy of Morals" which is all about how God and gods are bullshit and just mouthpieces people put words into to give weight to whatever temporary things that society wants people to think at the time.

It would be like using gravity as a piece of your proof of Flat Earth theory. Accepting the statements as true would require the premise to be false!

Okay, look. Timothy 2:12 is one of the most fucking controversial lines in the bible so before you trot it out, here's a good summary of all the thinking that's gone into it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Timothy_2:12. No one fucking knows what Paul was thinking when he wrote it, considering it goes against other stuff, including what he wrote in other places. Plus, there is the issue of the interpretation being changed in translation. In short, theology and the parts of the new testament which aren't the main 4 books are super controversial. Seriously, there are people who can devote their whole lives to debating just one or two sections. For example there's also the problem of this line in Paul's (same writer) letter to the Galatians: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Not to mention the fact that when he is greeting people in his letters, he greets a metric fuckton of women, implying that they are important in the missionary movement.

And I kind of responded to "what is in the fucking bible", by mentioning that both people are to submit to each other and the man is to treat the woman as he wants to be treated himself. In this case, love thy neighbor/wife as thy loveth thyself is not just "be affectionate towards" its treat them in the same fashion. Even the idea of the man being the head of the family is debated, since head can mean in this case "head" or "source", the problem being that "head" in western languages acquires the connotations of "leader or ruler" as time goes on. We don't see as much of this in Greek or Latin, so yeah its a bit tough. Which is why the whole matter of obedience is a huge clusterfuck. The idea of marriage in the Christian context is that both people are to merge into one being "become one flesh". A married couple is supposed to think and act like one. Which brings up the problem "does this mean wife just goes along with everything he says, or do they act together"? The Bible as written gives evidence for both sides in letter, because we're dealing with a text that's translated multiple times and passed through so many different layers of interpretation. Personally I fall under the egalitarian camp of Biblical thought. But there is, unfortunately, room for the barefoot and pregnant crowd to spread their idiocy.

Which brings up the opposition people have to gay marriage. Here's where the problem that the people who speak up aren't necessarily representing the people who actually vote. Church leaders may talk about gay couples alone, by their very being together, harming Christian marriage, but in the end it basically comes down to "people don't want to have the government force things on their religion". Sorry to mention this again, but that's why opposition to gay marriage, (lets assume same number of people don't take sides) goes from 52% to 26% if the issue is civil unions instead. A significant portion of people, including a lot of the conservatives I know, are fine with same sex couples getting the same treatment as hetero couples, its the idea that the state could force churches to perform same sex marriages, or that it in some ways weakens the religious nature of their bond. And using the law example is poor, because legal systems differ greatly across societies and often stem from secular ideals. Until the rise of secularization in the 1930's onwards, there was really no case of marriage stemming from anything but a religious ceremony as a root. That being said, as I mentioned before, and you illustrated perfectly with the atheist marriage comment, the idea of modern marriage is a clusterfuck caused by societal traditions being taken out of their original context and being grafted onto a system and society in which they are out of place with the times.

And on the matter of slavery, the New Testament never condones it. The people who actually talk about it, which are Paula and the other apostles, don't say "free all the slaves", but they never say its okay to have slaves. They had to walk a fine line in their times, but every time they mention slaves its in the context of "free your slave because he has been of great service to you" (his letter to Philomon) or even "You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men.", which is controversial. In short, he always speaks about respecting your slave, freeing them, or when talking to slaves, to take their freedom when offered at any chance. The Spartacus revolt was still well remembered during the time, so Paul seems to have preferred to work from the inside. Is it perfect? No, but it was the times.

And on the question of whether or not the Old Testament is invalidated, another hugely controversial subject which is nowhere near black and white as you presented. Jesus did say that he would preserve the law, but his lack of observance of Moses' code (all the nitty gritty about which fork you put down first) points to the fact that he was probably talking about the "moral" law (be nice to folks, no adultery, ect) and not the civil code contained in the Old Testament. Because that's what the Old Testament is in large part, its a history book and civil law code, with moral law (which the Catholic Church considers to be "the law) being sprinkled in. Its why Baptists eat a metric fuck ton of pork despite being way more hard core about the Old Testament than anyone else. Its fucking complicated.

And I think that kind of sums up this whole issue in the first place, its fucking complicated. Theology is ludicrously complicated, there's room for the points of view you bring up, but so much of that is rooted in interpretation or misinterpretation. There's also a whole lot of good shit in there. Which is sort of why I tend to defend the bible as translated (we don't have the bible as written). There's a lot of room to take a pretty egalitarian viewpoint and the fact that is places so much emphasis on social justice is important to me, especially as a Catholic. Heck, the Catholic church's teachings on economic justice are why I'm a progressive today. And, if you read what the Catholic Church actually teaches today (which I do suggest, if you want to make well researched critiques of it), you'll see that they tend to place themselves firmly on the egalitarian and tolerant side of the equation. Pope Francis is an excellent example of this. Is it perfect, hell no, but its the best I find today. In short, its a lot like the people we were talking about at the start of it all. The source is okay, the interpretation may suck at times, but overall they're not evil or bad, they just have flaws.

So, NAMP is just one more person who thinks that his cherry-picked quotes lead him to an understanding of Christianity that is better than other people with their cherry-picked quotes. Notwithstanding that the other people are popes and saints (or both) in his own sect. Move along.

The Bible is called "The Big Book of Multiple Choice" for a reason. It's intention wasn't to create a singular interpretive series of facts or even to describe a holistic cosmos. It's meant to be able to support any stance the Clergy might want to shout from the pulpits which is why it is so utterly full of contradiction. For instance you probably think that Christians feel that murder is bad. You could then go to the bible and quote things about loving everyone equally and the commandment to not murder. But then a different person could go to the bible and quote dozens of different examples of God ordering murders or genocides or Jesus ordering the death of nonbelievers. A book which can answer anything with "Yes!" or "No!" equally regardless of the question asked is not of much use as a moral guide. And it's FACTUAL internal contradictions like Genesis' contradicting statements about whether animals or plants came before or after people combined with it's factual external contradictions such as talking about Jesus moving because of a Census that we factually know never happened means that the bible is neither a reliable source of moral advice or factual advice. You should expect that though because the odds that a group of largely illiterate storytellers and scribes living between 2 and 4 millenia ago knowing more about the world or how to live a good life than you or I do would be a pretty unreasonable thing to expect.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:So, NAMP is just one more person who thinks that his cherry-picked quotes lead him to an understanding of Christianity that is better than other people with their cherry-picked quotes. Notwithstanding that the other people are popes and saints (or both) in his own sect. Move along.

Yes, exactly this. After torturously reading "wives obeying their husbands" and "husbands loving their wives" into a pair of supposably symmetrical statements that let him say the text of the bible doesn't not support equality and then being confronted with further text of the bible that completely contradicts his reading (of which there is far more than the Timothy snippet, but whatever), he... points out that the portion in question is inconsistent with the torturous reading he concocted and is therefore not Real Bible(tm) and because it's not Real Bible(tm) the Real Bible(tm) totally says the thing he wants it to say. As opposed to recognizing the flaws of his torturous reading, or experiencing doubt about defending a self-inconsistent text, or acknowledging that the bible objectively justifies terrible things.

And then after being confronted with one of the apostles giving a mandate to slaves to be obedient to their owners, he claims that "telling slaves to shut up and be slaves" isn't supporting slavery. There's a hair to split there, even if you can't see it.

And when Jesus defends and references and validates the old testament and the Scripture time and time again as god's word, well... he doesn't mean all of it, because parts of it are crazy, and Jesus wouldn't support crazy things.

There's no reasoning or evaluation here. The conclusion is predetermined; the good book is good. Everything else is just a sad man trying to weather a storm by closing his eyes and thinking sunny thoughts. Fuck him, this ain't worth it.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:So, NAMP is just one more person who thinks that his cherry-picked quotes lead him to an understanding of Christianity that is better than other people with their cherry-picked quotes. Notwithstanding that the other people are popes and saints (or both) in his own sect. Move along.

While thats true for NAMP its also true for DSM. So what?

The difference is that only one set of cherry-picked quotes is required to demonstrate that (a) the Bible is inconsistent and (b) not everything the Bible says is good. Demonstrating consistency requires either actual consistency or tortured doublethink about how two contradictory statements don't really contradict each other.

Korwin wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:So, NAMP is just one more person who thinks that his cherry-picked quotes lead him to an understanding of Christianity that is better than other people with their cherry-picked quotes. Notwithstanding that the other people are popes and saints (or both) in his own sect. Move along.

While thats true for NAMP its also true for DSM. So what?

rampaging-poet wrote:The difference is that only one set of cherry-picked quotes is required to demonstrate that (a) the Bible is inconsistent and (b) not everything the Bible says is good. Demonstrating consistency requires either actual consistency or tortured doublethink about how two contradictory statements don't <i>really</i> contradict each other.

Someone claimed the bible is not inconsistent? Did not saw that from either side.

And really, what would anyone* expect from an document that old and different authors**, with translations and shiftings of languanges in between.

* yes discounting direct divine intervention to keep it pure
** different authors!

At least it's not as inconsistent as the Koran, I heard. But then the bible got an editing round in the middle ages.

Korwin wrote:At least it's not as inconsistent as the Koran, I heard.

Isn't that a superset of the Bible or something?

Not exactly; I know for sure it disagrees with the New Testament.

Though it should be pointed out that a lot of Islamic tradition comes from "Shit Muhammad Said", or rather stuff that people reported him as saying. Islamic scholarship is very clear that only the Koran is the inviolate word of God, and anything else Muhammad said is not, and furthermore the witnesses may have been mistaken or lying.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the whole New Testament come from "Shit Jesus Said", written sometimes multiple generations after Jesus' death and then edited multiple times by the governing Christian authority to agree with their current view?

It's more like shit Jesus did. Although it should be mentioned that there is no reason to think Jesus/Jesua existed at all. There are no extrabiblical accounts talking about a super-rabbi whipping up a religious revolution in the area. The factual accounts of Jesus' life from the Bible are also filled with things we factually know did not happen. As a result there is no reason to believe that there is any more historical inspiration for the life of Jesus than there was for the life of Hercules.

name_here wrote:Not exactly; I know for sure it disagrees with the New Testament.

Though it should be pointed out that a lot of Islamic tradition comes from "Shit Muhammad Said", or rather stuff that people reported him as saying. Islamic scholarship is very clear that only the Koran is the inviolate word of God, and anything else Muhammad said is not, and furthermore the witnesses may have been mistaken or lying.

Basically yeah, the Koran itself is considered to be the direct word of Muhammad, which is why its really not supposed to be translated, and instead read in classical Arabic. Not to mention, why desecrating it is treated basically worse than if you were burning down a church or the like. Its sort of the rough equivalent to Jesus in terms of importance within the religion, in that both are "the word made flesh/physical". That being said, much like in any religion, the religious code, basically how you do shit day to day, is more due to a secondary interpretation than anything else.

Shari'a itself comes about 100-150 years later and mostly consists of adaptations of Jewish law, amongst other things. Since the civil law contained within the Old Testament was designed for a specific environment (pigs eat the same food as humans do, meaning that they compete for scarce resources, therefore unclean), and Shari'a is designed in large part for said environment, there's a ton of overlap. Wearing the veil itself/burqa has been an on/off thing in the whole mesopotamian region since the early Babylonians, so it gets thrown in too.

As for supersetting, the Koran itself is considered to be an improvement on the New Testament, but it doesn't replace it per se. Certain parts of the gospel, usually those which emphasize Jesus' asceticism, are considered to be holy texts within Sufism, and in general Jesus himself is actually considered to be the greatest of the prophets, though not the most correct one, and in their version of judgment day it will be him, not Muhammad, who will come to judge the living and the dead.

Korwin- Yeah, I never said that, they're the ones who think defending the bible (and at times presenting differing schools of thought on controversial passages) means "I love the bible unilaterally and think its perfectly fine as is. 1- Note how I specifically mentioned flaws and inconsistancy. 2- On the matter of cherry picking, my views are actually in line with the modern teachings of the Catholic Church as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the writings of Pope Francis. I'll take your critiques of the bible, but a certain point I'm going to trust that 12 years of Catholic education, some seminary studies during the summer and a lot of reading of both the Catechism and the Bible left some mark on my knowledge of what's considered to be proper. I get it, a lot of things seem weird from the outside, but there's a reason why people devote entire careers arguing over certain sections.

Korwin wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:So, NAMP is just one more person who thinks that his cherry-picked quotes lead him to an understanding of Christianity that is better than other people with their cherry-picked quotes. Notwithstanding that the other people are popes and saints (or both) in his own sect. Move along.

While thats true for NAMP its also true for DSM. So what?

No, it's not. If I were trying to prove someone were a murderer, I would point to a murder they had committed. If you were trying to prove someone were not a murderer, you would not point to all the times they didn't commit murder - you would attempt to disprove that they committed the murder in question.

If I were trying to prove the biblical text justified morally abhorrent behaviors, I would point to the places it justifies morally abhorrent behaviors. If you were trying to prove the biblical text did not justify morally abhorrent behaviors, you would not point to all the places it did not justify morally abhorrent behaviors - you would attempt to disprove that the text in question justifies morally abhorrent behaviors.

There is a fundamental difference between "there exists..." and "there does not exist..." (i.e. "for all, not...").

NotoriousAMP wrote:2- On the matter of cherry picking, my views are actually in line with the modern teachings of the Catholic Church as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the writings of Pope Francis.

So what? Do you know what popes before him thought, and also justified using the bible? The fact that Christianity has been dragged kicking and screaming into (relatively) modern schools of moral thought by a pressure to survive in a changing moral landscape that doesn't want to hear about selling rape victims to their rapists isn't surprising, and the fact that the church has abandoned large parts of its own religious texts and dedicated an incredible amount of intellectual effort justifying these blatant jettisons and bullshit reinterpretations isn't a defense of the bible or the church - it's a condemnation of the legitimacy of the entire clusterfuck.

If your institution exists to be the mechanism by which the faithful learn the word of god and every decade the word of god changes, maybe that's a hint your institution has nothing to do with god and is just a bunch of misguided fools (sometimes good, sometimes bad) sitting around a book trying to figure out how to use that book to justify what they already believe is right. And the obviously fickle nature of the book by virtue of self-contradiction and the magic of 'loose interpretation' does in fact mean it is a terrible benchmark to check your beliefs against, as it will offer you the same validation it has offered some of the most vile movements throughout history.

If the conclusion about what is right is predetermined and you're just picking and choosing the parts of the bible you like that get you to your conclusion, then... you don't actually need the bible. It's not doing any of the actual work.

Edit: though that's veering wildly off topic of this off topic conversation. The point is, there is nothing privileged or special about your interpretation of that book. It's the one you like, and because you like it you want the book to support it. But the book also supports a bunch of other stupid shit you don't agree with, and a hundred years ago the exact same institutions you are now praising for their revisionism had not yet performed the revisionism you are praising them for. And you No True Scotsmanned the shit out of them claiming "they were doing it wrong and those aren't real Christian values," even though they are right in the very same fucking book you are using to define your preferred values as Christian!

deanruel87 wrote:It's more like shit Jesus did. Although it should be mentioned that there is no reason to think Jesus/Jesua existed at all. There are no extrabiblical accounts talking about a super-rabbi whipping up a religious revolution in the area. The factual accounts of Jesus' life from the Bible are also filled with things we factually know did not happen. As a result there is no reason to believe that there is any more historical inspiration for the life of Jesus than there was for the life of Hercules.

I'm pretty sure Frank said on the Den* that the older texts that predate what we now call the Bible actually said the life of Jesus happened on the moon, and he was killed by demons, not humans. Which, according to my own research, means Jesus was actually Prince Endymion (aka Tuxedo Kamen), slain by servants of the evil Queen Metallia.

Bible/Sailor Moon. It's not the worst cross-over to exist.

Anyway, this thread turned out to be a gold mine. It wasn't intended to be trolling on my part, but wow, it sure caused a cascade of hilarity, now that we have a new resident crazy Catholic to replace tzor!

*or possibly Stephen Fry mentioned it on QI, I forget which.

I would be interested in learning about Jesus and his moon times. I know about some of the lost stories of him fighting, taming, then riding Dragons but I've never heard of his moon adventures. I know of Muhammad's though! In case you never noticed he flew to the moon on a winged horse and then split that bitch in twain.

I actually wish the Abrahamic mythos had a lot more of that stuff. All religions are lies, sure, but the Abrahamic religion is the worst of them because it is also SUPER BORING. Seriously I fucking love reading about things like the Hindu mythos. Shiva has an eye that, if she opens it, turns all her enemies to ash. Brahma made a super-staff he's supposed to give you if you meditate super hard that annihilates whoever you aim it at so completely that they are utterly destroyed 4 times over and then un-made from the universe! BAD-ASS!

So many religions are totally full of awesome mind-blowing shit and every Abrahamic religion is a total snoozefest comparatively. Revelations is by far the best thing they have. If Christians or Muslims had exciting books then at least listening to their ignorant mouthbreathing could be fun for people.

Korwin wrote:

Chamomile wrote:I'm going to restate that DSMatticus constructed an incredibly bizarre situation in which a man is simultaneously a selfless surgeon performing life-saving surgery out of the goodness of his heart while simultaneously being a sociopathic monster who murders women for giggles. Bizarre inputs generate bizarre results.

Would it make an difference, if he did the life-saving surgery because it paid good?

Yes. It would make every difference. Someone performing life-saving surgery because of good pay is 1) Draining people's resources, which is perfectly fair in exchange for performing vital services but also means that he isn't especially noble for doing it (maybe slightly more noble than, say, a lawyer, who gets paid the same but does a job which doesn't save lives, but not much more noble), and more importantly 2) He will perform the surgery for the people who can pay the most rather than the ones who need it most.

So you're saying for example Ted Bundy, who volunteered at a suicide prevention hotline is an asset to society, a good guy, as long as he talked down more people from committing suicide than he murdered?

No. Causing a murder will cause more fear and distress in other people than preventing a suicide will prevent. In both cases someone has died, but in the case of the murder people ask if they might be next, even if they're unrelated to the victim. Plus, Ted Bundy was a rapist in addition to a murderer, so not only do they die, they die experiencing personal horror on a level most people cannot comprehend. There is theoretically a number of suicides he could have prevented at which point he has done more good than harm, but that would be an extremely high number.

Chamomile: DSM is talking about evil acts.

No he isn't:

Dan Cathy is an evil man who deliberately and knowingly funds the abuses of his fellows. He does not get a pass on that because he isn't cartoon villain evil

DSM isn't condemning the specific action of Chick Fil-A. He is specifically condemning the entire corporation in what is very nearly the strongest terms possible because they have ever done something wrong, regardless of how much good they have done.

The problem here is that had the guy not existed in the first place, the hospital would hire another surgeon who would save the lives that guy would have saved

Doctors are not paid high salaries because they are a post-scarcity resource. There is a limited number of surgeons in the world and if we lose one, the price of surgery rises and the number of people who can afford them goes down. Alternatively, the line at the free surgery clinic gets longer and the number of people who will reach the front if it in time goes down.

What if he's a religious fundamentalist who feels he has a responsibility to save people who aren't abhorrent monsters, but considers prostitutes abhorrent monsters?

Then he's still not an evil person. He has misguided ideals that lead him to do terrible things, but he has also clearly demonstrated that he is an altruistic person outside of those ideals, and also that he values saving good people over killing bad ones.

No. I asked how many lives he has to save each month before it became ethically permissible for him to also murder a prostitute each month

Okay, sure. You asked a question that is irrelevant to the matter at hand, because nobody claimed that Chick Fil-A was better off being homophobic than not. Good job on obfuscating the discussion. Well done.

You have painted a completely false dichotomy between not expressing moral outrage at any opportunity and expressing moral outrage at every opportunity

No. I'm saying that at some point you will have to express moral outrage, and whenever that happens you will be condemning everybody because no one will perfectly conform to your morals, and you demand nothing less than perfect conformity from everyone to judge them as anything less than evil. Not just to judge them as actually good, but to judge them as anything else but evil. Either you only express moral outrage when everyone around you already agrees (and are therefore useless) or else you don't, and no matter how infrequent the moments when you express moral outrage are, you will never, ever have anybody on your side for them. Because your standards of morality are absurd and have absolutely no room for compromise.

No one is arguing that it is okay for Chick Fil-A to be homophobic. All that's been argued is that as a whole they might not be so bad because they do more good than harm. That is it. That is the entirety of the claim made by me or by NotoriousAMP. Now, NotoriousAMP is a Catholic and the Catholic position on homosexuality is not exactly a positive one, so it is entirely possible that he has an ulterior motive in making that claim, but it is nevertheless true that the actual claim he has made is that Chick Fil-A is an okay corporation because of all the other things besides donating to homphobes that they do.

He's also said some things about marriage and religion in general which are wrong, but that's a separate issue.

Chamomile wrote:DSM isn't condemning the specific action of Chick Fil-A. He is specifically condemning the entire corporation in what is very nearly the strongest terms possible because they have ever done something wrong, regardless of how much good they have done.

Make no mistake; Chick Fil-A's stance on same-sex marriage is fucking horrendous. Real people have sat in hospital lobbies with their adopted children fighting with hospital staff to be let in to see their partners while their partners died because (in part) Chick Fil-A spent millions of dollars making sure that did not happen. My condemnation for people who would put the observance of their stupid fucking religious text over tragedies like that is complete and total. If you are going to quibble over the extent of my condemnations, then have a very enthusiastic fuck you. Advocating that certain groups should have less legal rights is Evil with a capital E. Full stop. I don't actually care if that labels some startingly huge number of people as Evil, because if you're aware there was a time when owning black people was even more popular (not, mind you, to suggest that those are equally evil acts, merely to suggest that disgusting views can be popular and no less disgusting).

And no amount of good deeds will make it ethically permissible for Chick Fil-A to do what they have done because that is not how morality works. There's a reason I explained utilitarianism to you like you flunked intro to philosophy - you don't actually fucking understand it, despite a very shabby effort to hide behind it. To be an ethical utilitarian is to, at every opportunity, take the action which maximizes net utility. The hobby-murderer/doctor who kills only slightly less lives than he saves is unethical, because he very clearly does not take the action which maximizes net utility at every opportunity. His net contributions to the world may be positive, but even utilitarians (the ones who aren't retarded) have zero problems telling you he's a bad person, and the way he becomes a good person is to stop taking actions which knowingly and deliberately harm net utility.

You don't seem to realize it, but the moral system you're actually championing is straight out of a Bioware game. You can slaughter an orphanage, save a planet, plan to slaughter more orphanages, and come out with a blue glow and a halo because it's all on the same scale and good balances bad and blah blah blah. No. Fuck no. That's stupid.

Someone didn't play Socrates Jones because then they'd know the problems with Utilitarianism. Namely, utilitarianism, and that is what you're talking about, doesn't have "do no harm" written anywhere in it.

For instance, let's posit a cannibal, we'll call him Bob. Cannibal bob enjoys eating the still beating hearts of little girls so much that the happiness he gains is more than that little girl could ever have, give, and then unhappiness making her watch him eat her heart out could ever be. Is it then morally right for him to murder little girls and force them to watch as he devours their hearts? Too extreme? Fine.

What if the happiness gained by the super rich were at least proportional to the unhappiness of people working long hours for almost nothing while living in cramped, squalid, unventilated tenements with no sewage system or running water. Should the actions of industrialists during the American industrial revolution be considered morally right? See this is the problem with Utilitarianism, it doesn't care who's happy and who's sad or the distribution of happiness or sadness, only that ther is MORE happiness than sadness.

Another problem is, who decides how much happiness is being gained or lost? If Cannibal Bob is calling the shots then of course he'd say the hearts of little girls ect, ect, causes more happiness than it does unhappiness and if the super rich are then almost certainly they'll claim their wealth causes more happiness than the downtrodden are unhappy.

I'm not saying DMS is right about X!=Y so therefore you are a monster forever, and certainly I don't think his assertion early about intent is necessarily right either, but your argument of Y>/=X so you are not a monster forever is equally flawed.

darkmaster wrote:I'm not saying DMS is right about X!=Y so therefore you are a monster forever, and certainly I don't think his assertion early about intent is necessarily right either

The first of those I did not actually say and is only being bandied about because I had the audacity to call bigots shitbags (honestly, I expected to get less pushback on that), and the second of those I am unclear what you're referring to but genuinely curious.