Why would any woman want to be Christian?

[Esquilax]

That is because I don't really know what the correct position is. I have thought about gender issues a good amount in the Bible. There are different positions people take. You mention "the Bible puts women below men" and you treat this as a self-evident assertion of the Bible's moral inferiority, yet you give no evidence.

Um... the biblical quotations in the OP's video are literally in the bible. How is that not evidence?

Whether in fact men are to be given greater spiritual authority than women, I believe is very probable. I grew up in a feminist home in which my mother and father both had equal say in what happened. The result was chaos, they fought all the time, there was no peace, there was no sense of order. My dad bought into feminist values to a large degree and there was a sense that equality between genders was something that was stressed.

What's your point? Are you attributing the fighting your parents did to equality? Or are you willing to entertain the prospect that there might have been deeper, personal issues that, in a household that prizes free, unfettered expression from both sexes, were allowed to be aired?

Hell, maybe they just liked to fight. Some couples do that.

I really could not say what is the answer. I do not think that it is self evident the proposition "some passages of scripture teach male leadership as greater than female leadership" in any way entails the moral inferiority of scripture. Where do you deduce this from?

Uh, from the words you yourself placed in quotation marks?

From what assumption about human nature do you come to the conclusion which men and women, biologically very different should have the exact same roles. This is not self evident to me, I think it is likely false, but I don't know the exact form that should manifest.

And this just shows that you're missing the point: it's not so much about having the same roles as it is about the bible preaching female subservience to male authority, unquestioningly. To the point where a woman who is raped, according to the bible, should be married to her rapist. That's... that's sort of in there.

You probably don't agree with that treatment- I hope!- and that's fine, but the fact of the matter is that other people do, and that's a problem; it's the kind of religious exhortation that leads to casual misogyny and violence against women (spousal abuse is documented to be higher in fundamentalist religious homes) as well as political sanctions like the old nineteenth century concept of coverture, under which a married woman isn't counted as a person in legal terms, but as an extension of her husband. Hell, even more recently, it shows in the way the christian right fought tooth and nail against equal rights for women, based on this concept.

Feminism is a very new movement, it has not been around for very long at all. To say that lack of agreement with feminist theory constitutes an absolute intrinsic evil, a standard that can be measured absolutely against the Bible is to fail to see that the standard originates in a human movement.

So what if it's a new movement? I bet if I'd started a movement today that had absolute incontrovertible proof for god you'd be on my side immediately, so don't start acting like the age of an idea is its sole determining value. Beyond that, you're arguing with atheists here: from our point of view, every standard is a human standard. You'll have to do more than just assume the bible is something else.

What is your basis for claiming that feminist values supersede the Bible?

... Because one's a genuine and impassioned movement for the equal rights of fifty percent of the planet, and the other is a book of made up fairytales that endorses the keeping of slaves?

And yet, even as I say this, scripture itself declares that husbands and wives should "submit to one another out of reverence for Christ" and the Deborah was the prophetess who ruled over Israel and that there is "no Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free but Christ is all and in all" Gal 3.

We can all find bible verses to prove whatever we want them to, dude. It's one of the reasons we atheists find the damn book so specious.

I do not know what to make of this issue, but frankly I know that the person who posted this video does not know enough to be taken seriously. If you consider what he is doing to be an authoritative work on the subject, that shows that you are not well read about issues in New Testament theology.

Yeah, maybe he's not so well versed in the mental contortions you guys put yourselves through in order to convince yourself that evil is good, but do you deny that all the shitty passages he mentions are literally written down in the book?

He assumes that a fundamentalist approach to scripture is the only one that is Christian. This is a typical atheist lie, that in order to be a Christian, you have to read the Bible and take every single thing literally, and not study the traditions and culture that informs the Word of God. Of course, the person on the video does not do this, he is more concerned with getting a laugh out of people than being accurate.

No, that is not the assumption here. There is no assumption here, just the observation that some Christians use those passages as justification for awful things. Once again, the context of the book, or your interpretation of it (why is that interpretation something that takes precedence over what's literally on the page, by the way?) doesn't matter: what matters is the actions of people that are justified by that book.

I actually saw this same person on YouTube smoking a bong and then talking about atheism. If this is who you want to learn about Biblical criticism from, that shows you aren't serious about it.

Oh no, a bong!

But seriously, you've never done anything undignified? You gonna base your reactions to everything a person does on a single action? Really?

This is just pure propaganda, designed to take women away from the church and get people into drugs and follow an easy course of life.

Don't be silly.

"Who are you going to believe: God or logic"
This is so typical, the word logic actually does not refer to any mathematical system in which self evident truths are related to each other through established means, but instead refers to the culture of atheism. There is no logic to prove that women should have the same roles as men. If anything, the closest scientific evidence would say that they are different, in many many ways.

Missing the point again. The point is that different does not mean, as those passages in the bible indicate, inferior. Or that submission to men is a requirement.

People that use the term "logic" to mean "an argument from authority" should be given the title "propagandist". That is all they are.

You're being silly again. I told you to stop that, it does your argument no good.