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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 20, 2014 at 9:15 pm
I like the small absurdities.
Like:
You can breed striped goats by having them breed around polls that have stripes painted on them. Gen 30:37-39
You got to love the cure for leprosy. Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient's right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. Leviticus 14:2-52
There's plenty other stories like these.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 20, 2014 at 9:34 pm
I like Balaam's talking ass, myself; maybe his full name was Balaam Le Pétomane?
Also that bit in Matthew 21, mistranslated from Mark 11, when JC puts on a circus act for the crowd by entering Jerusalem on a donkey and a colt simultaneously. Unintentional comedy is often the best.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 20, 2014 at 9:42 pm
The part in Ezekiel about the donkey-cock loving whore.
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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 21, 2014 at 12:28 am
I love Job. Satan and God putting their dicks on the table, and poor Job's an asshole for being like "what the fuck, God?"
Or the Gospels. Four very different stories. The genealogies for Jesus are different in Matthew and Luke, not to mention they are traced through Joseph, who is not Jesus' father by blood. Details...
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 21, 2014 at 6:42 am
I always enjoy picturing the bit where Jesus reveals himself after being resurrected as a scene from Punk'D.
"Ahhhhh!! You thought he was dead!"
Good job Ashton, and nice trucker hat.
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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 21, 2014 at 7:14 am
Revelations 6:6 And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
Honestly, this dude was trippin balls big time.
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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 21, 2014 at 1:36 pm
The part where jesus licks toes.. or was it washing feet.. I forget...
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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 21, 2014 at 2:42 pm
When I was a believer one of my favorites was John chapter 9, where Jesus cures a man of his blindness and the pharisees seem pretty disgruntled about it. I think it's still a pretty well-written story with some subtext and a fairly good narrative flow.
The book of Job is probably my favorite now because there is so much to read into it. You come to understand at least some of the objectives of the writing of the story, and you can try to grasp how the people of the time would have understood it. And there are all of those very thorny questions that make theists squirm. :p
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 21, 2014 at 3:50 pm
To be fair, there are some fine noble sentiments strewn throughout the bible, for instance, the prophets' demands for social justice for the poor.
My favorite book to read would be Ecclesiastes. The author was a thoroughgoing skeptic who doubted there was any afterlife and was quite sure that rewards and punishments are not fairly apportioned in this world.
If by "favorite" you mean the one I most frequently quote because it is so fucking outrageous, that would be Deuteronomy 25:11-12
Quote:11 If two men are having a fight and the wife of one tries to help her husband by grabbing hold of the other man's genitals, 12 show her no mercy; cut off her hand.
There you go. The creator of the universe is regulating street fights and legislating Taliban-like punishments for women.
I can understand how a comatose Christian would read through this without it really sinking in. I can't understand how a bible translation committee would carefully weigh the meaning of the Hebrew words, and then afterwards say, as the translators of the NIV do in their preface, that they are committed to the inerrancy of the bible.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people — House
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RE: Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible
February 21, 2014 at 5:01 pm
You can call me sentimental, but I like the story of the good Samaritan. Who is your neighbor? The person who needs a good neighbor right about now.
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