Hump’s intro to Jewish Fundie Deception: Almost enough to make an ex-Jew anti-Semitic

I don’t know how many times I’ve had to grit my teeth to keep from screaming at my lap top when a Xtian fundamentalist insists that what the words of the Bible say aren’t really what they mean. Usually employed when they are confronted by hideously violent passages, or absurdly foolish scientific concepts, they’ll say the words don’t really mean those things; that I’m taking them out of context; that you have to “read them in the original ancient Greek” to full understand subtle… OH SHUT THE HELL UP!!!


In The Atheist Camel Chronicles I have a chapter devoted to the Christian propensity to lie for the faith. Indeed, lying for the faith was encouraged by a number of the early Church fathers as a way to spread the word and win converts. They figured their god would approve.

I see similar behavior from fundie Muslims who will insist that there are no calls for the death of infidels in the Koran - that those are simply misinterpretations, taken out of context, etc. But in their case, the Koran is so rife with contradictions, and the hadith so befouled with varying agendas by various sects that contradict the Koran itself, that I could actually understand how they could read one passage, and not another, or forget, or only embrace the one their sect endorses. Frankly, it’s not their fault entirely… in the world of scriptures theirs is an utter abortion.

But what I never realized was that intellectual dishonesty, or denial, oh - just call it out right lying to protect the faith isn’t the sole provenance of Christians and Muslims. The fundie / Orthodox Jews seem to have it down to a science.

An Orthodox Jewish woman blogger said that unlike Reformed Jews / modernist Jews, that Orthodoxy requires “strict adherence to Jewish Law.” I commented that I certainly hope the author doesn't ever have to come to the aid of her husband, and accidentally grab the genitals of his attacker as strict Jewish law demands her hand be amputated. (Deut. 25). I also wondered out loud if, on the rare occasions where such a thing happens was the woman’s hand lopped off by a moyle, or the local kosher butcher?

”When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets [genitals] : Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.” Deuteronomy 25: 11-12

In a similar vain, I offered that perhaps the Orthodox Jewish community is dwindling because of all those rude unruly sons they have to stone to death. (Deut. 18).   In response I was treated to this by another Orthodox Jewish reader:

”Wrong. Strict Jewish law decrees that the woman must monetarily compensate the attacker for public humiliation. It does not demand the amputation of her hand. This is figurative language. You are taking the passage literally and not in its inherent meaning which is that of compensation just as an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth refers to reciprocity in the court of law as also a strict interpretation of Jewish law.”

Now, that half-assed lie may work on a dim-witted goy, but I’ve actually read the bible. Shit, I was even Jewish...once.  There are many laws among the 613 in the Tanakh that specify compensation for various trespasses and crimes. If you rape some one’s virgin daughter you need to pay her Dad cash money. But in every one of those cases it specifically denotes financial compensation. No where in the Old Testament is verbiage that directs financial penalty masked in any way, much less masked by alluding to “cutting off her hand and showing no pity.”

Nah… the misogynistic brutal tribe’s law said what it meant, and means what it said: amputation for female scrotum grabbing, even if it is to save your husband.

If we were to accept the revisionist explanation of the obviously ashamed and embarrassed fundie Jewish apologist then we would be compelled to interpret all the harsh Jewish laws differently from how they were written and what they say. Thus directing the stoning to death of unruly children (Deut. 18) wouldn’t mean stoning to death at all. It would mean something akin to “Thou shalt withhold their dessert for the night, and not givith them the use of the family camel for the evening.”

Words of scripture never mean what they say when those words are an embarrassment to, or indictment of, the fundamentalist’s preferred fable … Xtian, Muslim, or Jew. How very convenient, how very transparent, how very Abrahamic.