Friday, March 18, 2016

The Bible: Either Love it or Leave it...you can't have it both ways



In a recent interview Jimmy Carter decried the use of the Bible as justification for immoral and unethical behavior. Here’s an extract:

“You can pick out individual verses throughout the Bible that show that the verse favours your particular preference, and the fact that the Catholic church, for instance, prohibits women from serving as priests or even deacons gives a kind of a permission to male people all over the world, that well, if God thinks that women are inferior, I’ll treat them as inferiors. If she’s my wife, I can abuse her with impunity, or if I’m an employer, I can pay my female employees less salary,...”


Whole interview here:
http://churchandstate.org.uk/2014/03/jimmy-carter-warns-bible-is-being-used-to-promote-the-abuse-of-women-and-girls/




So the question becomes:  “Yeah…and? Problem?”
The fact is that the Bible, the “Good Book”, is, according to believers, the last word in how their God wants people to behave. He sets the tune, and the sheep dance to it.  How then can Jimmy decry Christians who take God and His Bible at His/It’s word and accuse them of less than Christian behavior?  How does one have the nerve to say on one hand as a Christian he embraces the bible, while on the other hand it shouldn’t actually be taken seriously, lest we behave badly?  Why doesn't he just renounce the bible, since its been justifiably used to do just that for some 1700 years?


Seems to me if he wants to continue to believe a mythical dead Jewish guy is God he can do it without holding the bible up as some bastion of morality and ethics.  Thomas Jefferson respected Jesus' [alleged] specific words, but rejected everything else in that book of supernatural foolishness and immoral horrors. Jimmy could do it too ... all Christians could do it.

My point is: those who use that book as a guideline / as a model for and justification of their behavior, as obscene and evil as it may appear in the 21st century, are...by definition...more Christian than the one who rejects its guidelines but embraces its existence as holy.

Want people to stop using the Bible as support for their misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, and violent behavior?  Then declare it an obsolete and false doctrine. Disown it as a product of ancient ignorance and prejudice.  To condemn the actors but not their script, and its authors, is patently absurd and hypocritical.
   

3 comments:

TommE said...

Well written, logical, thought provoking, clean. Should be posted in the Religion section of newspapers. Give it a try. Sugar coated articles appear there all the time. The fairy tales need to be challenged.

Dromedary Hump said...

Thanks,Tomm,
Good idea. I may just do that.

Sunil said...
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