Reply #76: balderdash

[PurityOfEssence]

My stance is that the Bible, taken as a whole, is a mishmash of some good and a lot of primitive, abusive, subservient rubbish. Those who want to dismiss the uglinesses are no better than Stalinists who glory in the public works, social safety net, education achievements and technological advances, but don't want to take responsibility for the murders, slave-labor, torture and aggressive wars of conquest. When one signs on with a group, one is responsible for the actions of the group.

Religion is a package deal. If you join the faith, you're at least a fellow-traveler and enabler of the parts you may not like. Religions are political entities, and always have been: they're a method for controlling (or helping, in a kinder sense) the people. God says "don't eat pork" ('cuz we're too primitive to figure out how to cook it properly), God says "no shellfish" ('cuz our sewage makes them dangerous), God says "no homos" ('cuz we need to reproduce and have a new generation of young men to fight off the assholes from over the hills and go off and conquer the occasional weaklings who have things we want). Get it? It's politics.

This kind of a la carte self-justification is one of the more irritating things about religion. All good is the work of god, all bad done in religion's name is that of fiends and scalawags. Hitler wasn't REALLY a Christian. God is good. La la la la la.

I'm a Liberal Democrat. As such, I'm aware that I'll be tarred as indecisive, tax-and-spendy, soft on crime, and a host of other ills. I don't AGREE with those assessments, but they come with the meal.

Anyone who's going to hold Christianity up as "good" needs to take responsibility for the wicked, nasty and primitive crap interlaced with some of the undeniable niceties.

You can judge them as you please. I see the Bible as a document of assumptions that Christians agree is correct, if not literally, then more-or-less so. If individuals want to repudiate parts of it, that's fine, but then they have to grant others the nuances they demand themselves.

Religion simply doesn't play fair. Christianity also holds to the Old Testament, so if one wants to play self-congratulatory games of being "fer" the "good" and "agin" the "bad", then one doesn't have a leg to stand on when an obvious heretic takes issues with some of the "bad" stuff.

Where the books came from is more or less irrelevant; the party line is that those tomes, piled together into that one volume, IS THE WORD.