Reply #77: I'm hardly shifting goalposts. I'm responding to arguments made against my position.

[stopbush]

Debaters would call that drilling down into the argument. Nothing has changed about the initial premise I put forward, and I'm rather surprised you don't get that.

As far as, "You're claiming that the Bible's worse than Playboy because it involves underage people in sexual situations, which suggests that you either think the age of marriage has been our contemporary notion of adulthood for a hell of a lot longer than it has been." - I didn't realize Lot's daughters were married to their father when they fucked him. My bad.

BTW - you make the assumption that the tale of Lot's daughters fucking their father was not intended as a story to titillate audiences of the time. Why do you make such an assumption? The people who were allowed to read the Bible were men, not women, and the Biblical laws covered everything from the rights of men to sell their daughters into slavery (Yahweh approved!) to murdering the males of neighboring people and using their daughters as whores (Yahweh ordered!). Seems to me that there may well have been any number of sickos back then who got off on the idea of incest, so why not throw them a bone?

I'm all for things being put into a historical context. That's my basic point about disagreeing with anyone championing the Bible as an icon in the forefront of the battle for free speech, because we can only make that argument TODAY if we excuse away and cherry pick what is actually IN "the good book."

I notice you don't address the idea of the Bible being ahistorical. Why? Chances are right around 90% that the whole thing is made up, and that includes the way women may or may not have been treated back in the day. Archaeology has much more to say about what should be considered to be an accurate "perspective on the time" than does the Bible. The Bible is an accurate historical document the way Gone With the Wind is a history of the Civil War.

Closing BTW - I'm well within my rights to "embarrass myself here." Get over it. Debate the argument on its merits, not on the personalities involved.