Thoughts and Prayers: The Religion Thread

Oh, I get it.

You just hadn’t actually weighed in on whether you thought his rant was out of line. You still haven’t. Did you think it was out of line or not?

 

White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort

I’m sure most of these evangelical Christian are holding honest beliefs of their faith. And they are still fucktards and idiots.

 

Lecturing Abbott is an exercise in futility. He’s either oblivious or doesn’t give a fuck.

 

Do you think insulting racists is over the line? Nazis? Murderers? KKK?
and while I did engage in hyperbole because not every person who follows a religion is a fucktard unlike every racist, Nazi, murderer ... the strident religionists are. The ones who who excuse unspeakable tragedy by saying we cannot know what God wants. If God didn’t stop the deaths of 80% of indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere or slavery or the Holocaust or the Bataan death March or Pol Pot or pediatric cancer then God is useless.

 

Like the flood story, it was cribbed from other narrative traditions. The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Songs of Inanna... There are parallels throughout ancient literature. The meanings often reflect the master. For some, it's an argument against vegetarianism. For others, it's the start of the sins of the father being passed to the children. It's seen as an illustration of our inherent nature as sinners.

As far as I'm concerned, it could just as easily be a warning to vegans to not be such self-righteous jackasses. My tongue is planted firmly in my cheek, but something Anglican scholars like to stress is the Bible is meant to be read and reflected upon in the present tense. So yeah, maybe now it has more to do with hipsters demanding their waitress tell them if their chicken was happy and had friends. God to hipsters: "Stop being a pain in the ass to food service workers."

Not a literalist here. There are a lot of Christians like me who are aware of the heritage of ideas, the motifs, and the times in which the Bible was written. When you progress through history, it gets even hinkier when it comes to translations, interpretations, etc. As beautiful as it is, The King James Version was as much a political tract as it was holy writ. When someone suggested a "Book of Trump," one of my friends who happens to be a priest commented that it wasn't like it hasn't happened before."

 

How could the chicken be happy between her knees?

 

Can someone explain why self-styled Evangelical Christians are so opposed to gun control and are convinced that Jesus, if he were alive today, would be a card-carrying, AR-15 carrying zealot?

 

@Songbird

 

The Sports Desk is not so lively these days, my friend.

 

Which rant? He has offered up quite a few. I think it is out of line when he insults the intelligence of people who have faith.

 

Leviticus 2:14 would seem to apply here with its reference to “firstfruits.” Genesis 4 doesn’t refer to the quality of Cain’s offering but sings hosannas about Abel’s, which wold suggest that perhaps Abel offered high quality mutton while Cain’s fruits and vegetables were just whatever was lying around.

 

I don’t know many of these people. I question whether the majority of them are truly evangelical Christians, TBH. Attending a non-denominational mega church in the suburbs with good worship music is not a marker of “evangelical.”