this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Nothing makes atheists faster than reading the bible
It's pretty good at making Satanists too.
In my experience, if you read it cover to cover, it either makes you an atheist or makes you super religious. Not too many people go into it as a basic "I go to church on Sundays" Christian and come out of it the same.
I have been reading scholarly works about Jesus, the formation and development of Christianity, previously lost teachings and such. I’ve read a lot of OT passages in these books about later events as a result. I am have become convinced that the Old Testament god was a mean piece of shit.
Oh yeah. Judaism at the time was basically, "God is a big mean motherfucker and if you don't do what he wants, he won't just punish you, he'll punish your entire people collectively."
One interesting topic in the book, How Jesus Became God, was theological work in the first couple hundred years of christianity deciding whether the god of the OT was the same god Jesus praised or a different god.
My headcanon is that the New Testament god was someone else who murdered the old god and usurped his followers, pretending to be him.
What gave it away? Ruining someone's entire life, taking all he loves, inflicting him with the worst pains a human can feel, just to prove "See? I told you he's my greatest bootlick"? Nuking an entire town and killing someone for the entirely human reaction of looking back at the home they left behind like some even more twisted version of Orpheus and Eurydike?
Or giving his creations curiosity, tempting their curiosity, enabling them to indulge their curiosity, then yelling at them, throwing them out, condemning them to mortality, inflicting suffering on them and all their descendants as punishment for their ancestors' curiosity who didn't even have the comprehension to know what they were doing was wrong?
Yes, I know that story is supposed to be a metaphor, but I have yet to find an explanation that doesn't make him look like an absolute twat.
No mixing fabrics, fucken killjoy.
Actually, that one I'll give a pass for its context: Cheats mixing in cheap materials with expensive ones, but demanding the full price as if the whole thing was made of the expensive one.
Now the bit in Numbers about the cursed water, that was a bit fucked up - you shouldn't have to secretly cheat on your husband just to get an abortion. Imagine someone catches you and you get put to death instead. And what if he doesn't suspect anything or doesn't give enough of a shit to charge you? Just too unreliable.
I am making a joke ai understand a good bit of context, plus if memory serves right there is a debate amongst scholars if the laws of say Leviticus was a general law that applied to all Hebrews or simply the tribe of Leviticus. Basically were they clan laws or not.
Mainline Protestant over here just munching on my popcorn
Same thing I was thinking. Episcopalians with the daily office read through the Bible every 2 years and most of them are super chill
I highly recommend the Esoterica channel on YouTube. He gets into all the interesting stuff that was left out of the Bible. The greater context and pre-Bible history is fascinating.
Does he go over the apocrypha too? I love the Infancy Gospel of Thomas where teenage Jesus is an asshole who abuses his powers because he feels like it.
I like the one where Jesus was born in a cave, there were no wise men, just a few random children, and within like an hour of being born, Jesus fights a dragon and wins. That’s a much cooler nativity scene.
He mentions it fairly often. If he doesn't have some videos on it yet, I imagine he will add some. I've mostly been watching his videos on Gnosticism and also some about the early pantheon from which Yahweh likely emerged. He covers a wide variety of stuff.