this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Religious people are disingenuous by nature
Everything inconvenient is a metaphor, everything they like is the literal word of god and cannot be questioned
Those people don't believe in anything, they're just dishonest about it, lol.
Yeah, like following the Bible seems like an all or nothing kind of thing. I've never really understood the people that just kinda follow it and think they can rationalize issues away.
Why in the world would it be an all or nothing kind of thing? It's a compilation of writing from many different authors, for many different audiences, spanning thousands of years. It wasnt even intended to be all or nothing for contemporaneous audiences--Pauls letters, for example, were for specific recipients.
Assuming that the Bible is intended to be a literal, uncontradictory list of rules for living is accepting an incorrect Evangelical theology.
I believe it was originally intended to be a literal account of history and set of rules, but as society's knowledge evolved and literacy increased the number of people who could read it, the contradictions it contained both with itself and with the world it was trying to describe forced their hand. Some decided to defy logic and reject what their eyes and experiences told them, some decided to adjust how they interpreted the bible from literal to metaphorical (which just seems to me like an attempt to save the scam by those who were in on it or an attempt to keep the sense of security it gave without needing to worry about it clearly being wrong about many things by those who were true believers), and some rejected the premise of the bible (that the whole point of these lives is to serve the will of some mysterious being that chose to communicate with characters in the stories but otherwise only "shows up" via outcomes which show favour or disfavour).
And the people who pull out bible verses to support their hatred seem to prefer the literal set of rules interpretation, so why just treat that one as gospel and not the rest of it?
And the all or nothing bit comes from either this is the word of an all powerful being with absolute control over what happens to you over eternity, written by humans inspired by that being, who should know how to inspire accuracy, or it wasn't written for accuracy in the first place (either deliberately by the absolute being or because it was made up by humans writing what they thought made the most sense/would give them the most influence), at which point quoting verses is useless because any given verse could be "made up" rather than "inspired". Being able to say, "oh this part is real but this other part is just a metaphor" just seems either too arrogant or too convenient.
There is wisdom in it, as the other commenter said, but that wisdom is just human wisdom, not some infallible divine wisdom. That's what I meant by the "nothing" part, it's either a special book that should all be treated as special knowledge, or it should just be treated as any other book. This in-between where it's special but also contains stuff to not worry about is nonsensical to me.
It's also being functionally illiterate, as many (if not most) of the books in the Bible state their author clearly in the first paragraph, lol. It's not "the word of God" by definition, but that doesn't mean it's not a goldmine of wisdom! 👍
They just want divine justification to hate the people they fear
For the record... when Jesus was talking about "love one another' or "love your neighbor as yourself" and similar, it wasn't the all-encompassing "one another" we think of today. He taught adherence and obedience to the Law of Moses, and he certainly wasn't talking about loving one's slaves. (who were property.)
or unruly children that talked back to their parents. (Those... he was all for having them stoned.)
Jesus wasn't a shining example of goodness, but he's less awful than certain of his modern followers.
He was a jew, and wanted jewish bullshit "laws" followed
People like to write him up as a someone who would pass for a Bernie Sanders with a beard, but it's bullshit
Especially because there's not a shred of evidence that the magic stick-zombie even existed
Yup.
actually, in the NT, when he was beefing with the pharisees, it was because they had gone too lax, not because they were legalistic. Like when the pharisees came and bitched about not ritually washing their hands before eating... he literally called them out for not stoning kids. (which was, IIRC a law in Deuteronomy.)
The pharisees followed the "tradition of the elders" that kind of sorta added some things (like ritual hand washing,) and kinda sorta glossed over some things (Stoning kids that talked back.)
and the 'good' bits people like...? Yeah. that wasn't an original thing either. That time and place there were two movements going on: "Hey be nice" and... basically... the fundamentalism groupies going 'back' to the written law of moses.
Jesus literally had more to say about paying taxes than slavery. Jesus would have been that asshole saying "if you just comply, they won't kill you."
And all that is assuming he actually existed. (or wasn't legendarized. like King Arthur, or Charlemagne an his pallies.)
Even if he did exist, there's exactly zero reason to believe he actually said anything he's supposed to have said. Or even had a "ministry." We need not mention the miracles. (well, I am going to mention that there was a reason that he couldn't do them in his hometown: they knew he was full of shit.)
The point I'm making, though, is even if you just accept it all at face value, his morals were fairly awful. Which is why you get lots of people who follow him and have fairly awful morals themselves.
I have an image in my mind of an orange Jesus grifting and taking bribes to put certain things into the religion for his friends. I have never seen any evidence Jesus actually existed and isn't an just an ancient allegory.
if- and yes that's a very big if- we accept that Jesus had some type of "ministry" he was probably on the level of a proverbial traveling snake oil saleman, selling fake miracles and shit. The iron being, that the reason snake oil salesmen were a thing was because snake oil did have some medicinal properties. Which is more than can be said for random exorcisms and stuffing spit-daubed mud in the eyes.
The gospels were written so far away from where it all supposedly happened that no one was going to go back and check. which is why they were working off the septuagint for the gospels of mathew and luke. and none of the gospels were written by the people they're attributed to, they're all anonymous.
one of the more fun examples of an insertion is the whole virgin birth thing. (Isaiah 7:14, when properly translated says nothing about a virgin giving birth. The word used was 'Almah', which was translated into the septuagint as 'parthenos'. Parthenos basically also meant young woman, but then in christian literature came to mean a virgin, specifically. A mistake they would have caught had they been reading the scriptures in the original language.
Literally every single "and this was to fulfill that" sort of prophecy they claim is like that. It's either not a prophecy, or so obviously not about jesus that it's laughable. (The actual prophecy in Isaiah 7 was about the enemies of King Ahaz, three kingdoms including Israel, who were allies against Ahaz. God was promising to wipe them out. the kid only served as a sort of clock.)