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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Yes, but it doesn’t matter, these people don’t read the Bible.

    They do read the Bible though, at least in my experience. I’ve gone to a number of different churches, Evangelical and otherwise, and the Evangelical or otherwise Calvinist folks were the ones that read the Bible the most and in the most detail — but perhaps also the ones who came to horrible conclusions the most often. Like that you should shine the light of Christ into the world by blocking women for promotion at your job, because 1 Tim 2:12 says that Paul does not permit them to have authority over men. (Real example, if possibly the worst one I’ve seen.) Maybe my experience is not representative, but I don’t think the problem is primarily that Evangelicals don’t read the Bible.

    I have a long theory about some of the ways that Evangelicalism distorts Scripture, but one root of the issue is that (IMHO) Scripture was written by humans, reflects the biases of the authors and their societies, and has a lot of horrible things in it. If you take a sola scriptura view and then read it through a lens that’s been cultivated over years to reinforce patriarchy and supremacy (see e.g. Manifest Destiny, the curse of Ham, etc) then you will end up absorbing the genocidal and supremacist bits and not the hospitable and altruistic bits.

    For them, it’s just an excuse to do whatever it is they’re doing.

    For sure. People don’t want to repent. They want to find justifications for what they were already doing, or planning to do.


  • I was having a weird one today so I read through the book of Amos. It’s shockingly similar to the current situation.

    Amos prophesied that Gaza would be destroyed, even genocided, as a reaction to crimes that included kidnapping entire communities. But that’s just an intro to a prophecy that Israel would be violently and mercilessly destroyed in response to a long list of their own crimes.

    I’m not saying that Amos predicted the current situation, just that it’s sad how little we’ve improved in 2500 years.