If only Christians weren’t so damned ahistorical


Here’s yet another of those pious Christian groups protesting same sex marriage, using a bogus argument. It’s infuriating: they know so little of human history that they think their local, recent mores are the universal and eternal dictates of their god, when Christian perspectives on marriage and politics and every damn thing have been evolving in all sorts of directions for two thousand years.

We get the same thing from creationists. They pretend their interpretation of the Bible is exactly as Jesus intended it, when really, modern creationism would have been regarded as heretical madness by Christians at any time before about 1960.

At least this bunch provides some comedy relief. Their strategy for dealing with same sex marriage is to fast for 40 days. Only not.

A Christian group that is planning a ‘fast’ in opposition to same-sex marriage has claimed that members don’t actually have to stop eating food to take part.

Like the rest of their platform, none of this makes any sense.

Comments

  1. Job's Folly says

    Sounds overly optimistic to me. If Christians weren’t ahistorical, they wouldn’t be Christians.

  2. says

    I have gone without food for a pretty large chunk of 40 days; I highly recommend they do so. It will take their minds off nonsense like this.

  3. Al Dente says

    A Christian group that is planning a ‘fast’ in opposition to same-sex marriage has claimed that members don’t actually have to stop eating food to take part.

    I intended to fast but Micky D’s had a special on their breakfast burritos and I just couldn’t pass it up. Then Stop & Shop had a buy one get one free deal on packages of 10 chicken thighs. My wife makes great chicken fricassee. Then my mother came to visit one Saturday and I couldn’t let the poor woman starve. It’s my mother! I had to take her out to a decent restaurant and I’m not going to sit at a table, drinking water and watching my mother and my wife stuff her face, without having a little something for myself. I really tried to fast but things just didn’t work out as planned. But Jesus will understand and keep those damn gays from getting married.

  4. Owlmirror says

    We get the same thing from creationists. They pretend their interpretation of the Bible is exactly as Jesus intended it, when really, modern creationism would have been regarded as heretical madness by Christians at any time before about 1960.

    Really? Which modern creationism, and which Christians, do you refer to? And why would creationism have been considered heretical or madness before the rise of modern geology and biology, especially given that very early natural philosophers were interpreting aspects of geology as having been the result of a global flood derived from the bible story, and often considered the bible itself to be a true source of the history of the world?

    I note that the Catholic church has not taken the opportunity to condemn any form of creationism as heretical, nor am I aware of any other church that has specifically done so. Yes, the Church does say that Catholics may accept the findings of modern science, but it has not condemned anyone who rejects modern science, to my knowledge, being far more concerned with doctrinal issues.

    Some modern liberal Christians may well speak out against YEC as being wrong (and more power to them for doing so), but that’s not what the claim is.

  5. Menyambal says

    I shut it off after the Big Bang and all those galaxies and shit. The Bible says there is a dome of heaven with lights on it, and anything else is blasphemy.

  6. says

    When it comes to God’s design for marriage, there is no debate.
    [From the video]

    Uhuh.

    No one can deny that marriage is an external, worldly, matter, like clothing and food, house and property, subject to temporal authority, as the many imperial laws enacted on the subject prove.
    —Martin Luther

    The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws
    —Catechism of the Catholic Church

    Surely looks like a debate to me.

  7. tfkreference says

    But if they’re all not fasting, their prayers won’t do anyth….ohhh, nevernind, their prayers will be just as effective.

  8. Owlmirror says

    Aug 27 – Oct 5 is an interesting choice of dates. That’s the first of (lunar month) Elul until the day after Yom Kippur.

  9. Jeremy Shaffer says

    A Christian group that is planning a ‘fast’ in opposition to same-sex marriage has claimed that members don’t actually have to stop eating food to take part.

    In the late 90’s I worked at a restaurant and on Sundays we’d get the after-church crowd just as any other. During this time Disney announced that they would start allowing same-sex partners be covered by their employee’s insurance and the like. Naturally, we get a church group in that were discussing a ban on all Disney movies as they ate their after-church meal. This noble ban, of course, wouldn’t start until the following week, right after they took their youth group to the latest Disney movie that had just came out in theaters. They also didn’t see any reason why this ban on Disney would require that they repaint the walls of the church’s kids room to cover the Disney characters that had been painted on.

  10. David Chapman says

    We get the same thing from creationists. They pretend their interpretation of the Bible is exactly as Jesus intended it, when really, modern creationism would have been regarded as heretical madness by Christians at any time before about 1960.

    You claim that creationism would have been heresy before the 1960s; certainly well-educated Christians would have been skeptical of it in the nineteenth century, but my mother was taught Creation happening just like it says in the Bible, in the Catholic school system in Ireland in the 1940s. Similarly Bishop Ussher’s chronology of the history of the Earth was acceptable by Protestants after it was published in 1650, ( indeed it agreed closely with previous estimates by luminaries such as Newton and Kepler ) and this proffers a very creationist timeframe for the age of the planet, i.e., six thousand years ago. Ussher’s findings were printed as an annotation in many many copies of the King James bible up until quite modern times, so it would seem that young earth creationism was perfectly acceptable throughout much of Christendom. This is hard to square with your claim that Creationism would have been heresy “at any time before about 1960.” ( Or are there other aspects of modern creationism that you’re saying would have been heretical, besides its lateness and brevity? )
    And I find it difficult to believe that Jesus Christ believed otherwise, either, which you seem to imply. That silly fucker believed in Noah’s ark. ( Matthew 24:37-39. )

  11. Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhD says

    You mean things like the Ken Ham people lived and frolicked with dinosaurs type creationism?

  12. says

    Well… That was a load of BS. You show me were in the bible God specifies one man and one woman, because there is a ton of polygamy in there and I don’t see God saying anything about that. The Ephesians quote is awesome.

    Husbands love your wives…

    Yep no polygamy there. (Pure sarcasm.)

    God’s word can’t be edited well then explain the damn cannon or Constantine. And why the hell is there so many bibles? Where’s his corrective hand here? Huh?

    Circumcise our hearts to his? Seriously? Do you know what a circumcision is?

    Fasting for forty days huh? Well if you survive let me know how it worked out. Oh wait you said you don’t have to literally fast, soooo…. Then where does the fasting come in? So their going like their God would, without any falsifiable evidence, glad we got that figured out.

    Gandhi should rise up and smite you all for your insults. (I know it isn’t going happen but it would be awesome.)

  13. David Chapman says

    13
    Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhD

    You mean things like the Ken Ham people lived and frolicked with dinosaurs type creationism?

    Is that in reply to me? If so, I can only respond that if the Earth was the age that all those King James bibles claimed it was, then certainly people would have lived and frolicked with/been shredded and eaten by, dinosaurs. I don’t see why this is a different doctrine from the young age of the Earth, once you’ve discovered that dinosaurs lived on the planet. If human beings were as old as the planet, like it says in the Bible, then they must have co-existed here with dinosaurs. So I don’t see this people-with-dinosaurs schtick as a specific, ‘Ken Ham’ type of young earth creationism. The issue didn’t arise for Bishop Ussher & any other Christians before modern times because they didn’t know about dinosaurs; simple as that.
    ( Ken Ham depicts humans as frolicking with, rather than being horrifically mangled by, dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden on the basis that before the Fall, all of Creation was vegetarian. That might be unique to him for all I know, but it doesn’t really effect my contention. )

  14. Owlmirror says

    Husbands love your wives…

    Yep no polygamy there. (Pure sarcasm.)

    *shrug* Plural is plural.

    Circumcise our hearts to his? Seriously? Do you know what a circumcision is?

    Circumcision of the heart is in the bible. Deuteronomy 10:16; Deuteronomy 30:6; Jeremiah 4:4; Jeremiah 9:26.

    The unusual idiom appearing only in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah has lead to the suggestion that the Deuteronomist was in fact Jeremiah.

  15. wcorvi says

    OMG! They were right. Jesus was married to the church. They told us if we allowed gay marriage, next you know, people will want to marry animals. But to be married to a BUILDING! That is totally disgusting.

  16. Owlmirror says

    Ragutis @# 18:

    Circumcise our hearts

    What the everloving fuck is that supposed to mean?

    Going by the context of the verses I noted @#16, I would suggest that the original intent was that some?/most? of the men who underwent the body modification in infancy that showed tribal identity were not exhibiting behaviors that the author of the text (speaking on behalf of God, of course) approved of, and “circumcising the heart” was a metaphor for a more radical change in personal commitments and actual behaviors such that they would be those that the author (and God) did approve of.

    A similarly visceral metaphor might be “put some skin in the game”, except of course the Deuteronomist did not consider worship and (God’s)lawabidingness to be a game.

    wcorvi @#19:

    They were right. Jesus was married to the church. They told us if we allowed gay marriage, next you know, people will want to marry animals. But to be married to a BUILDING!

    No, no. “The Church” is not a building; “the Church” is the collective social body of Christians.

    So Jesus was/is married to many millions of men and women simultaneously. Oh, wait . . .

  17. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    Circumcision is the physical mark of the covenant between YHWH* and the Israelites. The act is the cutting off the skin. The meaning of the act is committing oneself to YHWH the way that YHWH has committed to the Israelites.

    It’s hard to know exactly, but there were some people who avoided breaching Halakha in obvious ways and yet weren’t invested in the Judaism of their local Jewish community. Some rabbis think that this was meant to be a provocative statement on the order of,

    Look, you’re a member of our tribe [b/c you have the cut-foreskin marker of membership] and your penis obeys our laws [by not penetrating menstruating vaginas – this being an important taboo in many but not all Jewish communities, and because it was put into practical effect by having a separate tent or house for menstruating women, it was easy for the community to know that sex *wasn’t* happening if a household was engaging in this custom], but are you obeying the laws in your heart? Are you a member of the tribe in your heart? Is your heart as committed to loving god as your penis is to avoiding menstrual blood? Because suck it up, man, menstrual blood is **ick-eeeeeee** and if you don’t want to get close to god at least as much as your penis wants to avoid that stuff then you really need to check yourself.

    I have no idea how common that interpretation is among rabbis, but since it was communicated to me by a rabbi, at least one holds it.

    *No one is to stone anyone until I blow my whistle, even – and I want to make this absolutely clear – even if they do say YHVH!