I greatly appreciate Dan McLellan’s work — he’s a serious scholar of the Bible and he often addresses the shallow assumptions some people make about their religion, and delves into the complicated history of Christianity. Sometimes, though, I think his focus on Biblical scholarship can lead him to miss the big, glaring horror behind belief.
This video begins with an arrogant Christian prick reading triumphantly from the Bible. It confirms his prejudice that women are less important, and that their purpose is to bear children.
I was surprised at McLellan’s criticism. The guy is quoting this verse of the Bible, 1 Timothy 2:11:
Women are to learn in silence with complete submission. I do not allow a woman to teach or to hold authority over a man. She should keep silent. For Adam was formed first, and Eve afterward. Furthermore, Adam was not deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and fell into sin. However, women will be saved through the bearing of children, provided that they continue to persevere in faith, love, and holiness, marked by modesty.
McLellan rightly points out that this book of the Bible is presented as the work of the apostle Paul, but it isn’t — it’s regarded by scholars as the work of someone else altogether. Fine. So? Those words and ideas are ugly and do harm, no matter which ancient evangelist wrote them, and those words are canonically in the Christian Bible. Are the words of Paul generally regarded as true and accurate representations of Christian belief? That’s one implication of McLellan’s criticism, that the only valid source of information is Paul’s writings.
My objection is to the blatant misogyny — the actual empirical evidence is that women are just as intelligent and just as worthy as men, and that there was no Adam & Eve & an apple, and therefore reality contradicts the literal stories told in the Bible. I don’t give a damn who wrote it. It’s just another example of how the wickedness in their holy book inspires the wickedness of smug young men, like the one in the video.
That’s the better argument, not quibbling over authorship, but simply talking to women and recognizing their personhood and autonomy and equal worth to men. It’s so weird to see a kid who doesn’t care about scholarship being rebuked for his lack of scholarship, when he’s treating the Bible in the same way he would an Andrew Tate podcast.
Adam was not deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and fell into sin.
Actually, according to Genesis, both of them were deceived. They both ate that apple, remember? Yet another internal contradiction showing what a perfect inerrant document the Bible isn’t.
Even McLellan makes the case that applying ancient perspectives on the modern world is a misuse of the literature. He’s quite clear, for example, that Bible says nothing about abortion, and that the role of women in the older parts is “property” first of their father and then their husbands. He frequently makes the case that “the Bible” is neither univocal nor inerrant. As for Paul’s position on women with respect to 1st Timothy, he has noted that in one of the letters,”Paul” cites a woman as an apostle so in that case that writer is giving serious props to a woman in the community.
I’ll also give him a round of applause for laying into Trump as a serial sexual abuser, and saying that Trump’s re-election does harm to all the victims of sexual abuse.
I’m not sure that I agree with everything McLellan says about the Bible, but mostly that’s just academic debate. He’s much more knowledgeable than me about the source materials and the languages. And then there’s the question of whether these debates really matter. Despite my long standing interest in it, I don’t think so.
On the bright side, recently women have started leaving the fundie xian churches in high numbers.
Why go to a church that claims you are subhuman and property.
Actually actually, YHWH deceived Adam (Gen 2:16-17) when he told him that eating the forbidden fruit would result in death that very day.
The serpent told the truth to Eve (Gen 3:4-5) when it told Eve: “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
According to Genesis, that is exactly what happened. Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they came to know good and evil, and they lived for literally hundreds of years more.
If you belong to the fact-based community you realise the ones with two Y chromisomes are humans of equal worth as the XY* variants.
But he is talking to the bible-thumpers who think those scribblings mean everything.
This is where textual criticism (done mostly by sincere believers) becomes important.
If misogynic persons hide behind passages that quite obviously are apochrypal in nature their arguments are shattered. They will of course not change their minds but it gets harder for them to convert others to their point of view.
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*People with a few Alien genes -like Ripley in her last film- are clearly superior but that is another matter.
“Women are to learn in silence with complete submission. I do not allow a woman to teach or to hold authority over a man. She should keep silent.”
Good God! 50% 0f humankind should not contribute to its progress. That is equivalent to using only half of your brain. Diversity makes life dynamic. To limit it is to limit oneself. No resource should go without consideration.
FROM: Greater Good Magazine – Science based insights for a meaningful life.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_diversity_makes_us_smarter
The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult.
The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think.
This is not just wishful thinking: It is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and demographers.
The people with only two Y chromosomes are all dead, never made it out of the womb.
If people didn’t have knowledge of good and evil before they ate the forbidden fruit, then they were set up by a monster who wanted them to fail because how would they know it wasn’t good to disobey his orders?
Just remember when citing this post, the incoming Theologian-in-Chief would call this epistle “One Timothy”.
Sure.
And why was this magic tree in the Garden anyway.
The Sky Monster god could have put it any where.
It could have been in Australia or on Jupiter.
An idiot could have seen what was going to happen.
Using the Bible as a justification for misogyny is a well worn tradition. Genesis itself is a mash-up of three different creation stories from various ancient places such as Babylon and Sumeria. . First there is the making of everything, then the Garden of Eden, and then Noah and the Ark.
All three are heavily redacted and rearranged pro-Jewish versions of those beliefs systems, where the Jews themselves were enslaved. It’s an anthology, not a manifesto. Plato put quite a bit of thought into the Demiurge long before anyone transcribed the Jewish scrolls into something resembling the Bible.
This belief in the jealous Evil/Malignant demiurge creator who is not truly GOD is found within various Gnostic sects for centuries
There are two trees in the Garden of Eden, and the Serpent (also a god) tells the truth, while supposedly loving Father god lies, and casts them out of the garden so that they don’t eat the fruit of the Tree of Eternal Life and become as Gods.
There are many writings that did not get included in the Bible, which are generally considered apochrypha. Greek and Roman philosophers had a much richer understanding of Hebrew philosophies than either of these smartypants modern Christian believers.
I really don’t care what a bunch of Iron Age goat herders like Timothy believed about women’s social behavior, or self-serving opinions about their supposed salvation via obedient reproduction.
Within the Apochrypal writings are examples like this.
“He is impious in his arrogance which is in him” is a good response to any man who thinks that women should be submissive incubators because hey look, some ancient dude named Tim wrote that down.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge
raven @ #10 — According to Dan McLellan, the creation story in Genesis 2 with the garden, tree and original sin is the older story. In it, gods creates things…like man…but they are flawed in some way. For example, he has to fix man by creating a companion. The newer version of creation is in Genesis 1 which repeatedly says that the creation “was good.” And of course, god creates man and woman in a single act. It’s also noteworthy that the Genesis 1 creation doesn’t start from nothing…”the world was without form” but it did exist. Both stories ended up preserved in the canon probably because of tradition.
As Reginald Selkirk notes @ #4, God seems to have changed its mind or lied to Adam because Adam and Eve ate of the fruit and did not die that day. Apparently the language of “on that day you will die” is very specific and no sense metaphorical, which is often a gloss used to explain away the fact that humans are still around. It’s not the only time where the Bible has god change its mind. He has Jonah go tell the people of Nineveh that its going to destroy the town no matter what. Jonah eventually gets to Nineveh and tells them this bad news, but then god changes its mind and doesn’t destroy Nineveh. Gods have always been fickle.
@10 or put a pool fence around it. God was obviously a first time parent., cause any parent will tell you that telling a young child not to touch something just makes said child more determined to touch something.
The bible is an atrocious, self-contradictory, bloody work of superstitious fiction that condones and encourages every possible evil, destructive, bigoted, murderous, incestuous, genocidal, act. You can’t rationalize use of it in any honest intellectual discussion.
With so many millions of drooling idiots following that to guide their lives, it’s no wonder society is such a horrible failure.
Pop culture ref:
(S8E8)
shermanj @14: Humans don’t need “an atrocious, self-contradictory, bloody work of superstitious fiction that condones and encourages every possible evil, destructive, bigoted, murderous, incestuous, genocidal, act” to do horrible things. We use those as excuses for what we would do anyway.
The idea that we would be better without all that crap is a convenient fantasy for antitheists.
Rob, shermanj did not claim any need; it was an observation that it exists and that it motivates a great many people who do in fact use it as justification for badness.
Didn’t even insinuate or allude to that.
(You know how the guilty flee when no-one pursues? Same sort of thing; your reactance to a perceived diss towards religious stuff made you make that assertion, in my estimation)
Mind you, clearly humans don’t need to be freethinkers.
And most indeed are not.
(Especially those who read the Babble, no?)
By substitution:
“The idea that we would be better without all that crap is a convenient fantasy for antitheists.”
↓
“The idea that we would be better without “an atrocious, self-contradictory, bloody work of superstitious fiction that condones and encourages every possible evil, destructive, bigoted, murderous, incestuous, genocidal, act” is a convenient fantasy for antitheists.”
Hm. You’re quite sure of that, Rob?
The idea that we would be better without all that crap is a convenient fantasy for antitheists.
Getting rid of “all that crap” would not, in itself, make us a just or enlightened people — but would be a good step in the right direction nonetheless, just like any other effort to purge lies, hate and bullshit from our lives.
the conservative religious really do seem to have a big problem with equality, it underlies much of the views on “life the Universe and everything”. In my life the conflict I saw with equality was always at the root somewhere with the religion, authority and the duty to obey. conflicting hypocrisy really just some ass**** bully boy no matter how “polite” they sounded threats always implied
Big fan of Dan McClellan videos, too. How can he possibly be a mormon is beyond me, I guess it’s some form of selective skepticism.
Being rid of bad stuff doesn’t make people suddenly good, but it removes an obstacle to that end.
[language games]
Biblical authority as a justification for misogyny
&
Misogyny as a justification for Biblical authority
(Either works for me)
Always love the Christian argument for Genesis – “The version spoken word of mouth by nomadic goat herders is the correct and true one, and describes a single god doing it all, but the one literally carved in text on a wall, in which each stage of the near 100% identical story is conducted by a different god, was copied from the goat herders, and therefor false.”
I can see also why the Apocryphon of John was left out. It literally, as written, makes the “One true god”, they all claim to be following more or less exactly what I have on occasion commented the god of the entire Bible, and all the horrible things his people do in its name – the “Lord of Lies”, whom they mistakenly call Satan, and the devil. You know, the character in the story that, while he tempts Christ, and appears in a few other early events, never actually lies about anything, but only shows people alternative paths they could be taken, and asks, in the Biblical god’s name, “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather do any of this, instead of what you are being asked?” Including it would, rather quickly, bring up all sorts of problems with the totality of the rest of its contents.
This God wanted total, mindless obedience, but gave humans a mind so they would suffer guilt and punishment for every independent thought. The original sin is God’s original torture: Do not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Yes, I gave you a mind but don’t you dare use it! The God of ignorance. Eve is therefore the first scientist. Adam, and all those fathers of the church who plagued the earth, were entrusted with silencing with any means at their disposal all women, and those men who also chose to ask a question or two. There is no need for knowledge because God is “Truth”. Pity he is also unknowable and ineffable… It follows that theologians know nothing and they too should shut up.