Well. To be fair, Dylan is a substantially better poet than I am.
(Love that song! And album!)
“He made the stars also.”
God spends a week creating the earth, but just as an afterthought, he takes two seconds to make hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.
I wondered where I left my gag Bible.
uhm … that’s the whole point of that story: when the people are about to stone her for adultery, Jesus speaks his famous words ‘he who is without sin cast the first stone’
Was it really common? Or just something said about their enemies that justified their continued demonization and slaughter?
Well, from what I remember, the “demonization and slaughter” was directed at the Amalekites - who were demonized not because of their religious practices, but because of their alleged attacks on Israelis in the Exodus myth.
The practice of human sacrifice certainly existed in the med, though how prominent it was isn’t known, due to lack of surviving archaeological evidence - not a surprise, given how little has survived.
The best evidence comes from the Carthaginians, though hundreds of years later than the writings in the OT. Carthage was a colony of Phonecia, and presumably shared culture with its parent; they allegedly practiced human sacrifice of children, as reported by their enemies the Romans (who also practiced human sacrifice, but of adults, in funeral rituals that eventually evolved into the gladiatorial games: plus, killing children wasn’t terribly taboo in Roman culture - in antiquity, sickly infants were sometimes “exposed” - that is, left to die). The Romans had no particular reasons to collude with the Israelis in lying about Phoenician culture.
Recent archaeology tends to confirm the Roman and Greek accounts.
So, the evidence is that Greeks, Romans and Israelis all claim that child sacrifice occurred; this has since been more or less confirmed by archaeological evidence (though as can be seen, these conclusions are controversial). Seems to me the weight of evidence supports the fact that it did indeed happen - otherwise, one has to claim all of these ancient observers independently decided to ‘slander’ this culture in exactly the same way (despite the fact that Romans had noting against either human sacrifice or killing children per se), or alternatively, that the Romans and Greeks were reading the Torah and getting their slanders from obscure passages in that work.
Which reminds me: God created the sun and the difference between day and night on the third day. How the hell did He know it was the third day?
I’d be more sympathetic to the whinging that spawned the above sarcasm if there were a lot less baseless “Christian” propaganda being regurgitated by numerous leading members of one of the two major political parties in the U.S.: “America is a Christian nation!” “The Constitution was based on the Bible!” “The nation is falling to pieces because we took prayer out of the schools!” “The Bible creation myth should be taught alongside the Big Bang and Evolution!” “We will live by the law of God and no other law!” Etc. Literally on a daily basis, that kind of crap is shoved in our faces.
So less of that, and we’ll mock the Bible correspondingly less on the SDMB. Deal?
Ironically, I actually non-sarcastically do hope everyone begins to feel free to “cast off the shackles” that religion places on the intellect. If this thread’s otherwise inconsequential mockery is a step in that direction for some, great!
I hope you mean christiaans may also cast off any shackles they may feel? And muslims, buddhists, wiccans, pastafarians for that matter …
Less witnessing, more Bible crazy, please. 
It’s a better story the way I tell it. After Jesus says that, an old woman picks up a half pound rock and brains the adulterous woman with it. Jesus turns to the old woman and says ‘Mom, I was trying to make a point here.’
In other words, aborting a baby is fine if it’s punishment for a wife’s suspected but unproven infidelity.
Although, my favorite verse in the Bible advocating baby-killing is Psalms 137:8-9:
“8 Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.
9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.”
So much for the inherent purity and innocence of babies, eh, God?
Of course I mean only Christians have shackles to be cast off! Sheesh! OBVIOUSLY every other religion has got it right. Just not Christians.
(Here’s a fun challenge: find me one “pastafarian” who in fact takes the tenets of that “faith” 100% seriously.)
Actually … that’s a pretty interesting mechanism for totally disarming patriarchal violence.
Note how the ritual actually works: man accuses woman of infidelity but has no proof. Rather than beating her up or killing her (sadly, common enough outcomes in our own day, let alone the Iron Age), the Bible states ‘take her to a priest who will give her some dust from the tabernacle floor mixed with water. If she’s actually guilty, she will swell up and miscarry, because of the curse’ (presumably, on the spot).
Note that harm actually befalls the woman only if you happened to believe the mumbo-jumbo is literally true. Given that magic curses don’t, in fact, actually work (at least I assume you would agree with me that they don’t), a woman would actually be harmed in 0% of cases. The fact that she’s not harmed by the magic curse them becomes “proof” of her innocence, and she escapes without being hurt.
I’m imagining something like this
Well, if the woman believes in the curse as much as the husband and the priest do, she might have a psychosomatic miscarriage.
I have no idea if that is medically possible … assuming she believes she is in fact guilty of adultery (if she didn’t think she was guilty, the curse was supposed to lack effect). I would assume actual cases where that would happen would be pretty rare, though.
I know it is sometimes written that witch-doctors could frighten people into actually dying with “curses”, but I always suspected that in such cases some trickery with physical poisons was involved, rather that psychosomatic effect … witch doctors would lose a lot of prestige if the people they “cursed” came to no harm.
I find bible-bashing more than a little adolescent.
And I find the Bible a silly book to believe in, in this day and age…and yet people that believe in this book and claim that it is the TRUT*H** are trying to use their myriad interpretations of it’s oft-contradictory stories to pass laws that affect others that don’t play their reindeer games.
Of these two problems, I know which one bothers me more.
Great, so now I’m doomed to the eternal tortures of hell AND your displeasure.