Actually they fought wars over it people were executed and it resulted in a schism that created the Anglican church.
Most fundies respond to this stuff in two main ways.
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Find weasel room for each and every rule and devise convoluted explanations for why none of them really mean what they say.
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Do what ITR did, and claim that of course everybody is a sinner and nobody can follow all the rules. Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven [retch].
The latter response invites the question as to why there are any rules at all then. If you don’t have to follow them, what’s the point of having them?
It also ducks the question of why the rules are so asinine and draconian. Does God really think women should be silent in church? Yes or No?
At some point in history, did God really tell people they should brutally murder their own wives and children if they try to get you to worship other gods? Seriously, yes or no? Is that something God really commanded?
I thought you had some sort of degree in religion. Why would you ask such a fundamental question then?
The rules are there because even though we are not perfect we should strive to be as good as we can.
Stoning relatives to death is as good as we can be?
Taking Deuteronomy and decontextualizing it certainly isn’t.
The context seems clear. If a relative entices you to follow a false prophet of some shade, you should stone him to death. If there is a greater context, then I’m happy to note that there is no word limit keeping you from explicating it.
Yes the context does seem clear. it is in the early days of Israel when the tribe was fighting for its life in a strange land. They were in the process of clearing out hostile tribes, and the thing that unified them as a people was the belief that God chose them, that they were a family with that God under the protection of his Covenant, that their very existence depended upon a deep and constant loyalty to their Lord. They couldn’t afford for this to be questioned, and as their successes grew out of their loyalty to this idea, it seemed more and more clear that it was necessary and true. They viewed the lack of faith as a virus that if left unchecked could eat away at the very fabric of their society.
There’s that first option I was talking about.
because, like so many other fundamental questions, I’ve never heard a good answer for it.
What do any of these rules have to do with being good?
I have to admit to not seeing an expiration date. Can you point it out to me?
It wasn’t a strange land, they were indigenous to the land.
Ok, here’s the thing. Historically, this is all mostly hogwash. Not to go into too much detail about it, but Deuteronomy was not written in any “early days,” but in the 7th Century BCE, and it was not written by a struggling tribe “clearing out hostile tribes” (nice euphemism for invading and slaughtering whole cities, by the way), but as poitical propaganda for a king (Josiah) who was trying to center political and religious power at the temple cult in Jerusalem, ans so needed to delegitimize all other local cults.
Even if your own scenario had any genuine histority (and it doesn’t). it wouldn’t justify anything. Any god who tells you to murder your own children is not a god worth listening to.
Your foundation for goodness is different from theirs. You either accept that and then you study the religion, or you don’t and you pretend that you studied the religion, when really you just read a bunch of information you never came to understand.
The book of law is their basis for goodness. So it has everything to do with being good because those are the rules that lay out how to be good.
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Sage Rat** Most reasonable people look at the Torah as a history of the Jewish people, a history that has ever evolved. You’d have to go find some Rabbi and ask him when precisely they stopped stoning people for that.
I’m not interested in the atheist revisionism.
I am explaining the book in its own context. According to the book they came out of Egypt. BTW, on that time scale there is no such thing as an ‘indigenous tribe’ on a long enough timeline every tribe moved from one place to another.
Your own opinion is not worth anything. You have wasted all your time of study, because you haven’t even bothered to try and understand the historical context. Even from an evolutionary phenomena perspective of religion, you have no empathy for your subject matter, and seem pretty much incapable of trying to understand why these people might have come up with these rules. What problems were they trying to solve, why did they need such harsh strictures to maintain asabiyah?
To paraphrase your three paragraphs there:
- I (mswas) know more about Christianity than you do.
- Stoning people to death who could mislead the Jews was the epitome of good.
- I (mswas) have no idea when the Jews were supposed to stop.
Well to comment on items 1 and 2, the Christian doctrine is that the Mosaic law lasted until Jesus came down to teach a new way. Of course, this probably didn’t save James the Just, possible brother of Jesus, from being stoned to death under precisely this very law.
But so, assuming this Christian teaching to be true–i.e. that the Jews were to stone to death anyone who taught the teachings of false gods and false prophets–all the way from ~1300 BCE to 1 CE, then you are saying that for a full millenia were in such a precarious position of being overwhelmed by another religion that it was the very epitome of Godliness to stone your child to death if, for instance, he tried to convert you to Zoroastrianism?
Who is “they?”
Nice try, but I understand it just fine. Many of the rules we’re talking about (and I should have excepted the quotes attributed to Jesus in this) have nothing to do with being “good” in that they have nothing to do with ethical behavior towards others, but either with ritual behavior in church, or with cultural purity.
I assume by “book of law,” you mean Deuteronomy. It lays out a lot more than basic ethics. It’s obsessed with ritual and cultural purity as well as the imposition of class and gender roles as well as demands of fealty to the local temple (i.e the local king).
Having said that, you shouldn’t need a book to tell you how to be good, because, according to Genesis, everybody already knows good from evil. Are you saying some people don’t? If they don’t know good from evil, then how can they be morally accountable for anything.
Your Bible says that I already know good from evil. Is that true or isn’t it?
If it IS true, then I must be right in thinking it would be evil to try to kill my family for trying to get me to worship idols. If I’m wrong in thinking that, the Genesis is wrong in saying that I know good from evil, and if I don’t know good from evil, I’m not morally accountable for anything I do or say. Either way, there’s no reason to consult a book. Either my conscience is correct (and so following it makes me good) or my conscience is wrong, which means the Bible is also wrong, and therefore unreliable as a moral guide.
Me either. I wan’t even aware that such a thing existed. What I’m giving you is actual historical and Biblical scholarship.
Yeah, but the Israelites were originally Canaanites. They didn’t come into the region as cultural Israelites, they emerged from it that way.
Even if we accept the Exodus mythology as history, all that would mean is that they came into the region as invading marauders who justified the sacking and slaughter of the regions they invaded by claiming it was the will of their own tribal god. Even in their mythological context, these stories were not about self-defense, but about conquest.
I’m the only one of the two of us who HAS made an effort to study the historical context. These stories do not reflect history, they reflect an invented history. They were made up long after the events they purport to describe.
Well, things seem to be trundling along here nicely. Spiffing, what? 
So I’ll try to throw in a clarifying question. Hold on to your hats, folks, because I don’t have a really great track record for this, but here goes :
What, exactly, is the proper Christian attitude to the Bible?
Is it that every single word of it is the word of God and you’re to follow it, well, religiously? Even though it’s clearly an anthology of largely unrelated texts that some council decided was “the good bits” 400 years after Christ died?
The alternative is that some parts are more important and worth following than others. Which leads to the question of what rule you use to figure out which are the most important parts, the really Bible-y parts, and which are skippable.
My OP hints at some of these. Right off the bat, the Old Testament is knocked off its peg by the whole “the Law is fulfilled in Me” line of thinking. The idea is that when Jesus came along, that was the end of the Old Law, and hence, the entire Old Testament is now more or less a really really long and unpleasant foreword to the New Testament, there only for the purposes of getting some of the references made in the New Testament.
So bang goes half the book. Pow, zappo, that’s a lot less rules to follow right there. When it comes to the NT, you can wash your hands of it.
This leaves the Gospels, and the Epistles. Well, the Epistles are just letters some guy named Paul wrote hundreds of years after the life of Christ, so while they’re neat and all, the religion is called Christianity, not Paulism, so, bang goes those.
But still, you’re left with the Gospels, and even though there’s some inconsistencies, overall, we can be pretty sure of most of what Jesus said, and He said a lot of things that people clearly do not live by. That whole giving away everything and giving it to the poor strikes me as conspicuous by its absence.
So how do you justify even modest, middle class wealth? How do you justify a hardline law and order stance, when Jesus said “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”? How can you tolerate or even encourage the existence of televangelists when the one thing we know made Jesus really, really angry was people making money off of religion?
These conservative Christians bash you with their Bible with one hand, and rip out most of the pages with the other.
Care to justify that?
(yup… started off to try to clarify things and ended up writing a whole other article… told you I’m not good at that… )
Hmmm. You’re getting very close to the line of “personal insult” here. How about we attack one another’s arguments and not each other, mmmkay?
When the writings of Paul were finalized is of course up for debate, but Paul himself was a semi-contemporary of Jesus. They never met in life (supposedly), but there’s no reason they couldn’t have.
Yeah, the 7 letters of Paul which are generally accepted as authentic are all from the 40’s and 50’s CE. He even claims to have met apostles (though he is sketch about telling us exactly what they believed).
Paul is really the closest thing we have to a contemporary source about Jesus. He’s not a primary source, but he at least claims to be a secondary source.
And no offense, MJB, but it’s also not true that “we can be pretty sure of most of what Jesus said.” In truth, we can’t be really certain of anything Jesus said, and even the sayings which have the best chance of being authentic still add up to only about a quarter of what the Gospels attribute to him.