Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

And how's that different from wives/concubines? Aren't they too barely mentioned?

in churches locked them in chains to the lecterns.

Less barely. The slave thing is easy to miss while the multiple wives thing isn't, even though I naively may not have been expecting either when I first read the Bible as a child.

In any event, since your quibble seems to be specifically about the word support, let's just say that if the Bible doesn't implicitly support polygamy, at the very least it explicitly condones it.

Church tried to avoid people reading the Bible and in churches locked them in chains to the lecterns.

That be gigantic naivete.

Or "The Bible condemns homosexuality, but that's old. Times have changed."

Marriage is a multifaceted concept with many features. Since this is so, it's possible to alter several features of it while preserving the core essence. Polygamy works like that. But "same-sex marriage" does away with the core essence and is therefore not marriage at all. You either perceive the core essence or you don't. The core essence is revealed in the creation story.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-05-28, 13:39:44

That be gigantic naivete.

Well, excuse me for not knowing all about polygamy, homosexuality and the Marquis de Sade when I was 8-10.

The Bible is almost invariably irrelevant to our current social and political issues. I'm surprised you would dispute that.

A very confused core it is.

In any case, there's obviously neither support nor tacit approval of gay marriage in the Bible.

The arguments against the so-called "clobber passages" in bible are numerous, including that much of the Bible appears to be have mistranslated.

There's even the issue of picking and choosing what parts of the Bible to enforce. There's what, eight passages or so in the entire Bible that have anything to do with homosexuality?

But the fact is in the United States the bible is not the law of the land. Every time people take a "holy" book and try to make the law of the land, you wind up with the harshest interpretation of becoming the foundation for a dictatorship. Historically, this even includes Christianity.

That's well into school age. You didn't have to know all about them, but you should have known about them.

Idolater Christian movement

Thieves Christian movement

"Homo" was a hurtful insult, but I didn't know what it meant.

In any case, remember I was talking about expecting whether to come across such things in the Good Book.

I don't think you understand how things are in a Christian nation. Heck, I think only Americans truly understand, but it's possible they also do in northern Germany and Scandinavia.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-05-29, 06:28:37

Idolater Christian movement

Aka Catholicism, the biggest of them all.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-05-29, 06:28:37

Thieves Christian movement

TV preachers.

What specifically do I not understand? I understand a society under institutionalised pressure towards a common doctrinal denominator (Gleichschaltung), if that's what you mean. Or if I really don't understand, now's the opportunity to tell me.

You are saying that you honestly did not expect the Good Book to deal with such matters? I honestly expect the Good Book to give all the answers imaginable.

Otherwise what's the book good for?

Logic led me to some kind of agnostic deism until I educated myself about evolutionary theory. For example that it doesn't mean "right of the strongest" and that "social Darwinism" has bupkis to do with it.

That's rather the point. It's presented as being good for everything, but it's good for nothing except cultural-historical understanding. And as a child in a Christian nation, that's a surprise.

This is why so many more intelligent children/teens can be drawn so strongly toward Buddhism, Taoism, Platonism, etc.: those texts are what we were promised in the Bible. They have meaning and purpose and logic.

We were given the book we were given. Perhaps we didn't deserve any better. I believe that's how it is.

This cannot be an argument. It can only be somebody's delusion. The Bible text is the closest-studied text of antiquity. Not just for word by word, but also letter by letter.

The hard conservative type of it that flourishes in the States and deeply involved in politics the way it is  rather unique in the West and not typical.

The context in Leviticus is immediately surrounded by rulings on incest and bestiality

Which is why so many scholars know that the translations people normally get a hold of are incorrect in many areas....

In fact, in the Romans passages all you really need to do is read the entire chapter to see something else besides same-sex love was going on. It was most likely a pagan fertility ritual or temple prostitution.

The bible seems to be the only book in the world (besides maybe the Quran) in which people think they understand what it says on any given subject based on a couple sentences, keeping in mind that Bible is becomes a maze of self-contradictions if you look at close enough. 

Quote from: ersi on 2016-05-29, 06:28:37

The context in Leviticus is immediately surrounded by rulings on incest and bestiality

And not eating meat and drinking milk at the same time, or wearing clothes of different fabrics, or eating shell fish. C'mon bro.

The world changed a little in the past several thousand years (not sure if any knows exactly since that was oral tradition long before it was written down.)

Oh and you feel adulterers need to be stoned?

Yes, the world has changed and soon there will be yet another turn for the worse.

Bekhor Shor himself notices the changed context and gives a very different explanation for the phrase here.

It is forbidden to cook meat in milk. The Torah specifically forbids the cooking… It is also forbidden to eat or derive any benefit from meat [cooked] in milk. The inclusion of the term “its mother” comes to teach us the reason [for the law], for it would be cruelty to cook the flesh of a kid in the milk of [the mother] which raised it. [Therefore, all milk is forbidden,] for perhaps the animal from which this milk came was its mother… This mitzvah is similar to “do not take a mother[-bird] with its chicks” and “an animal and its offspring [should not be slaughtered in one day].”[11]  [/url]

So what? It's still bad business to pick and choose passages from a "holy book" and try to make it the law of the land.  Witness Cromwell's oppression of the Catholics, the Catholics burning people for heresy, the Salem witch trials, modern day Iran, Isis, etc.