Don’t eat pork, don’t eat shell fish, don’t work on Sundays (or Saturdays depending on who you talk to), no sex before marriage, don’t masturbate … but you can bend the rules and get close to doing those things and even get away with breaking the rule because God is an idiot that can easily be outwitted or deceived with human logic.
And this is just a small list of rules and regulations … there’s a whole list of things that are not allowed in the bible but Christian leaders have made workarounds on everything because they are smarter than God.
God is not an idiot, your leader are.
Jesus basically came in to say: just follow the commandments, love one another, love your enemy as yourself, don’t be greedy and selfish, and you guys don’t have to keep doing those self-imposed rules the Israelites made themselves do like don’t eat pork or shell fish, etc.
Israelites believed that they were supposed to be purists about everything they do to some degree and saw being a purist as being holy; such as never mixing two different kinds of fabric together or don’t raise your goats with your sheep. Jesus said you don’t need to be a purist about all this unimportant stuff, but be good people.
My favorite one is do not boil a calf in its mother’s milk, which has been interpreted to mean no cheese or butter on beef.
Which means that cooking and eating a bacon cheeseburger yourself after sundown *on a friday while wearing cotton underwear and polyester pants is 4 sins, 3 of which are burger
Rabbits, beavers, and hippos are fish, you see.
That’s Moses, right?
You can tell when a tradition was set in by the hidden undertone it allowed to play for it. “Time for your circumcision… Whoops! Guess you are my eunuch surrogate now, totally didn’t mean to eliminate the competition / your genes from my gene pool of surrogates!” Yeah, probably looking too much into it, it’s not like it’s a practice associated with a culture heavily associated with a god’s chosen master race ideology or anything. Totes just a coincidence that it was fabulously sported by the slave loving Egyptians and cultures famous for their obsession with slave land owners of the times as a “rite of passage”. /actualshitcomment
So there is that story in Genesis where the sons of Jacob have an army of 318 men circumcised so they could follow their religion.
Just think they probably put then into a pile, a small little mountain of foreskins.
They made them into some wallets
You know how you can collect rubber bands over time, wrapping them around each other, and eventually you have a great big ball on your desk to play with?
My wallet is really at the end of its life cycle and this comment made me consider
I can understand desert people coming up with some excuse to preform the operation because sand is coarse and rough and irritating… and it gets everywhere.
But it’s just nicer to think they wanted their kids to have the most attractive cocks in the village
deleted by creator
You know, I have a personal theory that this particular law was established as a measure of genital hygiene, since without the foreskin dirt does not accumulate on the glans; but over the years it was distorted until it became a divine mandate that is just for the sake of it.
The best way to test the resolve of your fellow cultists is by making them commit to very rigorous rules that affect their life significantly.
I mean if you can get them to cut of a piece of their reproductive organs, you have insanely loyal followers. Also resisting something to eat that is very tasty, of it said ‘don’t eat shit’ it’s not a very hard rule to follow.
Somehow this works like a drug for some people. There a reason that many rehabs are ran by religious fellows.
Religions prey on the weak, hence the rehabs and homeless shelters. It’s not charity it’s recruitment
The vast majority of the Bible was simply guidelines to keep people healthy and happy. All this “the skin of the pig is unclean” stuff? They hadn’t figured out germs yet. No sex until marriage? No contraceptives, so don’t create in cared for children. I won’t waste my time on it but, when examined in context, this is the vast majority, if not the entirety of the bible: lessons on how to be safe and happy relative the time, made digestable and relevant to the common person.
Sucks they had to get there via fear of imaginary, post-life pain, and it sucks twice as hard that they’ve neglected to rationalize that part as the rest of the belief structure has modernized.
I can definitely get behind that. Like, if you read the Bible, especially some particular chapters, there’s a lot of old man yells at clouds vibes.
“I will cuteth off the member of him who pisseth against the wall”
Doesn’t really sound like a god thing. It would be very weird for the ruler and creator of the universe to get really, really fucking mad that any person who pees on a wall anywhere, regardless of the situation, should have their dick cut off.
It kind of sounds more like, you know, one of the leaders of a community is writing down laws and threatening to cut a bunch of boys’ dicks off because they keep peeing on walls and stinking the place up rather than using appropriate facilities.
I wish we had accurate historical records of the time, so I could see if this was ever actually enacted. Like, how much would it suck to be that guy?
Walking home late from the bar, you gotta take a whiz, you piss, the cops catch you, and like three hours later, your penis is lying in the trash.
And, I mean, talk about disproportionate response, like, did the concept of community service not exist? Like, what the fuck?
Then there was one phrase about, do not go and shave the sides of your beard, something something yada yada, and it reads like a protest against the kids and their fashion.
There’s lots of stuff where if you have the capacity to take the one mental step to say that every single word in the book may not have been written by God himself, but instead the texts chosen to be in the bible contain a historic medium of communicating laws, rules, and regulations that made sense at the time, inspired by God and definitely containing some legitimate things that were directly written by the Holy Spirit, but also invariably containing some information that was derived from that original mandate.
I mean, even the whole thing about the Sabbath, it was more a nicety to say, even God rested, you should rest too. You should have at least one day off a week where you’re not beholden to labor for somebody else, where you can enjoy life.
I highly doubt that God is throwing people into hell for working on the Sabbath. I get that it’s special to God because he rested for a day, which is something he had otherwise not done throughout existence. But at the same time, why torment someone forever for just working one extra day out of our comparatively very short lives?
I don’t know. I can rant forever. I’m sorry, I’ll stop here, but yeah.
Cross-amputation is still a thing under Sharia Law. I wouldn’t be surprised if people ever, or even still do, get their dicks cut off for pissing on a wall. John Wayne Bobbit had his cut off by his wife, but that was over marital rape.
One of my favorite examples of this: Leviticus 11:13-19
“These are the birds you are to detest and not eat because they are detestable: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe, and the bat.”
Most of these are either scavengers, or eat rodents which carry diseases that are awful to humans. The societies that ate them didn’t tend to last long.
Wrong dude. That was Abraham in Genesis.
Not as readily recognizable; but on the other hand, if you recognize Jesus then you already know this is incorrect.
Where’s that painting of Moses with the tablets? That’s probably better
If Jesus is God and God told Abraham then i guess it’s technically the right dude.
Jesus’ deity is pretty famously rejected by the Jewish faith.
only jesus said there is a new covenant with him, which nearly all denominations interpret to mean the rite of circumcision is a thing of the past
… Unless you’re in Protestant dominated USAmerica, where male genital mutilation remains a widespread, common practice.
Roughly 80% of American boys/men are circumcized, almost all at birth.
I can provide either statistics or pics as proof, your choice.
EDIT: There’s also a whole history of basically junk/fraudulent science in the US being used as a validation of this practice, much of which basically claims that having your whole hood intact makes you more vulnerable to skin infections and STDs.
This is false, but Americans are quite good at doing motivated reasoning and convincing themselves it is objective critical analysis.
no i know. i’m part of that statistic. my parents weren’t consulted ahead of time. it was simply done “for health reasons”
… are you saying you don’t want pics… =[
/s /s /s lol
I edited in a bit more info… yet another wonderful amazing lie I had to figure out entirely on my own that my fundie parents told me with utter confidence.
i saw the edit
Tell that to the doctors recommending it then, not to us. As far as I’m concerned this obsession over it is a mental disease and not one I’m pleased to see making the jump from Reddit.
I’m circumcised, and I don’t give a shit, and I never will, and it’s not the same thing as FGM at all.
Discussing it isn’t an obsession, an obsession would be making your whole personality about it, or basically having that be a primary hobby or something.
You are doing a less extreme version of the thing that politcal news pundits do against protests:
Protesting as a concept is fine, but it turns out any protest with views I disagree with? Well they’re protesting wrong.
If you are reading this as an obsession, I dunno what to tell you, check my comment history and you’ll see this is the first thread I’ve ever mentioned it in, and my older, nearly year old account? Don’t think I ever mentioned it.
Finally: Yes, female genital mutilation is very often much, much worse, in that it usually entails total removal of the clitoris, which is… basically fundamental to the ability of a woman to experience pleasure and orgasm.
But that doesn’t mean male genital mutilation is not also bad. The male hood also generally has a much higher concentration of nerve endings than… basically everywhere other than the head.
And both of these practices fundamentally remove bodily autonomy from a baby/child, and are culturally/religiously done for reasons that ultimately or directly arise from a very paternalistic and authoritarian approach to children as property of parents, and intending to diminish and control their sexual characteristics without consent.
… But if you don’t wanna have this discussion, feel free to block me, or just… not discuss… this…?
I will block you because this is tedious, but know that I will always discuss this and never let it go uncommented on because it’s unhinged. While you supposedly don’t make this your entire personality there were those on Reddit who definitely did, and you smell just like them. I will never stop speaking out that this whole thing is a bullshit non issue.
Does lemmy have a function to block words? if you can’t stop yourself from discussing it when you see the word, it might benefit you to not see it for a while. i’ve been there.
Why would you come to a thread about circumcision, read the comments about circumcision, and leave a comment about being fed up of circumcision discussions if you were tired of talking about circumcision? And then block a guy who replies to your comment in a reasonable and ration manner because he reminds you of someone on a different website.
If anyone’s “unhinged” here it’s the guy who doesn’t just move on to the next thread.
Glad you left your reddit trauma at the door to lemmy and certainly aren’t making any personal judgements based entirely on vibes rofl.
I will never stop speaking out that this whole thing is a bullshit non issue.
Not obsessive in any way at all, nope, that’s me apparently.
Hahahahaha
I will always discuss this and never let it go uncommented on
I dunno, sounds like the one who’s made it their whole personality might not be spectral here.
But that’s not religious. It’s an american thing.
It is an American thing that arose from, and persists because of how Americans ‘do’ Christianity.
As I said in another post, start with Max Weber, and then explore more of the history of how Christianity and Christian Denominations, cults, sects, revival movements, etc, have shaped the country as a whole, in ways that are distinct from how other kinds of Christianity have shaped other countries in the last 300 or so years.
Like… the whole reason we have the First Amendment, the freedom of religion part… was mainly to make it so that none of the varying Christian Denominations would be able to use the government to censor or outright oppress or murder each other.
Read the journals of the founding fathers, federalist papers, etc, if you doubt that. See how most of them were Deists, who… just believed in a big creator God, but basically no theology of any particular Christian branch… the neutral middle ground.
America was largely initially founded by populations of varying kinds of extreme Christian Sects fleeing persecution in Europe… and a lot of our early history is… those sects persecuting and mistreating, or at best, barely tolerating and competetively trying to proselytize, other sects that just over here now, on a different continent… as well as all the indigenous populations… and the imported slaves.
None of that is for (directly) religious reasons though; Americans circumcise their sons because a cereal company founder thought it would prevent masturbation, and Americans are removed apparently
Lol I guess one of the involved instances censors that word.
… It is an unchallenged remnant of many things, a large chunk of those things having puritanical religious origins.
And almost all those religions happen to be Jesus-centric.
Kellogg was just a more recent large scale eh… reinforcment of the norm. He was inspired by his particular Christian views… 7th Day Adventist.
Like, yes, its not as direct as many modern preachers constantly doing sermons about the virtuosity of circumcision… but even still, I can easily say that the reason the practice is unchallenged is that American Protestant Christians of many, many different Denominations… well they strongly promote traditionalism for the sake of tradition, not questioning authority figures, actively rejecting modern science and medicine.
Like uh… Max Weber’s christian protestant work ethic explanation of the peculiarities of American culture in regards to attitudes toward work and politics and many other cultural features… isn’t 100% perfect… but it is a very good starting point to understand why American Protestantism is sociologically distinct to other societies.
Which has fuck-all to do with Jesus, the meme is still incorrect
Pentecostal holiness denominations are both small and overrepresented in policy making
edit: oh yeah and they teach the opposite of what jesus did
? I agree with you. Has nothing to do with Jesus, the meme is wrong
Supposedly, Jesus was the new covenant. All these sunworshiping cults can’t get along. But yet they think they’re the ones that should be in charge. They’re all a bunch of idolaters.
Jesus hadn’t been created yet. God is eternal, but Jesus was God made mortal.
Yes, this dude got his dick cut off as well.
Genital mutilation for all your babies! Use myths and lies to explain why it’s necessary!
You mean to tell me it’s not physically impossible to clean the dick if the foreskin isn’t cut off? My whole uncircumcised life has been a lie!
Somewhere in heaven, God is sitting on top of a huge pile of foreskins like Smaug.
At least they did it bcs they believed in some BS.
Unlike the suckers doing it for ‘esthetic reasons’I want my turtle neck back.
If I remember my history correctly, one of the primary draws of the at the time new christianity over judaism was specifically that dudes wouldn’t need to lop off part of their dongs in a pre-anesthesia world.
Thou shall try really really really hard not to kill anyone, unless they pray to a different invisible made up man in the sky to the one you do.
God hates the tips of little baby dicks
