vodray
50764
1998
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Jun 13, 2024 4:10 PM
vodray
50764
1998
59
khora
Life begins at first breath according to the bible.
M4UsedRollout
The Bible has very little to say about abortion but what it does say is that life begins at first breath and causing a miscarriage is a property crime.
There are three verses pro-lifers pretend are on their side:
The no-murder commandment
The one where God says he picked Jeremiah to be a prophet before he was born (and before he was conceived)
The one where the holy spirit makes John the Baptist’s fetus jump when the pregnant Mary comes by for a visit.
None of these work.
Dazaster
Hey, remember that time when Jesus raised the dead? That guy's still here, goes by Larry now. He's a zombie and cannot die, but still, pro-life lol.
Imadethisaccounttopost
God killed off a man's family, and further ruined his life to win a bet with The Devil.
DukeDarkwood
When He could have taken one look at the guy, and told Satan "Nah, he's good."
jackal12345
Remember when god said he'd kill all first born of egypt unless pharoh freed the slaves and then literally interfered with pharoh's free will so he wouldn't thereby giving god the "moral high ground" to kill many many children.
ahorseelbowdeepinme
Not a Christian but I believe the Bible clearly states life begins at first breath and doesn't really say much else on the matter
gremliHero
Or when God told Moses to basically wipe out all of the Midianites except for the young women that have never known a man ....
fractalsphere
That's maybe true - but not everyone is Catholic so keep your bible mythology out of my government.
Feralkyn
Well... not quite. It's more the [checks notes] angels that came down and crossbred with humans to make a giant race of half-divine cannibals that were fucking and killing livestock so the angels went "hey god, uh, we fucked up" and he went "me damn it, tell noah to stick everything in a boat so i can flood those cannibal animal-fuckers out." Ofc half of this is only elaborated on in the "lost" Book of Enoch, but still.
M4UsedRollout
Enoch was thrown out for being fanfiction, but it’s a fun read. Not only does it expound on the flood, but it also retells the first half of Genesis with everyone as animals.
Redyls
i forget. which in the order of gods many genocides was the zoo boat one again?
sunyudai
It also gives instructions for when an abortion may be performed (infidelity) and how (making her drink water mixed with 'dust') - see the trial of the Bitter Waters. (Numbers 5:11+) - admittedly, this interpretation is not universal for that passage, but is supported by both NIV translation and the New Oxford Annotated Bible annotations that 'curse' in this passage refers to causing her to miscarry.
Clockworkdancerobot
If I recall there was some plant that was used for abortions that was harvested into extinction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
sunyudai
I did not know of this one, thank you.
ParryLost
And from that day forward any time a bunch of animals are together in one place, it's called a 'Tzu'!
ParryLost
... Unless it's a farm!
pretendthisisagoodusername
the bible says you should stone to death someone for wearing clothes made from 2 different fabrics
BoomerTheYounger
Pure and unadulterated mythology! Stretches the limits of what the mentally weak can be convinced to believe!
BaddyOneShoe
Psalm 137:9 -
Happy is the person who grabs your babies and smashes them against the rocks.
LumpPump
tbh these days we be saving them babies from growing up in a hellhole so yeah youd probably feel kind of good about ending suffering before it ever began...
Watcher555
Lontri
Basically kill everyone
DukeDarkwood
How's that "Thou shalt not kill" working out, there?
HonoredMule
Mistranslation, apparently. It was supposed to be "Thou shalt not murder" with murder defined as any killing not otherwise endorsed. On an unrelated note, I've never been part of a Christian group that didn't love engaging with semantics, be it for doctrine, banter, conflict, or black comedy.
JackingMeHoff
Sure, a fake guy named Noah constructed a boat, by himself, that could hold the equivalent of 20,000,121,091,000,000,000 of earths animals.
themightierpenis
Don’t forget about the time all the firstborn in Egypt were killed. Or when various nations were wiped out to prevent the Hebrew people from worshipping other deities. Or Lot’s wife died because she missed her home. Or….
CrumpetsWithHoneyAreCrumpetsWithBeeVomit
When he killed his own son... That's a big one
DudeThatsRacist
not to mention the whole of Sodom and Gomorrahh that had Lot and his family fleeing in the first place.
KirbyUOR
Or when God used some bears to kill a bunch of kids for making fun of a bald guy
VikingsAreNinjaPirates
For a playwriting class, I wrote a comedy on the Book of Samuel (mostly the David vs. Goliath story). One of my jokes was someone rattling off the absurdly long list of genocides committed on God's orders. Then they realized they forgot to kill the Amelekites, so they fired up their Zippos to see how flammable the Amelekite houses were. (Spoiler: Very)
Midgarmerc
Didn't God order some guy to kill his son just to make sure the guy was loyal to her?
viking12
Bro. the old testament literally had instructions for how to purposely cause a miscarriage
keiichi25
As a Christian, I will point out that the Family Research Council has failed to understand the bible in its entirety. Literally in the book of Genesis, God has not only wiped out most of mankind with a flood, he has also wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah and at one point told Abraham to sacrifice his only son. And while the Isaac sacrifice was a test, that was ALL in the first book of the bible. In Exodus itself, he sent plagues to Egypt, one of which was the Angel of Death.
mutingisforcowardsandsycophants
The conservative *idea* of the Bible is pro-life. Just like their idea of trump is a pro-america patriot. Conservative ideas are born of an imagination that ardently refuses to face its own ignorance.
doctorId
If conservatives could actually read maybe they'd understand the bible better
Photeus
At this point I'm convinced that believers really just pick and choose what they want to believe from it. Definitely follows with why so many denominations.
You can justify just about anything from it in a number of ways.
WhatzitTooya
The conservative idea of a bible fits on a bumper sticker...
MarkusAwesomesauce
Conservatives are pro forced birth because having children makes poor parents more desperate to take lower wages for a job. It's that simple.
torokunai
more future renters, too
Geo80
That's why the idea it's pushed by the higher ups. It's not what the rank and file think.
doctorId
It's also a really easy issue to spin into something that ignorant single issue voters will cling to, and some right wing politicians need that cause they don't have anything else to offer other than "I'm the only thing standing in the way of the baby killers" nonsense.
DerpeDimmer
So far God has a (human) kill count of close to 120 billion. Yup, very pro life.
ShamalamaDingDing
Well God said puny humans aren’t allowed to kill other puny humans. God can kill whoever he wants ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
gremliHero
That's when you pull out the Crusade style excuse of "God hath told me! Fuck those guys" killem all!!
ShamalamaDingDing
ToonamiT0M
I don't give a shit what your bronze age book of fairytales says about anything.
DukeDarkwood
That's a bit unfair to the Bronze Age (3300-2000 BCE). The Old Testament is believed to have been written in the late Iron Age, and the New in the middle of the Classical Era,
DukeDarkwood
Errata: 3300-1200. I can't believe that slipped by me; I KNOW its end date, whereas I had to look up its start.
Oh, I see it. The passage said "began around 3300 BCE and lasted almost 2000 years until around 1200 BCE." Brain latched onto the wrong number. Bad brain!
ToonamiT0M
HtNrN
surely there are more people god has smitten in the bible
demonmike777
God once killed a dude who kept the Ark from falling off a cart. https://www.gotquestions.org/Uzzah.html
LumpPump
god sounds like a narcissist. like i have been thinking that for a while but the more you learn about him the more god sounds like an abuser than a savior "how dare you forget im better than you and you are not good enough to touch my arc, i dont need you to save it even tho i told you to protect it"
demonmike777
Believe it or not, I think that at the time of its conception Christianity was a necessary and natural result of society bucking the nihilism of the ancient Greek culture. It's outdated now, but at the time it was a step in the right direction.
demonmike777
It's more complicated than that. God struck him down not out of pettiness or from offense, but because He Stated (essentially) that he was a force. The Force. It was more akin to the man touching a power line. It was an undeniable display of Power that was simply beyond human understanding. I'm an atheist, but I read the Bible, so I'm not defending it, just explaining the idea. This was in the Old Testament before Jesus came along and presented a softer, less spartan idealism.
HonoredMule
God cured my narcissism by showing me what I looked like. How's that for a silver lining? :P
DudeThatsRacist
smote
Pulger
He has smitten, he smote. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/conjugation/english/smite
keillrandor
Meh - it's English, smited will always do... (-d/-ed for past tense things of happening should ALWAYS be considered valid, regardless...)
DukeDarkwood
I waked up today and maked my way to imgur, just to say that I have seed this?
keillrandor
Well, differences between 'basic' (it's far more complex than that, really,) and continuous things of happening are pretty common for good reason, so seen probably does make more sense for the latter.
ShadeWisdomCrafts
Doesn’t the Bible end with everyone dying too?
gamer2k4
No, it actually ends with many getting raised from the dead and living eternally.
ShadeWisdomCrafts
Zombies?
gamer2k4
In D&D terms, it's less Animate Dead and more True Resurrection.
redzero700
Doesn't.. doesn't the Bible give a formula for causing an abortion in the book of Numbers..?
chine
no, the ordeal of bitter waters lets god communicate through the life of a fetus. If god kills the fetus, the woman is guilty.
waeraj
It does. If you Google that there's a lot of religious mental gymnastics going on
MaybeIllDisappear
Loosely. It would also cause the uterus to prolapse which would definitely cause an abortion.
Clockworkdancerobot
That's just Abortion with extra steps.
DisguisedLizardThing
Biblically accurate abortion
WickedSludge
EXTREME ABORTION
Blahend
Read this in Kreator singer voice
baals
Biblical abortion
zackingsman
In abortion of biblical proportion, In a civilization before time with a man in a woman with nothing to lose but a bastard baby!
Imadethisaccounttopost
Yep and when to take it.
seehemewe
Genesis chapter 38, Tamar seduces & sleeps with her father in law and chapter ends with him saying "She is more righteous than I."
Whole chapter is essentially God being like "Ok, I'm going to make these laws about women's rights b/c you men created a society where you don't respect women as people."
Also God was like "Onan, you thought you found a loop hole in my treat women as people law? Drop dead. How you like that?"
seehemewe
Says a lot about our current sex-negative / sexual repression society is that people took the story and turned "Onanism" to mean masturbation, instead of focusing on the whole moral of the story of how if a woman is disrespected, it's OK in God's eyes if she breaks any and all sexual "laws" to get justice.
SupernaturalReactions
Sure, but it was Onan's financial sin of trying to avoid the laws around inheritance that really pissed off God.
M4UsedRollout
Ehh that’s kinda dubious. It’s supposed to render an adulterous woman disfigured and infertile (and would abort any fetus she was incubating at the time), but make a virtuous woman fertile and if she passed the test, she would conceive.
Which indicates that the test was not intended to be used on pregnant women.
There’s still Exodus 21:22-25 which unambiguously says causing a woman to miscarry is a property crime unless you injure her, at which point it becomes a capital offense.
M4UsedRollout
Apologists will try to claim that by “miscarry” the text means “premature birth,” but that’s wrong for 3 reasons:
1. The rest of the similar laws in Exodus do not assign a penalty if no harm is done.
2. Premature birth was largely a death sentence. They did not have NICUs in the first millennium BC.
3. This law comes from the code of Hammurabi which was also picked up by many surrounding civilizations. It’s always interpreted as fetal destruction = pay a fine, kill the mother = you die.
LumpPump
and it looks like it was just more woman torture.. best hope you didnt piss off a petty neighbor or they lie to the priest to make you go through dinking this horrid "curse" to see if you were faithful. wtf https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%205:11-31&version=NIV
StormofWyverns
“BUh buh buh that’s only if the wife cheated, so it totally doesn’t count” (/s)
Audasity
yes. theres also a song in there about bashing babies brains against rocks
nightripper
I gotta hear a heavy metal Christian remix.
doctorId
They didn't have assault rifles back then so they had to make do
fractalsphere
God is all about killing babies if you really read the stories.
M4UsedRollout
The God of the Old Testament demands child sacrifices. (Exodus 22:29)
The story of Abraham and Isaac was possibly modified from its original ending, because even after Isaac is spared at the last minute, Abraham still walks back to his men alone. (Genesis 22:19)
Sacrificing firstborns is big in the OT. When the Israelites were about to conquer Moab, the Moabite king sacrificed his son to Chemosh, God of the Moabites. And Chemosh answered, driving the Israelites off. (2 Kings 3:27)
pilomotor
Mostly heathen babies. Therefore, abortion should only be restricted for devout Christians.
fractalsphere
Thats what I've been saying! It's already in their religion, so devout Catholics wouldn't be getting abortions anyway. But making 'laws' covering the same thing only imposes their religion on others.
HonoredMule
Unfortunately, that's also part of their religion. Remember when we were all worried about Islamic terrorism? I think that was game recognizing game. Heck, the original gifting of the "promised land" was a campaign of divinely mandated genocide.
IAmTheMightyLeon
What say Christians? We say, God has made it very clear that He alone has power over life and death, and those are not decisions we are to make. Ever. That includes abortion and the death penalty. But it is also very clear that God wants people to come to Him freely, which means imposing Christian ideals on non Christians is also non Biblical. The Bible is for how to live your own life, not for how you should tell others to live theirs.
spinbutton3
We have the death penalty and we kill tons of civilians and soldiers in our wars, so getting all high and mighty about abortion is hypocritical. When men kill it is ok...but no women, eh?
Hkafodays
Then why do the vast majority of Christian sects require their rubes to evangelize, proselytize and generally get up in other peoples' business? You're trying to polish a turd
IAmTheMightyLeon
They don't. There is no teaching in the Bible that says to do that, apart from evangelize. Read it and see.
AxeDropper
Really wish those “good christians” that told me they are going to “save me” would read it.
Really gets exhausting when they claim “the bible says..” and they are not even close. I politely say, “actually, it says…”.
SwiftyGuy
Well spoken, but even from a Biblical perspective, God is neither pro-life nor pro-death, but a mix of both. I say that as a Christian myself.
purgruv
Your god is specifically pro-death, as everything dies under those rules, even stars. He’s supposed to have set up the universe that way after all.
senseicombs
Regarding the 1st half, the bible does not male it clear that we should not make those decisions. Deuteronomy 20: "When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them, because the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you"
Here, god is supporting solders in their personal efforts to kill in warefare.
HonoredMule
Yeah, that's one of the _many_ widely accepted carveouts to pro-life sentiment.
DoctorWookie
In that case, it's God's will that the smaller army win, so he's dictating life and death. It's all cool bro, Daddy God said we can kill you. We're just the tools of his divine wrath.
gamer2k4
Forgotten the Great Commission? Jesus's last words to the people on earth were literally, "Go and make disciples of all nations." So don't act like Christians are supposed to live and let live when it comes to religion, because that's not what they were commanded.
gamer2k4
Not to mention the entire New Testament between the gospels and Revelation are about people setting up churches in unbelieving nations to convert them to Christianity.
IAmTheMightyLeon
Preaching the Gospel and forcing people to believe it are two separate things. Of course I'm to talk about what I believe and of course I want others to believe it too, but I'm not to force you to do anything and I'm not to relentlessly bombard you with my beliefs in perpetuity. The Bible is very clear on that too. Free will is essential.
FactWino
Not gonna lie, you had me in the first half
ExtremeDevice5938
Nah fuck that antiquated thinking. One could extrapolate that bullshit to mean we shouldn't treat infections because it's their god's will.
IAmTheMightyLeon
?
ExtremeDevice5938
Sorry, let me be clear:
Kill the priests, burn down the churches, and replace them with community resources.
DoctorWookie
And some do. They also won't take transfusions or utilize life saving procedures even on their own children.
torokunai
first off, toss the "Bible" out as a flawed work of Man and figure it out on your own
IAmTheMightyLeon
I always find it ironic that people who complain about Christians telling everyone how to live have no problem telling Christians how to live.
AxeDropper
Atheist here. I try to be a good ambassador of science and intelligence and there are many good lessons in the Bible… perhaps the most important one that people need to learn is the Golden Rule.
torokunai
hey man I was including Orthodox Jews and I guess Muslims in that opinion
AxeDropper
Atheist here. A good atheist respects other religions and beliefs.
torokunai
people who look to lead a 'Biblical' life are by definition locking themselves into at best a first century mentality (~40% of the New Testament is about St Paul and his associates so there's that can of worms too). This is a mistake, not something to be 'respected'.
AxeDropper
Perhaps not, but we are ambassadors of living through intelligence and we lead by example. Live a healthy and happy life according to science. Which means being generous and helpful, as research has shown it brings great happiness. Of course you should politely correct misinformation when you can, but by doing it with respect one day you’ll confuse the religious as I have: “how can you be so compassionate and an atheist?”
geekstudios
Atheist who still is involved in church here. Saying the Bible is morally flawed is not disrespecting religion, it’s just true. Shall we talk slavery, genocide, child sacrifice, using captured young girls as sex slaves? All of this was condoned by God. If you don’t know this, you don’t know the Bible. Jesus had many good lessons, but was a mistaken apocalyptic preacher. Apocalypse did not happen when he predicted.
AxeDropper
Very well articulated and a powerful argument. If you don’t mind a couple questions. 1 - I don’t recall Jesus predicting the apocalypse. Do you happen to know the verse? 2 - Even as an atheist I believe churches can be important and good for some people, and that there are many good churches out there. However, I’m curious why you are still involved in church?