I was arguing that scriptures are fucked up. Read before you answer.
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Religious apologetics always try to shift the blame on people, away from the scriptures, but the fact is that the scriptures are the root cause of all the problems created by religions. Not the people who were indoctrinated into the religions of their parents.
Christian or Jewish apologetics are the same as Muslim apologetics. You guys ignore the scriptures and divert the attention to something else.
Leviticus 20-13
"If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."
Both scriptures, the Quran and the Bible are clear on the subject. I am not sure what your objection is.
Are you confused? Frankly, the quality of your responses has been falling considerably. Are you ok?
You did not even try to counter my argument that destroyed the concept of free will. Now you babble something that not all Christians follow the Bible because they do not kill gays today. How is this remotely relevant to the discussion of the content of the scriptures?
Atheists have the easiest job in the world. They can just open the Bible or the Quran and read.
You, on the other hand, have to resort some mental gymnastics by inventing "proper instantiation", "proper translation", "proper metaphor",
"that is not what the writers meant", "the scriptures have to be read in the original language they were written", etc.
But the fact is that the scriptures recommend some seriously fucked shit as punishment, every 10-year old who reads it understands it, except you guys.
Admit that the scriptures are seriously fucked up so that we can move on to more important topics.
The problem we have af_newbie is not a decline in the quality of my response but a deeper fundamental divergence. We have adopted different fundamental positions regarding the nature of reality.
We both embrace the scientific method and are able to talk to each other coherently on topics related to fact and experiment. However, the conversation has now entered into the realm of the philosophical (free will vs determinism) and base principles (objective vs subjective morality) where out differences become stark and irreconcilable.
I have answered your argument about free will. You said that “If the world is deterministic, you have no control over what you are going to do next. Your thoughts are driven by all the cause and effects.”
I replied yes that is true but also irrelevant because you are using the wrong frame of reference to analyze the situation. You are attempting to describe how the universe looks from an all knowing top-down perspective of God. We don’t live in that frame of reference.
It is possible for agents to be free, relative to the fiction that they live in, whilst wholly determined from a God’s eye view. This was demonstrated by Izbicer well over a century ago.
The Izbicer Rebbe and Freewill
http://www.theapj.com/the-izbicer-rebbe-and-freewill-2/When we speak relative to a fiction, it is true to say that the characters are free, and the meaning of the word ‘free’ doesn’t have to be contorted in the slightest; the concept of freedom is the same concept that we started with. But, when we speak about the fiction, and its writer, we make a semantic ascent, and it is no longer true to talk of the characters as having any sort of independence from the author. But, the freedom that we attribute to the characters, in their world, is a real as anything can be, and it is freedom in precisely the pre-philosophical sense of the word; no definitions have been twisted.
We are free relative to our own limited frame of reference. This makes our freedom as real as anything else in this wondrous creation we find ourselves in.
As for apologetics. I agree that the Bible and any holy text should be understood in the original language and context they were written in. As far as Leviticus 20-13 it is clear that the Ancient Israelites were commanded to assign the death penalty to homosexual acts. However, why isolate that particular passage. There were a whole host of atypical or aberrant sexual behaviors that were similarly assigned the death penalty. Homosexuality was not singled out as special or unique. The death penalty was commanded for a variaty of sexual infractions these included:
Having homosexual intercourse between men (Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13).
Committing adultery between a man and a woman (Leviticus 20:10-12, Deuteronomy 22:22).
Being the daughter of a priest and practicing prostitution (Leviticus 21:9).
Raping an engaged female virgin (Deuteronomy 22:25).
Being male and practicing bestiality (Leviticus 20:15).
Being female and practicing bestiality (Leviticus 20:16).
Having sex with your father’s wife (Leviticus 20:20).
Having sex with your daughter-in-law (Leviticus 20:30).
Having incestual sex (Leviticus 20:17).
Marrying a woman and her daughter (Leviticus 20:14).
What’s the common theme here? It is that the human sexual acts must be confined only to traditional marriage between a man and women. Anything that detached the sex act from the bedrock foundation of the family and marriage was deemed so serious that it warranted death.
We’re all these rules necessary? There is a good argument to be made that they were. A strong society is ultimately composed of strong stable family units. The survival of higher civilization in the long run ultimately depends on strong stable family units. This is especially true when that society is under existential outside threat like the ancient Israelites were.
Dennis Prager does a good job of highlighting this here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B0-epfgG7lISo no I do not agree that “the scriptures are seriously fucked up”. Picking and choosing the isolated prohibitions you personally disagree with is pointless. You take issue with Leviticus 18:22. Someone else may think incest should be ok and dislike Leviticus 20:17. A third person may believe animals are on this earth for human consumption and enjoyment and hate Leviticus 20:15.
The reality is there is not a single group of Christians in the world going around and enforcing of the death penalty for Leviticus 18:22. Why not? After all the Bible is the word of God.
The reason at least for Christians is because Christians were also instructed that that we have reached the point in our development when we need to include mercy in the evaluation of sin for we are all grievous sinners to some degree or another. That mercy should extend when possible even to violations of Biblical law.
John 8:7 ,
“He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.”You will have a hard time following the importance of this logic because you don’t believe in sin.
