Caltrops - Biohazard: Code Veronica





	[quote name="Senor Barborito MetaFilter Post"]nofundy (and caddis, on preview, whom I cover towards the end here): Even when I was a believer I shared your misgivings about Paul. That having been said, it is important from a doctrinal standpoint that Paul's beliefs regarding both women and homosexuals be included in the New Testament. The Old Testament, specifically the Pentateuch, records the earlier covenants between God and man. Or to be more direct, between God and the Jewish people. To a very large degree this covenant as given through (and recorded by) Moses is very exclusionary. Within this context, condemnation of homosexuals and explicit reduction of the status of women is hardly unexpected. It is what is in what is commonly referred to as the New Covenant (the New Testament) that Christ supposedly greatly expanded the ability for all men and women to have access to God without the intercession of a priest<sup>1</sup>, destroying the barrier between God and man upon his death (the curtain of the Holy of Holies being torn as he died). Within this context, a more liberal view towards both women and homosexuals might have been possible. Unfortunately a person who believes in a perfect, loving, and all-powerful Christian God must accept that said God allowed Paul's condemnation (or the condemnation of future transcribers as posited by caddis' links) of homosexuals and misogyny to persist within the text which has represented his will and the New Covenant to nearly all his followers for many many centuries now. It is important for this reason to recognize the existence of Paul's views which mirror those in the Old Testament. If an all-powerful, perfect, and loving God objects to Paul's views, he's certainly taking his sweet time in making that known to us. One cannot believe in an all-powerful God who loves his followers and yet for centuries has allowed them to believe in false representation of major points of doctrine (the role of women within the church is pretty major). Failure to believe in biblical inerrancy or near-inerrancy is impossible to reconcile with the belief in a loving and all-powerful God, because such a figure would by very definition not allow himself to be so grossly misrepresented. One cannot pick and choose what parts of the Bible to accept without throwing the whole of it into serious jeopardy. Oh, and Alex Reynolds: my paternal grandparents were Hitler Youth as well. After watching their childhood Jewish friends get dragged away. Perhaps you are unaware, but children living in Nazi Germany were not given a choice as to whether or not to become Hitlerjugend. After escaping Eastern Germany and coming to America, they hammered an abhorrence of racism and facism into their children and grandchildren from the time they began speaking. Holding a person's former status as a member of the Hitler Youth against them is, frankly, bullshit. Judging by my grandparents it results in adults who are if anything violently reactionary towards anything that smacks of Nazi ideologies. <sup>1</sup><i>It's ironic that in the Lord's Prayer Christ instructed his disciples to ask for forgiveness directly from God, without the intercession of priests as in the Catholic hurch. This was pretty clearly a method used by the Catholic church to provide itself with blackmail material against its followers in much the same manner practiced by Scientologists.</i> posted by Ryvar at 7:25 AM PST on July 27 [/quote]