What Book would you leave behind?
- Thread starter Saul
- Start date
Someone loves bloodshed.
No. Quite the opposite.
Without wanting to turn this into a discussion, but the Old Testaments promotes a whole bunch of divinely sanctified genocide, murder and other cruelties, including ridiculously bloody punishments. There is no denying that.
And since you can't influence on what part of the book the aliens will focus (the ones who left the books behind in the episode didn't mean for them to become mobsters) how would you prevent them from focusing on Leviticus or Deuteronomy instead of whatever part you deem less bloody?
Burt Ward's Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights.
The violence you are referring to in the Old Testament was descriptive, not prescriptive. There is no open-ended, blanket command for Jews or Christians to wipe out anyone.
The history of the mob wasn't prescriptive, either. The iotians copied it anyway.
Just like the Bible.
There's enough passages that command to kill people for ridiculous things such as Leviticus 20:13. How would you prevent them from following those parts?
I personally find the Bible to be important part of my life but there are commands for people to be killed. Without context (which we can learn via studying history) it could easily become problematic for an alien culture. I mean, just look at Constantine and the Spanish Inquisition who used the Jews killing Jesus as justification to kill Jews.
Point is, if one believes in the Bible, then divine guidance needs to come with it.
I thought about this a lot actually. there is incredible risk in seeding any kind of information to a society that has been isolated from those kinds of ideas. I would leave well enough alone.
but if I HAD to I'd try to condense as much information as i could, even if it was conflicting. You want a culture to ultimately understand that the very documents they are founding their culture on may themselves be flawed or imperfect (fun little fact,most if not all Buddhist Suttas of the tipitaka begin with "Thus I have heard" because they were written not by Buddha Gautama but by those who had heard it from those who'd been there. They already knew there was loss in transmission and so put in that caveat).
So.. I'd give em Wikipedia, and I'd borrow Techmoan's awesome gadget:
but if I HAD to I'd try to condense as much information as i could, even if it was conflicting. You want a culture to ultimately understand that the very documents they are founding their culture on may themselves be flawed or imperfect (fun little fact,most if not all Buddhist Suttas of the tipitaka begin with "Thus I have heard" because they were written not by Buddha Gautama but by those who had heard it from those who'd been there. They already knew there was loss in transmission and so put in that caveat).
So.. I'd give em Wikipedia, and I'd borrow Techmoan's awesome gadget:
There are no commands for Christians or Jews to commit mass genocide, which was your initial concern. Rather than acknowledge your mistake, you’ll move right along to your next (out of context) argument. That’s fine. And of course, you go directly to the argument about homosexuality, as it is the preeminent obsession with the political left. Again, that’s fine.
This was not a command to murder homosexuals around the world. It was a law which specifically forbade Israelites from engaging in homosexuality. I won’t go into the specifics as to why Israelites specifically were forbidden to engage in this type of behavior, as it is not relevant to the discussion at hand.
Any alien culture that came into possession wouldn’t read it the way many so-called atheists do, which is strictly via Facebook memes, out of context passages, and keyword searches on the internet.
There is one commonality among Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe. They are all civilizations based on Judeo-Christian values. Nazi Germany, the USSR, Red China, Fascist Italy, North Korea, Cuba, and most of the Middle East also have one commonality. They weren’t.
Civilizations built on Judeo-Christian values thrive. I know that offends secularists, but it’s the truth.
Put together a list of people executed as a result of Leviticus 20:13. I’ll wait.
Okay if you want to explode like that, then that's your business, but only because you don't like that the Bible has a lot of bloodshed and cruelty in it, doesn't change thefact. However my initial message said:
So please don't misquote me. I went to Leviticus because it, together with Paulus' statements were used as a basis for centuries in the Western World to persecute LGBT+ people, and as an LGBT+ person that tends to be very close to my heart.
You can say all you want how "that's not akshullay" what it says, but it doesn't change how it was used in the last 2000 years of history.
While you are right that there's no implicit passage where Yahweh tells its followers that genocide is good, there's a lot of passages where either Yahweh himself slays thousands of people for ridiculous offenses or things that weren't their fault or where the Ancient people of the covenant are portrayed int he right for slaughtering whole cities.
Your equation of Christian values with civilization is both ridiculous and Euro-Centric and ignores things like the Golden Age of Islam and the success of non-Christian countries such as Japan or the various native North American nations before colonization.
It also ignores the Greco-Roman roman roots of modern Western Civilization.
Also I was not saying that there isn't some good in the Bible, just that you can't control what the aliens will focus on or adopt.
Last edited:
The New Testament retconned the Old Testament.
Exactly.
Much of it is prescriptive, and it's not limited to the old testament.
JN2849 said:
Opposing homophobia is not limited to the left, even much of the right, like for instance liberals oppose it. homophobia belongs in the 11th century, not 21st.
JN2849 said:
Quite the opposite: most of Europe is based on opposition to christianity, and nazi Germany+fascist Italy were extremely christian.
I doubt it would actually matter that much what book you'd leave behind.
Even if you'd write one specifically to that purpose, one that tells them to unconditionally love all living beings, tolerance of what you don't understand, and IDIC, and all these things, within a generation you'd probably still have sects beating each other senseless (and much worse things) about the interpretation of a particular semicolon you'd never even imagined could cause any difference in insight.
Even if you'd write one specifically to that purpose, one that tells them to unconditionally love all living beings, tolerance of what you don't understand, and IDIC, and all these things, within a generation you'd probably still have sects beating each other senseless (and much worse things) about the interpretation of a particular semicolon you'd never even imagined could cause any difference in insight.
Well, they were Catholics, not real Christians. (Yeah, I know most of Nazi Germany wasn't Catholic).
Similar threads
