Sex, Mom and God
How The Bible's Strange Take On Sex Lead To Crazy PoliticsFrank Schaeffer
Author as a child struggling to understand how God planned everything if Mom and Dad were using birth control to pick and choose when to have children. Apparently my parents were just exercising their "Free Will" which Gos knew all about and took into account with his Plan. He could adjust His Plan by issuing factory recalls (killing people) or by sending replacements, but since he knew He'd do that, even when He changed His mind, that too was part of His Plan.
There are many passages in the Bible about God changing His mind. Noah's Flood when he 'repented' of Creation. In Exodus he tells Moses that he won't be travelling with them to the land of milk and honey, because "you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way."
And despite what He said to women in Genesis ("I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shall bring forth children..."), God's Plan included the conception of Charles Goodyear who would discover the rubber vulcanization process as well as the German gynecologist C. Haase who invented the diaphragm, thereby changing His mind about punishing at least some women by allowing them to choose whether or not they would get pregnant.
So our family was fortunate to be Protestants, living after the rubber diaphragm was invented. That meant mom was only punished four times - five if you count her miscarriage - unlike Roman Catholic women, who even after rubber was invented, still got punished dozens of times because the supposedly infallible Popes, (filling in for Jesus during his unexpectedly long absence) rejected God's Plan for the Rubber Diaphragm Reprieve.
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The God-of-the-Bible made women as an afterthought - after creating all the animals, he decided Adam needed a helpmate - and apparently regretted it immediately. The owner's manual has multiple updates on how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb wome, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn't keep the many women-managing rules.
God is apparently deeply worried about menstrual blood but not any other sort. There's plenty of vengeful blood - slaughtering of anyone who is not worshipping exactly the same god. Blood from sacrificial animals is good. The blood gushing from Jesus's wounds is magic. But God must have botched the design of women because her bodily fluids - like shellfish, tattoos and wearing both wool and cotton at the same time - made her impure and unclean.
Christian equivalent of Muslim Sharia law: the OT teachings (including capital punishment for gays and virtues of child-beating) are still valid because they were the inerrant word of God and therefore should be enforced. Not just guidelines for believers, but biblical law that should be imposed, even on nonbelievers.
Both the Islamic and Christian movements the result of the collision between C20 science and modern permissiveness, and frightened conservatism.
Many Christians argue that they don't need to obey the OT rules because Jesus (sacrifice). But another branch believe that the whole Bible is the inerrant Will of God, and so should not only be obeyed, it should be enforced. Coercion must be used by the faithful to stop evildoers, who are anyone not obeying all God's laws as defined by the faithful.
The interesting thing about these Bible literalists is that they firmly believe that Mankind needs to be 'saved' because they are fallen. Except for them. They are not 'fallen'.
The Manhattan Declaration as a response to US govt enabling murder (abortion). Argued that that made the govt a counterfeit state which needed to be overthrown. Stop them passing laws which did not comply with their religious values. So if the government 'compelled' all Americans to recognize gay's civil rights, then the government need no longer be obeyed.
The intellectual enablers of the far right began by questioning abortion rights, gay rights, school prayer rulings etc. What they ended up doing was to help foster a climate in which the very legitimacy of government was called into question.
Science marched forth , demolishing fundamentalist 'facts' with dispassionate argument. So science also became the enemy. Rather than rethink their beliefs, religious conservatives renounced secular education. Thus to be uninformed, even willfully stupid, came to be considered a Godly virtue.
So evangelists withdrew from the mainstream addicted to facts rather than faith, but nevertheless, kept demanding that in 'family' and 'moral' issues, the society they'd renounced had to conform to their beliefs.
What is human life? The Christian tradition has produced demarcation lines even after birth to describe life's gradual transformation into full personhood. The Catholic Church invented the concept of limbo to comfort the parents of little babies who'd died without being baptized.
Other faiths:
The God-of-the-Bible made women as an afterthought - after creating all the animals, he decided Adam needed a helpmate - and apparently regretted it immediately. The owner's manual has multiple updates on how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb wome, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn't keep the many women-managing rules.
God is apparently deeply worried about menstrual blood but not any other sort. There's plenty of vengeful blood - slaughtering of anyone who is not worshipping exactly the same god. Blood from sacrificial animals is good. The blood gushing from Jesus's wounds is magic. But God must have botched the design of women because her bodily fluids - like shellfish, tattoos and wearing both wool and cotton at the same time - made her impure and unclean.
Christian equivalent of Muslim Sharia law: the OT teachings (including capital punishment for gays and virtues of child-beating) are still valid because they were the inerrant word of God and therefore should be enforced. Not just guidelines for believers, but biblical law that should be imposed, even on nonbelievers.
Both the Islamic and Christian movements the result of the collision between C20 science and modern permissiveness, and frightened conservatism.
Many Christians argue that they don't need to obey the OT rules because Jesus (sacrifice). But another branch believe that the whole Bible is the inerrant Will of God, and so should not only be obeyed, it should be enforced. Coercion must be used by the faithful to stop evildoers, who are anyone not obeying all God's laws as defined by the faithful.
The interesting thing about these Bible literalists is that they firmly believe that Mankind needs to be 'saved' because they are fallen. Except for them. They are not 'fallen'.
The Manhattan Declaration as a response to US govt enabling murder (abortion). Argued that that made the govt a counterfeit state which needed to be overthrown. Stop them passing laws which did not comply with their religious values. So if the government 'compelled' all Americans to recognize gay's civil rights, then the government need no longer be obeyed.
The intellectual enablers of the far right began by questioning abortion rights, gay rights, school prayer rulings etc. What they ended up doing was to help foster a climate in which the very legitimacy of government was called into question.
Science marched forth , demolishing fundamentalist 'facts' with dispassionate argument. So science also became the enemy. Rather than rethink their beliefs, religious conservatives renounced secular education. Thus to be uninformed, even willfully stupid, came to be considered a Godly virtue.
So evangelists withdrew from the mainstream addicted to facts rather than faith, but nevertheless, kept demanding that in 'family' and 'moral' issues, the society they'd renounced had to conform to their beliefs.
What is human life? The Christian tradition has produced demarcation lines even after birth to describe life's gradual transformation into full personhood. The Catholic Church invented the concept of limbo to comfort the parents of little babies who'd died without being baptized.
Other faiths:
