Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Conservatives, Marriage and the Bible

If all you listen to is conservatives then...

  • Marriage is nothing more than written permission from authorities to have sex.
  • The lyrics of the old song - Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage - were part of the liberal homosexualist agenda when they were written by Sammy Cahn back in 1955.
  • Allowing people to marry for love is "unchecked hedonism" - Rush Limbaugh (Limbaugh is a serial polygamist who has married four times).
  • By biblical tradition, marriage is one man-one woman.
On that last point, if you use the Bible as a guide for marriage you get a perverted array of definitions.
  • Rape Marriage - The Bible requires a raped virgin to marry her attacker. (Deut. 22:28).
  • Polygamy - The Bible clearly defines marriage as one man and as many women as he can get his hands on. King Solomon holds the record of 700 wives (1 Kings 11:1).
  • Inherited Marriage - A childless widow was required to marry her brother-in-law (Gen. 38:6).
  • War Prize Marriage - Beautiful women capture during war could be taken as wives (Deut. 21:11).
In the Israelite war against the Midianites (Numbers 31) God ordered all the men, male children, and non-virgin women to be killed. Virgin women and children (32,000 in total) were divided up between the soldiers and civilians as wives and slaves. Thirty-two were taken by God as human sacrifices.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have often wondered how anyone on earth would want to have anything to do with a god that spews out all the hatred the god of the jews and christians spew out throughout the bible.

I have to say that I have grown pretty weary of religious people trying to tell consenting adults what they should and should not do based on their perception of what a "sin" is, a perception that has no underlying basis other than the intrepretations (designed to match what they already believe) of words written by ancient people thousands of years ago.

Michelle Barnett said...

What I find interesting though, is how "God's" commands change over the several hundred years of the Old Testament. At the start of the Israelite nation, they're used to living in a similar fashion to the nations around them. In Deuteronomy some immediate changes are made in the law which actually IMPROVE the treatment of slaves, women, and restrict the reasons why you could go to war etc. They look terrible to us today, but by the standards of their day these laws were very progressive. By the time we get to the New Testament these have improved even more (we're down to normally being allowed just one wife, for example) and Jesus pushes their morality even further. In our modern liberal society it's easy to forget how long it too us to get to this point. Regardless of your view of god/s and religion, it is important that we acknowledge the advances in humanity's treatment of its fellows that the Bible records.