Microblog Memes

I find Abrahamic religious teachings to be very exclusionary (hey if you beleive what we beleive we’ll let you into heaven) Almost like a country club of sorts.

So true. Thinking about it, Christian missionaries' main job is less to sell Jesus, but more to sell FOMO.

Like a timeshare salesperson, they're not gonna talk much about the maintenance fees required (such as treating each other the way Jesus said to.) They're also not gonna talk about how so many of the other share-owners are insufferable to be around and regularly break the agreed-upon rules. Oh, but they will hype up how, for the low, low price of asking Jesus for forgiveness and getting baptized, you, too, could reserve yourself an eternal home in Paradise!

And slavery. Don't forget the slavery.

God shouuld have realized this when He chose His Favourite People.

Not exactly. In fact, this is a gross oversimplification. The New Testament contradicts itself and plenty of mainstream Christian beliefs. Different NT authors have drastically different views of OT law, ranging from the view that the OT law should still be upheld (Matt 5:17 where Jesus says “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill."), to completely rejecting the old covenant (Hebrews 8:13 "In speaking of a new covenant, he has made the first one obsolete, and what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear."), and a range of nuanced views in-between. You can torture the text to reconcile to make it fit a particular view, but that's not an honest way of reading a text.

Also, wholesale rejecting the OT on the basis that the new covenant supercedes the old is incredibly problematic. I can understand saying that in the case of a contradiction between OT and NT you would go with the latter (although even that is an issue), but if you reject the OT, you're missing out on essential developments in Israelite and Jewish history, thought and literature which is essential to understand the NT. It's bad enough as it is that the tradition of mystical literature which so heavily influenced post-exilic Jewish and early Christian thought is overlooked. The last thing people who want to understand the NT need to do is throw out the OT.

The sermon on the Mount and specifically Matthew 5:18 I think or something like that explicitly says that nothing from the law has been removed or invalidated by Jesus.

This is a common sentiment in American Christianity but it doesn't really seem to be backed up by the text.

If i remember correctly (it's been a while), then the Bible becomes a lot more coherent if you throw out the old testament, and keep to the new testament only

You mean the one that starts with four tellings of the same story, that contradict each other heavily ?

Jesus himself says that he didn't come to abolish the old laws, but to fulfill them.

The whole book is worthless.

Well that's not true. We're not living in 600s Europe where only the clergy can read (and not all of them could read that well). However, a major issue is how it's read. Common practice in churches is to read the text and interpret it through a pre-existing set of beliefs informed by the reader's current cultural and political background, as well as millennia of religious tradition which many modern Christians are barely aware of (people take the statements in the Nicene Creed for granted, but it's not a statement of faith that the Bible could support without centuries of heated discussions, politicking and reinterpretations filling in the gaps) In biblical scholarship, this is referred to as eisegesis, where you read an interpretation into the text, rather than allowing the text to speak for itself.

In contrast, exegesis is the method used by modern biblical scholars, as opposed to theologians. This is basically reading the Bible as you would any other historical piece of literature - when you frame the text in its historical, religious, cultural and literary context, it takes on a whole new dimension almost entirely missing from church readings of the Bible. Suddenly the creation stories aren't just an account of how the world was made and how evil came about, but a polemic against the creation stories of Mesopotamia, which the biblical authors adopted and adapted in order to distinguish them from neighbouring mythologies. You stop needing to reconcile the irreconcilable Gods of the OT - the wrathful, vengeful, murderous God and the benevolent, merciful God - and instead can appreciate how the biblical authors have taken what originally seem to be two traditionally separate gods from Caananite-Israelite religion (El and Yahweh) and, over time, merged the traditions to fit the theology of a monotheistic cult which developed later within Israelite religion. By reading beyond the biblical canon, you can see evidence of varieties of Jewish and Christian tradition that didn't survive into later mainstream religion (for example, the Gospel of Mary places more importance on women than the other gospels and didn't make it into the biblical canon) I could go on, but realistically who will read this far?

TL;DR - yes, people do read the bible - in fact, it's probably the most read book in the world - it's just that people read into it rather than out of it, which stops them from appreciating what the many authors and books of the Bible are actually saying

Hey now plenty of atheists like me have read it

I believe Buddha was merely quoting Hastur.

I like the idea that Jesus spent the 20 years between debating rabbis and his own ministry going east on the silk road and learning Buddhism. I've always felt like base Christianity seems like Buddhist principles through a Jewish lens.