Disturbing Passages in Holy Books

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I think all the religions and their holy books has that one or couple of issues that even the followers of themselves (even the most fundy) admit to struggling to accept or understand.

2 Corinthians 4:4 (New Living Trns.)

Matthew 5:27-32

Those are both disturbing passages. I don’t think we talked about the scripture in 2 Corinthians. It definitely reads gaslighty. My religion was especially fond of it. If we had valid doubts or concerns, we were taught to believe that we were just being blinded by Satan because the Bible can’t be wrong.

Nothing should be above scrutiny - not religious beliefs and certainly not holy books.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 30 Mar 2024, 8:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

^^^ My religion taught that the Earth might’ve been around for “millions” of years because the creation days in Genesis may have been figurative, but they thought that humans were created 6,000 years ago. If they’re going to be that nutty, they should’ve just gone all the way and claimed that the universe was created in 6 days. Disappointing. As a homeschooler, I wasn’t allowed to learn about evolution and didn’t do so until I was an adult. I should make a thread on my experience as a homeschooler one of these days. It was shockingly bad. It’s concerning that so many fundamentalists choose to homeschool their kids. Ignorance becomes a family tradition in a very real sense.

I certainly agree about the turn the other cheek stuff. It’s likely caused a lot of harm overall. Being conditioned to be passive sheep can probably lead to and keep people in abusive situations. That may have been some of my problem actually. It’s hard to say.

Considering all the harmful, unsound advice that’s in the Bible (including using rods on children), God seems to have been as ignorant as the people in the times and locations the Bible was written. Hmmm…

IME, the people who are loudest about pushing the notion that you can’t be a good person without accepting their religion often have questionable morals themselves. Without religion, morality is a simple thing. With my former religion, it was all about rules and judgment. They cast judgment on and encourage folks to disown family members who are LGBTQ+ which I find deeply immoral. Obviously, morality is a subjective thing, but so many fundamentalists fail to realize that you don’t need to believe in a god or holy book to care about morality and ethics. Morality to me is rooted in humanism.

Yes they assigned some strange traits to their supposed deity. It seems to me they had no idea of the notion that morality is about minimising harm.


I've probably said before that when the supposed divine rules deviate from humanist harm-reduction morality, people are going to get harmed. Is that what their benevolent Lord wants? Scripture is supposed to be the divine rule-book, and this thread has cited many examples of that deviation. Scripture indeed calls gayness an "abomination," but doesn't explain what's supposed to be the harm in such a sexual orientation. Longwinded as scripture is, it omits a lot of salient detail like that.

Meanwhile I've been looking at a few theists' answers to the "good atheist" problem:

https://creation.com/can-people-be-good-without-god
When we trust in Jesus for salvation, God reconciles us to Himself. One consequence of this is we become able to do good deeds, because God, the source of all goodness, enables us. Yet we remain completely dependent on Him: Jesus says, “apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
So yes, atheists can do what we would consider to be good deeds, but from a standard of divine perfection, none of us can measure up. Christians are only capable of doing deeds God considers good because of our status “in Christ” which means Christ’s goodness is credited to us and He enables us to do good deeds.

What they seem to be saying is that following God enables the follower to do good deeds, but in the same breath they admit that as atheists they were never disabled from that quality in the first place. Even though they cite Jesus as saying "Apart from me, you can do nothing." Muddled or what?

Another one:

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/onlin ... ief-in-god
....denying God’s existence results in an insufficient explanation for moral obligation. How can the moral law be binding if there is no moral lawgiver behind it that surpasses human authority? The answer is that it cannot.

The theory that morality is a human group survival thing explains it quite well to me. As for it being binding, we have secular laws that often surpass scriptural rules in their attention to harm reduction, and even theists are ultimately free to break the rules, and frequently do. But that's OK as long as they repent. Like I'm never sorry when I find I've done harm.

What bothers me a lot is the theists' absurd notion that you can behave as kindly as any theist for your whole life but as far as their supposed deity is concerned (or perhaps more accurately, as far as THEY are concerned), it counts for nothing unless you're also a theist. And it also has to be THEIR brand of theism.

It is odd that people claim they are cool with different sorts of people and beliefs but according to their God and holy text, there behavior will send them to everlasting torment unless they reject the behavior and repent from it.