Friday, June 13, 2014

What's behind the "Scriptural Shell Game"?


Funny how as society and social mores evolve, that religions - especially Judaism and Christianity - don't change their scripture, but instead they just parse it, manipulate it, and otherwise pervert it to not mean what it says.  This is necessary in order to be more relevant to modernity and appear less arbitrarily and utterly stupid.

They stopped not "suffering a witch to live," they quit stoning their unruly rebellious children to death, they don't "...sell everything and give the money to the poor...," and follow their man-god.  They ignore admonishments not to pray in public like the hypocrites do, preferring to insert public prayer at every opportunity. The list goes on and on.

The latest foray into this exercise in the scriptural shell game is perfectly demonstrated in the article attached.  In it a rabbi explains how the Judaic prohibition against tattoos as clearly stated in the Torah isn’t really a prohibition.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-evan-moffic/can-jews-have-tattoos_b_5484367.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

The rabbi's apologetics are just more of the same... "Never mind what scripture says - here's what I say it really says."  What a coincidence given the rising popularity and acceptance of tattoos as body art. 

The Mormons of course are famous for this.  First God tells Joseph Smith polygamy is the thing to do. Then when Utah was going to be refused statehood because of it, BAM! their church president gets a "revelation" that god changed its mind. First blacks are unworthy to be LDS church bishops, then BAM!, the church president gets a revelation (coincidental with the civil rights movement) and blacks are miraculously allowed to join the "White and Delightsome" as full church members in good standing. But to their credit, at least they are claiming a major change in their god's sexual appetite and racist perspectives.  The Jews and the mainstream Christians just re-imagine the textual meanings: "You have to understand..here's what God really meant."

I wish they'd cut the phony pretexts and hypocrisy and just come out and say what we all know:   "There is no Boogie Man. Scripture was the tribal law of Bronze Age nomads and ravings of 1st century cultists, all ancient myth of pre-scientific man. So do what you want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone,  live like good human beings just because we should - and cut the crap."

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