We'll give Colorado radio preacher and homeschooling maven Kevin Swanson some credit: the guy has Big Ideas, and in his ebook Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West, he's not afraid to make bold claims. His goal, after all, is to prove that Western civilization has been in decline ever since Thomas Aquinas started letting pagan Aristotelian logic into his theology, and that virtually every aspect of what people think of as our culture is really an attack on the Bible, which is our
Fundie doublethink is needed right out of the gate: Genesis I is the word of God, while Genesis II is "not biblical." (In G-II, Adam comes before the animals, directly contradicting the G-I account.)
<i> ...progressives like Twain &ldquo;won the propaganda war&rdquo; that followed the victory of the &ldquo;Northern Unitarians&rdquo; over &ldquo;Southern Presbyterians and Baptists&rdquo; in the Civil War, and skewed the way that Americans have thought about Christianity and slavery ever since. ... </i> I thought the Joos and the Papists were responsible for everything; now I have to worry about the Unitarians? Next it will be Theosophists.
Biblical slavery would exacerbate poverty. Who is going to pay a fair wage for all that menial labor if you can just press a slave into service for free? As long as a pot of gruel and some hay on a piece of dirt in the barn for boarding is cheaper than paying minimum wage, nobody is going to be hiring...
So Swanson, who otherwise abhors political activism as disruptive, chaotic, and dangerous, makes an exception--on <i>biblical</i> grounds--for hatred of and resistance to Big Government and all the things taxes pay for.
Yeah, about that whole anti-Christian Government-is-slavery thing:
Matthew 22:21 Mark 12:17 Luke 20:25 All versions of the words of Jesus: Give to Caesar what is Caesar&#039;s.
And my fav, from my main man St Paul--who never met an authority figure he didn&#039;t <strike>grovel to</strike>like:
&quot;Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, ... For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.&quot; (Romans 13)
The Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament to Christians was written for the Jewish people. All the rules and regulations apply to that faith alone. Even the Ten Commandments, i.e., &quot;Thou Shalt Not Kill&#039; is actually translated from the Hebrew as &quot;Thou Shalt Not Murder (another Jew)&quot;. You can kill in wars or if Yahweh commands you to conquer a city (kill all the inhabitants including animals). So pointing to anything written in it as a proscription for the modern lives of Gentiles is nonsense. Jesus himself was a Jew and it was Paul (who never even met Jesus) who declared that you could be a Christian without first being Jewish. The other school of thought was that pagans would have to follow the Jewish laws and become circumcised etc., and then follow the Christian rules. So game, set, match.You might as well claim America was founded on the principles taken from <i> The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel</i>, which makes more sense than anything in the bible.
And I seem to recall something from the Old Testament about how you&#039;re supposed to marry your brother&#039;s wife if he dies. Then there&#039;s another part where it forbids that! Did they not have editors in those days?
Which, if anyone recalls their chapter on Reconstruction from junior year of high school, was exactly the thought of most of the Democratic politicians south of the Tennessee border.
Heretical and evil, merely one part of the chaotic result of infusing our faith with Aristotelian reason in the ninth century. Something something family.
&quot;However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners... &quot;
That&#039;s the fun thing about the Bible: no matter what you read in it, there&#039;s a &quot;However...&quot; stuck into the text somewhere else. (Jon Stewart, in rabbinical mode: &quot;On the other hand...&quot;) For a professional bible-humper, Swanson is spectacularly ignorant of these subtleties.
Oh yes, anyone who Reads Seriously the history of nineteenth-century American letters will recognize (from his Biblical perspective, obviously, since only Christians are Good Scholers) that the real debate was between those who got slavery all wrong, and thus doomed us to a continuation of sin and degradation, and those who got release from slavery all wrong, and thus doomed us to a life of government oppression and tyranny, which is way worse than slavery anyhow.
Look, it&#039;s an apologist, rationalizing the Bible&#039;s teaching on slavery! Did you see him cherry-picking bible verses? Did you notice that his interpretation contradicted the clear meaning of the words? And did you notice the dishonesty, when he must be aware that the Jubilee applied to Hebrew servant/slaves of Hebrew masters? And that, even then, you can force them into permanent slavery if they&#039;re unwilling to give up their wives for freedom?
It should be a pretty simple concept- owning people is wrong.
Yes.
Fundie doublethink is needed right out of the gate: Genesis I is the word of God, while Genesis II is &quot;not biblical.&quot; (In G-II, Adam comes before the animals, directly contradicting the G-I account.)
So how many hectacres can her car travel on a gallon of gas?
<i> ...progressives like Twain &ldquo;won the propaganda war&rdquo; that followed the victory of the &ldquo;Northern Unitarians&rdquo; over &ldquo;Southern Presbyterians and Baptists&rdquo; in the Civil War, and skewed the way that Americans have thought about Christianity and slavery ever since. ... </i> I thought the Joos and the Papists were responsible for everything; now I have to worry about the Unitarians? Next it will be Theosophists.
Biblical slavery would exacerbate poverty. Who is going to pay a fair wage for all that menial labor if you can just press a slave into service for free? As long as a pot of gruel and some hay on a piece of dirt in the barn for boarding is cheaper than paying minimum wage, nobody is going to be hiring...
So Swanson, who otherwise abhors political activism as disruptive, chaotic, and dangerous, makes an exception--on <i>biblical</i> grounds--for hatred of and resistance to Big Government and all the things taxes pay for.
Yeah, about that whole anti-Christian Government-is-slavery thing:
Matthew 22:21 Mark 12:17 Luke 20:25 All versions of the words of Jesus: Give to Caesar what is Caesar&#039;s.
And my fav, from my main man St Paul--who never met an authority figure he didn&#039;t <strike>grovel to</strike>like:
&quot;Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, ... For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.&quot; (Romans 13)
The Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament to Christians was written for the Jewish people. All the rules and regulations apply to that faith alone. Even the Ten Commandments, i.e., &quot;Thou Shalt Not Kill&#039; is actually translated from the Hebrew as &quot;Thou Shalt Not Murder (another Jew)&quot;. You can kill in wars or if Yahweh commands you to conquer a city (kill all the inhabitants including animals). So pointing to anything written in it as a proscription for the modern lives of Gentiles is nonsense. Jesus himself was a Jew and it was Paul (who never even met Jesus) who declared that you could be a Christian without first being Jewish. The other school of thought was that pagans would have to follow the Jewish laws and become circumcised etc., and then follow the Christian rules. So game, set, match.You might as well claim America was founded on the principles taken from <i> The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel</i>, which makes more sense than anything in the bible.
And I seem to recall something from the Old Testament about how you&#039;re supposed to marry your brother&#039;s wife if he dies. Then there&#039;s another part where it forbids that! Did they not have editors in those days?
&quot;What in the hell is this shit?&quot; -God
Which, if anyone recalls their chapter on Reconstruction from junior year of high school, was exactly the thought of most of the Democratic politicians south of the Tennessee border.
Heretical and evil, merely one part of the chaotic result of infusing our faith with Aristotelian reason in the ninth century. Something something family.
&quot;However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners... &quot;
That&#039;s the fun thing about the Bible: no matter what you read in it, there&#039;s a &quot;However...&quot; stuck into the text somewhere else. (Jon Stewart, in rabbinical mode: &quot;On the other hand...&quot;) For a professional bible-humper, Swanson is spectacularly ignorant of these subtleties.
Oh yes, anyone who Reads Seriously the history of nineteenth-century American letters will recognize (from his Biblical perspective, obviously, since only Christians are Good Scholers) that the real debate was between those who got slavery all wrong, and thus doomed us to a continuation of sin and degradation, and those who got release from slavery all wrong, and thus doomed us to a life of government oppression and tyranny, which is way worse than slavery anyhow.
So, in order to pick cotton, the south needed more criminals so that they could be bound into slavery?
Look, it&#039;s an apologist, rationalizing the Bible&#039;s teaching on slavery! Did you see him cherry-picking bible verses? Did you notice that his interpretation contradicted the clear meaning of the words? And did you notice the dishonesty, when he must be aware that the Jubilee applied to Hebrew servant/slaves of Hebrew masters? And that, even then, you can force them into permanent slavery if they&#039;re unwilling to give up their wives for freedom?
It should be a pretty simple concept- owning people is wrong.
That&#039;s a cool story there K-Swan, but you forgot to explain how Obama The Time-Traveling Kenyan fits into all of this.