A somewhat common line from people who oppose gay rights is "What's next, bestiality?". In addition to being absurd, it struck me as kind of out of nowhere. Well, turns out that when laying down the law on what sex acts get the death penalty, just after man lying with a man is man or woman lying with a beast. So I must scale back my incredulity to just finding the argument absurd, since the source is clearer than I'd expected.
Wow, the end of the section that describes all the sex acts that deserve death is "A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death; they shall be stoned with stones, their blood shall be upon them". I learned about this writing technique in the satire class I took in high school. You present a list that gets increasingly absurd to point out the absurdity of the stuff at the beginning of the list.
It's interesting that Jews and Christians both closely follow certain parts of the Torah and completely ignore others, they just picked different parts. And I'm surprised by how much of what is considered fundamentalist Christian ideas come from the Torah.
If a man or woman lies with a beast not only is the person supposed to die, but so is the beast. Why does the beast have to die? That doesn't seem fair. Of course, killing a person for lighting a fire on Shabbat doesn't seem all that fair either, but at least there the person knowingly broke the rules.
So what happens to you if you don't follow God's commandments (other than the ones where he specifies that you'll be put to death)? Well, a list of bad stuff too long for me to bother to type (see Leviticus 26). And if after that you don't turn back to God he'll do a bunch more bad stuff to you including, "You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters". Whoa. That's twisted even by Law and Order SVU standards.
Oh and a bit of follow up from last time. The rules of kosher in the Torah are a bit more specific than I expected (although they have clearly been adjusted over time), heck which bugs are ok and not ok is even covered (if you keep kosher and you want to try grasshoppers you're good to go). And everyone knows that when Moses came down from the mountain the first time he broke the stone tablets in anger. What seems to get skipped over is that Moses also had three thousand people killed and then God unleashed a plague. But, whoa - tablet breaking - that's the part that shows how mad he was. Actually the commonly told story is Moses carved some stone tablets, got mad, broke them, had to carve new ones. Kind of a boring story. Seems like killing thousands of people helps add some zest to the story.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
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Ever since coming to the middle east, I've met a surprising number of people who believe that the three major monotheistic religions- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam- are basically one religion- like they have a common ancestor. I can believe that about Judaism and Christianity because in fact, Christianity was just Judaism until Jesus came into the picture, right? To put it simply. But the inclusion of Islam surprised me because it seems so different from the other two. But then again, I don't know much about Islam.
I've read briefly about one theory that proposes that Zoroastrianism- the oldest monotheistic religion- is the origin of Judaism and Christianity. It was the religion of the kurds before the Islamic conquest in 7th century AD or thereabouts.
Which version of the bible are you reading?
I never understood why the bible went on and on with such inane details. Like when God told Noah to build the ark, he went over the directions like 10 times, and was so exact about cubits and altars and curtains and i dunno what else. God is like the world's most anal home decorator. He's like my dad- my dad always turned what could have been a brief 7 minute lecture into a 2 hour one by repeating the same thing over and over again, as if we couldn't possibly have gotten the point the first 5 times.
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