Brilliant.

The Bible isn’t hate speech in the United States yet.  What will we do when it is?

That’s the problem with "hate crimes" laws.  Who gets to define what is a "hate crime".  Personally, I think if you beat someone severely, you don’t like them much.  The fact that you did it because they were gay (or black or Asian or whatever) shouldn’t add anything to it.

People scream "hate speech" when a Christian talks negatively of homosexuals and their behavior, yet it is okay to refer to those Christians as "Nazis" or "facists".  To me, that is much more hateful than saying "homosexual acts are sinful". 

I suppose while I’m prooftexting myself (i.e. just grabbing verses that seem to support a particular point of view without any real context or contemplation), I might as well mention that Leviticus 11, in most English translations, includes eating bats, insects, most birds of prey, or any form of fish without scales and fins to be an abomination. Yet, once again, I see very, very few in the "conservative Christian" community living up to that in their own lives, let alone loudly condemning these practices as part of a widespread degradation of America that God finds wicked.

The standard Christian interpretation–not just Catholic, but also held by most mainline Protestants and also the Orthodox, so, at least 80% of all Christians worldwide–is that the Jews had a whole host of special laws for their own behavior some of which applied to all mankind but most of which was just for them, to set them aside as a people, the people who would pave the way for the Messiah who would offer salvation to the entire world and not just the Jews. These rules were to make them separate and apart, and keep them separate and apart, so they’d be there for Jesus’ arrival. Once he died, that was the final covenant offered by God, and it was with all mankind; it did not include all the elements of the code given to Moses.

That interpretation may of course be wrong, but it’s certainly the interpretation the vast majority of Christians have always held to, and continue to hold to. [shrug]

One thing I’ve never been entirely clear on is what someone born Jewish is supposed to do about the Mosaic code if he accepts that Jesus was the Messiah. Most Jews consider that axiomatically impossible, but such people do exist and were much more common in the very earliest days of Christianity. My reading of the Pauline and Petrine epistles would be that those born Jews should try to keep to the old covenant as well as they can, and that’s how the original twelve bishops (the Twelve Apostles) usually tried to comport themselves, but in the First Apostolic Council, as shown in Acts, they made it very clear that most of the Mosaic code just didn’t apply to any non-Jews who wanted to accept the covenant offered by Jesus.

Our friend Kevin, being a "Messianic" Christian, is part of a tiny splinter group which believes that all of that old Mosaic covenant is meant to apply equally to everybody, Christians especially. Most Christians do not agree with that interpretation. Maybe they’re right, but if so, then for 2,000 years the rest of us have all been getting it wrong, and continue to stubbornly get it wrong. [shrug]

McKiernan: Oh, brother. Sometimes you make me crazy. You’ve been hanging out here long enough to know I grew up Christian–multiple flavors of it. You’d know I studied religion in college and that even while being a professing atheist I continued to study the world’s religions.

You, my friend, are a Catholic and as such you, at confirmation, agreed to abide by the teachings of that church and accept its authority. That church teaches, clearly and unambiguously, that most of the Mosaic code does not apply to the world’s Christians. If you don’t believe it, check a few Catholic sources. You might start with a good Catholic Study Bible; I’ve got a New American Standard I can loan you if you can’t locate one.

Catholics are 50% of the world’s Christians all by themselves. Which means I only need to find one other Christian group to back up my position. Hmm. Will that be a major challenge? Hardly. The Orthodox are the second largest group of the world’s Christians, and they teach the same thing. The third largest is the Episcopalian Communion, which is not just the third largest group of Christians in the world, it is also the largest Protestant denomination. They also believe that most of the Mosaic code does not apply to most Christians.

Among Protestant denominations, I can also tell you that the Lutherans and the Presbyterians, who number in the hundreds of millions, teach exactly the same thing on this matter: most of the Mosaic code does not apply to most Christians.

This is, frankly, as uncontroversial as asserting that most Christians believe Jesus was the one and only Son of God and was himself God. There are Christians who deny that (like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses), but they are such a small minority that it’s not in the least bit rude to say they’re a minority. Nor does their minority status grant them any cachet.

Most Christians don’t believe most of the Mosaic code applies to them, McKiernan, and if you knew anything about your own faith (and took your own Confirmation classes seriously when you were a kid) you’d know there’s nothing odd about that statement at all.

McKiernan: Oy. I don’t even know where to begin. So I’ll just say "Mosaic code" is a shorthand term commonly used for "all the stuff laid out in Leviticus" and I wouldn’t expect the Catechism to use it. Nevertheless if you’re suggesting that the church says it’s a sin to eat shellfish or pork, or have sex with your wife while she’s on her period, I’d be curious to see how you back that up.

Kevin: Actually I admitted I was prooftexting, which I think I’ve said before is a bad habit. I was just making the point that if you (generic "you," like this dorkwad who wants to sue someone for selling Bibles is doing) just grab a particular verse that seems to support a particular point of view, you are being silly. Still, it’s not clear to me in reading the Bible that homosexual behavior between men is worse than a lot of other things that "Conservative Christians" (especially Evangelicals) don’t spend a lot of time fulminating over, even though they are far more widespread. Eating shellfish and having sex outside of marriage are *wildly* more common today than men having anal intercourse with each other, and both are called abominations and/or detestable in the O.T.

What Catholics (and most mainline Protestants, and the Orthodox) teach is that to understand which of the Old Testament proscriptions and laws apply directly to most Christians and which don’t requires very careful analysis and studied exegesis. This is how doctrines are developed. For Catholics, Orthodox, and at least some Protestants, the final authority on all of that falls to the Bishops, because someone’s got to be in authority and, to us at least, it’s pretty clear who that authority was given to, it is spelled out clearly in the Book of Acts and it’s not just anyone who wants to pick up a Bible and declare themselves an authority (although everyone should study the Bible).

My own church teaches that homosexual behavior of all sorts, even between women (which isn’t specifically condemned in the Bible by the way) is sinful, but, it’s also sinful to treat homosexuals or any other sinners with hatred or contempt or any form of persecution, and that is a big part of the New Covenant: you don’t treat sinners like garbage, especially because we’re all sinners, up to and including the Pope (who is also secretly Batman by the way, but we aren’t supposed to reveal that part to you heathens).

The Old Testament is *hugely* important to us, and large parts of what’s in the New Testament can’t be understood without the Old. A lot of the practices we carry on, like the formal, ordained Priesthood, come straight out of it. It’s just a long-standing struggle to figure out what really applies and what doesn’t. It’s not a matter of the Mosaic covenant being invalidated or abrogated, it’s just that large parts of it don’t apply, just like a contract between Warner Brothers and Sony Entertainment would not generally apply to an actor in a Warner Brothers movie (although some parts of it might, most would be irrelevant).

Obviously, we can disagree on this without being disagreeable, which is a good development. 

"No longer applicable" isn’t what most christians believe; "were never applicable to most people and still, as a result, are not applicable to most people" would be the position. God also made a covenant with Abraham that his descendants would number like the stars; he did not make a covenant with you and me that we’d be so fortunate. That part of that covenant does not apply to Kevin and Dean (darn it).

Most Christians think this is all pretty clearly laid out in the Book of Acts. The Jews basically think the same thing, that the Noahide Code is for everybody but the Mosaic Code is just for them and them alone, and they were and are never required to ask others to live up to most of it (and they didn’t at the time of Jesus, either, nor did he ever say they should). That’s why when the apostles were asked (in the Book of Acts) to decide whether the Mosaic covenant applied to the Gentile Christians, they debated it for a while and Peter gave a final decision that the early Bishops (The Twelve) all assented to; the Gentiles were only asked to live up to the few things under the Mosaic code that applied to all non-Jews living in Israel. There were darned few such rules, and to most of us it would appear that even those may not all apply if you’re not living in Jewish lands; eating strangled meat, for example, doesn’t appear to be incumbent upon most Christians to avoid.

They were a “cabal” of men, chosen by Jesus to establish his early church, given the power of the keys (Matthew 16:19) and allowed to make these choices with the sure knowledge that Jesus would back them up. That’s the choice they made. It’s all right there in the Book of Acts and the Gospels, clearly and according to the plain text so far as I can see.

Jesus fulfilled the covenant with the Jews, he didn’t alter it in the least, and nothing in the teachings of most Christians runs counter that that I’ve seen in my studies. "Doesn’t apply to you" does not mean "has been abolished."

Wouldn’t it be awful if only you and Kevin had a say.

Your friend has yet to discern important nuances re: theology 101.

That’s okay as we are all on a learning curve.

How come the corrector thingie bypassed my prior comment ?

McKiernan: I can almost never figure you out but you are entertaining. But for anyone who cares, I’m laying out very basic Theology 101 embraced by most of the world’s Christian denominations, Protestant and Orthodox and Catholic alike. Mostly I try to keep my own opinions out of it, or to label them as clearly just my opinions when I do. Make of that what you will; little I’ve said here would have been controversial amongst the Presbyterians of my youth, just for example.

I don’t see any comments of yours in the holding tank. FYI.

There is an inexpensive  book which I rather like called the:

Didache (The Training of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles for the Gentiles). 

Even the book reviews are most interesting.

It begins by going directly to the chopping block with the directive that this is where it (religion)  starts.  Check out 1:1, 1:2 and 1:3.

If you like rummaging through a first century religious antique shop, then you may like the Didache.

The Didache is certainly a fascinating text; many of the early Church Fathers, when wrestling with which books to put into the Canon and which not, argued that it belonged in the Bible. Catholics and some Protestants honor it as an important work just below the Canon in its importance. At least some Christians (the coptics?) actually do include it in the Canon. Some suggest the only real reason it was excluded was because it did not have clear Apostolic authorship (or authorship by someone directly tied to an Apostle). Its origins unclear, it was nevertheless respected.

This gets to another argument between Evangelicals and most other Christians, which is our view that the Bible wasn’t supposed to be either the start or the end of written texts, just the most important. It still had clear design constraints and wasn’t supposed to be the starting point or the finishing point on any theological question. Not most of the time, anyway. It was just The Book, in the same way that the U.S. Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land but is in no way sufficient all by itself to cover everything.

Politics and religion are always contentious subjects. And, when you expressed an interest in writing on this blog, I warned you I wasn’t sure you’d be a good fit; I am an ex-Fundamentalist with Fundamentalist family, and I rejected that branch of the faith. Indeed, that branch of the faith, more than any other force, led me to atheism. It sometimes, at least when I was younger and before I mellowed out, led me to hate the Bible and hate Christianity (although even when I was an atheist I stopped that and often defended Christians and Christianity). I’ve now come to believe that, while fundamentalists may often be good people at heart, their entire approach to Scripture is deeply in error, often amounts to scripture abuse, and is even at times borderline idolatrous. I think it often leads to attitudes and beliefs that are corrosive and arrogant.

In any case, my criticism of this branch of the faith has been long standing, and remained unchanged whether I was an atheist or not.

You speak often of Protestantism but it often seems to me that all you mean by “Protestant” is a specific subset of Protestantism. At least I don’t hear much of the more mainstream Protestant perspective from you, and I see very little of it in your copious library of religious books, almost all of which seem to me are by Evangelicals/Fundamentalists, which are *not* synonymous with Protestantism but are rather a specific subset. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and other mainstream Protestant perspectives seem to be largely absent from your vocabulary, anyway.

I grew up in a household split between Fundamentalist/Evangelical and Mainline Protestant. There weren’t any Catholics there at all; I’m the only Catholic in my entire family, which is mostly Mormons and Fundamentalists although my own mom is now moving toward Catholicism. To me, it’s seems that fundamentalists are just louder and more vocal than their mainstream Protestant brethren. Most Protestants do not read the Bible the way fundamentalists do, or make statements like you do about it.

Most of us (Protestant, Orthodox, or Catholic) neither ignore nor cherry-pick the Old Testament. You may want to, yourself, consider just how often you give offense to Catholics, to the Orthodox, and to your fellow Protestants when you make such statements. You might at least consider whether it’s really true. It seems to me you often make sweeping pronouncements like this about other faiths, or other branches of the Christian faith, but then show quick offense at anything even slightly negative about your own. Consider that at least worth considering.

None of this makes you or your coreligionists bad people. But I cannot in good faith simply ignore what I consider to be profound errors.

We don’t ignore the Old Testament. We don’t cherry-pick from it. This may describe some worship or study services you’ve attended in Fundamentalist circles, but it doesn’t describe either my local congregation or the wider world of Orthodox, Catholic, or Mainline Protestant Christianity.

I also just think anyone leaving behind a lifelong commitment to their faith, or their particular branch of it, ought to at least consult knowledgeable people of authority within it to ask them questions before making up their minds to go a new direction. Is that really bad advice?

God bless you and yours regardless, my friend.