Dear God,

If I DO decide to work on sunday, and my friend sees me do this yet refuses to stone me to death on the spot, does my friend go to Hell too, or just me?

“On six days work may be done, but the seventh day shall be sacred to you as the Sabbath of complete rest to the Lord. Anyone who does work on that day, shall be put to death. You shall not even light a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day.” ---- Exodus 35:2-3 NAB

What if, after i invade a foriegn country, i DON'T steal babies from their mothers and dash them at their feet? Does that make me a heretic? Sometimes, after killing every able bodied man in a village, I'm all murdered out. What if i just can't muster the blood lust and raw animal hatred necessary to rape the women and shoot their children through the back as they attempt to flee?

“Anyone who is captured will be run through with a sword. Their little children will be dashed to death right before their eyes. Their homes will be sacked and their wives raped by the attacking hordes. For I will stir up the Medes against Babylon, and no amount of silver or gold will buy them off. The attacking armies will shoot down the young people with arrows. They will have no mercy on helpless babies and will show no compassion for the children.”---- Isaiah 13:15-18 NLT

I know you say:

“A man or a woman who acts as a medium or fortuneteller shall be put to death by stoning; they have no one but themselves to blame for their death.” ---- Leviticus 20:27 NAB

Does that mean i MUST hunt down and kill Ms. Cleo in order to get into heaven, or am i O.K. because i don't know her personally?

Lessons Learned.
Kill anybody who works on the sabbath. If i accidentally do some work on the Sabbath, I should make sure that whoever sees me working puts me to death.
When i inevitably invade a foreign country at the behest of God, I should obliterate anything and everybody, taking special care to dash babies to the ground in front of its parents.
Kill all fortune tellers, psychics, or other largely harmless mystics.

I can feel myself becomming a better man.

Dear God,

It seems like a shame, that I should be forced to go to my local bank and slaughter everyone who works there. I rather like those people. They helped me to buy my car, and my house. They treated me fairly and I count them as my friends. But, you do say:

"he lends money on interest and takes increase; will he live? He will not live! He has committed all these abominations, he will surely be put to death; his blood will be on his own head."
---- Ezekiel 18:13

So I guess I am in the wrong on this one.

I don’t know any Samarians, but I would suppose that when you say:

The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword: their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.
— Hosea 13:16

It isn’t so much that these people are Samarians as that they have rebelled against God. So… do I need to start with the ripping open of pregnant ladies if they aren’t Christians in order to get into heaven?

Very confused here, God.
On the one hand you say:

And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death."
----- Leviticus 20:10

But on the other you advise:

Then Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother’s wife, and perform your duty as a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.” Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground in order not to give offspring to his brother. But what he did was displeasing in the sight of the LORD; so He took his life also.
----- Genesis 38:8-10 NASB

So, under what circumstances is it allowed for us to have sex with each other’s spouse? It seems in some circumstances it is a good thing, even though you said we would be put to death for it, but only if we don’t pull out. I could use some clarification on which kind of adultery is the good kind.

How come when mobsters do it, and call it protection, it’s evil, but when you do it, it is only right?

“The anger of God rose against them, and he killed their strongest men; he struck down the finest of Israel's young men. But in spite of this, the people kept on sinning. They refused to believe in his miracles. So he ended their lives in failure and gave them years of terror. When God killed some of them, the rest finally sought him. They repented and turned to God.”---- Psalms 78:31-34 NLT
"I brought hunger to every city and famine to every town. But still you wouldn't return to me," says the LORD.

"I kept the rain from falling when you needed it the most, ruining all your crops. I sent rain on one town but withheld it from another. Rain fell on one field, while another field withered away. People staggered from one town to another for a drink of water, but there was never enough. But still you wouldn't return to me," says the LORD.
"I struck your farms and vineyards with blight and mildew. Locusts devoured all your fig and olive trees. But still you wouldn't return to me," says the LORD.
"I sent plagues against you like the plagues I sent against Egypt long ago. I killed your young men in war and slaughtered all your horses. The stench of death filled the air! But still you wouldn't return to me," says the LORD.
"I destroyed some of your cities, as I destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Those of you who survived were like half-burned sticks snatched from a fire. But still you wouldn't return to me," says the LORD.” ---- Amos 4:6-11 NLT

I see that you are making a habit of intimidating people with violence and death to get them to love you. That seems sorta counter-intuitive to me. Everything I have seen about, say beating your wife or children, or even killing them for not loving you catches a sort of negative spin now a days. Too bad people don’t actually read these parts of the bible. Then, when a man finally kills his wife for hitting her a few dozen more times than was strictly necessary, that man’s predicament could be better understood. Violence is close to godliness in this case.

OK,
Lesson learned:

Kill all bankers.
Kill everyone who has rebelled against God.
Kill anyone who commits adultery, except when you say that they should.
Kill, maim, starve, or otherwise destroy those who you love, or wish to hold power over, but whom refuse your dominance.

Have i earned my place in heaven yet God?

Johnson, you are taking the Bible more literally than a fundamentalist Christian.

Just examining some of the moral teachings it has to offer.

Think of somebody saying any of these things. Think of somebody writing a book meant to be a moral guide with this lunacy in it.

it would not fly. Put it into the bible and people him and haw, trying to justify or erase this stuff from their memory. The fact is, this material is in the bible. Any redeeming things in the bible are easily found in other literature without the bagage associated with what you see in the posts above.

many people feel the bible can do no wrong, some of them on this board, examining these passages demonstrates that the bible is clearly full of wrong-headed ideas and assumptions. People need to take a good look at this content and asses it for merit. If the bible is THIS wrong about these things, why should we take other things it says as absolute truth? (Probably the crux of literal interpretation. If you can throw out some passages as blatant craziness, you can throw out the rest.)

Besides that, how should we take these passages? literal or allegory, the bible's sole moral authority is advocating and demanding the complete slaughter of whole civilizations!

It just points to the fact that everyone creates their own moral world view and uses that. People who say they follow the moral teachings of the bible really live their lives as they see fit and then fastidiously select the passages of the bible which suit their needs, then calim to have the ultimate moral authority behind their choices.

It is a lie, and it should be exposed.

It is important to look at the bible from the culture that it grew out of. 5000 to 2000 years ago some of those things made sense to people. We may find them wrong now but our culture is very different. Sometimes people are just wrong no matter what time or place it is. But all cultures have faults. Including our own.

no doubt.

The problem being that the bible is very often not viewed in this context, but rather as a relvant guiding force in modern life.

I would argue that many thing in the bible are wrong by any standard, for instance, the complete eradication of a societry, from warrior down to the livestock he kept, but certainly we can judge that these passages are more than just useless for modern life. They are a detriment.

Also, cultural reference does not absolve wrongdoings. The Caste system in India is oppressive. It is not absolved because they adhere to it. The widespread destruction of indigenous americans cannot be viewed with rosey glasses. Human religious sacrifice is objectively wrong. The Genocides of Nazi Germany, Stalin's slaughter of his own populace...

Because a thing was allowed to happen due to popular cultural attitudes does not make it a moral thing.

I should add that my definition of moral vs immoral is as follows, and i think it can be applied across the board. Those things which contribute to the success of people, and fosters amiable relationships among them are good. Those things which threaten these things are bad.

This can be parsed further, but you get the gist.

Even if Johnson is taking the Bible and it's teachings a bit more seriously than they are intended, he has a point. By overexaggerating it he shows how simple God's reasons can be for doing things -- that isn't always a good thing (in the posts he made, they were seldom not evil.)

johnson1010 wrote: The problem being that the bible is very often not viewed in this context, but rather as a relvant guiding force in modern life.

It seems to me that those who say they derive morality from the Bible either aren't familiar with the Bible or they are simply have their blinders on and aren't willing to see the Bible for what it is. I was brought up Catholic and I can attest that we never did readings from these less appealing passages to which johnson refers. In fact, the Old Testament for the most part is ignored by Catholics I think because it's indefensible as a holy, revered document. Ultimately, this is a shame that churches find it necessary to present only the sanitized version because it leads to a pretense that the Bible is something it's not and so we don't see it for what it really is—a historical document. And I see this thread as a reaction to this pretense. Religion typically gets a free pass from any kind of criticism and I don't think it's unreasonable to question that.

That said, I can also see seespotrun's point that just because a small percentage of people view the Bible in an unreasonable way should not taint our own view of it. In this way I see it as a challenge to assume a reasonable stance towards the Bible as a historical document that is anachronistic to our modern world. And we can thus appreciate it as a work that is phenomenal and beautiful in many ways and which is also valuable because it documents the way people lived thousands of years ago. We can then view these passages that justify slavery, genocide, and incest with the disinterested eye of a historian, the same way we would read the violent passages from The Iliad and we can then say, well that's just the way things were back then.

These questions belong in and will be answered in the Bible discussion book forum but I suspect that Johnson1010 is dangling the bait here so I'll chime in:

Johnson1010 is in fact failing to read the Bible literally enough. If he had read and studied the Bible he would realize that those laws and provisions, pertained only to the Jews under the old covenant. The fact that Johnson1010 is neither and that he is living in the time of grace means that he can behave as much as a pagan as he wishes and will not suffer judgement in this life.