Disturbing Passages in Holy Books

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Thank you so much; this is a valuable and encyclopaedic examination.
If only those who use those verses in their attacks would see them for what they are.

^ Thanks for responding!

There’s a lot more I could’ve added, including cultural/historical stuff and more silly arguments I’ve heard people use, but it’s already too long for people to read. At least I have some research I can use in future discussions if the issue of Bible-informed homophobia comes up again. I learned a lot, too.

Paul’s Problematic Views of Women

1 Corinthians 11:2-16

Since Paul featured prominently in my post on scriptures people cite to support homophobia, I thought I could explore the problematic stuff he has to say about women.

There’s a lot of BS in the New Testament about women in various books that have been traditionally attributed to Paul, but it turns out that some of them (e.g. Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus) were likely not written by him although the writers may have been inspired by his writings. Maybe I’ll talk about those passages and/or the New Testament’s treatment of women in general in a separate post.

The following sexist scriptures are not considered an interpolation; scholars think they were written by Paul.

Enough said.

On the topic of head coverings:
While most fundamentalists choose to disregard this, my church practiced it in certain situations. I had to wear a head covering while praying or doing other religious activities in specific settings - often ones where I had to take the role that a man was supposed to fill if there were no men present. They tried to make this passage work with 1 Timothy 2:11-12 where it says that women are to be silent in church and not teach or have authority over men. It says something similar at 1 Corinthians 14:34 which, as I mentioned previously, scholars suspect was an interpolation, perhaps by the same misogynist who wrote 1 Timothy. At any rate, I couldn’t do certain things if a baptized male was present - even if he was just a kid and/or even if I could do a better job. If there was a 10 year old (or less) baptized male and a bunch of adult women meeting to go out preaching, he’d be in charge of assigning groups, prayer, and other nonsense like that. If no males were present, a female would do that stuff while wearing a head covering. Fun times.

I’m not sure why people want to listen to what Paul might say or suggest on other topics when he says such nonsense:More on verse 10’s footnote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Epi ... r%20Church

As far as the entire passage is concerned, Paul just seems to be a man of his day based on his sexist views and the silly arguments he employs to support them. Most of the folks who cite Paul (or pseudo-Paul) to support their bigotry towards the gay community don’t push the concept of head coverings, not that Bible-based sexism isn’t still a widespread issue.

Other Problematic New Testament Writings on Women
A lot of this stuff has been covered elsewhere, but I thought it’d be convenient to have it in one spot for reference purposes and to give a more complete overview. I’m not going to talk about the gospels much because, overall, they aren’t so overtly toxic as far as women are concerned although I briefly explore the topic of Mary here.

Pseudo-Pauls:

Telling women how they should dress:Blatant misogyny:Perhaps building off of what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 11 which I cited in my last post:^ It’s interesting that the husband should love his wife as himself, but that the wife should “respect her husband.” This is reflected in the marriage vows at Jehovah’s Witness weddings:

https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1996164

In other words, brides are to vow that they’ll deeply respect their husbands but not the other way around. (They say “deeply respect” because their biased translation of the Bible - the New World Translation - says “deep respect” at Ephesians 5:33, unlike virtually every reputable translation out there, including the NRSV which I utilize in this post.) JW weddings always contain a sermon which features some of the scriptures cited here (and elsewhere) to outline the roles of husbands and wives in marriage. There’s nothing like a healthy dose of misogyny to put everyone in a festive mood.
I always hated going to weddings.
Bad guidance for children which relates to the overall topic in a way:Sometimes kids shouldn’t obey their parents. Blind obedience isn’t good. Wives are also told to be subject to their husbands “in everything” at Ephesians 5:24 (cited above) which can lead to women feeling not quite like adults. It’s a bit difficult to describe being stuck for such reasons in a “state of perpetual childhood” and to be expected to go along with something against your better judgment or inclination. Disobedience here is often viewed as disobedience to God for those who are indoctrinated enough to believe in biblical inerrancy.

Older women are to encourage younger women to be submissive to their husbands:

Pseudo-Peter:

1 Peter claims to have been written by Peter, but most scholars believe it was written under a pseudonym by an anonymous writer.* Anyway, here’s what Pseudo-Peter has to say about women (spoiler: it’s the same s**t):


My church was obsessed with the “weaker vessel” thing. It’s like it gave the leadership boners to spend copious amounts of time thinking and talking about it. That’s the only way I could account for it.

Speaking of boners - an interesting Bible topic, I forgot to mention this passage from Paul in my last post:
In other words, if you are married, your body doesn’t belong to you and you need to agree not to have sex. While this passage is problematic although, as it would seem, equally awful for men and women, it can be even worse when it’s combined with the more sexist teachings of Paul and/or that of some of the other New Testament writers.

He goes on to say:
Here’s what Jesus allegedly said on the topic:
There were, undoubtedly, reasons why Jesus or the writer of Matthew pushed this teaching - reasons rooted in the social situation and values of his day, but sometimes it can lead to a lot of problems if it’s followed, like unnecessary unhappiness (or much worse).

At any rate, I have various issues with Jesus, but he never talked about headship nonsense. It seems like something Paul may have pushed (although probably not came up with on his own) and that his followers built upon. It’s just crazy that, due to religious indoctrination, there are still people who think following this stuff is a good idea and that raising their daughters with such beliefs is loving, rather than abusive, not that the teachings are healthy for any gender.

I might talk more about problematic passages regarding women in the Old Testament in future posts but that’s a huge, multi-faceted and largely narrative-driven topic, so it’s tricky to tackle. However, it does have a large bearing on the status and experience of women in fundamentalist sects. Obviously, the Bible is fascinating from historical and literary perspectives. I think the problem is more about striving to apply it to our day, especially passages which promote violence, human rights violations, or any form of bigotry.

* Footnote on why scholars don’t think Peter wrote 1 Peter:

A few quibbles.

So the church, as a body, is female? Yet exerts authority over men?


Since the Y chromosome is fragmentary, I cannot help but interpret this as "God created Adam, then for his second attempt...did it properly"


Clearly... This never sank in

That immorality clause...is that applicable to either party? and does it absolve someone marrying a divorcee? It sounds a bit like a "Get out of stoning free" card

I think it’s trying to push the comparison that Christ is to the church as husbands are to wives. It seems a bit self-serving to the male writers to liken themselves to Christ when it comes to authority sort of like Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 (which I quoted a couple posts up) saying that men were fashioned in the image of God but women were fashioned in the image of man. My mind is going to Plato’s theory of Forms. It’s sort of like women are a copy of a copy and, thus, further from perfection.
Rigid Bible followers would likely think of the whole Adam’s rib thing. Of course, there’s no mention of that in the creation account of Genesis 1. Scholars often say the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 are different. Well, they are, but apologists often claim that Chapter 2 is more of an expansion on Chapter 1 despite the contradictions on what days specific acts of creation occurred.
I doubt there was equality in terms of the law at the time. Perhaps women would’ve been less likely to go for divorce given their inability to earn a living and likely difficulties with finding a new owner husband.

My church pushed that divorce was only allowed if a partner cheated on you. You couldn’t divorce for abuse. Separation, not divorce, was only acceptable for abuse if it was “extreme physical abuse” that endangered one’s life.

and then lame justifications

https://www.gotquestions.org/dashing-ba ... rocks.html

especially when the Israelites themselves have looted and taken slaves

^ One of these days, I might start an absurd apologetics thread. I read some extremely entertaining content on the Elisha and she-bears episode from an apologist once, but apologetics aren’t something I’ve spent enough time exploring and debunking.

Homophobia in a Hugely Popular Evangelical Paraphrase of the Bible
(Before I get into this topic, here’s a link to a previous post that provides an in-depth analysis of the 6 Bible passages some cite to uphold homophobia.)

Sometimes I like to explore wackadoodle translations of the Bible for fun. I recently came across the highly influential The Living Bible (TLB) on BibleGateway - the site I typically use when I’m comparing translations. TLB is no longer popular because it was replaced with the New Living Translation (NLT) in 1996, but TLB was extremely popular, selling more than 40 million copies in North America and likely influencing people’s beliefs in some fashion and the evangelical movement as a whole. (Its replacement - the NLT - seems pretty similar to the NIV and ESV, so it’s not great but still better than TLB.)

Here’s some info on the text before I get into some scriptures:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_Bible

The American Standard Version (ASV) is basically a revised version of the King James Version (KJV) and is quite similar to it as you will see in the scriptures cited below. Overall and like the KJV, it’s a solid translation. Taylor thought that it was too complex, so he decided to write a simplified version - a dumbed-down version - full of his own biases on many, many topics. Despite its shortcomings:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_Bible

(Taylor also wrote illustrated versions for children as well as other pieces of religious propaganda for children and adults.)

I’m going to compare the American Standard Version and The Living Bible in the following Bible passages. What it says about Kenneth Taylor is enlightening.

Leviticus 18:22:

1 Corinthians 6:9-10:

1 Timothy 1:8-10:
He seems to be pushing the notion that one’s sexual orientation alone is enough to be rejected by God, so he goes quite a bit further than previously mentioned, biased translations, like the NIV and ESV. It’s disturbing to think about the harm that such passages have caused - directly and indirectly.

I’ll cite one entertaining scripture about women. As with homophobia, he had a talent for making sexist scriptures even worse.

Ephesians 5:33:
^ As I highlighted in a previous post, most reputable Bible translations merely say “respect,” not “fear.”
Being married to Kenneth Taylor must’ve been great…

At any rate, the problem with homophobia and misogyny among many evangelical groups is a huge topic that extends well-beyond problematic Bible translations/paraphrases promoted by problematic religious leaders, but I do think it’s a fascinating topic that’s often overlooked. I know some people who think that God’s Word is incorruptible - that God is inspiring translators or whoever and that maybe translations paraphrases like TLB are telling us what God actually meant. That line of thinking is to be found among some evangelicals who read currently popular translations that contain biases like the NIV, the ESV, and the JW Bible - the New World Translation. Obviously, the Bible contains many problematic passages; it’s just fascinating to me the role that mistranslation can play on beliefs/belief systems. Some of JWs’ core teachings are built on poorly translated scriptures. I suspect that translators sometimes believe that their own biases - their own feelings - is actually God’s Holy Spirit directing them.



Footnote on the Young Life organization that’s mentioned in the second quote of this post:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Life

this guy has some good arguments on youtube

the average Christian isn't equipped to deal with this type of atheist. but some are

^ That brings me back to church. The buck thing reminded me of a genocide-justifying part of a sermon I heard in which the speaker talked about interesting sex rituals involving…specially carved statues in temples. It was a very strange discussion to have, especially given that there were children in the audience. Apart from that they’d go with the standard, homosexuality (due to Bible translations), bestiality, child-sacrifices type of stuff - implying that they were all equally bad because the punishment for them in the OT was the same - stoning, not the good kind. Of course, I was told that my sin of fornication was as bad as murder since it’s listed in the same scripture as murder somewhere in the NT.

Killing entire populations, including children, for killing children would make a lot of sense, especially when YHWH often kills babies and children./s

It is very interesting in terms of human nature. People would need to view the other as barbaric subhumans in order to engage in genocide or to justify the chilling stories/YHWH’s behavior in the Bible.

I met a christian who thinks people choose to be gay, guess its too inconvenient to believe people were born gay

Do they think they didn't choose to be homophobic?

My cousin seems to think that it’s a choice, too. She keeps on pointing out “cute girls” to her sons because she thinks that will influence them. I have a problem with that no matter what angle I look at it from.

Since they believe sexuality is a choice, ask them when they chose to be heterosexual...