re: #269 Anymouse 🌹

You cannot reason someone out of a religious belief that a person reasoned themselves into.

There’s a reason atheists note that the best way to create atheists is to ask Christians to actually read the Bible cover-to-cover, rather than just listen to the abridged versions their pastor or priests read to them on Sunday.

If a person can get through all the incest, rape, slavery, genocide, hatred, &c in both the Old and New Testaments and says “yup, I believe this with all my heart, this is the word of God” that person needs to be opposed. That person does not deserve a place at the table of rational people.

I can tell you what they say, because last Sunday I brought up the genocides in Joshua and how everyone was killed, at least according to the Biblical account. (N.B. Which probably didn’t happen.) I was told that they all deserved to die, even the infants, even the unborn, because they were horribly wicked people that “passed their children through the fire.” (Also, for the record, they couldn’t have been passing all their children through the fire, because that’s just a euphemism for human sacrifice.) So they do have occasions where, if God tells them*, it’s perfectly OK to kill fetuses.

You can’t reason with people like that. But I’m out there to remind them that they do believe in these things and people think they’re nuts. The woman I had tea with, she actually gave me credit for sticking to my guns and continuing to come out.

*ETA: This is known as “divine command theory” or “it can’t be wrong if God tells us to do it.” Blergh.