A sign of the increasing secularism of the U.S. is that cartoons like this are appearing with increasing frequency. From The Far Left Side by Mike Stanfill, a panel called “Seeing the light.”
Indeed! And the complementary cartoon:
Wanna know what the verses are, you lazy git? Go here and here. (They’re good.)
h/t: jsp
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Jesus should write a shorter book next time. Try and be a littler more succinct next time Jesus lol.
One gospel should about cover it by the way. You’re welcome Jesus. We’ll do lunch.
There’s also the advantage that one gospel will mean there will be no contradictions, as opposed to what we get with four of them and their many differences. Can’t all be right.
Consider that a man who has one timepiece knows what time it is. A man with two, isn’t so sure.
*thinks* he knows what time it is.
There, ftfy
Yeah, God really could have used some decent editing; too bad there wasn’t a Maxwell Perkins or Gordon Lish around to shape up His prose, maybe give the whole megillah its sorely lacking sense of verisimilitude.
I’m now thinking of a whole genre of “What if [book of the Bible] had been written by [author]”. I guess there would’ve been various attempts at such pastiche (Lolcats is one point in this space, of course), which this margin is too narrow to contain.
I spent all day thinking about what writers I’d ask to tackle which scriptural passages. With two Testaments, and the whole of world literature, from he Sumerians to the current Times best-seller list, at my imaginary disposal, how much more time do you suppose I will fritter away on this exercise?
Curse you, Scanlon, curse you.
Know how they often get around that Matthew verse?
“Yes, I pray in public, but its ok because I don’t do it to be ‘seen by men’ – I just pray nearly all the time because I love God so much, and if people just happen to see me doing it, I can’t help that. Don’t hide your light under a bushel basket, amirite?”
It’s easy to justify anything when you massage verses any way you like and turn the Bible into a ventriloquist dummy.
“It’s easy to justify anything when you massage verses any way you like and turn the Bible into a ventriloquist dummy.”
Yeah, that’s why I gave up on the idea many years ago of out-quoting them.
Weren’t the Jews instructed to smite the Amirites?
That’s right. And when it came to smiting a neighborhood’s population, it seems that Yahweh may have mistakenly sent the message meant for the ancient Israelites to that other Moses, Robert.
I like Matthew 6:1-6. I was at a McDonalds’s drive through, and the fellow (who I think was the manager) had a big tattoo along the bottom length of his forearm that said “Righteousness”. I really wanted to tell him he should look at Matthew, but I couldn’t remember at the time if it was chapter 5 or 6.
The verses there lead me to the observation that most Christians prefer the parts of the bible that allow them to condemn other people’s behaviour over those that tell them how they themselves should live.
I doubt most Christians have read the Bible that closely. I was an adult before I made a point of reading it cover-to-cover and was amazed at what was in it. And what wasn’t (“Hey! Where’s the bit about Veronica’s veil?”)
One verse that floored me was Jesus saying, “You have been told ‘Do not swear false oaths in God’s name,’ but I say unto you ‘Do not swear any oaths in His name.’ Simply say ‘Yes’ or “No.'”
Everyone who swears “So help me, God,” from the President taking the oath of office to a witness in court, is disobeying the Bible! I was amazed–do people really not know that this is in the Bible? Obviously yes, or they wouldn’t do it. When people swear on the Bible, they are simply using it as a prop; it isn’t a book that they’ve actually read and are following.
That is, of course, why Quakers don’t (or didn’t) swear on oath in court, and why we have to option merely to affirm that we will tell the truth.
The stats regularly show that atheists and agnostics know the Bible better than any other group, although sometimes orthodox Jews give us a run for our money. Devout Protestants are usually at or near the bottom for Bible knowledge.
People who didn’t know my atheist views often thought I was religious simply because I understood what different religious groups thought about things.
I looked it up. It seems like it might come in handy some day.
Matthew 5:34
Dude, you cracked the code! It’s trivially easy to demonstrate this at exhausting length but I have neither the time nor the inclination. But for starters (with the usual caveats about what Jesus might really have said, or even whether or not he even existed), check out how often he mentioned homosexuality (hint: it’s a nice round number), and compare that to how often he talked about the the danger of riches (think camels, eyes of needles, etc.). Which makes it laughably easy to guess which one fundagelical protestant pastors talk about more.
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For believers, John 3:16.
For non-believers, Luke 19:27.
I’ve been drawing a few cartoons featuring He-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Called-In-Vain,the Quantum Woomeister, the Great Canaanite Massacre Defender etc. at my webcomic site:
Woobuster.
Check it out and enjoy!
There was often a nut with a sign standing in crowds with the John 3:16 thing. Like we needed to be reminded of how unbelievable his belief was.
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The John 3:16 citation is a bit of graffiti in our elevator at work. Now I know what to write in response, should I be inclined to do so.
Used to be you couldn’t watch a televised sports event without seeing some attention-whore in the background waiving a “John 3:16” sign (invariably in the same type of crude, hand-lettered style favored by the tea-baggers).
Matthew 5:5-6 is like a trump card laid right on top of it to take final trick.
How about 2 Peter 3:16
His {Paul’s] letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Like Walt Whitman, Scripture contains multitudes and contradicts itself. That’s why the devil himselfcan cite it for his own purpose.
John 3:16 is the one you see at sporting events sometimes, right?
As for the praying in public, that has to be (amongst Christians) the least adopted commandment ever. It is also one of the clearest, which makes it even odder.
Yes the Mathew 6 language is one of the clearest things that Jesus is ever supposed to have said, and it is totally ignored by all christians I have ever met. It was one of the questions I had as a kid in sunday school, “Why do people come here and pray out loud in front of everygody when Jesus says don’t do that?” Never got a straight answer. I left church shortly after that because I could never get a straight answer about anything.