ZAVibes

“During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.

Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch–the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. . . .

There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.”

– Mark Twain, “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice,” Europe and Elsewhere (1923)

I know a lot of Christians. A lot of them are also bordering on being fundamentalist, stating that the Bible should be taken literally.

Now, if we take this verse in 1 Timothy literally (which I guess was the intention at the time this was written), all women should be treated as inferior to men. I’m sorry, but any doctrine, law, cultural bias or instruction from “authority” that tells me to value women as inferior to men, can’t be taken as truth. Hell, it can’t even be taken seriously!

Sorry, fundi-buddies, but to me this just proves that the bible (and all other religious texts, for that matter), were just written by men, for men. No deity had a hand in coming up with this kind of prejudice!

Here is the Vatican’s position (from the Vatican website), in the words of Pope Leo XIII in ‘Providentissimus Deus’ (his 1893 encyclical on the Study of Holy Scripture):

“[I]t is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it-this system cannot be tolerated. For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the Councils of Florence and of Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated by the Council of the Vatican. These are the words of the last: “The Books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, as enumerated in the decree of the same Council (Trent) and in the ancient Latin Vulgate, are to be received as sacred and canonical. And the Church holds them as sacred and canonical, not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without error; but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author.” ”

Wow, the Pope’s ability to logical and rational argumentation leaves much to be desired. Let me try and get his reasoning straight:

“It doesn’t matter what you think is written in the bible. The fact that we believe it comes from the Holy Ghost makes it true, 100% correct and without error. Even if you can find something in the bible that looks to be a blatant error or contradiction, it is not.”

Should we not look at it from the other side? Should we not ask ourselves “If we DO find errors and/or contradictions in the bible, then that’s proof that it was NOT given to us by the Holy Ghost (or some other higher force), but was created by mere human beings?”

Is the latter approach not the more rational one? And is it not exactly this last approach which they themselves apply to debunk claims by the Muslims that their Quran is the word of God? Or any other religious text for that matter?

Delusional, but I guess he (the Pope) gets away with it because his flock is as delusional…