The covenant was between "all living creatures" and God. That would seem to include lgbtq+ people. Even this verse seems to support that community using the rainbow as a symbol. 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
Oh, man, this is *right* in my wheelhouse, Evan. I loathe the hypocrisy inherent in Christianity, and I loathe even more that some Christians can't see it. They can't see that Christianity is responsible for more death and destruction in the last 1,500 years than anything God did during the flood. Entire cultures destroyed, languages and histories ground to dust, families and all the ancestral wisdom they worked so hard for *generations* to build wiped out in days, all in the name of religion, "God." I live about 20 miles south of San Francisco and every time I drive into the city, my heart leaps a little when I see that beautiful rainbow Pride flag flying above Castro Street. It makes me so proud and so happy, and I'm pretty sure every god I believe in (and I believe in a few) are just as proud and happy as I am.
LMAO at "Not flooding, can’t get mad! Not flooding, can’t get mad!"
As a "why are there rainbows" creation myth the Noah's Ark story is really a stretch. I think the Bible writers could have done a lot better. That said, it works quite well as a "why aren't there unicorns" story (thank you, Shel Silverstein)!
I always appreciate Evan's insights because I don't know any white conservative would-be Christians and--viewing them from the outside--don't understand their thinking or motivations. For my part, most of my religious training was through a progressive program that took its inspiration from the Sermon on the Mount. And my mother told me early on that the Old Testament was just "stories and history."
Today's post reminds me of a paper my daughter wrote for a theology class in college. In it, she asked "What if God lies?" That was brave of her and her professors (one of them was Cornel West) didn't freak out about it.
Noah and the Flood predates Christianity, and Judaism, so it's on brand for cons to claim that the Rainbow is theirs, and the mean gays stole it from them. What a bunch of whiners! The cons, that is.
How come it's never mentioned by those who use their Bibles for bashing, rather than to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, that the UNCLEAN animals were taken "two by two," but the CLEAN animals were taken by sevens?
And where did all the other animals who couldn't even fit in the ark go? The sheer weight of two of every kind of beetle would have sunk that tub. They didn't know about elephants, did they? Or giraffes. Yet Victorian and probably modern Noah's Ark toys showed them sticking their heads out. BTW all Noah's Ark showing portholes and or people and animals on deck are dead wrong, the ship was sealed until Noah started sending out birds.
Once, long ago, when I was a naive Christian thinking that the Internet was a great place to meet other Christians, I found Noah's Ark apologists on AOL. There are all kinds of answers to those questions. One of my favorites was that all the animals were shrunk down to miniature size, or similar - that they were all embryos. It was there I learned about Answers In Genesis, where "scientists" determine what they believe, and then make up the facts to support their claims.
I'm still Christian, not likely to change at this late date, but I haven't been naive about the beliefs abounding in those claiming the same faith, in 30 years.
"So many of the Bible’s so-called mysteries start to fall away if one starts to accept the notion that perhaps the God of the Bible — whether He is literally real, or if He is not, and is rather a reflection of the cultures that created Him — is actually not a flawless figure, nor blameless, nor all-knowing or the epitome of wisdom."
ie, we created God in our image, not the other way around.
This has pretty much been my take too, having grown up in a Catholic household, and having attended a Jesuit college, where I had to take (oh the horror!) a semester of "Theology and World Religions."
I will hold hands with Evan and we can dance in a circle waiting for God to smite us for our reasonable skepticism... but if he hasn't seen fit to smite a Trump prayer breakfast, Karoline Leavitt, Pete Hegseth, JD Vance or any of these other fake ass Christians, I don't think he's going to get around to smiting us. :P
So glad my first exposure to Job was Archibald MacLeish. There's something wholesome about looking at biblical stories alongside, in my case, Ionesco's Rhinoceros and Anouilh's Antigone.
I read the Bible and was stunned by how many people God smote! Whatever that is. But I learned a dipshit song in Sunday School that has guided my life: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.” Not a bad lesson to have learned at an early age!
I was literally humming that tune yesterday for some reason! And simultaneously feeling a sense of dread and heaviness in my heart. Christians suck at their own religion.
JFC, it's so exhausting to have to wake up each day for another round of defending ourselves against the stupidity of our country and it's fascists who think they know what's best.
Because we are social animals, and predators, we have a "theory of mind" module which attempts to figure out what other creatures are thinking and intending, in order to get along with them better or hunt them better. Since it is powerful, we use it for lots of things when we don't understand and attribute conscious purposes to inanimate objects. So we will bash a golf club or tennis racket into the ground to punish it for betraying us, even though we consciously know this makes no sense. All ancient religions derive from interpreting natural phenomena as driven by conscious intent: lightning must be a very angry being to do such destruction, and the target must have done something to deserve it; the idea that electrical discharges follow paths of least resistance without precalculation of where this will end up is one that took us a long time to get to. The Noah story is memory from a period of intense floodings as the ice sheets melted and many sustained rain events caused multiple flood events which, naturally, were interpreted as some manifestation of anger.
The covenant was between "all living creatures" and God. That would seem to include lgbtq+ people. Even this verse seems to support that community using the rainbow as a symbol. 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
There ya go, being all logical again!
Oh, man, this is *right* in my wheelhouse, Evan. I loathe the hypocrisy inherent in Christianity, and I loathe even more that some Christians can't see it. They can't see that Christianity is responsible for more death and destruction in the last 1,500 years than anything God did during the flood. Entire cultures destroyed, languages and histories ground to dust, families and all the ancestral wisdom they worked so hard for *generations* to build wiped out in days, all in the name of religion, "God." I live about 20 miles south of San Francisco and every time I drive into the city, my heart leaps a little when I see that beautiful rainbow Pride flag flying above Castro Street. It makes me so proud and so happy, and I'm pretty sure every god I believe in (and I believe in a few) are just as proud and happy as I am.
LMAO at "Not flooding, can’t get mad! Not flooding, can’t get mad!"
As a "why are there rainbows" creation myth the Noah's Ark story is really a stretch. I think the Bible writers could have done a lot better. That said, it works quite well as a "why aren't there unicorns" story (thank you, Shel Silverstein)!
not gonna lie, cracked myself up
The Noah's Ark scene in the series Good Omens says it all. "They're drowning everybody else." "Even the kids? You can't kill kids!"
Yes, it made much more sense than the original!
I always appreciate Evan's insights because I don't know any white conservative would-be Christians and--viewing them from the outside--don't understand their thinking or motivations. For my part, most of my religious training was through a progressive program that took its inspiration from the Sermon on the Mount. And my mother told me early on that the Old Testament was just "stories and history."
Today's post reminds me of a paper my daughter wrote for a theology class in college. In it, she asked "What if God lies?" That was brave of her and her professors (one of them was Cornel West) didn't freak out about it.
Noah and the Flood predates Christianity, and Judaism, so it's on brand for cons to claim that the Rainbow is theirs, and the mean gays stole it from them. What a bunch of whiners! The cons, that is.
Not to mention actual scientifically explainable, atmospheric phenomenon rainbows, themselves!
Hello from Gilgamesh!
How come it's never mentioned by those who use their Bibles for bashing, rather than to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, that the UNCLEAN animals were taken "two by two," but the CLEAN animals were taken by sevens?
And where did all the other animals who couldn't even fit in the ark go? The sheer weight of two of every kind of beetle would have sunk that tub. They didn't know about elephants, did they? Or giraffes. Yet Victorian and probably modern Noah's Ark toys showed them sticking their heads out. BTW all Noah's Ark showing portholes and or people and animals on deck are dead wrong, the ship was sealed until Noah started sending out birds.
Once, long ago, when I was a naive Christian thinking that the Internet was a great place to meet other Christians, I found Noah's Ark apologists on AOL. There are all kinds of answers to those questions. One of my favorites was that all the animals were shrunk down to miniature size, or similar - that they were all embryos. It was there I learned about Answers In Genesis, where "scientists" determine what they believe, and then make up the facts to support their claims.
I'm still Christian, not likely to change at this late date, but I haven't been naive about the beliefs abounding in those claiming the same faith, in 30 years.
"So many of the Bible’s so-called mysteries start to fall away if one starts to accept the notion that perhaps the God of the Bible — whether He is literally real, or if He is not, and is rather a reflection of the cultures that created Him — is actually not a flawless figure, nor blameless, nor all-knowing or the epitome of wisdom."
ie, we created God in our image, not the other way around.
This has pretty much been my take too, having grown up in a Catholic household, and having attended a Jesuit college, where I had to take (oh the horror!) a semester of "Theology and World Religions."
I will hold hands with Evan and we can dance in a circle waiting for God to smite us for our reasonable skepticism... but if he hasn't seen fit to smite a Trump prayer breakfast, Karoline Leavitt, Pete Hegseth, JD Vance or any of these other fake ass Christians, I don't think he's going to get around to smiting us. :P
So glad my first exposure to Job was Archibald MacLeish. There's something wholesome about looking at biblical stories alongside, in my case, Ionesco's Rhinoceros and Anouilh's Antigone.
I read the Bible and was stunned by how many people God smote! Whatever that is. But I learned a dipshit song in Sunday School that has guided my life: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.” Not a bad lesson to have learned at an early age!
I was literally humming that tune yesterday for some reason! And simultaneously feeling a sense of dread and heaviness in my heart. Christians suck at their own religion.
Hell, I'm Tori's age and still felt a residual hot stove flinch when I first heard it.
My jaw dropped that it was actually aired. Have to admit it was never a favorite though.
It had the opposite effect on me. That whole album and it's videos made me a devotee.
JFC, it's so exhausting to have to wake up each day for another round of defending ourselves against the stupidity of our country and it's fascists who think they know what's best.
It's just an uninterrupted parade of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
👆🎯
God in the bibble is an evil vindictive bastard, there's really no better way to say it.
Sort of like any patriarch. You are what you eat. Also you are what you preach.
People attribute human flaws to god. It’s stupid.
Thinking transcendent thoughts is impossible. We cannot rise above ourselves without hard work.
Because we are social animals, and predators, we have a "theory of mind" module which attempts to figure out what other creatures are thinking and intending, in order to get along with them better or hunt them better. Since it is powerful, we use it for lots of things when we don't understand and attribute conscious purposes to inanimate objects. So we will bash a golf club or tennis racket into the ground to punish it for betraying us, even though we consciously know this makes no sense. All ancient religions derive from interpreting natural phenomena as driven by conscious intent: lightning must be a very angry being to do such destruction, and the target must have done something to deserve it; the idea that electrical discharges follow paths of least resistance without precalculation of where this will end up is one that took us a long time to get to. The Noah story is memory from a period of intense floodings as the ice sheets melted and many sustained rain events caused multiple flood events which, naturally, were interpreted as some manifestation of anger.
Man, Evan, I am sorry about your childhood! Sounds awful. But it does inspire you to inform us non-religious folks that our suspicions are correct.
FYI: there’s a good daily email/substack for the non-religious that can be very funny, called TFN by Tiedrich. I recommend it.
TFN is also a good read for those of us who are religious.