WAS JESUS TOO ACCEPTING OF HONOUR KILLING?
WHY DID HE NOT TEAR THE LAWS OUT OF HIS BIBLE AND BURN THEM?
In the Old Testament, we read how God laid down that certain
sinners such as homosexuals were to be stoned to death. Jesus if he is this
God, as he supposedly claimed to be, is responsible. Christians who say that
God had no choice but to command the executions cannot tell us why he had no
choice. They only guess that. Also, even if he had no choice did it really
have to be done by stoning? That was ultra-cruel. It is a lie too that the
rules were civil rules. They were religious rules and to be enforced by
religion. If the laws were really civil rules they would be more detailed
and read like legislation. And Israel was a wandering tribe not a state at
the time the rules were given.
John Loftus writes in The Case Against Miracles, "Joseph's dream is used in
Gospel of Matthew's narrative to help explain why Mary was not put to death
for dishonouring him because of adultery." The story says that Joseph
decided she deserved to be stoned to death but decided to divorce her
quietly so that the authorities would not kill her. It calls him a
righteous man agreeing that he had a dilemma and either option was okay.
Loftus says that one option was honour killing. "Honour killings were
justified in both the Old and New Testaments. Jesus even agreed with
the Mosaic Law (Exodus 21:17; Leviticus 20:9) against his opponents on
behalf of honour killings of children who dishonoured their parents (Mark
7:8-13). The tale of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus exposes
the hypocrisy of her accusers, doesn't change what Jesus thinks of the law
either (John 8; Matthew 5:18." Clearly the point Jesus made in this
case was that hypocrisy was going to be the subject not the woman's capital
crime of adultery. The text cannot be used against capital punishment.
It is not about that. It is about the hypocrites not the woman.
It is odd that making a saint of Jack the Ripper
is unthinkable for Christians when they make saints of Moses who was a
mass-murderer and of St Paul. And they make a God of the man that condoned
murders that surpassed anything the Ripper ever did.
