Saturday, June 1, 2013

Pick-and-choose commandments

It's a quite well-known fact that Christians, especially those who claim to adhere strictly to everything in the Bible, who consider it the highest moral standard in existence, practice pick-and-choose morality. They will adhere to some commandments while completely ignoring others, even though there's absolutely nothing in the text that would justify this.

Let's take a couple of examples. For instance, the vast majority of such Christians just love this one, in Leviticus 18:
Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.
Oh, how they love to hate, and how they love this particular passage, and how they love to try to impose this on others. But let's turn to the next chapter, and take another passage from there:
Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed.
Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.
Not a single Christian in existence cares about this passage. No Christian in existence is speaking out loudly against agricultural or fashion practices, claiming how they are immoral and against God's law, and rallying for law changes that would make them illegal. Moreover, most Christians don't follow these commandments themselves. Even if they know this particular passage, they simply don't care.

And it's not like these are two different categories of commandments. It's not like the text says from the first something like it being universal and extremely important, and from the latter that it's just some friendly advice that you might want to follow if you like.

In fact, both chapters start with the same words: "The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them." There is no difference in context or tone, it's all part of the same speech, and there are no alleviating words or degrees of severity mentioned. There's absolutely nothing in the text to justify strictly adhering to one commandment but basically ignoring the other.

This is what we commonly call hypocrisy.
 

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