During wheat harvest, Reuben went out into the fields and found some mandrake plants, which he brought to his mother Leah. Rachel said to Leah, "Please give me some of your son's mandrakes."
-Gen 30:14
Umm... what the hell do I do? What's a mandrake?!
Random Verse Generator, who's next?
ETA: I googled
The alkaloids make the plant, in particular the root and leaves, poisonous, via anticholinergic, hallucinogenic, and hypnotic effects.
Yeah, I'm goin' to jail.
Acts 16:3
Paul wanted to take him along on the journey, so he circumcised him because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.
oof, jail it is.
Exodus 35:3 Passage: "Do not light a fire in any of your dwellings on the Sabbath day."
Well, not jail at least.
I got Acts 13:10
"You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?"
Wtf am I supposed to do with that information
Leviticus 19:21
Passage: The man, however, must bring a ram to the entrance to the tent of meeting for a guilt offering to the LORD.
Sounds like you will have to apologize for problems at work that you cause with livestock.
Steal the neighbor's truck to apologize for the first thing, then say sorry to the neighbor by giving them livestock.
Psalms 80:3 Passage: Restore us, O God; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.
Guess I have good chances of winning
1 John 2:17
Passage: The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever
I live to see another day
Isaiah 5:22 Passage: Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks.
God in a night out: I fucking love you guys and I fucking love the bartender!
Bible writers: Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks.
First one that's am actual command:
Psalms 136:3 Passage: Give thanks to the Lord of lords: His love endures forever.
When the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?
Ok, I'm fine till winter
It's genocidin' time!
Joshua 9:24 They answered Joshua, "Your servants were clearly told how the LORD your God had commanded his servant Moses to give you the whole land and to wipe out all its inhabitants from before you. So we feared for our lives because of you, and that is why we did this."
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Joel 3:8 Passage: I will sell your sons and daughters to the people of Judah, and they will sell them to the Sabeans, a nation far away." The LORD has spoken."
So I need to get some slaves and sell them I guess
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The Bible is not just a long list of rules. Any random page probably has less than a 5% chance of containing any particular thing to "follow". The chance of landing on a page with an illegal commandment is next to none.
Yeah, quite a bit of the Bible would get you landed in jail so let's not act like the idea of Bible charades roulette isn't funny as fuck. If nothing else it's a fresh new way to highlight the hypocrisy of scripture in modern society.
What does this mean though? How does just reading some random story get you put in jail? It’s like you read their comment and them completely ignored everything it said.
How is that arguing in bad faith. You just made a rather witty hut ultimately meaningless reply to my comment. You said “Yeah, quite a bit of the Bible would get you landed in jail”, but the comment you were replying to talked about how this point wasn’t true. And your reply to their comment was essentially: Yeah whatever, but here’s what you just disproved but I’ve restated it.
How is that a reply that makes any sense?
If what you wrote there is how their post gets translated in your mind then yeah it doesn't make sense but for most of us it's not going through some sort of word blender.
I’m sorry to say that I’m lost on which post you are referring to.
From what I understand, the original post is an image that says, open a random bible page, do exactly what it says and the last person to end up in jail wins.
But as the top comment, under which this reply exists, states, if you turned to a random page in the bible you would be unlikely to land on a page which explicitly gives instruction. Which means to me, that you would not be able to turn to a random page and do exactly as stated because you would likely be reading some random story. And obviously the act of reading the story isn’t what I’m talking about, but to act out this story seems difficult, since quite a few of the stories in the bible talk about God or someone divine interfering. How could you act out a divine intervention? You would end up in jail, but not for committing a crime as is implied, however for being a Don Quixoteesque mad man who is acting out stories from the bible.
I simply don’t understand how this post can be anything other than slander directed at christianity snd the bible, because it’s clear to me that it isn’t possible to act out most stories in the bible. And what’s more, this post, to me, gives off the idea that people who follow christianity must be completely oblivious to the fact that it’s an ancient book and that they must follow everything written in it like it’s their own biological code.
But if this isn’t what you gather from this post, would you please explain your viewpoint because I am rather confused.
So you would read some random story and just act it out as written? Say I turn to the story of Job in the bible, what am I supposed to act out there? Am I supposed to pretend to be Satan and destroy the fuck out of Job? Am I supposed to be God and allow someone else to destroy Job’s life? Or am I supposed to be Job and just hope that everything that happened to him also happens to me?
It just doesn’t make sense.
Ephesians 4:29 (New International Version) Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.
You're not helping their needs.
Edit: The words of the Teacher,[a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
Maybe if we read the comment we could find out, but maybe someone else can tell me what it says, and I’ll just blindly believe them instead. Oh and here’s 10% of my paycheck!
The Bible rarely tells you specifically what to do. Most of it is more of a history of the Jewish people, writing down things that happened inside of a religious context.
After all, the book of Numbers is almost entirely just a genealogical list ( namat begat numat, etc ) so unless you guys want me to give birth to 15 generations of human beings it's practically impossible to follow as an instruction.
I mean yeah sure, if you blindly copy things that people were reputed to have historically done in a modern context then you are likely to get into some kind of trouble for that.
Maybe only a few odd stares from your neighbors as you put lambs blood on your door or burn only extra virgin olive oil at the stone altar made of stones that were never worked by human tools in your back yard.
And there's nothing illegal about lusting over big old penises or preaching in Galilee, but many people would find it at best difficult to tell dead people to rise and walk or to fast for 40 days and nights in the desert.
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"Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, "Go at once and select the animals for your families and slaughter the Passover lamb."
Ew, I'm vegan and I don't have a license nor the money for a lamb, so breaking in, stealing and slaughtering a lamb and doing rituals with its carcass publicly apparently?
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Good news! That's not a commandment, it's just part of a story, so there isn't actually anything to follow.
If we're playing a reenactment game instead of a follow-what-the-Bible-tells-you-to-do game, then in context the alternative is that your first born son dies and all you have to do to prevent it is put a little blood on your door for one night. Seems like a trade anyone would readily take. Also, it's not illegal and it's not a ritual. It's just regular old slaughter of an animal like we do thousands/millions of times a day in society.
Like, anything it says or just commandments? Because the Bible is filled with stories of bad people doing things the Bible considers bad.
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It is also filled with stories of bad people doing bad things which the Bible considers great. Arguably even more so.
"Amen I say to you, the virtuous eschew stylized meme typeface. The wicked useth Papyrus when modern serif fonts suffice."
"And lo, the Lord looked upon the world and saw Avatar, and was wroth with James Cameron, not only for the usage of Papyrus, but also for cheating on Linda Hamilton during the filming of Titanic, and lo, the Lord did manifest a malaise of the mind upon James Cameron, and did make him introduce dumb plot holes like a door not being big enough for two people, and that an element called "unobtainium" was reasonable, but alas, the people did not care, and James Cameron became a billionaire, because people are dumb, just as the Lord intended."
Proverbs 26:4-5
Don't answer the foolish arguments of fools, or you will become as foolish as they are.
I ain't religious, but wisdom comes from anywhere wisdom is found. Don't be a fool, fool.
Deuteronomy 7:15 Passage: The LORD will keep you free from every disease. He will not inflict on you the horrible diseases you knew in Egypt, but he will inflict them on all who hate you.
So I do nothing and just watch, I guess?
The LORD will keep you free from every disease
A good Christian would see that as the perfect opportunity to go for a fuck to crystal palace.
Inb4 a religious person will say "the new testament invalidates what was in the old one".
Yeah, but it's in a book that claims to be the final arbiter of morality and objectivity. Either people should follow them at all to the letter or not.
Acts 10:28 He said to them: "You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with Gentiles or visit them. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean."
Daniel 6:24 At the king's command, the men who had falsely accused Daniel were brought in and thrown into the lions' den, along with their wives and children. And before they reached the floor of the den, the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones. Ezra 10:21
The reason I hate online atheists is because they just make it a personality trait to think that everyone who follows a religion is stupid and that all religion and religious books are bad.
Obviously people don’t read the bible and do everything instructed in it. Christians don’t follow the old testament even though it says not to eat pigs and is a book in their religion.
Recently on this subreddit someone told me that he knew of a very smart scientist who believed in God and then told me that his beliefs are just outside his area of expertise. Later that same person told me that a degree in Theology is a degree in useless make believe or something along those lines. Then what exactly makes someone an expert on religious beliefs. Because according to this person it’s not a theologist and it’s not someone who follows a religion. So from what I can tell, this athiesm poster meant that to be an expert on religion and knowing who or what God may or may not be, is to believe exactly as they believe.
Hypocrisy at it’s finest. Online atheists may have logically sound arguments, a lot of the times their arguments are flawed. I just want to emphasise to anyone who may be reading this, that atheism is a belief like any other, it is not fact, and it is not science, it is a belief. So do not try to force your belief on others or give them an essay on why they are stupid for believing in a god. It just makes you an asshole.
that atheism is a belief like any other, it is not fact, and it is not science, it is a belief.
For me, personally, I have not found or been presented with sufficient evidence to believe in the existence of any sort of deity. I don't consider it a belief so much as a lack of belief until sufficient evidence is provided. Which is a perfectly sensible default position towards any claim, really. My reason for deconverting was due to adopting much more stringent requirements for believing religious claims.
Only science is science. One's thinking and epistemology could be scientific or non-scientific, though. Science depends on using good quality evidence to inform our theories.
Exactly. Calling atheism a belief just like religion is absurd. That's like if I were to say underground lizard people control the government, then branding you a non-lizard-eist for not believing me. It's not a belief system, it's just the logical default when no evidence is presented.
This is a very good point that I completely missed, lack of belief is really a default which is what atheism is, or what agnostic athiesm is.
The chances of any religion on earth being close to correct are unbelievably small if at all. So to follow a religion at all will almost certainly not be following the most truest of truths. My problem is with people who take this fair and reasonable viewpoint, and morph it into hatred for people who do choose to believe in a religion. Sometimes it’s nice to believe in what probably isn’t true, that doesn’t make that person stupid or oblivious.
I really chose a bad term ‘online athiest’, I meant it more like who the term ‘average redditor’ describes vs who the factual average redditor would be. It may be misleading, but I’m not very good at coming up with names for things.
Ultimately my comment was directed at the author of this post, which says to take a book, that is over a thousand years old and do whatever is in it. The author of the post is what I’d call an ‘online athiest’ because they use the guise of athiesm to just post stupid drivel about a book I’m sure they have never read.
I appreciate the well thought out reply. I agree that choosing to believe in a thing does bring comfort in difficult times I know all too well. And I know the type to whom you directed your comment--the edgy atheist that is just rude and shits on anyone religious.
In an echo of your good faith... (And sorry for the lengthy post here). In case it is helpful to hear my perspective as it was for me to hear yours...
I admit that I have been less than kind about religion and have been the edgy atheist at times. That was wrong of me.
Your comment has given me cause to reflect.
I know my anger shouldn't be directed at all religious prople. It should be directed at the religious right who display bigotry and judgement, and also to the religious leaders who abuse their power. I let my anger, bitterness, and personal hurt get the better of me and I have lashed out too widely sometimes. Not ok. And I am sorry for the times I've done that.
Relevant backstory: I was religious for most of my life, over 40 years. My experience toward the end of that felt like utter betrayal.
I had gotten caught up in an evangelical church. Most people I interacted with were quick to judge, lecture, and preach though I had considered them friends. It was hurtful to discover most were interacting with me out of obligation, not authenticity. They weren't there to support me or be a friend, but just to police my actions.
(And while I get the biblical basis for what they did, they failed to act on 1 Cor 13 -- doing everything out of love, the kind that requires commitment, genuine connection, a relationship with authenticity and vulnerability, not just calling people out without having any real investment in their life).
I left that church. It took some years after that before I deconverted.
I realize I have anger and resentment towards those specific people and too often let it bleed over to more than just them.
I have always felt frustration and anger towards people who use religion as a cover for hatred and bigotry. As I am sure is true for you. Nothing wrong there except directing that anger more broadly.
I am also angry at myself for being sucked into that church and for putting my trust in untrustworthy people. I'm angry for letting my religious belief hurt others and myself over the years.
And I sometimes allow myself to be angry and disdainful of all religious people and that's simply not right or ok.
So I will do better. I will recognize my anger and deal with it more appropriately before commenting on religion or the religious.
Again thanks for the reply.
I myself am guilty of having been an ‘online athiest’, everyone does it, and we do let our personal biases get in the way of that. All I want, and I’m sure all anybody wants is for people to just respect each other and be kind, and it isn’t always easy, especially when no matter how hard you try there will be people who won’t reflect on themselves.
But for someone to see error in the ways of their past and try to change, no matter how successful they are, that’s all that matters. If everyone tried to be kind and understanding we’d all be better off for it.
Thanks for your comment, it’s great to hear your story :)
Have a good day my friend.
My parents would quote the old testament when it was convenient for threatening me as a child.
Not disagreeing with the thrust that atheists can tend to push their views a bit but technically everyone is a bit of an atheist.
There are maybe 5000 gods currently being believed-in across the globe. A Christian doesn't believe in 4999 of them, an atheist doesn't believe in just one more.
Good comment, maybe it depends how you define pushing views, most religious people I’ve met have maybe spoke about how their personal views affect them but I’ve never met anyone who tried to push their views on me. Maybe I’ve just not met enough people.
Atheist may bother you online, but Theist literally bother you by knocking on your door on a Sunday.
Also most Atheists are Agnostic Atheists.
Sometimes a Jehovahs Witness will knock on your door, and you can just tell them you aren’t interested thanks.
Obviously what they believe isn’t true, but that doesn’t make them assholes. If someone genuinely believes that them knocking on your door and talking to you could actually save your soul in the afterlife, I won’t ever count that as bothering me. It can be annoying sometimes, but that’s usually because I’m already in a bad mood and not the fault of the door knocker.
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You hate "online atheists" for throwing all religious people into one group, yet in your opening sentence you do the exact same thing with online atheists.
You then use the example of your interactions with one person online, an environment known to not bring out the best in people, and apply that to an entire group.
And then you call every online atheist a hypocrite... That's kind of hypocritical, don't you think? Very ironic, too.
And I don't even disagree fully with you that some atheist can be an absolute pain, and treat their atheism with the same group mentality as any religion. But being an asshole isn't tied to any religion. That's just a people problem.
Atheism is, however, absolutely not a belief. It is the absence of it. It's the lack of belief, because there is no proof. The same as not believing in fairy tales or Santa. Coming to a conclusion based on evidence, or lack there of, is science, however way you like to spin it. Hell, you can be a spiritual person and still be atheist.
And religion is responsible for some horrible shit too. Let people make a bit fun of it, at least.
An online athiest in my eyes, is no ordinary athiest, but someone who goes online to forums and “discusses athiesm” but in reality just makes fun of people who follow a religion. You can be someone who goes online and is an athiest, that doesn’t make someone an online athiest, you can even go on forums and discuss athiesm if you so please, you are still not an online athiest. An ‘online athiest’ is someone who specifically goes online to poke fun at people who don’t think how they think. It’s not kind and I won’t stand for it.
Your last paragraph really describes what makes an ‘online athiest’ as I call them, I can’t really think of a better word. It’s basically someone who is an asshole and uses athiesm as an excuse for their assholery.
If you can successfully explain why Atheism is science I will declare you the most profoundly intelligent person to have ever existed.
Easy.
First we’ll define science (from the Oxford dictionary):
the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.
Now we’ll define atheism (from Wikipedia):
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.
The absence of evidence for any deity or supernatural power is the natural result you get when applying the scientific method to religion.
The key concept here is that science requires reproducible experiments. So let us assume that a deity or other supernatural entity exists. What consistently reproducible experiment can people perform which provides evidence for that hypothesis? There is none. (Though if you have one, I’m sure there would be a Nobel Prize with your name on it. Simply publish your results. You’ll be famous immediately.)
So what does science do when a proposed model does not yield experimental results? It rejects the model completely. A few examples of this include the luminiferous aether (a mechanism for light to travel through vacuum), phlogiston theory (an explanation for fire), or spontaneous generation (a theory for where life comes from).
Personal opinions or beliefs do not matter to science. Only reproducible experiments do.
Tl;dr - Atheism is science because there does not (and likely cannot) exist an experiment which supports the existence of God.
Sure, it’s more appropriate to say that atheism is the logical conclusion you arrive to when applying the scientific method to religion.
Of course Atheism isn't science, they are 2 different labels with different names to point to different things.
A hexagon also isn't a square, yet they do have similarities and are connected.
There is not, and likely cannot, be an experiment which proves the speed of light to be the fastest anything can travel in the universe. Yet scientists don’t take it to mean that the previous statement can’t possibly be true.
There are many things in science which cannot be proven to be true, that doesn’t make those things automatically false.
Religion aside, the topic about the speed of light is actually really fascinating, actually. I didn't quite grok what it was all about until recently watching a particular video which I'll link at the end.
The going theory (and here theory means our best model for how a thing works) is that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum. You may be familiar with the toss-a-ball-on-a-train (🚂) thought experiment?
If I'm traveling on a train traveling forwaes at 20mph and standing still relative to the car I'm in, and toss a ball at 10mph in the direction of the train's travel (toward the front), an observer outside the train could see and measure the speed of the ball they would find it is traveling 30mph relative to the ground (20+10) in the direction of the train's motion.
If I had thrown the ball in the opposite direction, toward the back of the train, the ball would be traveling at 10mph towards the front of the train (20-10)
Speed is measured relative to a frame of reference, ground or train, say.
Now if I were to instead use a flashlight, how fast would the photons travel if I were pointing the flashlight towards the front? The back? (And let's assume everything is in a vacuum to illustrate the point)
They wouldn't be 20mph + c forward or c - 20mph toward the back. The photons would travel at c.
Experiments have proven that c is constant-- that photons don't go faster when being emitted from a source already traveling at a given speed (see: Michaelson-Morley experiment among others). (A number of experiments demonstrate the general theory of relativity holds up at large scale, too).
But anyway, how can light possibly be constant regardless of the motion of the emitter?? It's a paradox right? It is because spacetime isn't "constant". That's where the video comes in...
https://youtu.be/Rh0pYtQG5wI?si=d1FG5jpGi6cghY5t
It may be more accurate to think of the process of science as: developing, verifying, and updating models based on the results of high quality evidence gathered from experiments that follow the scientific method.
That is to say that if sufficient, good evidence is gathered contradicts a model, the model is wrong, at least for the specific conditions of the experiments in question. In that case the part of the model addressing those conditions has to be updated. (In some cases the conditions are "all" essentially and so the whole model has to be tossed...like the aether theory).
Good comment, always interesting to hear about physics. And I agree with your definition of science. I think my comment was a rather weak argument to begin with.
Physics is so fascinating, right? I'm too dumb to be a physicist 😆 but videos like this are great. This channel is good. I also really enjoy and recommend PBS Spacetime videos to anyone interested. Another topic that is fascinating is how relativity and gravity relate. It's kind of wild.
Your example just serves to further strengthen my argument. The lack of experimental evidence for FTL travel is an astonishingly good argument that it doesn’t exist.
You should research the logical fallacy “argument from ignorance” which implies that a thing is true simply because it hasn’t been disproven to be true. That kind of argument is a feeble attempt to shift the burden of proof to the other party, when instead the maker of the claim is responsible to provide evidence for that claim.
Interesting, I agree with you, my comment was a particularly weak argument. I think the problem with disproving or proving that a god exists, lies with the fact that they/it would presumably lie outside of our universe. And from what we think now we won’t ever be able to escape our universe. Everything that Science says should exist or does exist, lies within our Universe, and we can’t say what lies outside it, and we won’t ever be able to. Which makes the topic of a creator especially difficult to prove/disprove. Following that, I personally still believe that someone who asserts that there is no creator holds it as a belief rather than a fact, although someone else pointed out to me earlier that absence of belief could be called the default. I personally believe that we can’t ever know whether there exists a creator or not, it’s my belief. In my eyes, everything regarding a creator is a belief, because again, I don’t think it’s a thing that is possible to prove or disprove.
Sorry for the hostility of my earlier comments, I just got carried away, I hope you can understand how that is.
Right, if a hypothetical deity exists outside of the universe and does not affect it in any way, that entity would be impossible to detect, by definition. (That entity would also be irrelevant to humans.)
You might also be interested in the term agnostic:
a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena
Some agnostics believe in a god and some don’t, what they agree on is that the truth of it cannot be known.
Agnosticism is also scientific in nature, because it acknowledges that there are no experimental ways to test the existence of a god.
And no worries, I didn’t read any hostility in your comments. I enjoy talking about this since I’ve spent multiple decades going over the topic myself.