Darker side of the Bible, Scriptures you're shocked to read

[tankgirl]

Ok, some how a close friend who has an insanely fundie past*, has decided to slip a bit back into the Bible and decided to suddenly try to lead me to bible study with her. I told her politely no, then had to be more firm about some small ways I don't follow or believe in the bible. Any way, I obviously didn't do it right as she is insisting that the Bible never condones rape, or creates rules for what I called "acceptable rape". So I thought I would first ask about where I can find these Scriptures, but that got me to thinking, what other Scriptures have you all come across that also had you shaking your heads, or in shock?

 

 

** Due to friendship I won't get into her past, but it involved home churching, extra minimalism to the point even same sexed children shared clothing, in the name of Pride and Jealously, Bible only schooling, with almost no Maths, they lived totally off the grid in the desert, and if they had a blog, I think they would have been a hit around here.

[RachelB]

I'm a practicing Christian, and there are some scripture passages I really can't stand.

I pretty much hate the story of Jephthah sacrificing his daughter (Judges 11)

And God's command to kill the Amelekites, all of them, in 1 Samuel 28, has never sat well with me.

[NotALoserLikeYou]

You just need this site

skepticsannotatedbible.com/

[Swamptribe]

This one always creeped me out, Numbers 31:18.

[CynicMom]

Skeptics Annotated Bible is a good resource with problematic stuff categorized for easy finding.

[Letgo]

Yes, there are definitely parts of the Bible that seem so wrong. I'm a Christian and I still don't understand Genesis 19. Lot offers his two virgin daughters to be gang raped in order to save two male guests (who were actually angels) from an angry crowd wanting to "know" the men. Later, the two daughters get Lot drunk enough so that he has sex with them and both conceive. Lot's wife is turned to a pillar of salt in this chapter, too. It's beyond my limited ability of understanding! I have way less of a problem with Lot's wife than I do the other parts. At least she obviously disobeyed.

[Knight of Ni]

Yes, there are definitely parts of the Bible that seem so wrong. I'm a Christian and I still don't understand Genesis 19. Lot offers his two virgin daughters to be gang raped in order to save two male guests (who were actually angels) from an angry crowd wanting to "know" the men. Later, the two daughters get Lot drunk enough so that he has sex with them and both conceive. Lot's wife is turned to a pillar of salt in this chapter, too. It's beyond my limited ability of understanding! I have way less of a problem with Lot's wife than I do the other parts. At least she obviously disobeyed.

You beat me to the story of Lot and his daughters. There's no way that drugging someone and having sex with them isn't rape. It's still done today. It's usually called date rape.

[anjulibai]

I think all the killing and raping of innocent Canaanite men and women at the behest of God during the Israelite conquest of Canaan is pretty awful.

I also think God killing David and Bathsheba's first son as punishment to them was pretty horrific. Yes, punish the little baby for something their parents did, but allow them to live and have another child.

[tralala]

I decided to look up any biblical references to abortion, and found one in the law books that was basically about suspected cheating wives. They were forced to drink an abortificant and if they weren't cheating whores they'd be fine, but if they were, god would punish them by causing them to miscarry.

Your mileage may vary on how to interpret it based on translation though.

"The priest shall say unto the woman, The LORD make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the LORD doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell. And this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, to make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot: And the woman shall say, Amen, amen. ...

And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people. And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed. -- Numbers 5:21-21, 27-28

How terrifying. And if you had an overly paranoid husband....I shudder to think the horrors you could face by simply being female in ancient Israel.

[MajorMajor]

These twisted bible passages played a huge role in why I left religion. The cognitive dissonance just got to be too much. But really even the story of Jesus is extremely disturbing if you think about it subjectively. The idea that Judas was basically preordained to betray Jesus and die a horrible death then be doomed to everlasting torment never sat well with me even at my most religious.

[utter solitude]

Abraham and Isaac.

Eight year old utter, after hearing this story in Sunday School, asked her mother if she would kill her if God asked. Her mother smiled and said "God wouldn't ask me to do that." Real smooth, Mom.

[fun2beme]

I think all the killing and raping of innocent Canaanite men and women at the behest of God during the Israelite conquest of Canaan is pretty awful.

I also think God killing David and Bathsheba's first son as punishment to them was pretty horrific. Yes, punish the little baby for something their parents did, but allow them to live and have another child.

The part in Exodus about the tenth plague, the killing of all first-born sons, bothers me too. Perhaps it's because I'm looped out on decongestants and antibiotics, but I admit to tearing up when I see the scene in the Ten Commandments where Yul Brenner holds up his son's lifeless body.

Or when God tested Abraham in Genesis by asking him to sacrifice his only son, the son he loved so much. And how did Isaac get through life, knowing his dad was willing to kill him?

[Vex]

The actual content of the bible is more or less why I got out of Christianity. I could not force myself to believe in a God who does all that insane, horrible, cruel shit.

It's part of why I am so insanely infuriated by the blind hatred of Islam in America by Christians (and Christians in other parts of the world too, of course). They say Islam is bad because of all the various awful rules that (mostly fundamentalist) Muslims follow, but the bible is just as bad, perhaps actually worse than the Koran. You think Allah is bad? Well Allah basically IS God. And your holy book condones killing babies to punish parents, incest, murder, rape, genocide... all in the name of God.

That's why, whenever I hear a Christian bashing Islam for 'making women cover up' (which, in most modern Islamic families is the choice of the individual woman, btw), I point out their bible thinks it's acceptable to punish women with abortion and to drug your family members to rape them.

[alba]

These twisted bible passages played a huge role in why I left religion. The cognitive dissonance just got to be too much. But really even the story of Jesus is extremely disturbing if you think about it subjectively. The idea that Judas was basically preordained to betray Jesus and die a horrible death then be doomed to everlasting torment never sat well with me even at my most religious.

Not to mention that Jesus was given up by his father to die a horrible death, and his mother was ... well, I'm not sure what the word is for what God did to her. She was deliberately impregnated against her will, anyway.

[formergothardite]

It wasn't till recently that I realized how dark and disturbing the actual salvation story is. I was just raised to view it as a normal thing but it is about a young teen being forcible impregnated by a deity, almost divorced by the guy she was betrothed because of this, had to live in fear that her young child would be murdered by an earthly king, then this child grew up, realized that he was actually a god and that his father wanted him to be murdered in a gruesome way and while he was being tortured to death his father would not comfort him but would instead forsake him in his time of greatest need. And the cherry on top is that anyone who doesn't believe this story and doesn't want to worship a god who does this will be tortured for all of time.

It doesn't get much darker than that. I taught this to preschool children and didn't see it as wrong.

[singsingsing]

I read the entire Bible straight through earlier this year. First of all, it was amazing - I would recommend reading it to anyone, whatever their belief system (although the genealogies and laws were a bit of a slog). Second of all, the Old Testament is basically the original Game of Thrones. I do not know HOW these fundies can read their Bibles so much and still claim mental purity. For fuck's sake, there's one part were a woman is violently gang raped all night, then left to die on a doorstep. Her body is cut up into several parts and sent all over Israel. There's another part where two daughters seduce their own father. David's son rapes his own sister. Esther essentially prostitutes herself to save the Jews. People often mention Song of Songs or the book of Ruth as the risque parts of the Bible, but they're tame compared to a lot of it.

The New Testament as well. Freaky stuff in there. How about Ananias and Sapphira dropping dead because they committed the atrocious sin of selling their field and lying to the apostles about how much money they got from it so they could only give them half?

I love the Bible, but having read every single word of it, the fact that fundamentalists claim to take it all literally terrifies me more than ever.

*I will take issue with the claim the Mary was impregnated against her will. She very clearly gives consent in the story.

[Lissa08]

It wasn't till recently that I realized how dark and disturbing the actual salvation story is. I was just raised to view it as a normal thing but it is about a young teen being forcible impregnated by a deity, almost divorced by the guy she was betrothed because of this, had to live in fear that her young child would be murdered by an earthly king, then this child grew up, realized that he was actually a god and that his father wanted him to be murdered in a gruesome way and while he was being tortured to death his father would not comfort him but would instead forsake him in his time of greatest need. And the cherry on top is that anyone who doesn't believe this story and doesn't want to worship a god who does this will be tortured for all of time.

It doesn't get much darker than that. I taught this to preschool children and didn't see it as wrong.

.

And this is why I refuse to take my kids to church! There's also the story about the princess or whatever she was wanting John the Baptist beheaded, for some reason that was always extra creepy to me.

[formergothardite]

Mary wasn't asked if she wanted to be pregnant, she was told that God had chosen her and was going to impregnate her and then after being told that this was going to happen to her she said she was okay with being God's handmaiden. Did she really have an option to do otherwise after and angel shows up and says:

The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

If this actually happened can you imagine the fear she must have had of what would happen to her if she rejected the Son of God? She was most likely a young teen and just got told that God had already decided she was the one to carry His son.

[Terrie]

Plus, God vs. Mary. Talk about your power imbalances!

[mebeforee]

Yes, there are definitely parts of the Bible that seem so wrong. I'm a Christian and I still don't understand Genesis 19. Lot offers his two virgin daughters to be gang raped in order to save two male guests (who were actually angels) from an angry crowd wanting to "know" the men. Later, the two daughters get Lot drunk enough so that he has sex with them and both conceive. Lot's wife is turned to a pillar of salt in this chapter, too. It's beyond my limited ability of understanding! I have way less of a problem with Lot's wife than I do the other parts. At least she obviously disobeyed.

A lot of Genesis is bizarre to me. Noah getting drunk and naked and his son (and all his son's descendents) being cursed for witnessing the nudity? That always struck me as the bare bones of a story that must have had more to it in its earliest incarnations, it doesn't even make sense on the face of it. The men being allowed to have children by their wives' servants and such, and it not being seen as any kind of a problem (and the sons often being allowed some level of legitimacy), or having more than one wife.

I also find it really bothersome, the stories of Abraham and Isaac claiming their wives are their sisters so that hostile men around them won't kill them in order to take the women. Their wives are then kidnapped and taken (presumably) to be raped by these people. For one of them I think God punished the kidnappers, but the reasoning isn't the kidnap/rape, rather that the woman taken was already married. The other time, God stops the kidnapper from touching the woman and speaks to him in a dream, explaining that the woman was married and God compelled him not to touch her in order to prevent him from sinning unknowingly. But the issue that is sinful isn't the kidnap or rape itself, it's that the woman is married to someone else. They've stolen property. :pull-hair:

(ETA: Also, Jacob. Just... all of Jacob. Every story about him makes him seem like such a douche.)

[utter solitude]

A lot of Genesis is bizarre to me. Noah getting drunk and naked and his son (and all his son's descendents) being cursed for witnessing the nudity? That always struck me as the bare bones of a story that must have had more to it in its earliest incarnations, it doesn't even make sense on the face of it. The men being allowed to have children by their wives' servants and such, and it not being seen as any kind of a problem (and the sons often being allowed some level of legitimacy), or having more than one wife.

I also find it really bothersome, the stories of Abraham and Isaac claiming their wives are their sisters so that hostile men around them won't kill them in order to take the women. Their wives are then kidnapped and taken (presumably) to be raped by these people. For one of them I think God punished the kidnappers, but the reasoning isn't the kidnap/rape, rather that the woman taken was already married. The other time, God stops the kidnapper from touching the woman and speaks to him in a dream, explaining that the woman was married and God compelled him not to touch her in order to prevent him from sinning unknowingly. But the issue that is sinful isn't the kidnap or rape itself, it's that the woman is married to someone else. They've stolen property. :pull-hair:

(ETA: Also, Jacob. Just... all of Jacob. Every story about him makes him seem like such a douche.)

Abraham and Sarah were half siblings.

From Genesis 20:

11 And Abraham said, Because I thought, Surely the fear of God is not in this place; and they will slay me for my wife's sake.

12 And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.

[mebeforee]

Yeah, I forgot that. But even so, the story is repeated with Isaac in almost exactly the same way and he wasn't Rebekah's brother, was he? The relationship that is important in the text (for both men) is their marriage, and it's apparently the only reason the kidnappings are problematic to God.

[utter solitude]

Yeah, I forgot that. But even so, the story is repeated with Isaac in almost exactly the same way and he wasn't Rebekah's brother, was he? The relationship that is important in the text (for both men) is their marriage, and it's apparently the only reason the kidnappings are problematic to God.

Oh, I wasn't trying to argue against your point, as I totally agree.

I was pointing it out because it's the first time in the Bible that an incestuous marriage is spelled out. The way Abraham explains it, it seems it's no big deal since they have different mothers. It's always been a big wtf moment for me, in addition to the lying about being married.

[shedemei]

Do fundies actually read the OT? Aside from passages condemning gay people, of course.

[mebeforee]

Do fundies actually read the OT? Aside from passages condemning gay people, of course.

I've wondered this, too. I mean they seem to take the OT laws very seriously, but I can't imagine Christians with such insane strict requirements about clothing and modesty and desires that can't be 'righteously fulfilled' reading some of these stories and seeing God bless the dudes in question. Their daughters have to be head-to-toe in cloth so boys won't even think about them in a sexual manner, but it's totally okay by God for Abraham to get a servant pregnant outside of wedlock because his wife is barren? Murderers should get the death penalty because of Biblical law, but Cain just gets exiled (and marked, which was even done for his own protection)? Jacob tricks Isaac into giving him the blessing meant for his brother by lying and taking advantage of his dad's blindness and there's no real comeuppance for it? This is some weird shit and I don't know how they reconcile it with their own lifestyles.