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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • I’m not saying he wasn’t progressive for his time in the context of those stories, but progressive for his time still meant the utter suppression of women within the culture.

    Women weren’t allowed to have opinions, conduct trade, or own property, because they were property themselves. eta: and Jesus didn’t explicitly say women should have those rights.

    If you believe the bible is the infallible word of god, it shouldn’t be controversial that women are like livestock.

    Now, you can rationalise progressive values by saying if Jesus was alive today, he wouldn’t have gone along with all that, but that’s just not what the bible actually says.


  • Yeah, contradictions are baked in, which is part of why it’s endured this long. But for the misogyny and sexism specifically, there aren’t really any contradictions.

    Jesus never said woman are equal or slavery is wrong. You could maybe argue he didn’t condone the genocide of his father by saying lepers deserved compassion or whatever (though that’s also a stretch), but there’s plenty of misogyny and racism in the new testament as well, so he absolutely did not counter any of that.

    Anyone trying to argue Jesus (an apocalyptic preacher who was a product of his time) wasn’t misogynistic doesn’t actually know scripture or history. The preacher in the article is absolutely following the gospel, even if that’s an uncomfortable truth.


  • They do cherry-pick, that’s true. But my point is you don’t have to cherry-pick to wind up at awful levels of misogyny and racism. If you take it at face value, misogyny and racism is the message you should take from it.

    They can hand-wave some of it away with the whole ‘Jesus fulfilled the covenant’ nonsense (which is 109% cherry-picking), but throughout the whole thing, both old and new testaments, women are property and some races are meant to be slaves.

    This is what fundamentalists – who famously don’t cherry-pick, but believe the literal word – believe. It’s atrocious, but their interpretation is literally correct.


  • Well, yeah. The bible was written in a place and time where women were property, like livestock, and if you actually believe those teachings (without doing mental gymnastics), that’s what you should believe.

    The 10th commandment makes this pretty clear:

    You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.

    Women are included in the list of property you shall not covet, on the same level with your neighbour’s servants and livestock.

    Modern christians try to whitewash the religion, but if you take it as it was written, women are akin to livestock.




  • How many in that statistic are men being killed by women? How many of those murders are the result of gang violence that’s predominantly committed against men by other men?

    I assume you’re referring to this stat:

    In 2022, the FBI reported that 14,441 men and 4,251 women were murdered in the United States.

    … which equates to about 79% of all murders.

    There’s a lot of nuance in that broad, sweeping statistic, but here are some statistics that are more clear:

    In the same year, there were 15,094 male murder offenders and 2,107 female murder offenders.

    … so the problem isn’t that more men are being murdered in general, but that an overwhelmingly larger number of men are murderers, and they target each other quite a bit. Gang violence stats are wrapped up in that 79%, and most gang violence is male-on-male.

    Here’s another:

    Among homicides in the United States, intimate partners kill almost 50% of female and 10% of male victims.

    Many of these stats are situational, making that overly-broad figure misleading.

    Also, the likelihood of being murdered increases quite a bit when a woman is pregnant:

    In 2020, the homicide rate for pregnant or postpartum women was 5.23 per 100,000 live births, which is 35% higher than the rate for non-pregnant and non-postpartum women.

    And that doesn’t include all the violent sexual crimes against women and girls, that are also committed at a far higher rate than against men and boys.

    The overarching fact seems to be that men kill men a lot, and they also kill women an order of magnitude more often than women kill men, so maybe the problem here is men’s propensity for violence.

    e: If that’s what you meant, I agree, we should be finding and implementing ways to reduce male toxicity in general, which includes many things like supporting mental health care and opposing norms (mostly within the online ‘manosphere’) that promote and foster toxic rather than healthy masculinity.