Awkwardly useless commandments. The Bible is chock-a-block with do's and don'ts. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue them. . The Lord will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head. Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit. You will build a house, but you will not live in it.
Christians may scoot past these passages, but one hell-bound humorist used them to create a biblical curse generator. Weird insults and curses. The Monty Python crew may have coined some of the best insults of the last 100 years: Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries. But for centuries the reigning master was Shakespeare: It is certain that when he makes water his urine is congealed ice. Had John Cleese or William Shakespeare lived in the Iron Age, though, some of the Bible writers might have given him a run for his money.
I'll limit myself to a couple tantalizing tidbits of each kind, and the curious reader who wants more can go to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible or simply dig out the old family tome and start reading at Genesis, Chapter I.ġ. To list all of the verses in these categories would take a book almost the size of the Bible one the size of the Bible minus the Jefferson Bible, to be precise. Here are 11 kinds of verses Bible-believers ignore so that they can keep spouting the others when they want to. Then, when it suits their other purposes, they conveniently ignore the parts of the Bible that are-inconvenient. When it suits their purposes, they treat it like the literally perfect word of God.
Some Bible-believing Christians play fast and loose with their sacred text. This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
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