Posted by Jay Livingston
When I saw this*
I immediately thought about the problem of cognitive consistency. (Earlier posts on cognitive dissonance and consistency are here and here.)
Our anti-gay friends, some of them, base their position on the Bible. Not the New Testament – Jesus didn’t have much to say on the topic. Instead, they go back to Levticus (18:22). The guy above is using the New American Standard translation: “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.”
The trouble with Leviticus is that you have to be very selective about your abominations. The famous “Letter to Laura” skewered radio talker Laura Schlessinger on this problem of consistency when she cited this same verse. Here’s a sample:
When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?(Snopes has the whole letter and much more.)
Aaron Sorkin turned letter into a scene on The West Wing complete with a version of Dr. Laura.
As for the righteous fellow in the first picture, I wonder if he felt any cognitive dissonance when he turned the page in his Bible, read the next chapter, and found this (Lev. 19:28):
You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the LORD.
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*HT: Chad Crawford via a Tweet from Incurable Hippie.
5 comments:
Wow! This would be a great image for the week on cognitive dissonance...
I have a good rule of thumb: anytime anybody quotes something from the Old Testament, they're wrong.
Sometimes I have fun asking Bible literalists about the contradictions, or about their selective picking and choosing, or why they mix fabrics in their clothes or eat pork.
Or I just ask them what language Jesus spoke and what language the first Bibles were written in. Because then I can assume their reading proficiency in Ancient Greek and their fluency in conversational Aramaic.
In terms of logical persuasive, it's a victory if I just can get them at least to move on to the New Testament (you know, the book that features the lessons from the guy they believe to be the Actual Son of God). And yet it's surprisingly difficult to get Christian Bible literalists to use the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Usually I just get blank looks. Because these people are ignorant. They don't even know the books they claim hold the literal words of God. They just know a few quotes that support their pre-existing hatreds.
Too bad about 1/3 of Americans and a majority of Republicans fall into this category.
Mike, What if he’d had the anti-tattooing verse tattooed on his arm? There must be a word for this kind of paradoxical, self-contradictory thing. There must be other example, humorous and serious. I wonder where you can find them.
Peter, You can quote Jesus when you want to be tolerant, or you can quote the OT God when you want to be punitive. What still puzzles me is that the fundies (as a seminarian I once knew called them) insist that all parts of the Bible are the word of God and that there are no contradictions.
People can *quote* whichever book you want, but that doesn't make it right.
Not to get too theological here (oh, hell, why not?), but for Christians, it's not like the Old and New Testaments are supposed to be given equal weight when the say different things. New trumps Old.
Even if you think both Books are somehow the literal word of God, God, say Christians, changed His mind on a few things (and told us so through His Son, who was kind of enough to make a personal appearance).
For instance, it's why Christians can eat traif, which is clearly forbidden in Leviticus. According to Mark (7:18-19--I looked it up), Jesus said that since you sin from the heart, not the stomach, nothing you eat can defile you.
Similarly, you would think, other prohibitions in Leviticus would be trumped by Jesus's lessons on forgiveness. Jesus did not stone the prostitute, he forgave her.
If you claim to believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ (which is kind of the point of Christianity, right?), how can you ignore the things Jesus ruled on (and talk about an eye-for-an-eye, for instance)? That's what I don't get about Bible-thumping bigots (Old Testament--rarely do people thump the New Testament).
As to the tattoo tip, I think getting a tattoo saying, "getting a tattoo is a sin" would be the ultimate bad-ass tattoo.
There are many ways to mock and defame those people who believe in God and the Bible. One very common way is such a kind of in which people mix up all commands of the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. In this writing, I bring forth that how mockers distort, take things out of the context and mix up order of the Old and New Covenant.
I bring forth few arguments that mockers use. My answers are according to the order of the New Covenant, and I rectify few misunderstandings and misrepresented things.
Source; http://koti.phnet.fi/petripaavola/answeringtomockersoftheBible.html
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