Bible Quotes To Live Your Life By
One of the issues I have with any organized religion is the way the rules governing the religion are passed on. Typically, this is through some sort of book, The Bible, The Quran, Battlefield Earth for example. The problems with these books, as I see it, are two fold. Firstly, they are written by third parties, not directly by the deity. Secondly, and inexplicably, they are directly tied to the time and place they were originally written. In some cases this means talking about animals and tasks that were around at the time, in others it’s raging sexism or homophobia. Either way this results in proponents of the religion interpreting certain aspects in their own way. A way which tends to suit their already established beliefs. And they can do this because of the inherent ambiguity of language. This essentially gives practitioners an “out”, and allows them to selectively believe parts of their holy book. Compounding this is the fact that many of these books have been translated multiple times between numerous languages.
So when reading this short list of quotes taken from The Bible, remember that many Christians choose not to follow these statements, because that would be ridiculous. They did choose to believe that a man can walk on water, and an invisible entity created everything in seven days.
For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death.
Exodus 35:2
If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.
Exodus 21:20-21
For anyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother; his blood is upon him.
Leviticus 20:9
When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if it responds to you peaceably and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded.
Deuteronomy 20:10-17
I’m an “all or nothing” sort of guy so I find it hard to understand the stance that Christians take on the numerous contradictions and inaccuracies in the bible. If you were to ever read The Bible, it becomes blatantly obvious that it was written by people of the time who had no divine guidance. The simple scientific mistakes, which very much reflect the thoughts of the people at the time, really back this up.
Source: Scary Bible Quotes
We need more of these great quotes.
James, I’ve posted a new set of Bible quotes. You can find them here:
More Bible Quotes to Live your Life by. Enjoy.
Apart from your sneery style, you make a good point. Either all the Bible is the inspired word of God or it isn’t, in which case the extra bits should be snipped out, or it plainly admitted that the whole thing is a phoney.
Historically both solutions have been held by some believers (for example those who thought the entire Old Testament should be replaced by the New Testament).
You are absolutely right, however, that all the books without exception are “written by third parties” (unlike the Qu’ran which devout Muslims believe was dictated to Mohammed directly). For this very reason you are also right that “they are directly tied to the time and place they were originally written.” However it does not follow that they can just be interpreted in any way at all. The inspiration of the Bible by God in a traditional Christian view is neither dictation, nor the same type of inspiration, say, that led Tolkein to develop his whole landscape of Middle Earth. Rather, God is the true author, in that his basic message is faithfully transmitted, but also the writer (or writers) are the true author, in that they express things in their own language and in their own culture. That is always the way God deals with anyone: as they are - there is no other way, in fact.
Thus we need to be able to separate out specific questions “of the day” and those things that are meant to be universal truths. This is not normally as difficult as you make out. When you live in a nomadic tribe the rules of conduct will differ from when you have established a city. God patiently changes customs and ways of thinking as he teaches his people. We are too impatient with God. Fortunately he is not so with us. All the quotations you bring are from the very earliest books of the Bible and need to be understood in that context of a people still living as nomads. The rules you isolate are in every case, actually civilising curbs on the culture of the day. Note, for example, that at least some protection is now given to a slave. That was not the case in surrounding cultures. It would take some centuries before slavery was first further restricted, then the slaves respected (eg read the letter of Paul to Philemon) and finally slavery outlawed. The passage to an understanding of the inherent human dignity of every person (and thus the immorality of slavery) is a long one. But it would not be fair to ask a Christian, for example, why those who work on the Sabbath should be “put to death”. Indeed if you recall these very questions were asked and answered in the most complete way by Christ himself in the New Testament.
PS as an addendum to my last comment, I would suggest this analogy: it is not fair to complain that doctors did not sterilise their equipment before the discovery of bacteria causing unnecessary disease and death. We should look sympathetically and kindly on those who did what best they could under the circumstances even though we now know better. The Old Testament, especially the first few books should be read with much more empathy than you do. It contains some wonderful stories. The first three chapters of Genesis, for example, are surely unsurpassed even in purely literary terms.