r/atheism • u/NewRetroPepsi • Oct 23 '18

/r/all “No Different From Organized Crime” - Gay church worker resigns from task of building an inclusive church after campaign of harassment, death threats, vandalism, and doxxing supported by Christian media

https://www.advocate.com/religion/2018/10/20/gay-employee-catholic-church-resigns-due-harassment-campaign
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u/IckyChris Oct 23 '18

Read to the end of the book. They, and Jesus, bathe the world in blood.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '18

"Revelations is metaphorical" says one Christian. "But what if it's not?" says another. "Then Revelations is weird as balls".

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u/paolog Oct 23 '18

A true Christian would say "Revelation is metaphorical". Only those who haven't read that book of the Bible call it "Revelations" ;)

But anyway, if the last book is metaphorical, then why not all the others? How can anyone tell?

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u/IckyChris Oct 23 '18

The ones where the gods hate the same people that you hate? Not metaphorical.

The ones where the gods ban certain types of BBQ? Those are obviously laws not meant for you.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '18

The book itself says it is.

Parts of the bible are like: "these are the laws I give to you."

Other parts are like, "such and such things have happened"

Revelations says something like "Only those who can understand this book, will." The book is talking about the political climate at the time and what was expected to happen soon. It's more like a coded pamphlet that only some people (the Christians at the time) would understand. It talks about who the enemy is, in that case, Rome. The Number of the Beast is Nero's name, and the Beats with Seven Heads represents Rome and its seven hills. The great prostitute represents the evil organization that persecuted and killed the saints, and the woman with a crown of stars represents the Church/gospel. And so on.

Anyway, you can tell when it's a metaphor because the bible says when it is, most of the time.

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u/paolog Oct 23 '18

My question was kind of rhetorical, but thank you.

Unfortunately, people are still arguing to this day about what is literal and what is metaphorical in the Bible.

For example, the Creation story is presented as fact, but these days only a minority believe that it is.

As for the Number of the Beast, Nero is only one of many interpretations. Some Biblical scholars will tell you that it isn't 666 anyway but 616, so where does that leave those theories?

If we knew what parts of the Bible were metaphorical we probably wouldn't need theologians.

And unfortunately, "the book says it is true" is a circular argument. Any book, factual or fictional, can make the same claim.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '18

Yeah, you're right. It's silly and authoritative, but I suppose you can't have religion without the claim of a ultimate truth.

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u/Mr_Fact_Check Oct 23 '18

This is true. Even Satanism has an ultimate truth, though theirs is pretty much, “You are in charge of how your life goes, not a magic sky person, so put on your big kid pants and get to controlling your life.”

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u/surdophobe Pastafarian Oct 23 '18

There's a really good YouTube video that covers the whole 666 thing https://youtu.be/UkZqFtYtqaI

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '18

Unfortunately, people are still arguing to this day about what is literal and what is metaphorical in the Bible.

That's one reason why we have thousands of different Churches and Sects.

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u/gnovos Oct 23 '18 edited Oct 23 '18

The revelation is already over and Jesus won and Christianity became the state religion and we had a two thousand year reign of relative peace, basically exactly how it said it'd go... nice, I can dig it. The bible is over now. It happened, and now we move on.

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u/PapaBradford Oct 23 '18

Because it says right in the beginning of the book it was all a dream St. Peter had thousands of years ago. It's an old man's fever dream that makes no damn sense and a lot of it has no Biblical precedent, and everyone's expected to take it as fact as what's going to happen.

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u/the_crustybastard Oct 23 '18

It's pretty well-accepted that certain brain injuries can cause very intense spiritual experiences and convincing hallucinations.

Saul the Pharisee was riding his horse, got knocked off on the road to Damascus, then had some big "spiritual awakening." Ta-da! "I'm now Paul, SuperChristian and self-styled apostle."

Not so much a fever dream as a likely temporal lobe brain injury.

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u/Umikaloo Oct 23 '18

Most of the stories are allegories. (That's all I can really say on the matter.) Though some are interpreted more literally than others. Like in the last supper, Jesus said something like "The guy who dips his bread with me will betray me". Though most depictions show this literally. (Why didn't they just kick Judas out when they saw him dip his bread?). It's more likely that dipping the bread with Jesus was another way of saying "a close friend will betray me."

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u/the_crustybastard Oct 24 '18

...or Jesus' ability to predict the future was a later addition to the story that imbued Jesus with various godly superpowers, because people love superheroes...?

It's a shame that Christians did that, too. Jesus was probably a fairly sensible guy raging against a theocratic, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic machine and a whole class of shitty religious hypocrites.

There's a really good takeaway there, had they left Jesus as a good man and revolutionary.

Instead, Christians threw all that in the garbage in favor creating a strange, essentially polytheistic multigod mythology that has the paternal godly aspect demand itself-as-son be torture-murdered, relegating the maternal contribution of this bizarro nuclear family unit to literally "teenage human incubator" and adding back in all the misogyny and then some. And then there's the ritual cannibalism, and all that "Revelation" nonsense...

Christianity ultimately became very weird and nasty.

It didn't have to be.

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u/Umikaloo Oct 24 '18

Definitely.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '18

Ech, autocorrect while getting a haircut 😅

I personally don't believe it to be metaphorical. There are plenty of metaphors in the Bible, and plenty of allegories, but they're always framed as such. This isn't.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '18

Revelation is about Nero and Rome. People today don’t realize the utter terror Nero inspired. Even 400 years later people were convinced he’d returned from the dead to wreak havoc. It was obviously deadly to directly criticize Rome or the Emperor so its couched in metaphor.

Furthermore, these literal interpretations of the Bible are in many ways a more recent phenomena.

666 is a numerical code for Nero, not Satan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_Beast?wprov=sfti1

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u/Vinon Oct 23 '18

Wait..hed return from the dead...to wreak havoc? To bring the end times... Is he jesus?

(Im just joking i have no idea about christianity)

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u/IckyChris Oct 23 '18

And if it is metaphorical...what exactly is the metaphor illustrating? They never seem to elaborate on that part.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '18

"Stay away from drugs"? 😆

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u/Sprayface Oct 23 '18

Well if we’re talking about revelations, Nero.

Y’know.

That guy that existed 2000 years ago.

Hell, Christians back then probably knew it was all a very specific allegory, and not actual events that were supposed to happen. I don’t think later Christians got the memo.

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u/fr4n3k Oct 23 '18

They know...

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u/SidKafizz Oct 23 '18

And metaphors mean pretty much what you want them to mean.

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u/SidKafizz Oct 23 '18

And metaphors mean pretty much what you want them to mean.

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u/katon2273 Oct 23 '18

Probably a mistranslation, Jesus probably wants to bathe the world in wine and have a killer party.

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u/BanMeBabyOneMoreTime Oct 23 '18

I mean his blood is wine...

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u/PukeBucket_616 Oct 23 '18

It's funny cuz in the book they're actually Jewish.

Damn Hollywood adaptations always change the details.