This pissed me off so fucking much when people defend Christianity by saying that all of the bad shit is in the Old Testament and that the New Testament is totally fine.
1 Corinthians 6:9
“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,”
Gay people and gender non-conforming people are not allowed in to heaven
1 Peter 3:1
“Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands;”
It’s still an extremely misogynistic book even in the new testament
Romans 1:26-27 … 32
"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
…
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them."
Both homophobia and misogyny
I could go on and on, and I probably will in the comments, but it’s pretty fucking clear that all the nasty bigoted shit in the book just doesn’t go away in the New Testament
You cannot separate the bigotry from the Bible. The Bible is very clear that you cannot pick and chose, that you have to accept the full book or none of it, you can’t just take the verses you like and still be Christian. To be a good Christian who follows the entire Bible you must be bigoted
Just want to add an interesting note here regarding this line and one other that I learned from my favorite professor in college, absolutely brilliant scholar who was like an encyclopedia of New Testament studies. Supposedly this line is intended as a double entendre that only Jesus’ audience of common people would have fully understood - on the surface it sounds like “give to Caesar what belongs to him” meaning taxes, fealty, etc. But it can also be interpreted as “give Caesar what he deserves”, meaning revolutionary violence against the Roman state.
Another example is the “turn the other cheek” saying. In the culture of the time, if you slapped a person with the back of your hand, that was a sign you considered them your inferior or subordinate. Slapping with the palm of your hand was reserved for people you considered your equal. (it might be the other way around but you get the idea) So if a Roman solider backhanded you, and you turned your other cheek towards them, they’d have to palmslap you if they wanted to hit you again, acknowledging you as their equal.
Granted I learned this stuff well over a decade ago so take it with a grain of salt. The language, translation, and interpretation of the texts is a HUGE factor in how Christianity in particular develops. Similar to how:
CW: pedo
The lines from the Pauline epistles that seem to refer to homosexuality generally are largely about the practice of pederasty in Roman culture, if you understand the original, Greek texts
Not to detract from your other points about the modern Western understanding of Christian theology (esp among white evangelicals), I just find the academic study of the Bible very enlightening for these reasons. Ultimately reactionary forces will push whatever interpretation benefits them and the status quo the most. The “original texts” don’t hold a lot of value for a dialectical materialist analysis.
I also want to beat the Caesar shaped dead horse.
Some can even interpret it as an instance of Jesus supporting a separation of Church and State. As he says in the full phrase “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”, and a while later before getting railed and nailed 😉 on the cross he said to Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But now (or ‘as it is’) my kingdom is not from the world”. Which more or less says the spiritual shit is separated from the material shit, or to say that desiring to create or enforcing the theocratic “Christian Nation” is directly heretical to the word of the Christian messiah as the only kingdom of God itself exists in heaven.
Of course taking a more historical materialist look at it, one could simply say do unto Cesar is basically Jesus doing some squirrel shit to avoid getting tattled on by his religious-political enemies who’d want him to openly advocate for the tax resistance movement that active during the time and get thrown in jail before he was ready to get nailed to a cross.
Is also why he says he is the Son of Man, instead of the Son of God. To avoid declaring a full blown insurrection.