Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.

  • gregorum@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    Dear Yvonne,

    Thanks for reaching out with regards to the Bible. One quote I find particularly useful in situations like this which I believe you should take to heart is 1 Timothy 2:12:

    “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”

    Have a Blessed day!

    gregorum

    • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Fwiw, 1 Timothy is widely recognized by scholars as a later forgery. So it’s effective at shutting up literalists but not as much people who recognize the text as an at least partially flawed effort.

      But that “shuddup women” stuff in the late first and early second century is pretty interesting.

      Like you had Phillip the Evangelist’s daughters supposedly prophesying, apocrypha where Jesus is privately teaching female students, with later traditions claiming their original teacher was a woman.

      And then Corinth a decade or so after Paul deposed the appointed elders from Rome, and the bishop of Rome writes 1 Clement to them, which is all about how young people should defer to old and how awesome the biblical women who stayed silent were (presumably ignoring the earliest women who were driving tent pegs into the heads of dudes).

      Suddenly after this schism and competing materials and tradition owing themselves to female teachers you have a forged letter about how women shouldn’t teach.

      It’s a fun line from the Epistle to throw in their faces, but it obscures one of the more interesting and eyebrow raising episodes to the early church.

      • ouRKaoS@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        “This line that I don’t agree with is fake, but the stuff you don’t agree with is 100% truth.”

        • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          More like “the stuff in line with extensive and repeated archeological finds which is present in lower layers of textual analysis below what’s clear anachronistic royal propaganda is probably true.”

      • gregorum@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        The entire Bible is a lie. For you to argue that any part of it negate any other part of it just shows how much of it you’re taken by.

        None of it was real. Wake up.

        • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          You might be surprised. There’s a ton of BS, but the things it tried to cover up are actually pretty revealing.

          For example, it talks about how one of the earliest leaders and prophets is a woman named ‘bee’ and in her song she talks about how the tribe of Dan “stayed on their ships.”

          Well just in the past ten years there’s been a discovery of the only apiary in the region which was requeening their bees from Anatolia for centuries up until the period when Asa is supposedly deposing his grandmother the Queen Mother, when the apiary and only the apiary is burned to the ground.

          Inside that apiary there’s even a four horned altar to an unknown goddess - a feature that becomes a part of later Israelite shrines.

          Just a few weeks ago there were articles about what’s thought to be a very early Israelite graveyard where they were burning beeswax with a similar chemical profile to this apiary with the imported Anatolian bees and four horned altars.

          Up in Anatolia was a tribe of sea peoples known as the Denyen, who an archeologist in the 50s thought might have been the lost tribe of Dan staying on their ships. And just in the past few years the lead excavator of Tel Dan was remarking that he might have been right given they found Aegean style pottery made with local clay in the early Iron Age layer.

          There’s quite a lot more to all this, but while none of it is straight up acknowledged in the Bible, there’s very valuable evidence of it having been covered up and rewritten in the Bible.

          Just because you don’t like the current version of royal propaganda doesn’t mean there aren’t earlier layers beneath what’s presented that have value in being learned about and analyzed, particularly for history buffs.

          As the science historian John Helibron said, “The myth you slay today may contain a truth you need tomorrow.”

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    Dear Yvonne,

    Thank you for writing me and sharing what you claim to be valuable information, but I am not finding it all that valuable considering it’s a single line from your Bible telling me that an omniscient being can hear me. And I should think so too.

    To answer your first question, I do not think any god listens to my prayers because I do not pray. Your second question makes no grammatical sense. I’m sorry, but I can’t answer it. Perhaps you should see if your god will grant you a better command of the English language.

    I won’t be contacting you for your free Bible study, because I have never heard of Bible study that charges you money… So this kind of feels like a scam. Are you selling timeshares?

    Sincerely,

    Flying Squid