offensive and outdated or just a belief

[PupsAndKittens]

The bible... believe in it or not, everyone knows it.

My question to all you lovely people, should it be censored ( particularly the homophobic section).

Personally I am really torn on this as I am both Bi and Christian.

For
Society has moved on and has realised that people are born LGBTQ plus and no one has control over it
It is also extremely sexist which also makes me uncomfortable

Against
I will always be an activist for freedom of speech and I believe that every human being should be able to believe what they want, no matter how un PC ( providing that they never physically hurt anyone)
Aren’t we then discriminating against Christians? For saying that their beliefs are wrong and should be made illegal?

So what do you think. is it time that this book is changed to meet current moral standards or are we all snowflakes and should just except beliefs of Christianity, that people have a right to believe if they want to.

The Bible is obviously ancient with references to outdated beliefs regarding homosexually and women. It's also a book that has poems, songs, allegories and recounts and all sorts of different forms of writing. It's not supposed to be all read and taken literally. No-one, teacher or priest/vicar is going to use the Bible to teach these outdated and unacceptable ideas.

If you try and rewrite history people won't learn from their mistakes.

People need to read it as it is.

It is for you to interpret it.

No, it shouldn’t be censored

We’d literally have to censor everything to fit modern standards

If your church is fine, then I’m wondering what made you think of it. They’re not using the homophobic parts in readings I hope?!

The word of God is the word of God. It doesn't chop and change depending on prevailing public opinion, Is the churches answer to this

@PupsAndKittens I've only read your first post.

Focus on the New Testament, ensure you are reading it in the historical context of the time, look at how much is said about sex outside of marriage regardless of orientation and recognise Jesus wasn't obsessed with making sexuality into the big deal people believe the bible does.

The New Testament also relies on having an ongoing relationship with God through the Holy Spirit.

So it isn't straightforward at all.

Oh and a "husband" that loves his wife "as Christ loved the church (his people not the institution)" would treat them as more important than himself. There were many woman that became teachers/deacons/leaders in His time they just didn't get written about because the NT is imperfect and incomplete.

From long ago memory (been a longtime since I attended church) Jesus was far more angry and condemning of the hypocrites selling fake unblemished lamb for sacrifice outside the temple than he was at peoples individual sin.

Here is a lot of cherry picking in all Christian religions and for some reason picking on sexual orientation was a big thing back in the day...

I don’t agree with censorship. It’s not as if it’s hate speech aimed at parts of today’s society. It’s thousands of years old.

And it’s all complete bollocks.

Why take heed of opinion from a book where someone fed a fish to thousands?

It isn’t the start of a slippery slope, fiction is already being censored when re-released!

The bible is more a historical document. A compilation of testimonies from ancestors who heard the voice of God. If you read the Bible you’d s see that God changes over time from being angry and vengeful to more loving and tolerant. It is important to preserve that history.

@JacquesHammer. Please could you give some examples?

I can’t recall which it is but there’s a Noel Coward play which I would censor on stage tbh, for a “joke” about hitting a woman.

Please could you give some examples?

Agatha Christie
Enid Blyton

Thanks Jacques

The bible is a load of bollocks anyway, like all religion. I despise it

All religions are made up by people
None of the major religions are modern
None of the religious books stop evil acts in themselves
To pick on one is to ignore the others - show me a non-biased established religion
People's behaviour is the issue here, not their holy books
In a world where starvation, homelessness, cancer and wars continue - as they have for millenia - what's changed?
I am pro-rights for all. But not at the expense of other's rights.

If you want a good run of outdated beliefs in the Bible that are no longer practised have a rummage through Leviticus.

Be out, be proud and if you want to be Christian, be Christian. Very few branches are literal adherents to the Bible.

No, of course it shouldn’t be censored.

People should be able to read whatever nonsense they want to.

Education that that it’s just a book, written by men, badly and rewritten to suit the men of the time is something fully grown adults should be able to comprehend.

@JacquesHammer freedom of speech is freedom from government interference of speech. If some publishers decide to publish censored content then ironically that is their freedom of speech as they are not he government, and they are not supressing original versions that are still available as they have no power to. You can still chose the original.

If ops vision were realised that would either require government to legislate that only the censored version is legal (an act against free speech, with a reaction similar to when Queen elizabeth banned Catholics) or the churches (hundreds of them) publishing and making the new version the right one, and every single church in the world accepting the changes in it down to the people like wesbro baptist church members and preppers in the woods of rural areas. The people who believe it would have to accept it, do you see that happening?

Muse-reader

I’m sure you noted my first post when I said I believed fiction shouldn’t be censored.

As a Christian, I take the whole Bible seriously as the Word of God. But it's made up of historical documents written for particular people and purposes.

So if for example I read "don't eat pork", I have to decide who that was addressed to (firstly, the Jewish people about to newly establish a nation, and called by God to keep themselves distinct and ritually pure from the nations around them), and to what extent it requires anything of me. In this case, that's not a question of me conveniently "picking and choosing" because in Acts, Peter is given a clear vision which gives the newly-established Church the authority to say no food is unclean - it's a marvellous demonstration of how now Jesus Christ makes people clean, no longer what they eat.

We can equally seriously consider the Bible's message on homosexual acts, tracing the historical context and later apostolic teaching for followers of Christ. I'm not qualified to do that justice in a post, but my point is that we should preserve all the texts in order to work things through, not just keep the bits that fit with our current culture.

I consider myself a Christian ally, and I think the New Testament is pretty clear - Jesus says nothing about homosexuality at all, but he does say to love everyone and treat them as we would want to be treated. Thus, I support LGBT people having every right that I have. I think Paul's words were written for a different context from today and don't apply to loving, committed relationships. That said, I do have many Christian friends who don't agree with me. However, they are not in contact with many LGBT people, so thankfully there is little harm they can do.

As a Christian, you might enjoy doing some more academic biblical studies that look at these sections in detail. You will often find that translation can change meaning, as can the evolution of the very meaning of the words themselves. You will also find that some content was clearly very contextual. For example, if you are reading a letter from St Paul to community, but don't have access to the letter he was replying to, you can make wildly wrong guesses about his guidance. The bible was written over the course of almost 2,000 years, so there is a huge amount of social history within it and even the most recent writings are from a very long time ago. This makes it fascinating to pull the text apart and find out what is underneath. Sometimes that leads to the realisation that passages that seem bigoted were not as bad as you thought, but not always, because society has moved on.

The Bible has been (mis)translated and fiddled with multiple times. The Catholic Church's bible contains bits generally removed from Protestant bibles. It was all written far too long ago now for anyone to know whether we have ended up with the authentic word of God in the current versions.

Or, to put it another way, the Bible had multiple contributors, multiple interpreters, multiple editors and multiple translators. Anyone thinking the prejudices of the time of the earthly human beings doing all that fiddling about with it didn't occasionally creep into it is a bit hard of thinking. That doesn't mean we should edit it now to fit our own prejudices, as I don't think mankind is closer to the Christian or any other God now than it was over two thousand years ago.

@ponoka7 I completely agree that most of the religions have just as questionable beliefs, however I feel that society ( particularly in the western world) had more hate for Christianity then Islam

What does this mean ?

No it should not be censored but it should be removed from our schools and not presented as fact in any way shape or form.

The story of how it was put together is fascinating - far more interesting than the contents

No, definitely not. The Thought Police is a very bad idea. No one has the right to dictate what others believe, and censorship doesn't change beliefs, if anything it strengthens them.

That goes for homophobia, sexism, racism or anything else. Providing people don't hurt others, it's okay for them to have non PC views. A lot of religious homophobia so called, is just not accepting that same sex attraction isn't based in pathology and cannot be healed, has bad social affects, isn't equivalent to heterosexual marriage and so on and that's all fair enough, it's just opinion.

Censoring ancient texts is a bad idea - and far too Orwellian. Instead we should be using the tools we have to engage with the text using textual criticism, understanding about context and intention and audience etc. The bible is a library of books of many genres, a rich resource of history and poetry and prophecy. For many Christians it is the living word of God, which it is for me - but that certainly doesn't mean I disengage my brain and simply take every word as literal. More that I want to uncover the richness and layers of the text in order to appreciate it and understand the whole of it and how it works together. Because of that I've been able to appreciate how emancipatory is is towards women, despite what we might see immediately on surface level - how liberating it is in terms of the time it was written in - for instance, Paul's affirmation of women in leadership and naming of so many women alongside men when it came to his lists of people to be thanked. And so much more than that.

Censoring the Bible would be a slippery slope to burning any book which doesn't reflect current norms and the morality we take as read in our time. And that would just be bad...