Lily Philips - can she be a 'true' Christian?

[mids2019]

https://www.premierchristianity.com/opinion/lily-phillips-has-been-baptised-i-pray-its-accompanied-by-change/20772.article

This article made me think about what it means to be Christian especially about the concepts of sin, judgment and redemption.

In my view Lily of course is a Christian being baptised but to not give up a lucrative adult film career possibly does cause angst amongst more traditional Christians.

We are taught not to judge 'Let those without sin cast the first stone' and to accept the universal unconditionally of forgiveness. (We pray every day about the forgiveness of sin) so it is difficult thologically to condemn others.

However does any fellow Christian need to remind Lily she makes money from a profession where many women with less choice are coerced and manipulated for thr gratification of men? Wr have moved away from a less judgmental Christianity but how do you view participation in Christian life with such a job?

You wrote that you think there is something wrong with me.

Re 1 tim. You are adding a lot to that verse to make it so it does not apply to you.

IGoing back to some of the theme of the thread no where in the ten commandments is sexual assault mentioned; indeed sexual assault is mentioned little bit as a human I can work out AS is certainly not part of God's value set. We are trying to clean the nature of God from a biblical text which does not reflect modern society so it is necessary for human interpretation and virtualisation hence a desire to limit core beliefs of it all just gets contradictory.

Quote " I think there is an argument for a form of Christianity stripped back to the basics."

The Thomas Jefferson Bible might be for you then ?

I said you seemed to have some traits by how you have interacted and posted online and not just in this thread. I didn't say that something was wrong with you when everybody has a neurotype etc. I don't need to know what yours is.
I wrote you cannot determine from online for a diagnosis. You was not reading between the lines several times and you were brave enough to post a thread about Jesus foreskin so you didn't seem very sensitive .This is to do with observation on this forum.

Do I apply the 2nd scripture to myself...I had a small role in the church at one so it didn't fully apply to me. I have read out scripture to in an Anglican church. I like to see women ministers but I respect those church's which do not have them. I would have to think about it more if I ever wanted to do ordination one day.

The fact the ten commandments do not allow covering of you neighbour's wife shows how sexist the bible is. If we took the ten commandments literally you would have women non sinfully converting husbands. The fact it ain't a commencement shows how little agency women were given within ancient society. Adultery is a massive sin but no mention is made of infidelity in unmarried couples or other forms of marital angst.....wife beating is OK as long as you are not unfaithful?

I still contend that to accommodate modern gender equality you need to look at the BIble with perhaps almost revisionist eyes but I still think there is room for Christianity

But in the OT, those who God treated with favour raped slaves, and engaged in incest, and never received any punishment for that - in fact it was sanctioned. I'm not sure if the NT ever actually said it wasn't okay to have sex with women you owned?

And yes, obviously it doesn't reflect modern society, but from a religious perspective that doesn't mean that the Bible is wrong and needs to be twisted into a pretzel of different, corrupted interpretations, it means that modern society is wrong, and needs to return to the social norms of the NT.

Hah, exactly! There are so many to choose from, and some have been around far longer than the Christian God!

Christian/Jewish/Muslim deity fighting the entire Greek pantheon? I’d watch the hell out of that film.

@Justmerach, I suggest you look up the meaning of the idiom ‘to read between the lines’. You keep misusing it.

Quote : "The fact the ten commandments do not allow covering of you neighbour's wife shows how sexist the bible is."

Exo 20:17 You do not desire the house of your neighbor, you do not desire the wife of your neighbor, or his manservant, or his handmaid, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything which [is] your neighbor's."

In this version of the commandments, the wife is lumped in with the livestock. Same as the slaves.

In the second set of ten commandments, the coveting is still there, in the same words but this is added.

Deu 5:14 and the seventh day [is] a Sabbath to your God YHWH; you do not do any work, you, and your son, and your daughter, and your manservant, and your handmaid, and your ox, and your donkey, and all your livestock, and your sojourner who [is] within your gates, so that your manservant and your handmaid rest like yourself.

So maybe that is an early example of the teachings changing after complaint. As in " Why do you, the man, get to rest but we don't"

They did not seem able to overturn Leviticus 15 though.

Lev 15:19 And when a woman has dischargingblood is her discharge in her fleshshe is in her separation [for] seven days, and anyone who is coming against her is unclean until the evening.
Lev 15:20 And anything on which she lies in her separation is unclean, and anything on which she sits is unclean;
Lev 15:21 and anyone who is coming against her bed washes his garments, and has bathed with water, and been unclean until the evening.
Lev 15:22 And anyone who is coming against any vessel on which she sits washes his garments, and has washed with water, and been unclean until the evening.
Lev 15:23 And if it [is] on the bed, or on the vessel on which she is sitting, in his coming against it, he is unclean until the evening.
Lev 15:24 And if a man really lies with her, and her separation is on him, then he has been unclean [for] seven days, and all the bed on which he lies is unclean.
Lev 15:25 And when a woman's discharge of blood flows many days within the time of her separation, or when it flows over her separation--all the days of the discharge of her uncleanness are as the days of her separation; she [is] unclean.
Lev 15:26 Every bed on which she lies all the days of her discharge is as the bed of her separation to her, and every vessel on which she sits is unclean as the uncleanness of her separation;
Lev 15:27 and anyone who is coming against them is unclean, and has washed his garments, and has bathed with water, and been unclean until the evening.
Lev 15:28 And if she has been clean from her discharge, then she has numbered seven days for herself, and afterward she is clean;
Lev 15:29 and on the eighth day she takes two turtle-doves or two young pigeons for herself, and has brought them to the priest, to the opening of the Tent of Meeting;
Lev 15:30 and the priest has made one a sin-offering and one a burnt-offering, and the priest has made atonement for her before YHWH, because of the discharge of her uncleanness. (LSV)

Remember, in the NT they were still burning birds at the temple as offerings.

Mat 21:12 And Jesus entered into the temple of God, and cast forth all those selling and buying in the temple, and the tables of the money-changers He overturned, and the seats of those selling the doves, (LSV)

He never said anything about stopping the bird burning, not directly anyway. Not about women having to burn birds because they have a heavy period.

He never said anything about that. But apparently he did find the time to write a letter after he was dead to say the Children of Jezebell are to be killed.

Well, obviously, Muslims, Jews, and Christians differed in culture, and they (like you want them to now) changed the scriptures to suit their individual needs and wants, and therefore their understanding of the same thing differed.

I think those sorts of questions are fairly inconsequential, aside from whether your life on earth is important, and how redemption works. I think a Christianity stripped back to the basics wouldn't be Christianity anymore.

Personally, I think a more relevant question is: Is God as he is depicted in the Bible a moral god, who is worthy of worship?

So you have a revision by your admission when we go from OT to NT in terms of sexual sin. However Jesus glossed over sexual sin with vague comments about sexual immorality which I would suggest is open to the society that interprets that. You can still see echoes of a patriarchal society when Jesus gives conditions for divorce that mentions men divorcing wives and not vice versa. It is actually the scarcity of mention of sexual sin and the ambiguity which leads many to question how do we view sex and sexual sin within a modern church?

Do you think there is an obvious answer? This is not to goad but open to debate what Christian in 21st UK look to in terms of minimising sinning.

Jesus told us infidelity was the only reason for divorce was (female(?)) adultery..Henry the 8th did not agree with this but had the luxury of creating g his son church. I think this is an obvious historical example of Telford dogma being questioned to accommodate scoiety. (Unless we delegitimies the Church of England)

Even the question how does redemption work is fraught with debate? Can we live an amoral.love and ask for redemption at the lost possible moment for instance?

Is God worthy of worship. Yes. However I think a lot humans would reserve an ability to define morality even as faithful as morality is time and society dependent. (Exmaple of age of consent through the ages).

Remember, Henry wanted to divorce his first wife because she was his brothers widow, and he thought the lack of a male heir was because God had cursed the marriage. Apparently he had found a verse in Leviticus saying this.

Lev 18:16 You do not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife; it [is] your brother's nakedness.(LSV)

But what the Bible also says about it is this:

Deu 25:5-6 When brothers dwell together, and one of them has died and has no son, the wife of the dead is not given to a strange man; her husband's brother goes in to her, and has taken her to him for a wife, and performs the duty of her husband's brother; and it has been, the firstborn which she bears rises for the name of his dead brother, and his name is not wiped away out of Israel. (LSV)

So the widow is given to the brother. And note there is no mention of " unless the surviving brother is already married".

Women were possessions of men. No doubt about it.

So when the end times come which apparently will happen (say whom/when?) - which religion does it relate to - are they all their worshippers going to disappear and relocate somewhere else?
I want to watch what happens - again will make a great movie - Hollywood will live off it for years!

Loads of movies about it. The left behind series. Nick Cage done one too.

Why is God worthy of worship? What has he actually done? If you look at the Bible, he doesn't seem very moral at all - even the concept of Hell is immoral, sadistic, and abhorrent.

Definitely. Women were possessions of men and Jesus Christs' teaching that a man that gazes lustfully at a woman has committed adultery in the heart misses the obvious fact that women can look lusting at men. Is not a woman looking at an attractive man and fantasising about sex exactly the same sin? The implication is that women did not have sexual desire or it was a taboo topic at the time.

Also it is the impossible standard of men not looking at women and never thinking about their attractiveness or sex that means other more meaningful sexual sins are ignored or given a dangerous false comparison to lustful gazing. It is these anomalies that a modern Christian needs to face up to and be honest with.

What revision? I said I don't know what the NT said about incest, or the rape of slaves or wives, but as far as I know, Jesus didn't say 'stop doing that'.

As for the mention of patriarchal society, it's pretty clear that 'God' (I mean, really, it's the men of the time making up twaddle, but let's assume that it's real for the purposes of this) wants a patriarchal society. That's not a bug that needs fixing, it's a feature.

I would say the obvious answer to minimise sinning, if Christian, would be to try to abide by the rules laid out in the OT that weren't abolished in the NT, and also any amended rules in the NT. Simple, really.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205%3A27-28&version=NIV

Yup it's only men doing the lusting.....

Because it doesn't matter what an object thinks, I suppose. A woman can lust all she wants, but she's still going to get raped by her husband or owner at the end of the day.

Taking another person's object though - that's not okay!

The fact Jesus presumed men were only capable of sexual lust shows a problem with interpretation of scripture. People now interpret theverse as being about people rather than men but you can see how a change in text alters meaning and Christ's teachings themselves become open to human interpretation. I agree with bug not a feature but there is a lot of debate about what is a bug and what is a feature.

shows

Does this mean in the 21st century we need to have frank discussions about how to make Christianity more appealing to young women?

Interesting... So in a way, what it's actually saying is that women lusting after men (and lesbianism, I believe) isn't sinful 🤔 Only male sexuality is sinful. I mean, I can get behind that!