Lol, a mythical story is not worth all of these paragraphs...

Did you hear the BBC Radio 4 episode of Bookclub with Margaret Atwood? She talked about how Christianity, and the word of god, has to adapt to the prejudices of its loudest adherents. So ‘love thy neighbour’ and ‘the least first’ does not fit in with Ayn Rand’s selfish philosophy, so the hunt is on for sections of the…

A long, long time ago - probably at least a decade ago - I was listening to an interview on NPR with a scholar of Aramaic. He was talking about the multiple translations of religious texts, the power/prejudice/limitations of language. It was very interesting. One of the examples he used was the story of Sodom and…

I will never understand why countries don’t just adopt a very simple tax system for corporations. “You get taxed based on where the money comes from, not where your fucking corporate HQ is”. There. Solved tax havens.

I feel like you read something into this that isn’t there, and that’s kind of your own problem to deal with.

Russell, girl, you would not HAVE a gym business without gay people. Acknowledge, then sit the fuck down.

Even if we explain the layers to this onion, are you going to care? No. You already have a point you want to make. You made it. Good day.

Hey, keep your god off my lawn.

Christian conservative from Alabama who up until Wednesday was the chief knowledge officer

When I am Emperor, my first official act will be to tax the piss out of every church and religious organization to 1) pay for everyone’s college 2) pay for everyone’s healthcare, and 3) pay for the infrastructure and defense upgrades we need. Scientology will pay twice whatever everyone else pays. Whew! There might…

Yea, Paul “met” Jesus the same way people post-1977 “met” Elvis.

Lol, dude, I am not about to argue the minutiae of this particular myth. The bible specifically supports slavery, rape, genocide, and human sacrifice. It is a horrific book and no one should look to it for moral guidance, period.

I get the impulse, and I’d like to agree with you. On the other hand, I am cursed with the sneaking suspicion that if Paul didn’t exist, the early Christian church, as an institution, would have had to invent him.

Jesus laid down rules about how you’re able to treat your slaves, including how badly you can beat them. So, not so nice after all.

I suppose you could almost say Paul was Ray Kroc?

I’ve often wished that Paul had never come around. I was raised in a very religious home, but one that’s a bit outside the mainstream (Mennonite, a pacifist tradition with a big emphasis on social justice and expressing your faith through acts of service in the broader community). When I went away to college, I was…

It’s not widespread, but some people call Evangelical Christianity “Paulism” because that’s what it is. Although, modern biblical scholarship attributes much of the awful Paul stuff to another even later writer.

The real problem was the Council of Nicea, the group that, for political reasons, decided what writings did and did not go in the Bible. This practiced has been mimicked again and again throughout history as various kings and governments have snipped and edited their theological dogmas in an effort to control people.…

Paul was the salesman/conman. The Trump of the early church.

Sometimes I wonder how Christianity would have fared if that asshole Paul had never shown up. I’m an atheist, but reading Jesus’ words it’s hard not to like the guy- he was a radical determined to shake up those in power, he taught that people deserved to be treated well, preached that the poor should be fed and…