tumblr repost 3: "because it's Sunday and I skipped church."

Okay, okay. AS A GENERAL RULE, I'm not going to post content that isn't mine unless I want to discuss it in depth, but this comic speaks for itself, I think.

tumblr repost 2: religion in supernatural's apocalypse, pt. 1.

(via fuckyeahsupernaturalsecrets)

Okay. I could write a dissertation on this secret and everything that's wrong with it, but the TL;DR summary version goes like this: the Antichrist and the Rapture are not in the Book of Revelation. To be fair, neither are the designations of the Four Horsemen and their colors that Kripke and co. came up with; I forget the exact sources, but everything that led up to the way Gaiman and Pratchett wrote the Horsepersons in Good Omens (which, all things considered, was probably a big influence on the Supernatural Apocalypse) came from post-Biblical interpretation of Revelation.

And the Rapture? That came from way post-Biblical (like, early/mid-eighteenth century post-Biblical) interpretation of the Gospels (Matthew 24:36—41 and John 14:2—3) and the letters of St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15:49–55, Philippians 3:20-21, 1 Thessalonians 4:15–17, and 2 Thessalonians 2:1-7). The primary source for belief in a "rapture" comes from 1 Thessalonians, which reads, in the King James Version:

For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

See, it's called the Rapture, because the word used for "seized up" in the Vulgate Bible was a form of the Latin verb rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum — see, raptum there? It's the participial form of this verb, and it means "snatched up." Raptum, Rapture — isn't etymology fun?

Anyway: as with the Rapture, the Bible says absolutely nothing about a singular antichrist, using those terms. 2 Thessalonians references a "Man of Sin" (or Lawlessness, depending on your translation), but he's only equated with the idea of "The Antichrist," again, in post-Biblical interpretation. The only times in the entire Bible where the term "antichrist" crops up are in 1st and 2nd John, and on each of those five occasions, it refers not to some guy who's going to come during the Apocalypse of Revelation, but rather several people, contemporaries of St John, who refused to acknowledge certain "truths"/believe what he did about Jesus.

So, yeah. Everything you thought you knew about how the Apocalypse is supposed to go? …Most of that is total crap, as far as the actual Bible is concerned. Some guys, writing long after Saints John and Paul*, made it up based on how they decided to read certain passages. And since Kripke, Sera, Ben, et al only read the Book of Revelation, that's why the Rapture and the Antichrist, as such, aren't in the show or aren't taking the role you want them to take.**

Basically, from a religious studies student who loves Supernatural — before you criticize how Kripke et al handled the Apocalypse, please, please, PLEASE: read a goddamn Bible.

*: The debate over the authorship of the Johannine and Pauline texts is very long and very complicated; suffice to say, historians don't believe that John and Paul wrote all of them.

**: I actually liked the way that Show handled Jesse — one of many possible Antichrists, born of a demon-possessed mother, potentially but not essentially part of the Apocalypse, believes in childhood superstitions instead of religion. They hit all the high points without breaking the show (which would've been all too easily, since they cribbed notes from Good Omens again and gave him reality-warping powers).

tumblr repost 1: It doesn't matter how many times I run afoul of them…

Evangelical Christians who use the Book of Leviticus to justify their homophobic tirades continually surprise me, especially considering how four of the seven "clobber passages" are from the New Testament. It's just like… they have so much material in their own section of the Bible (which has suffered terribly from translation issues, but that aside…), and they keep coming back to: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is an abomination."

Now… I don't have any statistics backing me up on this, but I'm pretty sure that statement from Leviticus is the most frequently quoted Biblical condemnation of homosexuality in America, at least. And every time that I see it, I have this constant, increasingly pressing urge to just find some Evangelical who will talk to me and ask them to their face if they've actually read the book that they claim to put so much stock in. Because insofar as I can tell, they haven't.

I mean, first of all, there's how Jesus himself says, on a few occasions, that the Mosaic laws and customs are unnecessary, or else contradicts them:

Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, "Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don't wash their hands before they eat!"

Jesus replied, "And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, 'Honor your father and mother' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is a gift devoted to God,' he is not to 'honor his father' with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:

"'These people honor me with their lips,
     but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
     their teachings are but rules taught by men.'"

Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen and understand. What goes into a man's mouth does not make him 'unclean,' but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him 'unclean.'"

Matthew 15:1—11 (NIV).

Okay, so. Let's get it out there that Jesus's relationship to the Mosaic law is at best very hotly debated amongst religious scholars and leaders. This passage can get spun any way you want it — which, har har, is true of literally everything in the Bible — but in the presented context, it goes like this: Jesus and his apostles violate the Mosaic law; the priests object; Jesus points out that they are being hypocritical. He isn't rebuking them for not following the Mosaic laws; he's rebuking them for trying to have things two ways… in order to prove that his disciples are in the right for violating the Mosaic law in the first place.

Moving right along:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

"So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Matthew 5:38—6:6 (NIV).

This passage (which cuts off right before jumping into the Lord's Prayer) is sort of two-fold: on the one hand, Jesus instructs his audience not to be like the Pagans; but, on the other, many of the things he tells them to do also fall in violation of the laws of the Torah. In Leviticus we see many examples of the first precept, that of rebuking sinners (something of which Evangelicals are more than a little bit fond): rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt. (19:17). And then there's:

If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death. Anyone who takes the life of someone's animal must make restitution—life for life. If anyone injures his neighbor, whatever he has done must be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured. Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a man must be put to death. You are to have the same law for the alien and the native-born.

Leviticus 24:17—22 (NIV).

…which Jesus deliberately contradicts early in this passage. And besides that, he deems the Mosaic laws and their to be spiritually insincere: his objection to his followers obeying them is that, in his view, they lend themselves too well to publicly purporting to be a faithful follower of God with insincere, self-serving, etc. motives.


What was that they said about history and those who don't learn from it, again?

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Luke 14:26 (NIV).

This one is less overt than the previous passages I've quoted, but it's still in violation of pretty much every regulation in the Torah about honoring your father and your mother, the importance of familial relationships, etc. …and the only way to truly follow Jesus is to ignore those, abandon your family (the sum of your earthly cares, physical distraction masked as spiritual concern) entirely.

And then there's Saint Paul of Tarsus on the relevancy of Jewish customs to Christians:

When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?

"We who are Jews by birth and not 'Gentile sinners' know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.

Galatians, 2:11—16 (NIV).

Okay, so, some added context here: the Peter whom suffers Paul's rebuke here is, indeed, Saint Peter, born Simon, victim of the first pun when Jesus declared, "thou art Peter, and on this rock, I build my church." (See, it's funny, because naming someone Peter is basically naming him "rocky." Oh, Yeshua. You're a true master of witticism. This is about as funny as me telling Dean Winchester to fuck himself when, ahahaha, THERE ARE TWO OF HIM. I digress.)

So, uh… about that. Saint Peter was the disciple who, in the Bible, is closest to Jesus — true, he denies Jesus three times, and I could make a case for Judas (who I really believe was closest to JC), but it's through that failing that he comes to understand the importance of what he needs to do as the rock on which Jesus built the church. He's the one who carries the movement forward after Jesus is dead. On the other hand, Saint Paul is basically a rantypants little upstart, who neither met Jesus while he was alive nor spoke to him personally, and was even directly opposed to the workings of early Christians. Before his vision of Christ on the road to Damascus and subsequent conversion, Saint Paul was one of the people helping persecute Christians; as much as he established himself as the evangelist to everyone with ears to listen, this is the equivalent of Sarah Palin publicly rebuking John McCain and telling him that he doesn't really understand what the Republican party stands for.

…Or, even more in keeping with how shocking this would have been to their contemporary Christians: this would be like Glenn Beck telling Thomas Jefferson that he doesn't understand what the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are really saying.

But the thing is: so much of contemporary Christian theology is founded on the letters of Paul to the various Whoevers of his world that we can't ignore this passage, or any other one, as being Very Important. And here? Paul just outright says that Christians have no use for the Jewish laws and that following them when redemption is supposed to come through Christ alone is spiritually disingenuous.

So, you know. There's that.

BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE:

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.


Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

Galatians, 5:1—6 (NIV).

Hey, guys! You know all those tedious, irritating laws that Moses said to follow? Secretly, they're just a form of slavery and Jesus died to make it so that we don't have to follow them. And if you do still follow them while calling yourself a Christian, then you're just not in Christ's good graces because you're trying to get salvation through something other than faith.

The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.

Hebrews 7:18—19 (NIV).

See, the especially interesting thing, to me, about Paul's objections to following Jewish law and customs is that Paul is the source of all but one of the four non-Old Testament "clobber passages" that I linked above. The source of his homophobic comments all seems to be due to issues of translation, and even if they weren't, then his letters are still being appropriated to condemn homosexuality based on a trend of adherence to he Mosaic laws that he outright condemned. And yet… people continue to use Paul and Leviticus side-by-side, without considering this fact, and I do not understand why.

It's not that I object to Christianity, or to Christians, or to people's rights to say whatever they damn well please. This is, after all, America, and as a writer, I'll protect to the death someone else's right to free speech, even if I disagree with what they have to say, because they're human beings and if I get that right, then they get it too. What I'd like to see more of, though, as a religious scholar-in-training and as someone who has a great deal of respect for and personal attachment to the Bible, is some more internal consistency in how it's applied by different groups to the modern world.

EXAMPLE 1: if you're going to use the letters of Paul to condemn homosexuality, then you don't get to use Leviticus too, because maybe the Hebrew Bible is divinely inspired, but the founding father of your faith says to exclude it from your worship practices — and stop telling the homosexuals that they're damned because you have to remember what Jesus said about loving your enemies. The whole 'rebuke the sinner' thing comes from the Old Testament, first, and then from the writings of later religious reformers who definitely never spoke to Jesus personally, and since Paul says that Jesus is the highest authority (which, being a Christian, you nominally agree with)… Get cracking on that tolerance and acceptance.

EXAMPLE 2: On the other hand, if you want to use Leviticus to condemn homosexuality because it's divinely inspired and the New Testament and the entire Christian movement itself wouldn't exist without the foundations of the Old Testament, then toss Paul out the window as a crackpot… oh, and get going on honoring the other 613 mitzvot set forward in the Torah. Circumcise your sons, learn the Torah (THAT MEANS ACTUALLY READING IT, GUYS) and teach it, read the Shema prayer every night and every morning, stop eating shellfish and cheeseburgers and meat pasta with alfredo sauce (they're mixing meat and dairy, which is not allowed), don't hold grudges (yes, even against the gays), give more charity to the poor (but don't make a big show out of it), start helping every stray on the side of the road (Deut. 22:4: If you see your brother's donkey or his ox fallen on the road, do not ignore it. Help him get it to its feet.), start celebrating Passover, Shavu'ot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot… and, well. The list goes on.

Oh, and the best part? If you try to mix and match from these examples (like, say, using Paul and Leviticus to condemn gay people), then you're being a massive hypocrite and, as we saw in the three Jesus passages, that means that Jesus would say you're being a very bad Christian.

tl;dr version: people who don't read the book their faith is based on make me do this:

gif courtesy of ~fuckyeahladygaga.

YOU DON'T GET TO HAVE IT BOTH WAYS AND STILL BE RIGHTEOUS, GUYS. THAT IS CALLED HYPOCRISY, AND IT IS NOT WHAT JESUS WOULD HAVE DONE.