This pissed me off so fucking much when people defend Christianity by saying that all of the bad shit is in the Old Testament and that the New Testament is totally fine.
1 Corinthians 6:9
"Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,"
Gay people and gender non-conforming people are not allowed in to heaven
1 Peter 3:1
"Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands;"
It's still an extremely misogynistic book even in the new testament
Romans 1:26-27 ... 32
"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
...
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them."
Both homophobia and misogyny
I could go on and on, and I probably will in the comments, but it's pretty fucking clear that all the nasty bigoted shit in the book just doesn't go away in the New Testament
You cannot separate the bigotry from the Bible. The Bible is very clear that you cannot pick and chose, that you have to accept the full book or none of it, you can't just take the verses you like and still be Christian. To be a good Christian who follows the entire Bible you must be bigoted
Or how many religions don't even have religious texts or how religion clearly predates writing before those religious texts would even exist. Obviously, this means religious texts isn't a core part of religion as a whole. Maybe for Abrahamic religions, but not religion as a whole.
Or even how many believers even know about those texts or would agree with them. If even churches no longer hold themselves to that, were essentially fighting a strawman. For instance:
How many Christians actually practice this? I don't know of any, even the extreme reactionaries who talk about "Adam and Eve and not Adam and Steve" don't hold themselves to such a standard, even if they tell themselves that they do. Christians absolutely pick and choose, everyone does, no matter how much they protest that they do not. What's the goal here, to point out hypocrisy? To say that religious people must become bigoted to be true believers? To get people to abandon religion because it's bigoted? Around half of the LGBT community in the United States is religious with around 40% of them Christian, so that doesn't work.
I had another post about syncretic religions, and to me, those religions embrace rather than fight the human tendency to pick and choose what to follow. I don't see anything wrong with that. If anything, that's a good thing. You keep the good that you have, you adopt the good from other religious traditions, and you discard the bad.
People on Hexbear just have a very Burgerlander Protestant understanding of religion, which is very annoying. It's very clear, especially if you observe practitioners of different religions instead of the Evangelical congregation that you grew up in, that everyone pick and choose what you follow. Christians pick and choose, Muslims pick and choose, Buddhists pick and choose, Chinese folk religion practitioners practically just make shit up as they go along, and so forth. Even socialists and scientific socialists and Marxist-Leninists pick and choose from their texts. And that's a good thing.
And at the end of the day, the Bible is just ink on paper. It's a dead object. The Bible won't physically grow arms to punch you if you don't follow every single passage. Jesus won't descent from Heaven to personally put a foot up your ass if you publish a misleading translation. And another consequence of being a dead object is that a dead object can't react to the times in a dialectical process. But people, by virtue of being living creatures, who both are shaped and shape the environment in which they live in, can be part of this dialectical process. This is ultimately how religion is transmitted. It's not through dead text, but through the practice of living people passing on their traditions and beliefs to the next generation.
People on Hexbear having an annoyingly Yankee understanding of the world? Unbelievable!