Monday, January 25, 2010

The Most Disturbing Defense of the Bible I Have Ever Seen

rape, bible, god, fail
Apparently, I've been Poed. Honestly, you can't fake fundamentalism to a degree that makes it obvious you are faking it. No matter how crazy your parody, somebody actually thinks it's the word of god.

Ray Comfort defended the God ordered murders and genocides of the Bible as merely being history. Normally, I would find that disturbing, but commentor Y=X beat that by a mile.

[Trigger Warning: Rape]



I just know some atheist is going to mention

Deuteronomy 22:28-29

If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl's father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.

Allow me to answer this in advance. When a virgin is raped she is no longer pure and thus her chances for marriage are greatly diminished. God provides for the woman who has become impure due to rape. Since no else will want to marry her, God commands that her attacker marry her and pay her family a tidy sum. The man who rapes a virgin has clearly shown an interest in the woman and so forcing him to marry her doesn't cause him too much distress on him and lessens the chance the marriage will be a really bad existence for the woman.

Making the attacker pay her family a tidy sum helps the family out and in this way the girl helps her family out. So, instead of the woman being considered defiled and an outcast the family can embrace her. She gets a husband and the family gets money.

God setup rules to help even the lowly out. God has a plan for each of us and we just need to seek Him to find out what His plan is.
O_o

That's so . . . is there a word for that? I'm the Queen of Obscene, and I don't know the word for that.

First of all, the impurity angle alone proves to me that either god is a complete asshole, or god didn't write this rule. I can't help it if someone rapes me. No one can help being raped. That's why we call it rape. I can be a good little girl and protect my hymen for all I'm worth, and I'm still at the mercy of anyone who can overpower a 100 lb woman, i.e., almost anyone. (Being a woman, I worry about these things.)

So, god in his infinite mercy and compassion, doesn't simply tell the Israelites "Hey, rape victims are not impure. Treat them with compassion and care." He could have done that, but he doesn't.

Secondly, The man who rapes a virgin has clearly shown an interest in the woman displays such a fundamental misunderstanding of rape that I am amazed. Rape has nothing to do with sex. Rape has nothing to do with desire, lust or anything other than power, rage and control. The man who rapes a woman is showing an interest in humiliating and exercising power over that woman. God's answer to that is to hand that woman over to the man, as property no less? That's the best answer god has? "Here, you've proven that you want to abuse this woman as much as you can, here she is, yours to abuse until she dies!" That's . . . wow.

God has a plan for each of us and we just need to seek Him to find out what His plan is. Apparently, his plan is for me, a woman, to be treated as property. Apparently, his plan is to reward rapists with unlimited access to and power over their victims. That's god's compassion, his love, his plan.

I hope Y=X brings this up to every potential convert he meets. It's certainly good press for the atheists.

13 comments:

  1. Um. Wow. Just...wow.

    I...um...hold on a minute.

    Okay, let's start here. Many, many years ago I was dating a girl who I honestly didn't like much as a human being and shouldn't have been dating in the first place, but that's totally beside the point. She told me once that a friend of hers had been raped, then started dating a guy, told him, and he responded by deciding she wasn't good any more. I found that utterly and completely horrifying.

    I mean, let's say that you've got some guy who works in a convenience store. One night a robber comes in, steals from the cash register, and puts a bullet in the counter guy. If you met him later and he told you about that time he got shot would your response be, "Man, I can't believe you let yourself get shot/put yourself in a position to get shot/can't move fast enough to avoid a bullet at five feet. I don't think we can be friends."

    This is ultimately the same as the rape scenario (with all the necessary caveats that rape is far more deeply personal and traumatic). I mean, nobody wants to put themselves in a position where they'll get shot, just like women don't actually walk around asking to get raped. And in each case you need an outside agent to walk in, uninvited, and bring unwanted violence. But we'd never say, "Wow, if that guy didn't want to get shot he shouldn't have gotten a job at the Kwik-E-Mart." We'd instead talk about horrible criminal behavior or how the neighborhood is really falling apart.

    I'm not a fan of the opposite extreme where the attitude becomes, "All men are rapists," because we're not. To go back to my example, it would be unthinkable to respond to the c-store robbery by saying, "All [insert group here] are armed robbers." The "men are all pigs" attitude is as dangerous in its own way as the "women are all asking for it" one.

    It is entirely possible to find a happy medium on this, though. First, simply respond to a victim of rape with sympathy and the admission that an unwanted crime has been committed. Second, indicate that this doesn't diminish that person's value as a human being. Third, beat the living crap out of anyone who says that rape is part of god's plan to make sure women know who's really interested in them.

    The implications of that entire view are beyond disgusting. And they get worse every time I consider them from a new direction.

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  2. Personal Failure said: "That's so . . . is there a word for that? I'm the Queen of Obscene, and I don't know the word for that."

    A quick list:
    1. Monstrous
    2. Obscene
    3. Foul

    Seriously, if that's an example of G-d's Grand Plan, we're better off without Him.

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  3. You've been poe'd. quite badly. His other posts made it quite clear he was an atheist and he declared what he was doing on his own blog.

    http://yequalsx.blogspot.com/2010/01/poes-law.html

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  4. Oh, good, because that was too disturbing to be true.

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  5. ...Yeah, color me relieved as well.

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  6. The problem with Poe is, as with all "jokes", there's a grain of truth to them.

    There are a number of people (mostly men) who think that Rape *is* a sexual act, basically an extension of unreciprocated/underreciprocated desire. What they don't understand is that that desire can't be sated by rape, and most sane people fundamentally know this and therefore don't rape.

    Poe or not, there's no shortage of men (and even a few women) who haven't got a clue speaking from a platform of religious "authority" on what rape is. So this should still be terrifying.

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  7. The "superior" morality of the devout shine through in the most horrific ways...

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  9. This example may be a Poe, but this argument isn't an argument that hasn't been used before. There are some Jewish apologists who have made a nearly identical argument.

    The one point I am going to disagree with is the claim that rape is all about power. This is a common claim, but the evidence simply doesn't support it. There are a lot of problems with it: First, for many (even perfectly functional people) power issues can be intrinsically sexual or sexualized. That's why consenting adults engage in things like BDSM. Second, there's evidence that rape levels go down in areas where people have more access to pornography. That strongly suggests that the males in those areas are getting other sexual outlets and so are less likely to engage in rape. Third, the vast majority of rapes occur by males to young females. Fourth, prison rape is less common in prisons that have broad conjugal visitation rights. While any one of these data points could be explained by other hypotheses, the hypothesis that explains all of them most effectively is that a substantial fraction of rapes occur out of sexual desire.

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  10. Since you quote the Bible so often surely you must know the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Specifically, what was considered the Law of Moses and why it was done away with...because it kind of makes your whole post meaningless when you consider that...

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  11. Joshua:
    Rape is doing something to someone without their consent.
    You claim doing something to someone without their consent is not about power.
    To be charitable, that claim is stupid.

    Your correlations are on the order of 'pirates cause global warming', and your arguments, to any civilized adult, demolish your own claim: Anything can be made sexual—therefore rape is not about power?! and, The most powerful do it to the least powerful—therefore rape is not about power?! These are straws a third grader wouldn't grasp at.

    The hypothesis that explains all this most effectively is that you are rationalizing your own desire to rape, or misuse power generally, a hallmark of right wing thinking. Doing something to someone without their consent does not 'occur out of desire', it occurs out of contempt.

    The Desire to do an action does not cause an action.
    The Power to do an action does not cause an action.
    Both these are restrained by the civilizing influence of maturity, something we call morals. You may wish for a world where sexual desire causes rape, where anger causes violence, greed causes theft,
    and desire generally causes action, but no one here wants it. We're grownups. Try to join us.

    ReplyDelete

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