Paul and his letters

Aondeug

I have no idea what to label this...I'll just put it as media because WHY NOT.

Fuck you Paul. Fuck you and your letters. You made the New Testament hideously boring.

Also Revelation is overrated. HEAR ME HISTORY CHANNEL?!?

Aondeug

He at least got eaten by a whale which makes for a good dinner story.

Kinkajou

Fun fact: Evangelicals seem to love Saint Paul and his epistles more than the gospels, as far as their quoting of Scripture is concerned.

Aondeug

Evangelicals are the greatest evil known to man then. I must wipe them out in the name of interesting literature everywhere.

TheMightyAnonym

The Bible isn't supposed to be "interesting", last time I checked.

The gospels are my favorite part of the Bible, by the by.

...and why do you hate Paul so much...?

Gelzo

"The Bible isn't supposed to be "interesting", last time I checked."

Why not? It's fiction, isn't it?

/shitpost

snowbull

"Revelation is overrated."

wtfamireading.jpg

DelusionalSunset

Paul is quite verbose, makes him good quote fodder. Especially when you want to cherry pick for best ways to alienate folks.

Pykrete

I maintain that the vast majority of problems Christians have nowadays can be summed up as "dammit Paul."

Doesn't help that we're not even sure how many of the damn things he actually wrote and how many were just pushed by random second-century dudes during a power struggle.

Myrmidon

Jesus is Marx, Paul is Lenin, and Constantine was Stalin.

I don't know who was Trotsky.

Pykrete

IIRC our current canon epistles are like half that we're pretty sure he wrote, a quarter that lexical analysis shows pretty thoroughly were written a good deal later but idiots insist them to be canonical anyway, and a quarter are up in the air.

Some things like preventing the ordination of women are centered around ones we pretty much know to be false, so at least there's that.  Others like his general sex-is-evil attitude that got gleefully picked up for the next 2000 years are unfortunately rather everpresent in all of them.

In any case, how much weight we should give them and their frequent contradictions with Jesus's general teachings is something that's been talked about for a very long time.

Super Lazuli

Old Testament is better.

Trufaks

Myrmidon

“I remember when I was young I found Dostoyevsky always boring but I heard
about and basically went to the Grand Inquisitor in Karamazov Brothers. Even now
I’m on the side of the Grand Inquisitor you know, which is why my hero is St
Paul. He is totally disinterested in Christ as a person. You find almost none of
this, Christ did that miracle, he did this, and this doesn’t bother St Paul.
It’s only, Christ died, he arrives, and ok that was the event, now lets build
the party and so on. Point two; he is external to the event. With the other
apostles meeting, lets say in, 43, ten years after crucifixion, you can imagine
then this nostalgic moment of having dinner, ‘do you remember how Christ asked
me to pass him the salt’ ten years ago. None of that with St Paul, he is
external, external, and this is why I’m with St Paul.”

Khwarizmi

Paul... I'm not a fan.  He did write my favourite Bible passage (1 Corinthians 13), but he also claimed that nobody who was effeminate or gay would enter Heaven, that women should not speak in church and should never be allowed to be in charge, and that Christians and non-Christians could never coexist as equals.

Pykrete

that women should not speak in church and should never be allowed to be in charge

We're pretty sure he didn't write that particular one, actually.  Timothy is one of the ones we're almost positive was written in the second century.

Khwarizmi

Still, canonically, Paul wrote it and it's part of the Bible.

And either way, 1 Corinthians contains some things which I find morally abhorrent and which I've seen Christians flat out deny (like the part about gay and effeminate people not going to Heaven).

glennmagusharvey

How do you set up a yellow quoteblock like that?

Also, isn't Revelation the book that's filled with awesome crazy stuff?

Super Lazuli

Revelation is the one with personface locusts.

Super Lazuli

The Rapture is an invention of later tradition, yeahs.

Revelation is pretty awesome. If I ever become a director, I will make a pricey and bizarre movie about it.

/pipedream

glennmagusharvey

I already have a story in mind in which the protagonists defeat fifteen angels, including the angels of conception, birth, life, war, pestilence, famine, and death.

I really enjoyed assigning Evangelion-starring angels to those roles, based on their appearances in Evangelion.

Conception: Armisael (the double helix angel)
Birth: Sandalphon (the larval stage thingy)
Life: Tabrias (he appeared in human form)
Death: Leliel (the eraser of existence)

War: Zeruel (one of the strongest angels in terms of raw attack power)
Pestilence: Iruel (the computer virus angel)
Famine: Arael (the "denier"--as in, one who denies others of their hopes and dreams, and frustrates them)
Death: Leliel (again, being the end of both sets of four angels)

Longfellow

GMH--

tags.

TheMightyAnonym

In the end, I like the guideline KCK mentioned in the other fora.

"Forget Christianity, try Jesus instead!"

The ultimate focus of any follower is to be more Christlike, so I'm sticking with that.

glennmagusharvey

lol old testament?

So, hilariously, one of my my mom's friends, who hosts a Bible study group, once confused Joseph of technicolor dreamcoat fame and Joseph of being Jesus's human dad fame.

TheMightyAnonym

Ooops.