Whole Lotta More Lot And An Even Bigger Asshole - How Scripture Will Have To Be Used If It Is To Survive

Still getting flack from those Sodom and Gomorrah posts

LOT HAD NO RIGHT to offer his two little girls to be gang-raped as an alternative to the two angels who were visiting him and who were about to rain fire and brimstone down on the town where Lot lived.  Lot had a right to offer himself to be gang raped, if he had any right to offer up victims to the mob of men at all.  You'll notice that neither he nor the unnamed Levite in the clear recycling of the folk-tale to give an excuse for a bloody civil war in Judges 19-20 are ever questioned as to why they saved their own asses by offering girls up to mobs of male rapists.  The Levite in Judges is even a bigger asshole than Lot because the crowd not only raped his concubine to death, when he woke up in the morning and saw her dead body lying on the door step, he ordered her to get up because he was ready to go on his way. Perhaps he'd enjoyed the hospitality he was offered so much to have it trouble his mind. According to Scripture, he slept away the night as his concubine was being raped to death outside.   No doubt the implication made at the start of the tale, that she had not been faithful to the Levite, is seen as her having deserved it.   If you didn't figure this story is told from a typical straight-guy POV.

I'll point out that when Lot offered up his little girls to suffer a similar fate the two angels don't point out to him that he's doing something wrong.  If nothing else in the story tells you there's something entirely screwy about using the tale as a guide to what "God's unchanging moral law is" for the purpose of forbidding the faithful marriage of two fully competent, consenting adult men or Women to marry, it is that the alleged agents of God's moral retribution fail to tell Lot that he shouldn't be offering his little girls to be raped to death, nor do they warn him that he shouldn't get plastered and rape them, himself, not many verses along in the story.  Some angels, huh? 

I'll also note that in the Sodom and Gomorrah stories, though it was gangs of men who committed the crimes, women and children were obliterated as a consequence, no doubt, if they thought about women and children at all, the scribes and editors and commentators would certainly have figured even children too young to have moral discernment or even language would have been obliterated as, in fact, Lot's wife was when she didn't offer anyone up to be raped and wouldn't share in her husbands crimes after her death.  From now on no hermeneutic that doesn't ask what happened to the Women and Girls who the men don't mention in the text should be considered to be legitimate.

Those two pieces of Scripture (and I only use the capital as a courtesy, not because I think those passages reveal the mind of God) are and always have been too immoral, themselves, to guide a Christian's moral judgement. It is a serious indictment of the process and character of "Scripture" that those questions have not figured decisively in the understanding of those stores.  

One of the greatest things that Christianity accomplished was the elevation of children, especially female children to the status of persons instead of chattels of their fathers.  The ubiquitous practices of infanticide, of child rape, of children being prostituted, etc. that characterize the pagan cultures of the Mediterranean regions and elsewhere being somewhat destroyed by Christianity is one of the most convincing arguments that can be made in favor of the truth of Christianity.  

Either it is a father's absolute moral duty to protect his children from, among other things, gang rape, now, in the future and in the past, or it is not moral duty today and no father has such an obligation.  Either it is and always has been wrong for a father to have sex with their daughters or it is not.  And if you entertain the idea that it wasn't then, you should not have access to children without court supervision by responsible adults. And that's just a tiny bit of what's wrong with that use of Sodom and Gomorrah and Judges 19 in any argument about morals for anyone. especially faithfully committed, consenting, adult gay men.  

That the idolatry of Scripture has not allowed such questioning of those passages, and similar ones, and their clear identification as morally depraved and of no use to determining how we should live now shows how with just how little seriousness the truth of the Law and the Prophets, do to others what you would have them do to you, is taken.  I think Jesus was speaking with divine authority when he said that, I think that a similar conclusion is attributed to the great exponent of Jewish law, Hillel, should lead to the conclusion that any part of Scripture that contradicts that is false.*  Either the Golden Rule is true for all time as the will of God, as I believe it is, or those parts of Scripture which don't promote that are a refutation of it as eternal Law.  

You put that together with "by their fruits you will know them," as the absolute standard of moral discernment in light of The Law and the Prophets and the entire case against faithful, committed, free and competently entered into gay and Lesbian marriage is demolished.  Even identifying those with the depravity of all-male rape mobs who don't appear to have been gay in Genesis and who were obviously not in Judges with faithful same-sex marriage is bearing false witness, another breach of a very serious Commandment.

I don't think that Scripture can retain that status without that critique AND WITHOUT THOSE CHOICES EXPLICITLY BEING MADE FROM NOW ON.  

I think we are going to have to choose on the basis of those Commandments which passages that were inserted into Scripture by the many, many hands that wrote down and edited and commented and assembled those written Scriptures that come down to us because without making those choices, the truth in them are going to be discredited by not only the presence of those but the evil results of them in history.  The Scriptural arguments for the subjugation and harm of Women, the Scriptures used to oppress, discriminate against and murder LGBTQ+ People, those which were used to establish chattel slavery even in its most evil forms,should be used to identify the false passages of Scripture which should be made infamous for their falseness.  That must be done no matter what the vintage and pedigree of those are because they clearly contradict the real Law and real Prophesy and the real Gospel.  

Clearly no one needs to take any argument that sets up what Lot and the unnamed Levite did as having anything to do with today's marriage equality seriously.   The asshole isn't even presented as having been married to the woman he threw to the wolves to save his own ass, he kept her as a concubine.   I wish those who have argued for marriage equality had gone through those to see just how morally corrupt they are.  Especially Lot and the unnamed Levite who seems to have been a totally asshole as well as a self-indulgent idiot.  I'll bet the reason his concubine fled to her father's house was because the asshole beat her.  Though, of course, that wouldn't have made it into the story.  

* In preparing this, I tried to find out how reliable the provenance of what Hillel is said to have said is and am left wondering why the same standards that are used in terms of Christian manuscripts aren't used to question the sources for him and the others recorded in the  Pirkei Avot .  

I wonder if anyone has ever wondered if the attribution of the negative statement of the Golden Rule to Hillel was due to it having been said earlier in the Christian Gospels.  I wouldn't be surprised if a great Rabbi had come to that conclusion, I'm not questioning its authenticity but I have read it claimed that the Gospel writers were cribbing Hillel in that attribution of the positive statement of The Golden Rule to Jesus, on those grounds.  I think fairness demands that the rules that are habitually applied to Christian sources as a means of debunking those must be applied to all other texts with a similar and, sometimes, even less well documented provenance.  That includes those which are pagan and secular (just how anachronistic is that category for that time?) as well as those which are religious.  

I think the mess that Scripture and its commentary are leaves us with no alternative but to choose what we believe is authoritative and what we are forced to reject on the basis of what we believe to be the Truth of God. I think that's how Scripture has always been used in practice, no matter what lip-service is paid to the daffy notion that it is a consistent and entirely true whole.