I ran across a comment a little while ago that, though it has its heart in the right place gets its facts just about entirely wrong. The comment is:
The moron [Trump] and accomplices [Sessions, Kirstjen Nielsen, John Kelly (whose idea it seems to have been), etc.] seem to have dropped the Beatitudes from their 'bible', making Leviticus great again.
Well, Leviticus does contain some harsh laws, some of them meant for the priestly class that have been extended to anyone and some which have been entirely misrepresented for centuries. But it doesn't say what the comment claims it did in regard to Trump's putting children into horrific, cold concentration camps. It says:
When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
Leviticus: 33-34
Leviticus also says:
You shall have one law for the alien and for the citizen: for I am the Lord your God.
24:22
and:
When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
19: 9-10
In the regulations in The Law saying to leave crops in the field for the poor and alien to glean, what farmers were required to leave were the major cash crops, grain, olives for oil and grapes for wine. It wasn't a small thing they were told to share with the poor. It wasn't a tithe of mint and cumin. Nothing could be farther from the modern Western industrial-capitalist model of thought or behavior.
There are a large number of Old Testament texts commanding that the alien, the stranger, the sojourner, all be treated with justice. The commands are as strong as the many other commands in Leviticus and the rest of the Old Testament to treat mercifully and kindly and, most of all, justly with widows and orphans. Children without parents with them, in other words.
No, everything about this Trump-fascist deliberate cruelty overseen by the repulsive Sessions and Nielsen their ICE ICE "defense eschalon" is forbidden in the strongest terms in Leviticus, what it is is pure American racism and the natural modern Republican love of cruelty to poor, dark-skinned, powerless people. Though there are Mammonists posing as Christians who have websites to try to deny that's what the Bible says, as it also points out and gives examples of, Satan will distort scripture for evil purposes.
Ah. The old "the Bible is a fount of wisdom except for the inconvenient parts that obviously aren't" dodge.
ReplyDeleteWell, I wouldn't call it "inconvenience" I'd call it the parts that are the results of the conditions the people who wrote the various books and verses lived in, their cultural milieu and the parts that aren't relevant and don't answer the way things are now. Especially after Jesus revolutionized and made The Law international instead of a national code.
DeleteYou know, Dopey, it's under the "enlightenment" Constitution that Trump and Sessions are getting away with what they're doing, that document so beloved of "secular" lefties. I wonder if those atheist organizations the existence of which I had to inform you of the other day had had much to say against them, I could probably find hundreds and thousands of religious people, clergy, theologians, etc. who pointed out the immorality of them.
I could locate the passages in Darwin that Sessions could have accurately pointed to in support of expelling them, only Darwin was more in favor of going places and killing people and stealing their land, the kind of imperialism that created the conditions that created especially the conditions in Central America that are leading to so many people having to flee their countries. Darwin was an anti-vaxxer, too. Or at least when it came to poor people.
Wisdom, it turns out, is complex and subject to understanding and interpretation, tasks apparently too difficult for some.
ReplyDeleteThe trouble is some officially hip person would have to tell him what to think and the officially hip tend to be as moronic as he is.
DeleteAh. The old "let's bring up Darwin in a discussion of crap in the Bible" dodge.
ReplyDelete:-)
I only did that because I know how emotionally dependent on your phony image of ol' Chuck you are and because he would probably be entirely in favor of what Sessions and Trump have done. He was really, really big on shafting the poor, explicitly whining that the homicidally inadequate aid given to Britain's poor kept too many of them alive, especially at the ages of those who Sessions and Trump are locking in concentration camps to send them away to be killed in their native countries. If it wasn't in the Darwin-Wedgewood family tradition, his positions were always in favor of the rich and always about as sincerely held as any idealism that might come out of the lying mouth and empty head of Ivanka Trump. Another Trump you have something in common with.
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