Texas Democrat leaves Republicans speechless when he uses the Bible against them

nao@sh.itjust.works to politics @lemmy.world – 715 points – Watch This Texas Democrat Leave Republicans Speechless When He Uses The Bible Against Them
news.yahoo.com

Texas State Rep. James Talarico using biblical scripture to tear down conservative Christian arguments

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This is why it's really handy to be well versed in the Bible -- it's very easy to throw their shit right back in their face. Know their bible better than they do.

Matthew 5:17-9 says that all old testament laws still apply

Matthew 6:5 says not to pray in public or flaunt your religion.

Matthew 19:24 says that no Christian should have any disposable income.

Timothy 2:12 says that Christian women may not proselytize

Peter 2:18 says The Christ himself condones slavery

Psalm 137:9 says that those who kill babies in the name of the Lord are glorified for they are exterminating the next generation of "Our Enemies"

There are a ton more. I'll add as I remember them.

Numbers 5:11-31 is the only time that the entirety of The Bible or The Apocrypha even mention abortion. Those verses tell you how to perform an abortion. (In possibly the worst way, and for the worst reasons imaginable) This literally makes The Bible Pro-Choice.

I'm intentionally ignoring the incest and lots of logical holes in the Old Testament as much as I can, because I want to poke holes in what these modern "Christians" believe.

Edit 3: Oh! Oh! This shit contains so many verses to deploy against evangelicals. http://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/

I'm sure the answer would be: "Yeah but they couldn't have foreseen how the modern world works 2000 years ago. We need to adapt to the ti... Hang on did you say we can have slaves again?"

How could they have know that 250 years later, we’d have miniature Gatling guns that fit in a pocket and can be reloaded in seconds when they wrote the second amendment.

So their all-powerful, all-seeing god couldn't foresee the future when putting down his official laws?

From the article I'm not seeing what part of the bible they actually used against them. What did I miss?

Matthew 6:5-6 "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

It's the foundation of his argument that Christians shouldn't impose religion upon others but should lead by example.

As a Christian, I agree with this idea and I also find the proposed law rather silly because it's the same kind of virtue signaling that conservatives love to accuse liberals of.

What I don't understand is why the article considers this "standing up for LGBT+ rights". Can anyone help me with that?

In the video, he talks about why he considers the bill antithetical to Christian beliefs and quotes Mathew 6:5 to bring his point home.

More knowledge is always a good thing but religious texts can and are twisted to suit an agenda all the time. We can't go back and ask the authors for clarification so we're left arguing about what a person believes the text means.

That just leads to another debate of who wrote the damn thing.

Hint: It wasn't God or Jesus, but it won't stop them from guessing those two first.

The earliest text in the New Testament was written around 50 years after Christ's death. There's no definitive account of his life because the accounts in the gospels are sometimes contradictory. It's messy, almost like it was written by a bunch of people recounting stories they heard rather than it being the literal word of God.

But they (the right) usually quote it by removing all context and by only using snippets of the text so there's no interpretation required, in which case it's very easy to retort by using the same tactic or by quoting the whole passage.

Heck, just telling them that "it's written all over the place in the Bible that only God has the ability to judge" takes care of most of their message.

True, but if you bring facts, logic, and citations to a discussion about belief and faith then all it takes is, "that's not the interpretation I choose to believe" to end the conversation.

Unfortunately, unless you also follow the Bible to a larger degree than they do, it makes you just as much of a hypocrite.

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They never have an answer when someone uses the book they’ve never actually read against them. All she could do was stand there and stutter.

Gotta love when an articpe describes something in the title, and then doesn't actually put the details of that thing in the article. The only mention of the bible in the article is "After quoting from the bible, the Democratic lawmaker said..."

Anyone know what the actual quote was?

Matthew 6:5 about praying in secret. Also some references to faith without works is dead and to feed the hungry and clothe the naked in reference to why there is a proposal to put the commandments in classrooms but not to do what Jesus actually calls Christians to do.

It does include the tiktok video of the rebuttal, which is well worth the watch!

What do you call people who don’t follow the Bible?

Answer - Christians

Jesus was a poor, brown skinned, socialist, Middle-Eastern, Jewish, pacifist hippie who advocated for paying taxes, supporting the poor, forgiving criminals, giving your money away to charity, and practicing nonviolence all while hanging out with a bunch of other men and prostitutes.

If the second coming happened today Christians would crucify him again before the weekend was over.

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What do you call people who have actually read the Bible?

Atheists.

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I thought republican Christians did not believe in the bible any more. It's too woke

They're fine with the Old Testament, it's got plenty of treachery, rape, slavery and fraud cheered on by God, mixed in with smiting and destroying things that disagree with you.

They have a problem with the teachings of Christ in the New Testament, which is all a bit too "someone was different to me so I made friends with them and we ate together".

rape, slavery

It draws an odd moral line here where a virgin prisoner of war can basically be raped for the rest of her life as a "wife" but the act of doing so makes it so the "husband" cannot sell her into slavery after leaving her.

I think the best way of summing up biblical ethics is "there's animal rights but women are the animals"

The new testament and old testament "god" are so different that sometimes I wonder if the new testament is 5% Jesus^1 hijacking an old religion to try and make something good out of it, and 95% his followers trying to make sense and reconcile what Jesus taught with the old testament.

^1 afaik it's fairly well established that Jesus - or someone like him - existed, the big question is if they were actually a deity or not.

I think there's definitely something in your line of thinking. In modern terms, there's a lot retconning in the New Testament to make the books add up as a series. They spend the whole "intro" persuading you it follows a direct lineage over ~2000 years.

There's some pretty wild "fan theories". Some say it's correcting the "errors", "corruption of language over time" or "devil influence" of the older book, others say OT "YHWH" is not NT "God almighty", but an unrelated angry local God.

They all claim "Newest is truest" - even the more controversial "later sequels".

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A lot of Catholics in my hometown don't believe the Pope is Christian anymore.

To be fair, the Bible says nothing about having to follow the pope in order to get to heaven.

In fact, one could even argue that Jesus would not have approved of such an institution, because in Matthew 23:9, he explicitly says this:

Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven.

Meanwhile, the verse that the Catholic church bases the legitimacy of the papacy on (Matthew 16:18) is far more vague:

And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.

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The only video I could find - that wasn't tiktok or some other garbage.

Just so you and everyone else is aware. In the link you posted, everything after the question mark is a tracking id, using the link without that part of the link works perfectly fine and reduces traceability.

I loved how small she sounded at the end of questioning by the first guy. Then the chud in the back-right corner has to jump on and say "oh since Jesus is God, he wrote the ten commandments, don't you just feel the luuuv in them" and totally tried to give her back face after the questioning. But as the first rep said, the bill, as it's written, is arrogant and idolatrous. But she just wants to "keep it clean", and ignore every other piece of history that shows the coalition that formed to create the US.

That was awesome. I'm not anti Christian, I'm very pro even field though. The call out of hypocracy in a way that was from the source was art.

Sadly it usually doesn't work. These "Christian" Republicans wouldn't have any faith if they didn't have bad faith. They don't care what the book they supposedly follow says. They just use it as a weapon for those who supposedly believe it but have never read it for themselves.

Don't y'all know it doesn't count if it happens in the new testament

Isn't Jesus from the new testament?

That is what he is saying. To them Jesus doesn’t count. He’s much too nice to others. Really, they don’t care about the Bible except as a tool to abuse others so the argument in the article will not have any influence on christofacist thinking.

I recently read an article where pastors/priests are having this issue. They are quoting Jesus Christ and then being told by MAGA followers that they are spouting "woke liberal propaganda."

Now, you don't have to follow what Jesus said to do. I'm not Christian and so don't model my life around his teachings. But if you claim to "follow Jesus," but then want to reject what Jesus said to do because it's "too woke," then maybe you should get a different religion!

Funny thing is, if you take the bible and ignore the new testament, isn't that effectively Judaism?

I'm Jewish and I believe so. Of course, they don't follow those rules either. They want to follow a bunch of rules that they imagine are in the Bible and they won't let a little thing like those rules not being in there get in their way!

Ah, I misunderstood then. I keep hearing Americans praise Jesus, only to turn around and do everything Jesus told people not to do...

But yeah it totally makes sense when you only consider these people who only use the Bible as a tool.

Junk links all over the article, but none leading to the video they talk about? Journalism is dead.

Ahh yes I too remember the well known and oft quoted bible passage “and then the Lord said unto him, ‘place a picture of your dingus on the wall in every room’ and then after he had said it, he laughed unto himself, saying ‘hehe I wonder if they’ll actually do it’ “

The only argument in favor if this bill seems to be that the Ten Commandments were taught in our nation's earliest schools...

Imagine all the crazy things that were taught in 18th & 19th century schools. It's just a stupid argument on its face.