Those Anti-Gay , Shrimp-Eating Fundies and their Shrimp-Eating.

[richardf8]

Friends,

I have seen, in a number of places ranging from LJ entries, to Letters to The Editor, to comic strips, attempts to label homophobic Christians hypocritical for citing Leviticus 18:22 as a proof-text against same sex marriage while gleefully washing their bacon-wrapped shrimp down with their ham and lobster milkshakes.

While this seems like a nice "Gotcha!" the truth is that their non-compliance with the dietary laws is not inconsistent with Christian Scripture. Acts 10:9-16 narrates a vision in which Peter is shown all kinds of non-kosher animals and told, by God, to "Kill and Eat." When he protests, God chides him saying "Do not call anything that I have made impure." This passage pretty much releases Christians from any observance of the Dietary Laws.

Thus, their pork-eating does not constitute a reasonable basis for an accusation of hypocrisy.

However, given that most of these flaming homophobes are on board for the whole Republican agenda, including the cutting of taxes at the expense of social programs, we need only look ahead to chapter 19 to find a far more serious hypocrisy.

Leviticus 19:9-10 instructs us not to harvest our entire crops, but to leave some behind for the poor, the widow and the orphan. In modern terms, what this means is that we are not free to keep every last penny we earn, some must be held out for the benefit of the poor. The "I've got mine, Jack, get your hands off of my stack" mentality of the same people who are content to drive Leviticus 18:22 into the ground, flies right in the face of Leviticus 19:9-10.

So they ARE in fact hypocrites. But not because they eat shrimp.

Comments

[kevinjdog.livejournal.com]

As for 18:22, you can find my understanding of what the obsession with that is all about right here.

There was an age when reproduction was something the world desperately needed, considering that infant mortality was about 80% guaranteed. Since a dead baby can't harvest crops or help fight encroaching enemies, making more babies would raise the probability of a higher population. Therefore, Mister, if you even think about wasting precious seminal fluids on Brian (picking a Monty Python Irish-Jewish name) instead of on Rachael, your ass is grass.

We really can't comprehend the sort of society that had to stay together and protect its existence so heavily in order to survive. It was a different world than today. There is no permanent Nicene council out creating Torah/Tanakh/New Testament 3.0 to give us precious updates to our code of life, so we have different people picking and choosing passages, even though religious leaders will tell you that every single contradictory passage is valid. (Crap, my Grandmother, a devout Baptist, would always tell me you don't even have to go two chapters into Genesis to find glaring contradictions.)

The Bible is not, by itself, a growth-oriented religious model. Like any code or set of postulates, it's a potential starting point. The trouble with orthodoxy of any kind is that it insists that it be the ending point as well, and that is when progressive thought and adaptation for our survival will completely die out.

[richardf8]

The Bible is not, by itself, a growth-oriented religious model. Like any code or set of postulates, it's a potential starting point. The trouble with orthodoxy of any kind is that it insists that it be the ending point as well, and that is when progressive thought and adaptation for our survival will completely die out.

This is totally and completely on the money. The problem with fundamentalism is that it would rather regress than adapt. It is afflicted by a false nostalgia for goodle days that never existed.

There is no permanent Nicene council out creating Torah/Tanakh/New Testament 3.0 to give us precious updates to our code of life

At least within Judaism this is not the case. Tanakh (which includes Torah) is followed by the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Shulchan Oruch, right into the contemporary age with Responsa literature from the various movements. So the Jewish tradition is constantly getting "service packs," to continue your software versioning analogy.

so we have different people picking and choosing passages, even though religious leaders will tell you that every single contradictory passage is valid.

Proof-texting is simply bad exgesis. Because of these contradictions a more gestalt approach is necessary to arrive at reasonable conclusions. The bible, despite what evangelical fundamentalists like to think, is NOT a step by step guide to daily living. Indeed, it is more of a koan by virtue of those contradictions, and one is intended, I think, to struggle with the text. It results in varied readings, and forces one to look for overall precepts instead of niggling details. In Jewish tradition, the tension between the "letter of the law" reading and the "overall precept" is almost always resolved in favor of the overall precept.

Christian movements, instead of asking what the text is trying to say, rather start out with a thesis they wish to demonstrate, and support it with whot proof-texts they can find. So it is with doctrines like the trinity, transubstantiation, opposition to abortion, and so on. This process of imposing meaning on the text rather than deriving meaning from it is called "isogesis."