Ignore the BS in the Bible

We ignore the bullshit in the Bible about race, about slavery.  We ignore the bullshit in the Bible about women.  We ignore the bullshit in the Bible about women should be killed on their wedding nights if they’re not virgins, that parents have a right to murder their disobedient children. 

There is all sorts of crazy bullshit in the Bible that we just ignore, that religious people ignore and we’re going to have to get there for homosexuality.  The Bible got slavery wrong, something as easy and obvious as slavery, as Sam Harris wrote in Letter to a Christian Nation. 

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount couldn’t spare a sub clause to say “don’t own people.”  If the Bible got slavery wrong, something as easy and obvious, a moral outrage, the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong is pretty high. And what religious people have to reconcile themselves to is dropping it, ignoring what the Bible says about gay people the way they ignore what the Bible says about polyester and lobster and figs and shrimp and women.  

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.