People and cultures have very different ideas about what constitutes abuse of children. Some cultures would consider it abusive not to cut off parts of their children’s genitals.
I don’t feel bound by any part of the system of violent punishments that Jesus rebuked. Especially not one line which wasn’t even from either listing of the Jewish law in the Torah.
OTOH, there is something to be said for actually teaching children to behave. Using a rod to spank children is a failure of patenting, but so is letting your kid run around the restaurant making a mess because you can’t bear to rebuke them.
(And, again: Proverbs is a pre-Christian work that was incorporated by the gentike Christians when they formalized a canon for the Roman empire.)
So how much child beating is necessary for it to not be hating a child? How much/little is abuse?
Beating children is not an effective way to get them to behave. But people didn’t know that (and still don’t) so they thought/think they need to beat good behaviour into their kids.
Do you want to have a real discussion about morality and religious teaching, or are you just in search of an gotcha quote because you feel the need to reinforce your theocratic nihilism by arguing with a theist on the internet?
I think a good pointer when you want to approach religion from a sane perspective is to treat it as primitive tech. For example, modern people know that you need to separate science from politics from law from history from psychology etc… and have a different system for each. But pre-modern people didn’t necessarily know that, so religious doctrine had to serve several, sometimes incompatible purposes. You look at it and it’s like a shovel that has a hammer on it and part of the hammer can be used as a screwdriver. It makes no sense but at the same time it kinda does and it sure has dug a lot of holes and tightened a lot of screws over millennia.
A comparison of religion to legal systems is both only a sensible comparison to the three Abrahamic religions and incredibly useful for those three. (Other religions such as Buddhism are more starkly personal).
Essentially no Christian, Muslim, or Jew in any century takes the common scripture and reads it like an RPG manual for the game of life. Either they’re laypersons who rely upon the guidance of experts, or they’re the experts and they approach it with the advantage and bias of the years of study it took to become experts. And if those experts are wrong, there is always some authority to correct and rebuke their interpretation.
Ignoring the Protestant schism for a moment, this is exactly how the USA’s legal system works. The body of written law and judicial interpretation are extremely complex and nobody relies only on the plain text of the law when they want to figure out how it affects them. Even the crazy sovereign citizens mostly rely on someone else’s interpretation.
(And “sane” isn’t really a helpful label here. It encourages atheists to think about Christians as if the latter are entirely unpredictable and unreasonable, when it’s much more useful to think of us as mostly rational people who have a philosophical difference with you. More akin to the leftist/progressive/liberal/socialist discussion you can see on Lemmy than a MAGA/non-MAGA encounter.)
People and cultures have very different ideas about what constitutes abuse of children. Some cultures would consider it abusive not to cut off parts of their children’s genitals.
What’s your relationship with proverbs 13:24?
I don’t feel bound by any part of the system of violent punishments that Jesus rebuked. Especially not one line which wasn’t even from either listing of the Jewish law in the Torah.
OTOH, there is something to be said for actually teaching children to behave. Using a rod to spank children is a failure of patenting, but so is letting your kid run around the restaurant making a mess because you can’t bear to rebuke them.
(And, again: Proverbs is a pre-Christian work that was incorporated by the gentike Christians when they formalized a canon for the Roman empire.)
So how much child beating is necessary for it to not be hating a child? How much/little is abuse?
Beating children is not an effective way to get them to behave. But people didn’t know that (and still don’t) so they thought/think they need to beat good behaviour into their kids.
Do you want to have a real discussion about morality and religious teaching, or are you just in search of an gotcha quote because you feel the need to reinforce your theocratic nihilism by arguing with a theist on the internet?
I mean I guess you got me, I was being a dick.
I am genuinely interested, but I wasn’t acting like it, I was being needlessly provocative.
I’ve been learning a lot about Christian history but I’m frustrated because it (Christianity) doesn’t really make sense.
I think a good pointer when you want to approach religion from a sane perspective is to treat it as primitive tech. For example, modern people know that you need to separate science from politics from law from history from psychology etc… and have a different system for each. But pre-modern people didn’t necessarily know that, so religious doctrine had to serve several, sometimes incompatible purposes. You look at it and it’s like a shovel that has a hammer on it and part of the hammer can be used as a screwdriver. It makes no sense but at the same time it kinda does and it sure has dug a lot of holes and tightened a lot of screws over millennia.
A comparison of religion to legal systems is both only a sensible comparison to the three Abrahamic religions and incredibly useful for those three. (Other religions such as Buddhism are more starkly personal).
Essentially no Christian, Muslim, or Jew in any century takes the common scripture and reads it like an RPG manual for the game of life. Either they’re laypersons who rely upon the guidance of experts, or they’re the experts and they approach it with the advantage and bias of the years of study it took to become experts. And if those experts are wrong, there is always some authority to correct and rebuke their interpretation.
Ignoring the Protestant schism for a moment, this is exactly how the USA’s legal system works. The body of written law and judicial interpretation are extremely complex and nobody relies only on the plain text of the law when they want to figure out how it affects them. Even the crazy sovereign citizens mostly rely on someone else’s interpretation.
(And “sane” isn’t really a helpful label here. It encourages atheists to think about Christians as if the latter are entirely unpredictable and unreasonable, when it’s much more useful to think of us as mostly rational people who have a philosophical difference with you. More akin to the leftist/progressive/liberal/socialist discussion you can see on Lemmy than a MAGA/non-MAGA encounter.)