Don’t Prooftext, Even on Monday

Last updated on: April 4, 2016 at 8:22 am by Anne Kennedy

Don’t Prooftext, Even on Monday 2016-04-04T08:22:48-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I shouldn’t exactly be lying here messing around on the internet because I have a rather disagreeable doctor’s appointment in a short moment and then Matt has to mess about with our taxes, and there are a lot of other unpleasantnesses to be going on with because of having shoved them off in the interest of having something like a rest last week. Moreover, I’ve injured myself shoving furniture around, so I have a sore arm and hurt pride accompanying me everywhere. It’s going to be that sort of day.

To top it off, I came across this foolishness somewhere or other. See, you dumb Christians, you haven’t even read your own bible. You should go climb in a hole for being such dummies. I shouldn’t let this kind of stuff needle me, but on a day like today, when my personal defenses are no where to be found, it is impossible for me to let it roll of my back and cheerfully carry on serving the Lord. As I’ve said before, I’m not God am I.

The link, if you still haven’t clicked on it, is 20 bible “quotes”–um…does the author of this little inanity mean “verses”? Surely she means “verses”–that prove that Jesus was a political liberal, you dumb Christian. I know! Who knew! All these hundreds of years of studying the life and “quotes” of Jesus, thinking that we knew what on earth, and in heaven, he was talking about, and that we understood him, only to be proved wrong by someone on the Internet. Thank goodness for Facebook, that’s all I have to say, or I should never have been properly corrected.

Our gentle author begins by defining the word “Christian” and to do this she goes to Dictionary.com. [Its ok to smile a wry smile here because that is pretty funny.] Guess what dummy Christian, a “Christian” is someone who follows the “teachings” of “Jesus Christ”. I know you didn’t know that either. To show you how wrong and evil you are, our author pulls out the same 20 “quotes” that are always pulled out to bash the people who most love Our Lord. I kid you not, the list includes, “judge not lest ye be judged” and “let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

I think I’m going to spare us all by pulling any “quotes” out from her carefully researched, thoughtful consideration of the life of Jesus and his followers. You’re welcome to go read them if you like, or if you need some early morning Monday outrage to get you moving through the snow.

I would just like to note, blandly, that as much as our author wishes it were so, she can’t have it both ways. You can’t accuse Christians of not being serious, of not knowing their own scriptures, and then misuse those same scriptures yourself. You’re not allowed to “proof text”–that means blindly and wildly pulling those “quotes” out of their context and making them mean something they don’t actually mean. If you want to know what the bible says, you have to read it the way it’s meant to be read, not the way you felt like reading it when you were mad at some people and wanted a justification for voting for Bernie Sanders. Christians rightly get called out for doing this. The basher of the Christian doesn’t get to do it either.

And on that note, I will arise and look for some snow boots, and go to do the things which I ought to do, and none of those things which I ought not to do. Or try to anyway, since, being a dummy Christian, and not God myself, I can only try and never actually succeed.

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