The Quran is not anti-banking per say. It is anti interests, anti predatory and scamming businesses and anti crime financing, which the Torah and the Bible are too. Problem is for Islamic banks it is practically impossible to participate in the global finance system without also being exposed to interest.
For Jews eventually the discourse shifted that they first allowed seeking interests from non Jews and eventually from everyone, despite the Torah being clear about it.
The sinful business practices of the time were one of the main things Jesus challenged according to the Bible, but Christianity has always been very flexible with interpreting the life and teachings of Jesus.
"Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you."
Most people asking these questions were raised by one or more christians. The failure of religious organizations to answer to their own ideals is the primary reason people leave a religion.
Example: Christians worshipping somebody as immoral and hateful as trump is driving people away from the religion.
Of course, that's clearly what the word means, but there are a lot of Americans who call themselves Christians, including a large number of preachers who follow Trump and worship money. They are putting young Americans off Christianity.
Are we pretending that Christians actually read, understand, and follow the teachings of the Bible?
They only seem to weaponize whatever part fits their interests and ignore everything else.
They stretch whatever meaning is there to whatever they want it to say, and bludgeon people with it, verbally and legally.
I haven't read the whole thing or anything, but I'm pretty sure that there's like one passage that mentions anything remotely "gay", which, IIRC, says something to the effect of, a man should not lay with another man the way he lays with a woman. Which can mean all kinds of things, including that lesbians are cool, but men being gay isn't. That's just one way to take it. Another could be regarding jamming your dangly bits together, so docking is bad, but everything else is fine.
Then in later passages where the text pretty overtly forbids a thing (such as eating certain foods), or explicitly tells you to do something, such as help the needy, those things get completely ignored.
Modern Christianity is basically a mishmash of "fine, do whatever you want!" And cherry picking verses that should be followed, ignoring the rest.
It's even worse; the passage you cited might be a mistranslation, it uses two different words for "man" in Hebrew and can be interpreted as "A man shall not lie with a boy as he would lie with a woman". So it forbids pedophilia not homosexuality between adults.
Edit: Christianity is a looooong game of telephone where everyone passing along the message has a different agenda.
Yep. All facilitated by the fact that nobody will bother to take the time to learn Hebrew to read the original text, so some guy, perhaps someone named James, goes ahead and translates it whichever way they want to.
I find it funny how depending on the parts you pick, you can assemble almost any ideology. Jesus is amazingly 2 faced. One seconds he's teaching you the importance of treating people with kindness, even your enemies, that any person can forgive another's sins and then another second he's cursing a tree for not bearing fruit out of season or telling his followers kill the people that don't want Jesus to be their king.
The fig tree was a lesson, as Jesus was very fond of parables and "props" in his teaching. Israel is depicted in scripture as a fig tree, so the lesson was that Israel was not prepared for the arrival of the Messiah (which, as foretold, would have had no season) and would face harsh penalties as a result. The lesson was a rebuke of Israel, that through it's own self-determined nature, it had failed to do what it had been commanded.
The second one you mention is a single line from a parable (specifically, The Parable of the Minas) that you have taken out of context.
If that's the intended lesson it fell flat. You're not ready for me right now? Well fuck you, I, the all mighty and mercifully curse you to never have a future again.
And granted, with the last part I'm working with the assumption that Jesus self-inserts him self in the story. After a bit of looking around online only half the people I saw thought it was a self referential story, so I guess the church you attended interpreted it differently. Honestly that's the main problem, that this shit is so cryptic nobody can agree what it actually means.
That’s an understandable sentiment, honestly. I constantly remind people that we - westerners living 2000 years in the future surrounded by magical objects and an utterly alien culture - were never the audience for these stories. As a result, almost all context is lost without a background in the history, language, and culture of the time.
Very little in scripture is mysterious… but modern “Christianity” has a vested interest in obfuscating and hiding the context.
The fig tree story was a scathing rebuke that was readily understood by Jesus followers. The Parable of the Minas is about the Resurrection of the Dead (the topic that incited the story was whether the Kingdom of Heaven was coming immediately). That is, at the end of all things, all those who have died will be raised from the dead and judged. The righteous, who did God’s work and reaped dividends for him, will be rewarded… and those who rebel (actively worked against him) will be annihilated… that is, truly, finally, eternally dead.
Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, but this claim was rejected by Jewish leadership… yet Nicodemus (one of said leaders) visited Jesus under cover of darkness and pressed him further.
Read 16-21 again, remembering who Nicodemus was and that he did not visit openly, but secretly in the darkness, and that his line of questioning was patronizing at best, and bad faith at worst (which Jesus does not let him get away with).
The context here is explicitly It’s about Israelites - but even more specifically Jewish leadership (e.g. the Sanhedrin, of which Nicodemus was a member) rejecting Jesus status and authority as Messiah despite both the evidence and Jesus unambiguous claims.
See also Luke 7, where Nicodemus suggests his peers hear Jesus out, and they essentially reply: “Pfft, nobody from a redneck backwater like Galilee could ever be a prophet.”
Where does he specify that? Because I've read it in context and he never specifies that he's specifically talking about the Sanhedrin, so please don't try this on me.
There are four "official" gospels, seven more "unofficial" books, and somewhere north of 50 different written accounts that survive from the period.
It's helpful to read these as perspectives rather than definitives. Imagine showing up at a funeral and every attendee has his or her own story about the deceased. Just because the stories seem to contradict one another, I would not think that means the individual they're recounting was duplicitous.
Written decades after all eyewitnesses had died as pure propaganda. Luke/Acts was a response to Matthew v Mark war. Mark had vomited all over the James community, Matthew tried to redeem the James community a bit, Luke/Acts tries to put Pauline and James community on equal footing.
Now it's true Paul pushed for charity and tried for a semi-equality in his churches but how much he pushed or how much of that goal was "nice to have" is debatable. It's likely his letters were transcribed by slaves for example.
Basically this is a classic example of ancestor worship. With an added twist that the author was trying to win a political point or two.
My favorite story from the bible is when Jesus storms into a temple and starts whipping the living shit out of everyone as they were counting gold and their riches. Jesus was a god damn socialist hero.
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeeredb at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the named of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.
For sure and not just families. I'm sure nearly every English speaker has heard the story of Egypt and the 10 plagues.
We have to remember, its a choice they made. I mean, they're god. They can do anything right? God could've just teleported the Israelites away. He could've just made the Egyptians temporarily blind or fall asleep for a few months, keeping them alive while doing so. He could've given all the Israelites individual flaming chariots. He could've made flaming rail infrastructure and run a flaming railway service for the Israelites to leave on.
"No, I told you already. Its child murder or nothing, Moses."
You forgot the best part (I’m not sure there is an agreed-upon translation, so I’ll cite oremus randomly). The sentiment is repeated throughought the 10 plagues, but it’s most concise in chapter 10:
Pharaoh hurriedly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘I have sinned against the Lord your God, and against you. Do forgive my sin […]’ […] The Lord changed the wind into a very strong west wind, which lifted the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea; not a single locust was left in all the country of Egypt. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go.
I think this needs a little clarification. The culture war bullshit is real because these laws have real effects, its just all fake in its justification. You pull the mask off the culture war and its just rich people trying to pin their crimes on marginalized groups.
