Right wing starlet Erick Erickson likes to wax poetic about how Jesus’ parable about the good Samaritan wasn’t insisting people help those in need, it was about helping only other Christians in need. There was some Bible code or some shit that went into explaining how that worked.
That’s a lot of mental gymnastics, given that Jesus’ selection of a Samaritan was specifically made because Jews and Samaritans loathed one another as a rule. The point was to treat everyone as your neighbor, not just those who were part of your in-group. It takes some incredible brain damage to argue “actually, it means the exact polar opposite of its plain meaning.”
Well, you see, the eye of the needle was really a gate on one side of Jerusalem, so if you wanted to get into that gate with your camel fully loaded with your trade goods and gold coin, you were probably going to need to get down and lead it by hand and therefore humble yourself before God as you brought your wealth into the city. Only some kind of Commie bastard would suggest that there was something literal about that story in the Bible. Duh!
What. Literally the entire point of it was that the good person helped a stranger who was different when the people who weren’t different and had an expectation and responsibility to help. That’s not interpretation anymore than deciding it’s likely to rain tomorrow is interpretation of a weather report calling for rain on Tuesday.
So many Christians jump through hoops to ignore the explicit message. But these are the people who fetishize guns and excuse police murder while putting the words “thou shalt not kill” on government buildings
Right wing starlet Erick Erickson likes to wax poetic about how Jesus’ parable about the good Samaritan wasn’t insisting people help those in need, it was about helping only other Christians in need. There was some Bible code or some shit that went into explaining how that worked.
That’s a lot of mental gymnastics, given that Jesus’ selection of a Samaritan was specifically made because Jews and Samaritans loathed one another as a rule. The point was to treat everyone as your neighbor, not just those who were part of your in-group. It takes some incredible brain damage to argue “actually, it means the exact polar opposite of its plain meaning.”
Well, you see, the eye of the needle was really a gate on one side of Jerusalem, so if you wanted to get into that gate with your camel fully loaded with your trade goods and gold coin, you were probably going to need to get down and lead it by hand and therefore humble yourself before God as you brought your wealth into the city. Only some kind of Commie bastard would suggest that there was something literal about that story in the Bible. Duh!
What. Literally the entire point of it was that the good person helped a stranger who was different when the people who weren’t different and had an expectation and responsibility to help. That’s not interpretation anymore than deciding it’s likely to rain tomorrow is interpretation of a weather report calling for rain on Tuesday.
So many Christians jump through hoops to ignore the explicit message. But these are the people who fetishize guns and excuse police murder while putting the words “thou shalt not kill” on government buildings