Recommending Me Articles Which Turn Out To Be Apologetics P****s Me Off!

[fatpie42]

Okay, I've had a bad day of apologetics recommendations. (Well, just two actually, but anyway.) I don't seek this stuff out, but in two separate places it's been recommended to me and so I'm being actively encouraged to get pi***d off.

Comments

[cyranothe2nd]

What's so hard about saying, "Women were property back then and the Bible treats them like property. We know better now." All these aplogetical backflips are required only if one wants to hold onto inerrancy (which, I know, is a really hard pill to swallow).

Don't be lazy

[ext_313522]

It's pointless to say "what's so hard about saying..." and then offering a solution that requires less thinking, less examination of the evidence, and deliberately casts a person and their views in a negative light. This is mental laziness. We don't normally live this way. For example, imagine if I said "Gravity? Don't give me gravity. What's so hard about saying that the magic pixies make things fall, and that is that? All these physics backflips are required only if one wants to hold onto science."

How about this, Cyranothe2nd: Where evidence is available to be examined, we examine it instead of dismissing the whole scenario as mentally arduous so that we don't have to concede a single point?

Re: Don't be lazy

[fatpie42]

Look at the evidence?

Any decent historian will accept that in those Biblical times women were treated as property, and not just by the Israelites. That's just how things were.

Maybe you are right to say Cyrano is slightly misrepresenting things though. After all, not everyone seems to know better now... :P

Re: Don't be lazy

[cyranothe2nd]

One ting: One of those examples are true and one is not. Gravity exists. Women used to be treated like property. Complicating that with the social and biological contingencies behind such a belief is all well and good (and ought to happen imo) but the statement itself is factual. The apologetical backflips are required when one attempts to be intellectually lazy and hold onto a version of Biblical inerracy that is just not tenable, for many reasons. If anything, *that* is the solution that requires less thinking and less examination of the evidence.

[virginia_fell]

The discussion in talk_religion was so full of rape apologism and misogyny that I actually found it a little frightening and difficult to read.

Part of me wants to join that community to try and back you up, and the other part of me is unsure I'd be able to have a civil and productive conversation with people who argue that there's basically no way anybody can ever know if a woman has been raped if nobody heard her scream. The level of sheer skin-crawling horror gets worse and worse the longer I think about the implications of people thinking about rape accusations this way.

[fatpie42]

I'm biased towards women's rights apparently.

http://community.livejournal.com/talk_religion/9884.html?thread=186524#t186524

Probably more of a complement than I deserve. ;)

[virginia_fell]

Yeah, well. Fuck that person for trying to derail the conversation by turning accusations of rape into something men have more reason to be afraid of than women have to be afraid of rape. Men don't have to fucking live their entire lives scheduling every waking moment around reducing the likelihood that they'll be accused of rape. I can't even leave my apartment and get in my car without figuring out the safest way to do it, because if I so much as have earbuds in while I walk across the parking lot, I'll be blamed for what comes next.

So much rage. So fucking appalling. I really hope that no actual victims of assault are still following that conversation, because the sheer amount of rape apologism in there is really really disturbing.

I joined, so tag me to come back you up next time there's some serious dehumanizing of women occurring. But my God. This conversation has sort of gone past the point where I can stomach interacting with that callous, misogynist, ignorant, bullshit-spewing asshat.