The malnourished and badly bruised son of a parenting advice YouTuber politely asks a neighbor to take him to the nearest police station in newly released video from the day his mother and her business partner were arrested on child abuse charges in southern Utah.
The 12-year-old son of Ruby Franke, a mother of six who dispensed advice to millions via a popular YouTube channel, had escaped through a window and approached several nearby homes until someone answered the door, according to documents released Friday by the Washington County Attorney’s office.
Crime scene photos, body camera video and interrogation tapes were released a month after Franke and business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a mental health counselor, were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. A police investigation determined religious extremism motivated the women to inflict horrific abuse on Franke’s children, Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke announced Friday.
“The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the children how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies,” Clarke said.
So you’re claiming that there is a context where beating children to death with rocks is a good thing? As a humanist, I’m glad I don’t have to make desperate excuses for those kinds of doctrines. Are you suggesting that the Old Testament is not the word of your god? Because if so, we would agree.
The Old Testament isn’t just a historical record for your religion. It is the moral foundation upon which your entire belief system is based. If the old Testament is a weak, rotten, crumbling, amoral structure, then all of Christendom never had legs to stand upon.
And it is.
Didn’t say it was a good thing. Description, not prescription. King David was angry, generally this falls under “imprecatory psalms”. Basically nobody in the Bible was perfect apart from Jesus which is the whole point. Selfish laws are given and screwed up things happen. Saying the Old Testament is a literal word of God is unfortunately an oversimplification which even some Christians don’t pay too much attention to as they should. It’s a historical record of God’s people. Sure there are good lessons and things to learn in there, and it demonstrates why we needed Jesus. But basically everyone has some form of shortcoming apart from Jesus. It’s there for honesty (criteria of embarrassment) rather than for flat out glorification.
Christianity is hinged primarily on the Life, death and most importantly - resurrection of Jesus Christ. When God became incarnate as a man and lived the perfect life to die a death we all deserved.
Then the word of your god is imperfect. Especially so for corrupting the moral behavior of humanity for some 4000 years. Had your scriptures condemned slavery, genocide, child sacrifice, torture, rape, and war from the beginning, your religion could hold the high ground. But it condoned it instead, just like all the other religions. Just like the bloodthirsty kings and greedy priests who made it up in the first place to justify their lusts. Just like Christians have always used it to oppress others and enrich themselves.
Seriously though, you ought to read your Bible. And while you do, I dare you to ponder these questions:
“How would I know whether this is the word of God, or if Satan wrote it pretending to be God? If Satan wrote it, how could it be any worse? If God wrote it, why isn’t it any better?”
You basically just skipped over what I said, because the Bible is not literally the word of God. The old testament was the compilation of scriptures that the second temple Jews used in the time of Jesus that Jesus mentioned, and the New Testament were all written first generation/apostolic accounts of Jesus and theology. So of course there’s going to be descriptions of evil, compromises made with evil to fulfill the greater picture, concessions, etc. Even Jesus made this clear about Old Testament law:
Matthew 19:8 ESV He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.
So when it came to laws regarding Israel, they had to have laws to prevent immorality from leaking in and also have laws about keeping slaves as taking slaves was normal in that society. But it is worth mentioning that the slaves were treated better in comparison. Israel could barely behave with these concessions nevermind without. And in the grand scheme of things, you’re forgetting this is a finite life compared with infinity.
Heck. People nowadays cannot even obey Jesus’ “do not divorce your wife” law. We still need framework to compromise with that.
I’m glad you agree that it literally is not the word of god. But it is a book which condones all those things I listed before, which means that it also is not a book of morality or wisdom. Any book which says that it’s ok to kill, enslave, and rape children, or to beat people to death with rocks for who they love may, indeed must, be completely distrusted in every way by a modern reader. At best it is a collection of unreliable historical texts by ignorant, backward, corrupt leaders of an ancient world.
But that leaves you with the problem of believing that these people got it right when it comes to the existence of the god you worship today. It further leaves you with the problem of the history of your religion being one of ruthless adherence to the worst teachings of the Old Testament. Whereas the modern interpretation of a kind, gentle, loving Christianity is a totally modern fiction meant to erase the crimes of European colonialism.
I’m astounded that you’d try to convince anyone that slavery is something you can handwave away. The fact that your religion ever condoned it ought to be considered proof that you’ve been tricked into devil worship the whole time.