Quote:
Originally Posted by MarchHare
So what? It's still in the Bible, and millions of Christians around the world draw influence from it. Plus, it's not like that single passage from Ephesians is the only part of the NT with a similar message:
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So I can see where you want this to go, but that wasn't my point in posting the quote.
Religious texts are receptacles for probably the entire spectrum of human longing, virtue, action, thought ... Everything. They are so powerful because for whatever reason they really do sum up what is to be a human bracketed by the eternities of birth and death.
So they interact with culture in a really peculiar way as they both shape and are shaped by it. So yes, the Judeo-Christian scriptures are filled with lots of things that we modern people find repugnant. In a society that is increasingly less Christian, there is a lot less context around the particular passages, and as a result, less reflection. They have effectively become ideologized within the modern polarization between religious conservatism and liberal secularism. So I completely agree that since they are in there, and lots of people believe them, it is pretty silly to argue semantics.
Nevertheless, the verse that I posted from Galatians is very striking, and it certainly fulfills an ethic that we moderns would recognize as cosmopolitan compassion.
The problem, related back to the burkini ban, is about how a garment, which is anti-modern in both its ethic and aesthetic, can become so symbolic of an entire faith and culture.