Oddbean

I assure you, women did not write this: Deuteronomy 22:13-2 Marriage Violations 13 If a man takes a wife and, after sleeping with her, dislikes her 14 and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, “I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,” 15 then the young woman’s father and mother shall bring to the town elders at the gate proof that she was a virgin. 16 Her father will say to the elders, “I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. 17 Now he has slandered her and said, ‘I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.’ But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, 18 and the elders shall take the man and punish him. 19 They shall fine him a hundred shekels[a] of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives. **20 If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, 21 she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you.**

Old Testament Bible passages only have shock value when presented to someone who hasn't been raised up reading them and hearing them interpreted in light of Christ fulfilling the Law. This is what I mean. Your lack of empathy for women with an entirely different worldview, upbringing, and real religious devotion is painful. Religious women have agency. We are saved in our own right.

Also unfair criticism, as the emphasis was clearly on exonerating the woman for false accusations, rather than letting her husband get away with a lie about her, as formerly, under the pagans. A lot of OT law was an improvement upon what had existed before, even if it seems extreme to us.

Your presuppositions are showing. No, women did not write that, nor did mere men. You're quoting the Word of God, and doing it through the anachronistic lens of postmodernist and neo-Marxist power dynamic analysis. I have a lot of respect for what you write and share freely with us in your realm of expertise. I have benefitted personally and am grateful. But this is clearly an area that you are still parroting the normie takes of faithless so-called academics In economics, most of academia is Keynesian, but (as a fellow bitcoiner, I assume) we know that the 'Austrians' really have the signal. There is an analgous situation in theology. Most of the seminaries today abandoned the supernatural for the modernist a hundred years ago (look into the modernist-fundamentalist controversy). Entertain, for the sake of argument, the idea that there is a God, and that what you quoted really is his word. What would be the logical conclusions of that presupposition? What would have to happen to the Foucauldian, "I want to destroy logocentrism in all its forms" way of reading a text (or even a culture)? What would it mean for your life if this is true? What would you gain? What woul it cost? Would you have a vested interest in this being true or not true that may prevent your willingness to accept it as true? With respect.

The point I was trying to make with the economics analogy is that rejecting Christianity because all one knows of it comes from modernists is like rejecting all economics because all one knows of it comes from Keynesians. In both disciplines, there is a faithful remnant, and it's to them you should turn for what is truly taught--no to those who have explicitly rejected its core teachings. Like Mencken did.

Keynesians like modernists aren't all wrong, they're just retarded/handicapped for excluding vast parts of the cumulative sum of knowledge in their respective fields for the most recent bits. It would be like quantum physicists rejecting Einsteins (provable) theory of relativity that came prior, rather than trying to unify the two ideologies, as they've spent the late 20th century to the present working towards