Is It Wrong to Stone an Adulterous Wife?

“The Bible says it; that settles it.”

How many times have I heard that statement, or variations on it? It’s used as justification for almost any unpopular or unpleasant stance in Christianity.

“The Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. I don’t hate them. I just can’t accept their sin.”

“The Bible says women are to submit to their husbands and be silent in the church. I’m not a misogynist. It’s just the way God set things up.”

“The Bible says that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. If you don’t accept him, you’re going to hell.”

“The Bible says that a parent who loves a child will beat that child to save his soul. I don’t want to whip my children, but the Bible commands it. I would be a horrible parent if I didn’t obey.”

It’s almost as if Christians think that by pulling out this excuse, they can distance themselves from their own actions and words.

Sometimes I counter with other words that have been attributed to Jesus or God.

“Be submissive to the wife; her love ennobles man, softens his hardened heart, tames the wild beast in him and changes it to a lamb.” (The Life of St. Issa)

“The kingdom of heaven is within you and all around you. Cut a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me.” (The Gospel of Thomas)

“There is no such thing as sin.” (The Gospel of Mary)

“I tell you that the son of man is within you all! Seek him inside; those who search diligently and earnestly shall surely find him.” (The Gospel of Mary)

Those who are familiar with the Bible quickly recognize that my quotes aren’t in the “Bible” as we know it.  And, of course, people react negatively to them when I refer to them, complaining that those aren’t known words of Jesus. And we get down to the real heart of the issue.

Why do we accept the Bible as it is presented to us today?

The 66 books contained in today’s popular Scripture are far from the only books that claim to be gospels or holy texts of Christianity. In fact, there are enough texts that aren’t included to create a whole new Bible! I’ve got the collection sitting on my coffee table.

Historically, the Canon has varied considerably since the first century. The Catholic Canon cannot be traced any earlier than 393 (almost four centuries after Jesus). The Protestant Canon, which further rejects the Apocrypha, is even more recent. And no matter which version of the Canon we’re talking about (for there are many), the inescable fact is that it was chosen by a committee of men who had never even met Jesus.

People try to argue that the non-Canonical books were rejected as frauds which were most likely written by unqualified people. But the true authorship of the Canonical books is equally questionable. We don’t even have a reasonable guess as to who wrote Hebrews, and the four gospels are neither the oldest nor the most credible in authorship. The Gospel of Matthew wasn’t even attributed to Matthew until well into the first century.

Sometimes Canon apologists abandon the fruitless age/authorship line and try to argue that the non-Canonical books were rejected because they contain unorthodox teachings—that for whatever truth they may possess, it’s tainted with errors and lies and is filled with misogyny or questionable morals.

They’re right.

But the Canon that the church accepts contains passages that command the stoning of rape victims and people who break the Sabbath. The Canon that the church accepts contains passages where God commanded the slaughter of infants. The Canon that the church accepts contains passages that blame women for the entire fall and demands that they redeem themselves through the pain of childbirth.

Authorship and credibility has always been a crapshoot. At least before the Canon was set, Christians were forced to use their brains in determining what to accept and reject.

“But once you start questioning the inerrancy of the Bible, then how do you know which parts to accept?”

I don’t—if by “accept” you mean “don’t question.”

So where am I going with this? Before I finish out my rampage against the Bible, let’s take a tiny little tangent—a story.

Once upon a time there was a man who wanted to see what humans were capable of doing. He came up with a way to test their abilities by setting up a teacher/student scenario, assigning one volunteer as the teacher and one as the student. Teachers were responsible for giving their students a simple test. If the students failed the test, the teachers were told to hurt the students to help them learn from their mistakes faster. It started out with mild pain, but with each mistake, the pain was supposed to get worse.

As the teaching commenced and the punishments rose in intensity, the people who had agreed to help the man with his teaching started to think that maybe the whole thing wasn’t working out so well. They felt like they were hurting the students too much and they asked if they should stop. But the man told them to continue. This work was important.

So they continued.

They continued even after the student had stopped trying to respond to the questions.

They continued even when they thought they had killed the student.

This man wasn’t really interested in how pain affected learning. He was interested in obedience. In fact, the “students” were really actors and the pain wasn’t real—but it was to the teachers who thought they had killed their students.

His experiments became famous. You can watch a sample of them below.

Milgrim Shock Experiment

His results became famous—when ordered by an authority figure to do something, even something atrocious, the majority of people will obey without question.

Obedience.

“Obedience is the very best way to show that you believe. Doing exactly what the Lord commands. Doing it happily. Action is the key. Do it immediately. And joy you will receive. Obedience is the very best way to show that you believe.”

The Bible says it; that settles it.

People do some pretty atrocious things within fundamentalism. I have a four-page document of links to stories of abuse, violence, and hatred in the name of God from IFB churches alone. That’s not even counting the number of scandals in other denominations or the things that get covered up.

When confronted with these acts, many try to excuse their behavior saying, “I just did what I thought was right.”

But the problem is that they didn’t think.

They obeyed.

They obeyed the faulty interpretation of a two-thousand year old book that is controversial in its authenticity at best. Very often, they overrode their own conscience in order to obey a command from someone they had never met.

The Bible should be questioned.  Every fucking word should be questionable, especially if you are trying to distance yourself with a phrase like “God said it; that settles it.”

What are you willing to obey? Are you going to gouge out your eyes or cut off your hand if you’re tempted to sin? Are you going to stone a girl who gets married without being a virgin? Are you going to demand we execute every man, woman, and child in the countries we’re at war with? Are you going to force women to wear veils and cover their heads? Are you going to burn alive your pastor’s daughter if she becomes a prostitute? 

Just because the Bible said it doesn’t make it okay. We are each responsible for our own choices. While claiming the Bible as authority might save someone the grueling labor of figuring out what they actually believe is moral, it doesn’t divert culpability. God is not the invisible white lab coat who is going to accept responsibility for the things someone does in obedience to him.

Obedience is not an excuse.

Ch-ch-ch-children! Grow One of Your Own! The scam of Biblical parenting.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents’ philosophy towards raising kids. Like most IFB parents, they believed in the popular “spare the rod, spoil the child” myth that they think comes from Proverbs.

Technically the “spare the rod” phrase isn’t even in the Bible. But beyond that, there’s enough empirical evidence to show that spanking has more detrimental effects than positive ones.

In and of itself, that idea is problematic, especially when that “rod” is taken literally to mean an instrument with which to beat someone (i.e. a belt, cooking spoon, wooden paddle, etc.) However, it’s not that philosophy that has been bothering me lately, even though it certainly bothers me at other times. It was one they extracted from another verse in Proverbs 22:6.

“Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

My dad had a favorite illustration he would use in his sermons to convey how he thought this verse was to be used. It was the idea that children were like plants. If you want a plant to grow a certain way, you put constraints on it and prune it. Otherwise it will just grow any which way it wants.

The problem is that children aren’t like plants—at least not the way he viewed plants (For the record, I have a much different view of plants, but for the sake of this post, I won’t get into that.)

In his mind, a plant might be “living” in so far as it grew, but it wasn’t a conscious being. It didn’t feel pain. It had no hopes, desires, dreams, plans, or personality. Thus, cutting it or manipulating it to grow the way he wanted was about as offensive as molding clay.

Children are not like plants.

They do have personalities, dreams, hopes, sometimes even plans.

And they definitely feel pain.

To assume that growing a plant is the same as growing a child is grossly problematic. For one, plant growth is physical. It’s an awesome ability to be able to grow new shoots after being cut down, but you can’t cut a child’s arm and have it regrow in a better shape. Children don’t just grow physically, and obviously this illustration wasn’t talking about the physical growth of a child. It was about the mental growth.

One of the most important psychological developments for a child is the development of a sense of self—a sense of being a separate being from others. With that sense of self should come a growing sense of autonomy and an ability to think and reason for oneself.

But fundamentalism doesn’t acknowledge that aspect of growth in children and acts in a way that actively tries to stifle the natural development of the child’s psyche. Like so many of my friends who survived living in the IFB, I remember all too well the lessons and songs about obedience. Children were to obey right away, without question. Anything else was rebellion, and rebellion, I also remember being taught, was “as the sin of witchcraft,” which was a stoning offense in Bible times (both rebellion and witchcraft).

From a very young age, therefore, I was led to believe that questioning my parents’ reason for any rule was a dangerous place to go. As I got older and started to develop my own tastes, that presented unique problems. They thought rock, country, pop, rap, CCM, jazz, and any other music genre you can think of were all bad. They thought movie theaters and playing cards were sinful. They thought drinking alcohol was wrong. They thought wearing “tight” (aka didn’t fall off my hips without a belt) jeans and shirts was morally reprehensible. They thought shorts and bathing suits and tank tops were indecent.

And I discovered that I liked Shania Twain, didn’t think there was any logical reason why playing cards and theaters should be off-limits, wanted to wear clothes that fit and that expressed my unique style, and didn’t want to have to leave my cousin’s wedding reception early because people around me had wine in their hands.

I was doing what any normal teenager would do—developing my own ideas for myself. And they were hardly radical ideas to the rest of the world.

But in my family, I was “rebelling.”

There’s actually a psychological term for what I was doing—individuation. It’s a healthy and necessary step in the psychological development of a person.

In fact, as far as I know, every teen in the IFB goes through a “rebellious” phase—some sooner than later. Some are easier to “break” than others (yes, the goal is to “break the will” of the child—their own words)—but every child “rebels” within this paradigm.

So I had a strict upbringing. Who cares, right? It’s no big deal. What is so dangerous about this teaching that children, like plants, can be manipulated into absolute obedience?

The danger is this: Physical growth isn’t enough. Children need to stimulate their mind in order to develop their brains so they can function as adults. By making individuation a sin, my father automatically made growing up an act of rebellion.

I recognize that he is, to some extent, the victim of this teaching too. He didn’t come up with it on his own. It was taught to him, maybe by his parents (ironically, I don’t know what their parenting philosophy was), probably more so by his college and seminary training. And for that, I do not hold him responsible.

However, I do hold him responsible for perpetuating that teaching onto his own family and the church that he pastors.

Shortly before I left, my dad said, “I’m sorry I raised a daughter like you.” I suppose it must have been terribly disappointing to realize that his parenting method didn’t work as well as his gardening methods. Unfortunately for him, children aren’t chia pets.

The Freedom of Uncertainty (Step One to Spiritual Freedom)

I’m not a huge fan of new-year resolutions or of the whole farewell, time-to-assess-my-life thing that tends to dominate this week for others, but I have to admit that this year has been a wild one for growth. It’s been three years coming, but this year in particular has been the one where I even blew myself away.

Looking back on who I used to be, I barely recognize myself—in a good way. These have all been changes that I needed and growth that I wanted, even if I didn’t like the means of growing at the time. I’ve been trying to pin down what has been the most important lesson or change this past year, the one that kick-started all the others. I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing this year would have happened without the less-astounding, more internal lessons of the previous year—learning to sit with uncertainty.

When I first began my baby steps out of the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement, I never intended to go very far. I wanted to get away from the abusive environment that dominated those churches and “schools” and find a church that held onto the “truth” of Christianity without all the bullshit.

For a while, I clung to the core of my religion as my anchor while allowing myself to question the things around it. Some fundamentalists warned me that if I started down that path, I would lose my faith. But I told myself that if my faith couldn’t stand up to questioning, it wasn’t worth having. I felt certain that I would eventually find my answers.

But for every answer I found, another question appeared. They got bigger and bigger until even the core seemed unstable. All the books and scholars I found couldn’t fully reconcile the doubts and contradictions I had; the answers only covered the surface, never getting deep enough to reset the foundation.

I was faced with a choice. I could turn away from my questions, push away those who reminded me of my doubts, shut my mind off, find reassurance in the imperfect answers that had reassured me before, and live the rest of my life in a religion I was too scared to leave.

Or I could let it all go.

I’ve never been very good at ignoring cognitive dissonance, so I let go.

I wanted to start studying other religions and belief systems immediately to find a new one that I could rely on, but I knew that if I did that, I wouldn’t be doing it because I actually believed in that religion. I’d be doing it because I’d needed to fill the vacuum left by Christianity. I made some tentative attempts at engaging other religions, visiting a Buddhist Temple and talking with some Mormons, but my own desperation scared me.

Probably the hardest thing I have ever done in my life was choosing to be “agnostic.” I’m not talking about the softer form of atheism that claims agnosticism or even the agnosticism that finds answers and comfort in not having answers. I’m talking about confronting my doubts and embracing the fear that maybe there really were no answers to my questions. It was an agnosticism that denied myself my need to explore spirituality until I no longer felt the need to run from the possibility that this was all there was.

For almost a year I held myself to this agnosticism, refusing to even attempt to come up with answers to my questions. I started collecting books, attempting to fill my bookcase with at least one major book about every major belief system I could. But I didn’t read them. I merely let them sit there, their presence reminding me that each of these religions or non-religions (atheism/agnosticism) claimed to be “the truth.”

It was torture. There were days when I just sat in my apartment, crying and rocking, trying to pray to a god I didn’t believe in anymore, trying not to pray to that god. I felt like my world might crumble and disappear right in front of my eyes.

But the world didn’t end. I didn’t cease to exist. Life around me continued on exactly as it had before.

And I learned the lesson that set me free: even though my worldview might make me feel like it holds the world together, in the end, it doesn’t do anything.

Without the preconceived notion that “I’m right,” any worldview had the potential to be right. Some seemed more believable than others, but there was absolutely nothing that was self-evident. There was always room for questions. Always room for other answers. Always room for new discoveries.

Eventually I did get to a place where the doubt felt almost like an answer—not the answer I was looking for. It didn’t solve anything. But learning that it was okay to simply not know freed my mind in a way that nothing else could have. I began to play with ideas, trying them on like clothes, seeing how they fit. I allowed myself to start exploring and creating my own spirituality, choosing what made sense to me rather than what I was too scared to reject. Suddenly the journey to find what I believed was a wondrous, fascinating, and exhilarating journey, rather than one of terror and pain.

It is because of that year of uncertainty that I have been able to sprint through so much internal work this year. It’s because of the year of unidentity that I’ve been able to make so many strides in creating my identity into who I was always meant to be.

Part of me would have liked to return to Christianity, and I admire the friends I have who took a similar journey and found a place for themselves within Christianity. But I honestly don’t think I was meant to be a Christian. My spiritual life now feels so natural and so fulfilling, an expression of the things that have always been inside of me waiting for permission to come out.

As I head into the new year, I’ll ignore the pressure to make new-year resolutions as usual, except perhaps the resolution to continue to live the full breadth of life, facing down fear, embracing uncertainty, and finding myself through it all. And I encourage others to dare to take that journey themselves.

It’s worth it; I promise.