Bad rules in the Bible

Some people think the Bible is a good source of morality. Have those people read the Bible? I don’t see how you could think that, knowing the things the Bible tells people to do.

God even admits that, at least at one point, he was giving his people bad laws. That’s meant to contrast with the laws he had given before, but those were bad already. Paul says the reason God gave his laws in the first place was to make people sin more. And he says God may have intended them to bring life, but all God’s deceptive laws did was bring death.

In the Bible, God makes circumcision a requirement for all male descendants of Abraham forever. If you’re going to be mutilating the genitals of babies, you’d better have a very good reason. But the only reason God has for this rule is that it’s the sign of the covenant he’s making. If it’s meant to be a sign, that means the purpose is to communicate something. Why can’t God think of a better way to communicate than by cutting off part of a boy’s penis?

If you want people to be marked with a sign, a body part that people aren’t going to be able to see most of the time is the worst possible place to put it. This rule was stupid. Even the Bible itself later says that circumcision is worse than useless. According to Paul, it can prevent Jesus from saving you. So apparently all of Abraham’s descendants are going to have to go to hell because God made them follow this rule.

God likes to celebrate his holidays by forcing his people to eat “the bread of affliction“.

There are all kinds of problems with the Ten Commandments, as I’ve detailed in another blog post. About half of those commandments really aren’t good rules at all, and the rest are handled rather too simplistically. God doesn’t actually follow the Ten Commandments himself, which shows that either they’re not good or he’s not good. Or both.

One of the main focuses of God’s laws is all the animal sacrifices that God demanded from his people. Sometimes they would only burn part of an animal and eat the rest, which doesn’t sound like they’re really sacrificing anything. And in the case of burnt offerings, they just burned the whole animal.

They were required to sacrifice the best animals they had, which is not just needless killing, and not just a waste of good meat, but also dysgenic selective breeding. By specifically killing the best animals they had, they were probably causing the quality of their livestock to continually get worse over time.

The biblical protocol for dealing with infectious skin diseases states that people confirmed to be diseased are not to be isolated. And that people are to be considered clean when there’s a disease visibly covering their whole body. But once you’ve recovered from a skin disease, you have to spend a week outdoors. You’re not even allowed to use a tent.

God’s laws don’t just encourage generosity, but make it mandatory, which makes it into theft. God says a little stealing is fine, just don’t do a lot of stealing, at least not all from the same person. But if you kill a thief who breaks into your home, you may or may not be considered guilty, depending on what time of day you did it.

God’s laws condone brutal slavery. Apologists like to focus on the less terrible temporary debt slavery when they discuss biblical slavery, but the Bible also allows much worse slavery practices that are no better than what normally comes to mind when you think of slavery. And the Bible’s laws regarding slavery are discriminatory, so being a slave is much worse if you’re a women or a foreigner.

God says if you find an attractive woman among the captives of war that you’ve taken, then after she’s done mourning for her parents that you killed, you and your captive can get married. Like she would want to.

If a man’s married brother dies childless, God’s law requires the man to either marry the widow and have kids who won’t be considered his, or be publicly disgraced.1

And the law says none of these terrible rules can ever be changed. Good thing everyone ignores that rule.

The Bible’s positions regarding freedom of speech are generally terrible. For example, the law of Moses says anyone who says anything against the God of Israel must be killed. (Even though the Bible says a real god shouldn’t need anyone’s help to defend himself.) And the Bible approvingly mentions a king making a similar law that applied even outside of Israel.

One of the rules for people who want to be disciples of Jesus is that they have to hate their families.

Jesus says you should do to others as you would have them do to you, which sounds like a pretty good rule if you don’t think about what it’s saying. A lot of atheists even agree with it. But I’d say it’s really not a good rule at all. I’ve written a whole other blog post explaining why. Basically the problem is that it completely fails to take into account what others want, which is a pretty important thing to consider when you’re deciding what to do to others.

Jesus’s rule for how to deal with evil people abusing you is to not resist them. If people are stealing from you, hitting you, or kidnapping you, just encourage them to do even more evil. He says you have to forgive people for what they did to you, if you want God to forgive you. But forgiving people isn’t an inherently good thing. By forgiving everyone unconditionally, you would just be making people more likely to do bad things to you.

Jesus says you should deal with your own problems before you worry about helping others. Well, he was probably trying to say something else, but the way he chose to illustrate it sure makes it sound like he’s promoting selfish behavior.

Paul had a rule for his followers, which he claimed was a command from God: Married people can never get divorced. This is a bad rule because it turns marriage into captivity, forcing people in unhappy or even abusive situations to stay that way for the rest of their lives. Banning divorce, or even just banning no-fault divorce, also makes adultery happen more often. Even God disagrees with Paul’s rule, or else God wouldn’t have given his people rules commanding them to get divorced in certain situations.

The Bible tells people to embrace faith, and other irrational and anti-intellectual ways of thinking that are inherently opposed to truth.

Discrimination

The Bible has a lot of rules that discriminate against certain kinds of people for no good reason.2 For instance, it’s unbelievably sexist, forbidding women to have any position of authority or even to speak at church. It treats women as property, and says people who do bad things to a woman have to compensate the man in charge of her, instead of having to compensate her. Paul says women need to submit to their husbands like they’re God, and Peter says women need to submit to their husbands the same way he thinks slave should submit to their violently abusive masters.

The Bible says men who have sex with men have to be killed for their wicked, detestable, vile, outrageous, shameful sin, and will not be allowed into the kingdom of God. God’s law also demands that anyone who worships any other gods be killed.

A lot of the stuff that the law of Moses required other Israelites to tithe “to God” actually went to the Levites. Moses was a Levite, by the way. Moses kept claiming that God wanted the people to give Moses’s family and tribe free food and money.

God’s laws demand that you respect old people, even though not all old people are respectable. The law also says you shouldn’t say anything bad about your rulers and religious leaders. When Paul realized that he was talking to a ruler, he decided he had been wrong to point out that that person was violating the law. According to Paul, everyone should just let the rulers and leaders do all the bad things they want, without anyone even being allowed to talk about it.

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Does everyone who asks receive?

Yes.

When Solomon asked God to answer the prayers of whoever prayed toward his temple, God agreed. Solomon’s temple doesn’t exist anymore, but now we have Jesus. And he says you can ask him for anything, and he will do what you ask. All you have to do is ask for something in Jesus’s name, and God will give you whatever you asked for. Because God is willing to satisfy the desires of everyone and everything alive.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re like. God gives generously to everyone who asks, without finding fault. Ordinary human beings can control the weather, just by asking God. If you don’t have what you want, it’s only because you haven’t asked God for it.

And it’s not just God who will always give you what you ask for. Jesus says everyone who asks receives. So you could ask anyone for anything, even from someone evil, and you will definitely get what you want.

Maybe?

Elihu said you can pray and God will turn your life back around… at least if there happens to be an angel around and the angel decides to ask God to spare your life. That sounds like a pretty specific kind of situation, so it doesn’t seem like he’s saying this is how it will always be for everyone. And we don’t even know if Elihu is right, since God never clarified whether Elihu had spoken the truth about him or not.

When God agreed to Solomon’s requests about the temple, God said now he would be attentive to the prayers offered there. Is that unusual? Does he normally ignore the prayers offered in other places?

Jesus says even evil people know how to give good gifts to their children. So God will certainly give good gifts to those who ask him. But will he give bad gifts? What happens if you ask God for a bad gift? Jesus doesn’t say.

James states that if you ask anything of God according to his will, he’ll do it. That condition he’s added there pretty much negates the whole statement. Of course God is going to do what he wants, regardless of what you think he should do. But then when James attempts to restate the same thing, he forgets to include that condition, which means he’s saying something very different this time. Do these people even know what they’re saying?

No.

Obviously Jesus is wrong when he says everyone who asks receives. The Bible itself contains plenty of counter-examples.

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The Story of Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daniel
Daniel in the Lions' Den

Fake fortune tellers exposed

After Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon captured Jehoiakim (the third-to-last king of Judah), the four smartest aristocratic young men in Judah were brought to Babylon to be Nebuchadnezzar’s advisers. Their names were Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, and Daniel, but king Nebuchadnezzar renamed them Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Belteshazzar. (Apparently one of those new names wasn’t so catchy.)

Nebuchadnezzar had a troubling dream about a big statue being smashed by a rock, which then became a huge mountain. He decided to see if his magicians could tell him what it meant. To make sure they were really capable of interpreting it, instead of telling them what he had dreamed about, he demanded that they tell him first. The magicians said that was impossible; only a god could do that. Since they couldn’t read his mind, the king decided to have all the wise men in Babylon killed for being frauds.

But the king’s wise adviser Daniel said that wouldn’t be necessary, because his God could help him do what the king demanded. Daniel described the dream and said it was a prediction about the kingdoms that would come after Nebuchadnezzar’s. The king was very impressed, and he promoted Daniel and his friends to high positions.

Daniel obeys the king

After he had a dream about a huge statue, Nebuchadnezzar decided to make a huge statue. He decreed that everyone had to worship the statue or die. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to worship it, so the king had them tied up and thrown into a furnace. Daniel didn’t get thrown into the furnace, so apparently he was willing to worship the king’s idol.

God sent an angel to protect Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and they came out of the furnace unharmed. The king was very impressed, and he promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to high positions.

God continues to communicate badly

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Daniel in the Lions’ Den
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Does every firstborn male belong to God?

Yes.

When God killed the firstborn of the Egyptians, he decided that the firstborn of the Israelites would be set apart to be his. So God commanded his people to consecrate every firstborn male to him. He said the first son of every female animal or human in Israel belongs to him. You can never choose to dedicate a firstborn animal to God, because the firstborn already belongs to God by default.

That means the people have to give all their firstborn males over to God. You must give him the firstborn of your sons, doing the same thing you do with the firstborn among your livestock: They can only stay with their mothers for seven days, then you hand them over to God. They are to be set apart and never put to work the way others would be. This is how God decided it will be, therefore this is how it will be forever, and it can never be changed.

No.

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Things the Bible doesn’t say

There are a lot of things that aren’t in the Bible, but for some reason everybody assumes they are.

Old Testament stories

The Bible doesn’t say Adam had another wife named Lilith. The only “lilith” mentioned in the Bible is some kind of creature that Isaiah said would haunt the ruins of Edom. Possibly a demon, or maybe just an owl. And the word Isaiah uses is plural, so it’s not an individual. The idea of Lilith being a wife of Adam seems to have come from an 8th-century work of satirical fiction.

The Bible doesn’t say Adam and Eve ate an apple. It just says they ate a certain kind of fruit that was forbidden. You don’t think eating apples is forbidden, do you? I’m not sure why anyone would assume the fruit that was forbidden was an apple, when they don’t regard apples as forbidden in any other context.3

It doesn’t say that nudity became sinful when Adam and Eve sinned, or that their sin was actually discovering sex, or anything like that. The first thing God ever said to humans was telling them to reproduce, so he clearly didn’t have a problem with sex. And it never says God thought there was anything wrong with people being naked. That was Adam and Eve’s own sin-induced perception, which God didn’t really seem to agree with.

It doesn’t say Cain and Abel were Adam and Eve’s only children. They were their first, but it says Adam had other sons and daughters. Noah, and therefore everyone after him, was descended from Adam and Eve’s son Seth, not from Cain. (At least not patrilineally.)

It doesn’t say the mark of Cain was a curse of any kind. It says God cursed Cain, but then agreed to also give him a mark that would prevent people from killing him. Having the mark was desirable for Cain. It also doesn’t say Cain’s mark was the origin of dark skin. The Bible never says what the mark looked like. It doesn’t say Ham or his son Canaan had dark skin, either.

The Bible doesn’t say the dove brought back an olive branch to Noah. It was an olive leaf. Only one English version I know of mistranslates it as a branch.

It doesn’t say Job was patient. In fact, Job specifically rejects the idea that there’s any reason he should be patient. His resolve to refrain from criticizing God lasts no more than the first two chapters. Then for the next thirty chapters or so, he does almost nothing but rant about how cruelly and unjustly God is treating him, and how he can’t wait to meet God so he can let him know what God has done wrong.4 I have no idea why people think of Job as patient. What could he have done that would show less patience?

It doesn’t say God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality. The Sodomite men in the story do seem to be gay; they all want to have sex with the men visiting Lot, and they aren’t interested when Lot offers to let them have sex with his daughters instead.5 But the Bible never says that was why God destroyed Sodom.

There are two passages in the Bible that give specific reasons for Sodom and Gomorrah being considered evil. One is a list of failings that have nothing to do with sex. The other says they were punished for sexual immorality, but it doesn’t specify what kind of acts they were being punished for.

The Bible doesn’t say Joseph was the youngest son of Jacob. Benjamin was the youngest.

It doesn’t say God killed Onan for masturbating. It says God killed him for refusing to impregnate his brother’s wife. He could have completely avoided any kind of sexual act, and God still would have killed him. It doesn’t say Onan ever masturbated, and God never said there was anything wrong with masturbation anyway.

It doesn’t say Moses grew up not knowing he was a Hebrew. There is no scene in the Bible where he finds out he was adopted.

It doesn’t say the Pharaoh that Moses freed Israel from was Ramesses II. Most Pharaohs mentioned in the Bible, including that one, go unnamed.

It doesn’t say atheists are fools, or that they’re uncommonly evil. That verse in the Psalms says fools are atheists, which is not the same thing. If all fools are atheists, it’s still possible that most atheists aren’t fools. And it says everyone in the world is evil, not just the atheists.

It doesn’t say Jezebel was a prostitute. Apparently some people think she was because it mentions her putting on makeup once?? But in context, it certainly doesn’t seem like she’s trying to seduce anyone.

It doesn’t say Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Every translation I know of calls it a fish. Not that the ancient writers of the story would have even been aware of that distinction. And the mention of the fish in the book of Matthew does sometimes get translated as “whale”. But still, that’s not what the actual book of Jonah says. So why do people always call it a whale?

New Testament stories

The Bible doesn’t say anything about an “immaculate conception”. It does mention a virgin birth, of course, but the immaculate conception is something entirely different. Immaculate conception means being conceived without inheriting sin, which some Christians believe is true of Jesus’s mother Mary. But that didn’t become an official part of Catholic belief until the 19th century, because the Bible says nothing about it.

It doesn’t say how old Mary was when she married Joseph. Getting married at 12 wouldn’t have been anything unusual in the past, but the Bible doesn’t actually mention her age. Or his.

It doesn’t say Mary and Joseph were immigrants when Jesus was born. Some American liberals like to call them “undocumented immigrants” or “refugees” for some reason. They were not any of those things. At least not until they fled to Egypt a couple of years later, which I’m pretty sure is not what those people have in mind.

It doesn’t say Mary and Joseph had to stay in a stable because there was no room in the inn and they couldn’t go somewhere else because she was about to give birth. It just says she gave birth “while they were there”, not necessarily the night they arrived. And it doesn’t even mention an inn or a stable at all! All it says is that Mary put her baby in a manger “because there was no guest room available“. More likely, they were staying with relatives. With the livestock that the relatives had brought into their house, because people did that back then.

It doesn’t actually mention any animals being present when Jesus was born, though.

It doesn’t say Jesus was born on the 25th of December. Winter seems like an unlikely time for a Roman census. Or for shepherds to be out in the fields at night. Based on what the Bible actually says, it’s arguably more likely Jesus was conceived around that date, and born in September.6

The Bible doesn’t say three wise men visited baby Jesus, much less say what their names were. It just says the wise men (however many there might have been) brought him three gifts. It doesn’t say the wise men were kings. They were Magi, which might mean they were mathematicians, astronomers, priests, astrologers, alchemists, or magicians, but not kings. And it doesn’t say the wise men came on the night Jesus was born. It was more like two years later.

The Bible doesn’t say Mary was a virgin all her life. It says Joseph married her, and abstained from sex until Jesus was born. (The author wouldn’t have included that qualifier if he hadn’t mean that they did have sex after Jesus was born.) And later, it says Jesus had brothers and sisters.7

It doesn’t say Christ was Jesus’s last name. His followers called him by the title Christ, because they believed he was the Messiah, which is what Christ means. But other people wouldn’t have called him that. To everyone else, he was Jesus of Nazareth, or Jesus son of Joseph.

It doesn’t say Jesus had long hair.8 According to the Bible, long hair on a man is disgraceful. It doesn’t say Jesus dressed in white, either. The Bible doesn’t say anything about what he looked like. Unless you count the alleged Old Testament prophecies about him, which call him horrifyingly ugly.

It doesn’t say Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Just about all it says about her is that she saw Jesus die and she saw him after he rose and she used to be possessed by seven demons. So where did people get the idea that she was a prostitute? Well, Luke and John both have stories where a woman pours perfume on Jesus’s feet. Luke’s story describes the woman as sinful, and in John’s story the woman is Lazarus’s sister Mary.

But to conclude that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute based on that, you would have to make three questionable assumptions: that both of these stories are supposed to refer to the same event even though they take place in different locations, that Mary Magdalene was Lazarus’s sister (note that there are several different people named Mary in the gospels), and that the “sinful” woman was specifically a prostitute.

The Bible doesn’t say the Jews killed Jesus. At least not directly. It says they wanted to,9 but under Roman rule they weren’t allowed to execute anyone themselves. So they had to convince the Romans to do it. Pilate tried to put all the blame on the Jews, even though he could have easily overruled their wishes if he really didn’t want Jesus to die. But anyway, the Bible says it was really God’s idea. Blame him.

It doesn’t say Saul of Tarsus changed his name and became Paul when he converted to Christianity. He just always had two names, a Hebrew name and a Latin name, because he was born both a Jew and a Roman citizen. He may have used the name Paul more often when he was traveling outside Judea to preach to the Gentiles, because he wanted to be relatable, but he never stopped being Saul.

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Who chose Saul?

The Bible says God is always the one who establishes who the authorities are. So naturally it was God who sent Saul to the prophet Samuel to be anointed king of Israel. When Samuel privately anointed Saul, he said it was God’s doing. After that, Samuel publicly cast lots as a way of letting God choose a king. They brought out Saul after he was chosen by lot, and Samuel described him as “the man the Lord has chosen“.

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The Story of the Exile of Israel and Judah
The End of the Independent Hebrew Kingdoms

Where the Samaritans came from, according to the Jews

Jotham’s son Ahaz was an evil king of Judah, so God sent the kings of Israel and Aram to fight against him and defeat him after God had promised they wouldn’t defeat him.10 After God predicted Assyria would destroy Judah, Ahaz got the king of Assyria to instead help him attack Israel, by giving him all the gold and silver from the temple of God.

Hoshea, the next king of Israel, was an evil traitor. When the king of Assyria found that out, he took Hoshea prisoner and conquered his country, putting an end to the kingdom of Israel. The people of Israel were exiled to Assyria, becoming the Ten Lost Tribes. The king of Assyria sent foreign pagans to settle in the former land of Israel, becoming Samaritans.

How Hezekiah used the gift of success

Ahaz’s son Hezekiah was the most righteous king Judah ever had. So God made him successful at everything. Hezekiah successfully convinced God to let his people break God’s law by celebrating the Passover in any way they wanted.

He successfully rebelled against the king of Assyria, so God told the king of Assyria to destroy Judah. But righteous Hezekiah kept the king of Assyria from conquering Judah by giving him all the gold and silver from the temple of God (which his father had already given to the king of Assyria). After Hezekiah successfully convinced the king of Assyria not to conquer Judah, the king of Assyria continued to try to conquer Judah, as God had commanded him, until God got him killed.

Hezekiah got sick, and God sent a prophet to tell him that he would never recover. But Hezekiah successfully convinced the never-changing God to change his mind, and so he recovered anyway.

Men from Babylon came to visit Hezekiah, and he showed them all the treasure and stuff he owned. The prophet told Hezekiah that now that the Babylonians knew about all that treasure, they were going to steal it all some day. And they would kidnap and castrate some of Hezekiah’s descendants. Righteous Hezekiah said he didn’t mind that, since he wouldn’t be around when it happened.

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The End of the Independent Hebrew Kingdoms
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Did God allow a census of Israel?

The Bible says when David took a census of Israel, that was Satan’s idea. Joab couldn’t believe David wanted to do such a repulsive thing, and he only helped because he had to. David was conscience-stricken afterward, and believed he had done a very foolish thing and sinned greatly. And God agreed that there would have to be a severe punishment for this evil act.

But the Bible also says that census was God’s idea! David was just doing what God wanted him to do, as he always did, so why would God have a problem with that? There was never any law against taking a census. On the contrary, God had commanded his chosen leaders to take a census of Israel multiple times in the past, and it was not a problem. God had also made laws about how to do it properly, which implies that taking a census was going to be a regular occurrence.

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The Bible’s questions, answered—part 9: Answers to questions in Psalms

The Bible contains a lot of questions, and it doesn’t always provide satisfactory answers. So I’ve been answering some of the Bible’s questions myself. This time, I’m looking at questions from the Psalms.

A king asks: Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? Answer: It probably has something to do with how tyrannical you and your God are being.

Someone asks God: Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? Answer: Because he doesn’t exist.

He asks: Why does the wicked man revile God? Answer: Because God’s even more wicked?

And he asks: Why does he say to himself, “He won’t call me to account”? Answer: Experience?

Ethan the Ezrahite asks: Who in the skies above can compare with the Lord? Who is like the Lord among the heavenly beings? Answer: Does Satan count? He and God have a lot in common.

Ethan asks: How long, Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? Answer: Yes, God never listens to humans. Other than that one time.

He asks: Who can live and not see death, or who can escape the power of the grave? Answer: Enoch and Melchizadek and Elijah.

He asks God: Where is your former great love, which in your faithfulness you swore to David? Answer: He broke his promise to David, but what’s it to you, Ethan?

Moses asks: How long will it be? Answer: How long will what be? How long will our lives be limited to around 70 or 80 years? It’s still about like that over 3000 years later. Maybe we’ll be able to do something about that eventually, but not by waiting around for God to do something.

Someone asks some fools: When will you become wise? Answer: The Bible claims it’s impossible, but the Bible’s wrong, as usual.

He asks: Does he who fashioned the ear not hear? Does he who formed the eye not see? Answer: The blind watchmaker does not hear or see.

Then he asks: Does he who disciplines nations not punish? Answer: Judging by what the Bible says about God, it seems like he mainly just punishes people who don’t deserve to be punished.

And he asks: Does he who teaches mankind lack knowledge? Answer: Yes.

He asks: Can a corrupt throne be allied with you—a throne that brings on misery by its decrees? Answer: You mean evil kings like David? Apparently yes.

Someone asks: Had the Egyptians not rebelled against God’s words in Moses’s time? Answer: No, the Egyptians had done exactly what God made them do.

Someone asks: Why was it, sea, that you fled? Why, Jordan, did you turn back? Why, mountains, did you leap like rams, you hills, like lambs? Answer: Because your author is insane?

Someone asks: Why do the nations say, “Where is their God?” Answer: Because you don’t use idols to represent your god, like they’re used to.

Someone asks: How long must your servant wait? When will you punish my persecutors? Answer: Never.

Someone asks: What will he do to you, and what more besides, you deceitful tongue? Answer: He won’t do any more to you than what he does to you, you deceitful tongue.

Someone asks: Where does my help come from? Answer: Helpful people.

Someone asks God: If you kept a record of sins, who could stand? Answer: Poor people who hate their unpleasant lives, but still dress right and get places on time. And rich people with lots of friends. And people who live with Christians, but don’t care about evil, and then get destroyed by Satan. And whoever else God randomly decided he wanted to save.

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Does the Law give you freedom?

Yes.

The longest chapter in the Bible is all about how great somebody thinks God’s Law is. One of the things he says about it is that he can walk about in freedom as a result of always seeking and obeying the law.

Paul says being under the law kills you… but dying frees you from the law. So the law does give you freedom. From itself. Paul also says the law of the Spirit sets you free from the law of death. That seems to contradict what he said about the law killing you, unless “the law of the Spirit” is something different from the Law from God that he was talking about before… but either way, he is still saying the law frees you. And James too says the law gives freedom if you follow it.

No.

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