It is written: God’s people should let their light shine by doing good deeds in front of others, so everyone can see how good God is. They should do what is right in view of everyone, displaying their good works to both believers and nonbelievers. Hiding your good deeds would be stupid,1 like lighting a lamp only to cover it up. Only evil people are afraid to let their deeds be exposed.
Continue reading Should people do good things publicly?The Bible has a lot of rules about who you shouldn’t have sex with. There are whole chapters devoted to the subject. But there are also a lot of sex rules surprisingly absent from the Bible. In this post, I’ll be listing some of the latter.
Important note: By including something on this list, I am not necessarily saying it should be forbidden, nor am I necessarily saying it should not be forbidden. I am including both acceptable acts and unacceptable acts in this list.
The things that should be forbidden are interesting to note because you’d think a supposedly good and infallible God wouldn’t forget to include those things in his laws. There are some pretty important rules missing!
And the things that should not be forbidden are also interesting because there are probably a lot of people who think it’s wrong to do some of these things, but the only reason they have for that belief is the false assumption that those things are forbidden by the Bible.
So here’s the list. As far as I can tell, there are no rules in the Bible2 against having sex with…
Continue reading Sex partners the Bible doesn’t forbidThe author of Ecclesiastes (who claims to be Solomon, the wisest man of all time) advises young people to follow their hearts, and to follow whatever their eyes see. Everything else the Bible says about following your heart or your eyes is very much against it, though. Righteous Job, for instance, believes that people who let themselves be led by their eyes don’t deserve to eat.
Continue reading Should people follow their hearts and eyes?Jesus says you should do to others as you would have them do to you.3 This is known as the Golden Rule. Sounds like a pretty good rule, right? As long as you don’t think about what it’s actually saying. But it’s really a very bad rule. Let’s look at an example to see why.
A man would like to have sex with a certain woman. But that woman is not willing to have sex with him. What should the man do? Well, what would he want that unwilling woman to do to him? He would want her to have sex with him. So according to the Golden Rule, he should go ahead and have sex with her.
That’s right, actually following this nice-sounding rule would lead to rape. What went wrong?
Continue reading Why the Golden Rule is a bad ruleThe first chapter of the book of Daniel establishes that Daniel is not willing to ever eat choice food or drink wine. Daniel makes a big deal out of this. He has religious reasons for his dietary restrictions, as well as health reasons. He insists on eating nothing but vegetables and drinking nothing but water, even if doing so risks incurring the wrath of the king.
Continue reading Did Daniel normally eat choice food, meat, and wine?In the beginning, there was nothing but a perfect God. Everything that existed was perfect. So God decided to create the world, which he knew4 would turn out to be imperfect. Now everything is no longer perfect. Good job, God.
Continue reading The Story of Adam and Eve—In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul discusses the relative merits of prophecy versus speaking in tongues. He says as far as the church is concerned, it’s better to prophesy, because no one can understand you when you speak in tongues.5 But what about when unbelievers are around? What’s the best thing to do then?
Continue reading Is it more beneficial to unbelievers to prophesy or to speak in tongues?In case you’re wondering what the name of this website means, it’s a combination of “reductio ad absurdum” and “Absalom”.
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