I don’t know how the Catholic Church manages to hold itself together in the face of all these revelations. The Dutch church was practicing the usual heedless barbarities.
Up to 11 boys were castrated while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic church in the 1950s to rid them of homosexuality, a newspaper investigation has said.
A young man was castrated in 1956 after telling police he was being abused by priests, the newspaper reported.
Although it does suggest a better solution. Like the priesthood of Cybele, perhaps the Catholic priesthood ought to demand voluntary self-castration as a prerequisite to admission? I understand that they’re already having problems getting recruits, and this certainly wouldn’t help — but at least the ones you would get would be much more dedicated.
Wait, no…one thing we don’t need is more dedicated Catholic fanatics.
That article is from spring 2012. And you’ve blogged about it already.
Yes, you have.
Highly recommended by jesus himself.
Did I just read a joke about male castration?
You think that’s a joke? No it’s a suggestion and a retraction.
Don’t put words in my mouth. I asked a simple question.
No.
He is serious.
Jesus the godman thought highly of it. Origen, an influential church father is reputed to have castrated himself following god’s advice in Matthew.
Did I just see someone JAQ off?
This is actually hilarious obliviousness on the part of nohellbelowus:
“Did I just read a joke about male castration?”
“You think that’s a joke?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.111eleventy!!”
a question is only a question when nohellbelowus asks it.
amazing.
Yes, brianpantsy, questions can be asked without assuming the answer beforehand.
Perhaps you can suggest a better phrasing of my question?
So did the Rev, dumbass.
Second question: do I hear the sycophant choir beginning to sing?
;)
Perhaps you can explain how you ask “did I see a joke?” without the possibility existing that you think there’s a joke.
You already repeated yourself. That started echo in your head.
@13:
Of course there’s a possibility, dumbass.
Since you are only asking questions about things that are not there and that you do not think are true, obviously not.
@14:
An indefinite article would be nice, Nerd. Slow down. It’s Saturday morning.
Such deep-seated hostility! Why are you so angry? I was just making a comment. Nothing to do with anything I might or might not believe.
Trying to weigh the relative evil of institutions here. Let’s see:|
Catholic Church | Nazi Party
Can’t quite decide.
I’ll follow your lead. You slow down first…
Seriously. Way too early for JAQing off, in my opinion. I’m still trying to enjoy my coffee.
Frivolous festival increase aardvark. Adverse domestic reflex fill! Intended electric impressed multiple blow farthest greed.
What? I was just making a comment that had nothing to do with anything I might or might not believe, okay? Don’t get on my case just because you expect me to, like, make sense or something! SHEESH, what a buncha fassists.
That’s tricky to measure, given the relatively brief time the Nazis had influence compared to the RCC. Plus, they weren’t operating in separate spheres, so you’d have to disentangle the influences in both.
I guess you’d need one of those side-by-side comparison lists, but at this point, I’m more than willing to hand it to the Catholic Church.
One thing we don’t need is pompous self-righteous male virgin castrati telling everyone how to organise their sex-lives and families, how to (not) manage their hormone levels and libidos.
I’ve nothing against people who voluntarily castrate themselves, it’s often a very brave and laudable thing to do, and voluntary or not, I don’t think having particular parts of one’s genitals intact is important. But knowing how RCC priests, bishops and popes love to provide advice and rules for something they have no experience of themselves, I don’t think it’s a good idea.
Letting priests marry and allowing women priests – now THAT would be a step in the right direction.
Ahh, #3 and 7 already beat me to it :)
Maybe castration WOULD be good for people who aren’t ever going to have sex though. I respect Origen very highly, probably more than all the other early church fathers, and you must admit not having a sex drive would make it easier to focus on theology.
Also it would stop them from raping little boys. Just a thought!
Given that rape and child abuse are acts of violence by using their genitals as a weapon, and that the first thing you do with an armed person likely to commit unsanctioned violence is to disarm them, it would seem to follow that the way you deal with a rapist is to disarm them by removing their weapon.
raven @3: “Highly recommended by jesus himself.”
I take it as literally a recommendation of castration, as the earlier recommendation (Matthew 5:29-30) to pluck out your right eye, or chop off your right hand, if they cause you to sin. In other words, not so much.
If you were really only asking a simple question, then you might have noticed that the question has already been answered. But then, the answer to the question wasn’t really what was important, was it? The point was to ask the question and thus cast aspersions on PZ and the commentators here.
You’re not fooling anyone, so don’t even bother.
Comment 22 FTW!
Ooh! A troll! A troll! *happy happy joy joy* Dance for us, troll! Dance! :-)
Uh, what makes you think those weren’t meant literally either?
if abuse and rape are about power also and not just sex if castration eliminated or reduced the sex drive how would that change the power dynamic that is also involved and why would not the compulsion to abuse not change to one of just sadistic pain infliction without any sexual gratification?
if we are going to punish why not just beheading?
anything that can be done to discourage the religious life is OK with me.
uncle frogy
Because, as silly as a lot of the bible is, a literal interpretation of the plucking/chopping would be whole new levels of absurd. Since we’re all sinners, we should all be walking around without a right eye and a right hand, removed by ourselves. Hyperbole by default.
As for ‘eunuch’; in reading a 400 year old translation of a 2,000 year old text (which may in turn be a translation), I trust context more than the apparent meaning of a particular word. Did the original word (or words) mean exactly what ‘eunuch’ means now? In Matthew 19:12, the context provided by the preceding verses points to celibacy rather than mutilation.
Yes it did.
The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, an ancient form of a still living language. Greece is even part of Europe and there are still Greeks running around.
Eunuches were not uncommon in those days and in many other times.
Rob Grigjanis is playing exegesis. Exegesis is a dishonest con game. It’s a way to make the horrible ancient old kludgy bible sound not so horrible to us moderns. The bible ends up being a giant Rorschach Inkblot that says everything and nothing.
So Rob, why don’t you prove that your metaphorical interpretation is correct and better than any others? The only way xians have ever found to do that is fight wars and kill a few dozen or few million people.
The horror men feel today at being castrated is relatively modern and cultural.
It hasn’t always been that way.
1. The Catholic church used to castrate boys so they could be choir boys forever. This stopped in 1987 according to Google.
2. The Chinese used to do it to government employees. The admiral of their famous treasure fleet was an eunuch.
3. Reading the plain words of Matthew 19 indicates that jesus thought it was a great idea. 12 For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.
Just who is made single from their mother’s womb anyway?
Just who is made single of men anyway?
who receives singlenss?
It’s quite clear when jesus who is god says eunuch he means cut those dangly man bits off. Koine Greek had other words for celibate, single, unmarried, divorced, and so on. If that is what they meant, they would have used those words.
I think you meant 1887.
You are not very bright.
raven @32:
To disagree with raven is to be automatically accused of bad faith. Good to know. Actually, you’re giving me too much credit, because I’m not fluent in Koine, and I don’t know if, or how much, word meanings in Greek have changed in 2000 years. I have read that self-mutilation is forbidden by Jewish law, but perhaps you can correct me there as well.
You did inspire me to look for the ancient Greek text, and confirm that the word used is indeed εὐνοχοι (that didn’t copy exactly). And it does seem, contrary to what I had thought, that Matthew wasn’t, alone of the gospels, originally Aramaic. So, thanks for that.
Religious-induced mutilation is not limited to the RCC, but they are the ones making the claim of being civilized, as opposed to the “Barbarians” who practice circumcision and female genital mutilation.
The irony is off the scale.
all the more reason for Jesus to have encouraged it then.
I suppose him saying to leave family, etc, was also just metaphorical.
actually, no, it really wouldn’t be. It indeed is exactly the same level of absurdity as taking any of the text for what it says, but then, if you don’t take the text for what it actually says, then you either are:
a: omniscient
b: the person who wrote it and knows exactly what they meant or didn’t mean
so which are you?
Sound like Rob Grigjanis is making more stuff up. It’s a xian thing.
Citation needed.
BTW, Rob, a central ritual of Judaism is circumcision, cutting off the male foreskin. Since this is done on babies, it really isn’t self mutilation since babies don’t have the fine motor skills yet. But certainly Judaism doesn’t have a problem with people mutilating other people.
Well were down the rabbit hole into the truth of xianity. There isn’t any.
1. We don’t know what jesus actually said. He left zero works of his own. We don’t know if he was even literate or even existed.
The bible was written long after his time by anonymous authors and the bible jesus is a fictional composite character.
2. Biblical exegesis is ancient. The word itself is Greek and Origen was an early advocate of it when the xian church was being started.
For nearly 2,000 years, whole forests have been cut down in service to exegesis.
The result: There is no agreement among xians as to what their magic book says, and they have no way to determine which is metaphor and which is not. Except wars, which they have resorted to often. The ones who are wrong are the ones lying on the ground, separated from their head, and not moving.
Which is why there is 42,000 and expanding different xian sects.
Which is also why every single xian without fail is a cafeteria xian.
3. In the present case, what Matthew’s sockpuppet jesus means is clear from the wording. If you look at the real context, it is even clearer.
A main theme in the NT is the immediate end of the world. Replaced by the Kingdom of God or Heaven. The writer is warning people to be extra careful. Because if you blow it by sinning, your eternal life will be in hell, not heaven. In that case a few weeks or months minus your testicles is no big deal. You are going to be in heaven on earth Any Minute Now so who cares. It’s a trade of something you don’t need or want for a finite time for infinite life in heaven. A no brainer.
Of course that never happened either, the Apocalypse and Kingdom of Heaven. If xians actually took their magic book seriously and read it rather than lying about what it actually says, the whole thing would have stopped millennia ago.
@ raven
YHWH asked me to speak up on His behalf:
Deutronomy 23:1
Sure you have the right Yahweh? According to the Mormons, jesus is Yahweh.
Matthew 19 12 For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.
When the bible isn’t opaque or ambiguous, it can be contradictory.
Hmmm, well according to most xians, jesus is god is Yahweh as well. That Trinity thing.
IIRC for Mormons there are actually two gods running around in the bible. The father of jesus is El or Elohim. Jesus is Yahweh. So much for monotheism.
theophontes (坏蛋) @ 41
Deuteronomy is in the old testament. The new testament supersedes it. According to some factions. Except when it suits them.
Shrimp
raven: Although I’ve been an atheist for 45 years, it is possible that I have retained some exegetical habits (despite my atheism, there are still parts of the KJV that I’m quite fond of). I’ll go over what you wrote again.
Raven, i think there are many more than two gods in Christianinanity. Satan is clearly a minor god. So are the angels. The Christers’ religion evolved from Judaism, which evolved form its polytheistic roots.
The old gods, such as El, Marduk, & Asherah lived in large groups. There were males & females. The Abrahamic religions kept them on as ‘angels’. Asherah was the wife of El, (who morphed into Yahweh/Jehovah). It;s all rather confused.
Quoting from Wikipedia: Further evidence includes, for example, an 8th century combination of iconography and inscriptions discovered at Kuntillet Ajrud in the northern Sinai desert[10] where a storage jar shows three anthropomorphic figures and an inscription that refers to “Yahweh … and his Asherah”.[11][12] Further evidence includes the many female figurines unearthed in ancient Israel, supporting the view that Asherah functioned as a goddess and consort of Yahweh and was worshiped as the Queen of Heaven.[11]
Christianinanity is clearly polytheistic.
Lacking a penis isn’t enough to stop a sexual predator. They can still use their hands, so maybe that’s where we should start.
Nah. Self castration would only be used as a way to get into the priesthood for the sake of a cushy job. A smart applicant would simply start using that new brand of testosterone that is applied to the armpit. Nothing would really change and there’d be a new hymn heard in the apartments of the elect.
“Whoppie ti yi yay, I roll my own way. . .”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnatOfv22f0
Off with their heads!
Heh. I am “wounded in the stones”, which forbids me the congregation of the Lord. I am also the son of a man whose parents were not married, which damns me and any children I might have (for five more generations). I’m also an atheist for logical reasons, before I learned about the first two disqualifications.
Three strikes and I am definitely out. At least I don’t have to worry about spending eternity with priests.
—
Say, if the priests were castrating boys, isn’t that “wounding them in the stones”, and effectively damning them to Hell? I mean, the kids aren’t just messed up for life, they are burning for eternity.
see, cutting them off is one thing, crushing them is another. apparently it’s a bad thing to have ’em crushed and a good thing to have them cut off.
Doesn’t this just refer to entering the temple and “going before the lord”? I don’t think this is a condemnation as such, more a matter of ritual purity.
A lot of the Old Testament laws refer to some kind of classification system, with those things that fall between categories being impure. E.g. shrimp live in the water, so fish is the category they ought to fit into. However, they don’t have scales, so they don’t really count as fish. Result: impure.
In the same sense, a man whose genitals have been damaged doesn’t count as a man anymore, but he obviously doesn’t count as a woman either. As a result, he’s necessarily unclean and can’t go before the lord.
This concern for mixing or transgressing categories makes sense of a lot of things that are otherwise nonsensical; e.g. the prohibition against mixing fabrics. Why on earth would anyone care about that? Well, if the idea of keeping separate things separate is central to your idea of purity and holiness, you’d care a great deal.
As for New Testament endorsement of eunuchs, it might be relevant to remember that not all Christians saw Jesus as a continuation/renewal of the Jewish faith. The Marcionites (and earlier strains, possibly going back as far as Paul) were almost gnostic, viewing Jesus as a representative of the “good” god, while the god of the Old Testament was more like the demiurge. For such people, the prohibitions of the Old Testament would be as irrelevant as the rules of any other foreign religion.
@54
I appears that the NT negates the OT dietary restrictions, at least.
*It* appears…
Distracted by the Methodists hooting & wailing across the road…
oh, you have GOT to be kidding me.
Mabus is like athlete’s foot… the fungus just keeps returning without proper treatment.
To Markuze, we’re all 2 feet tall
Well, some parts do and some parts don’t. That was my point. The NT has parts coming from wildly different sects. The discussion about to what degree the OT restrictions still applied was of major concern to the early Christians. It was such a big deal that it’s even part of the official storyline in Acts.
The NT eventually comes down on the side of dropping the OT rules, but it’s by no means a unanimous decision. I think the whole mess was closely related to the transition of Christianity from a Jewish sect to a separate, gentile religion.
The fundies are happy to pretend that the bible speaks with one voice, but we should remember that it’s a chorus of often conflicting sectarian views. The bible is a result of multiple levels of preaching, disagreement, editing and no small amount of outright fraud, read through a lens of several centuries of hindsight, reinterpretation and self-serving church tradition.
The only reason that there’s even the slightest appearance of a unified voice is because a lot of work has been done to harmonize the otherwise very conflicting texts. E.g. Jesus has to be the Davidic Messiah, but there’s also the tradition that he was from Nazareth. What to do? Have him be born in Bethlehem and then later moved to Nazareth. That’s so obvious a solution that Matthew and Luke both take that road, although they make the transition in different ways.
My point here being that already in the gospels, we’ve got harmonizations in the basic storyline. In other words, the gospel texts themselves are already so far removed from reality that they have to do clever editing to make things work. The earliest level of writing isn’t even accessible to us anymore, except as whatever has survived in these later, edited accounts.
Incidentally, that’s the biggest problem relating to finding out who the “real” Jesus was. While there might well have been such a figure and he might even have said and done some of the things attributed to him, it’s buried under so much propaganda that it’s hard to tell what, if anything, was the original story.
Anyway, pardon me for the tangent, but the more I learn about this subject, the more interesting it is. If anybody wants to know more, I recommend the podcasts of Robert Price; The Bible Geek and The Human Bible. Also, there’s this lecture series.
I’d be totally in favor of religious studies in public school if they taught some of this stuff. The more you know about the bible, the harder it is to take it seriously. I heard someone compare it to the old saying about sausages and laws.
@ LykeX #59
Can’t say I disagree with any of that. Actually reading the bible & learning a bit about its history were major factors in me finally ditching christianity…although I’d had my doubts from about the age of 5
@ Icthyic #57
I think the only answer is to get in the pest controllers and fumigate the entire internet.
@Slowdjinn/59
Oh heavens yes. Actually reading the Bible makes more atheists than anything I can think of, and the more “context” you read and the more of the older languages you know, the less and less believable it is (contra the “but you need to read it in conteeeext!” whingers).
@Theophontes #41
“Wounded in the stones”? Why can’t that damn book just say what it means? Also, this appears to be saying that any man incapable of making children can’t enter heaven. That’s a bit of nastiness I was previously unaware of. Good to know the modern Xian obsession with baby-making isn’t entirely new.
I really don’t think that’s what it means. For one, at the time of writing, I’m not sure that the Jews even had a clear concept of heaven or an afterlife. As far as I know, the assembly or congregation refers to the people gathered for religious ceremonies of worship, not any kind of afterlife. Reading it as a matter of salvation is anachronistic.
Also, note Isaiah 56:4-5
@LykeX
I assumed the Congregation of the Lord was a metaphor for Heaven. I could be wrong, but even if I am then in practice I’m still right, since Jewish and Christian tradition both teach that you can’t enter heaven if you’re an infidel/gentile/heathen/whatever else they’re calling us these days. And if you’re not allowed to join the church because you can’t make babies, then you can’t go to heaven because you’re not in the church; therefore you can’t go to heaven if you can’t make babies.