Oh, joy…yet another bible-walloping lackwit claiming that god hates gay marriage…and this time he claims to have a biological justification.
“You only have 15 percent of the middle who are hypocrites, who think, Jesus is cool, but I don’t agree with how he defined marriage,” Klingenschmitt said. “When Jesus talks about one flesh, he’s really being a scientist, he’s being a biologist. Because he realizes and he’s articulating simple biology, that when a sperm and an egg form together, they match in a zygote and a new DNA is formed and it becomes one new human flesh.”
“[W]e’re not reading our biology textbooks,” the former chaplain added.
“Which were written by Jesus, as you say,” Pakman pointed out. “Jesus was a biologist.”
“Well, he defined marriage between one man and one women, becoming one zygote, becoming one flesh,” Klingenschmitt insisted. “And that’s the only way in the next 100 years that humans are going to be able to procreate. If you get two men together and they mate, they’re not going to have a baby. If you get three women and a dog together, and they all mate together, they’re not going to have a baby.”
Wait, wait there. I can read Matthew 19 just as well as Satan can, and that’s where he claims Jesus is discussing biology. Here’s the relevant passage:
And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,
And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
Jesus is talking about the man and woman becoming “one flesh”, not sperm and egg. He also doesn’t mention zygote even once.
He’s not describing fertilization at all. That’s the plot of The Human Centipede!
Figures that god’s son would be into torture porn.
poor Christians, what they forget is that their god supposedly hates *all* marriage and marriage is considered only a poor substitute to remaining a virgin/eunuch. As always, Christians take the easy way out, not even trying to remain a virgin or whacking their genitalia off.
Thanks to Netflix streaming, I laughed very hard at the reference to The Human Centipede.
But, of course, that passage has nothing at all to do with procreation. It has to do with divorce. Jesus says no divorce. Ever. Period. Except, of course, if she’s sleeping around — then it’s totes OK as per Jesus. Him sleeping around? Nope. No divorce for you, little lady. Suck it up and procreate some more.
Wait, didn’t Klingenschmitt already get in trouble a couple of times for wearing his uniform for things like this? Or am I misremembering?
Ah, Klingenschmitt. Frequent occasion of mirth at Ed Brayton’s blog.
Klingenschmitt makes frequent appearances in the biggest dumbfuck of the day parade. As Eamon Knight says, Ed has taken him down numerous times.
Again, to Christianists, marriage is only ever about what happens in bed, and whether what goes on there is a concerted attempt to manufacture more human beings. Things like “love” and “companionship” are irrelevancies at best. So again the question becomes: infertile straight couples…elderly ones? Deny them marriage rights too?
DJ, you want another example of atheist “winning”? How about defeating idiocy like this?
*Headdesk*
The twain becoming one flesh is quite clearly a metaphor for consummating the marriage. At least, I always assumed so, given the context. Especially given the next sentence, and the fact that historically a couple was not considered married until the marriage was consummated.
I read that passage as saying: ” A man will leave his father and mother to be married; and once the marriage is consummated, they are married and may never be divorced”.
Not exactly making the point he thinks it is, is it?
It’s also a logical category error. Even if the passage could be interpreted as praise for one type of union it doesn’t say anything about the preclusion of other types of unions.
Wow near the end he starts talking about “the gay species” and how they “recruit” young people to be gay. I’m not sure if everyone remembers “the gays” coming to your door and asking you to sign up but I sure don’t.
I’m almost positive the only reason there’s gay people today is because straight people had babies
Just watch out for rainbows.
/sarcasm
Actually, he does mention “zygote” once in the video. Just for the record.
As a response to a Christian unjustly slamming gays, you go just as far in misrepresenting Christians.
I’m no fan of Christianity, but you should at least state their actual beliefs, not a caricature of them.
I’m almost positive that gay people can have babies, too.
Oh.. Good point.. damn 3am brain trying to make a lame joke
I’ll bet the fundie Christians listening to that broadcast are now telling all their friends that the bible is the greatest biology text book ever written – and Klingenschmitt is patting himself on the back and saying, “See, it does pay to tell lies for Jesus.”
Carbon life form:
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/1cor/7.html#1
4. Jamessweet – No, you are remembering correctly. He got in trouble because he wore his uniform at political events which is against military regulations. He isn’t a chaplain anymore because he has been kicked out. Don’t know why David Pakman recognizes him as such.
In my opinion, he is just another right-wing anti-gay crackpot.
I do wish he’d expand on the first part of the Babble quote where. “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female…” One of each, if I’m not mistaken. Well, one from dirt and lint and whatever was laying around, the other from the rib of the first one. Then there was a whole lot of cleaving going on, apparently, but I’ve always been curious about their male offspring leaving their father and mother and cleaving with… who exactly? Or what?
My gosh these fifth grade science projects are so adorable.
Mike.
First, I would not quote from the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which might seem to be just a bit biased. Next, even the bit that you quoted does NOT say “god supposedly hates *all* marriage”, and don’t pretend it does.
Second, as Paul makes it quite clear in 1 Corinthians, he is giving his opinion that not being married is better than being married. I suggest that you read the entire chapter. You are, as I said, giving a caricature of Christian belief, not the actual belief.
There are Christian writers you might have cited — Jerome, the man who wrote the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, directly compared a woman’s vagina to a sewer, and said that the only good thing about marriage was that it produced virgins. Or you might have cited Augustine of Hippo, who wrote that sexual intercourse, even between a husband and wife, without the express intention of procreation, was sinful. But that bit from Paul does not actually say what you would like it to say.
I don’t even …
I’d like to crack a joke about this asshole’s porn habits, but there are several reasons in that one phrase alone that prevent me from getting past that one phrase. There’s nothing funny there at all; on every level that is a vile and disgusting mind at work. I don’t even want to begin listing all that’s awful in that phrase. What the fuck is wrong with him? What the fuck is wrong with people like him?
Ugh!
So, how does he respond to the fact that Jesus got his facts wrong about the mustard seed being the smallest? The usual defense is to say that the bible is not a science textbook, but that undermines his first point.
The way he talks about it, makes it sound like marriage is a breeding program, like we do with cattle and dogs.
“One flesh”. Do they not know how creepy that sounds? Would make for a great Dr Who monster though, something like the abzorbaloff meets the Borg.
chem @10:
If you haven’t been visited, can I get your address? I’m short on my homosexual recruitment target this month.
Oh yeah, baby. Recruit me all night long.
vaiyt @24: To them, it is.
Klingenshit is always good for a chuckle. He did get in trouble for doing something like this in uniform. I’m pretty sure he has since been discharged from the military. I don’t recall the details, but I think the Navy let him get out without a ‘dishonorable’, but I could be wrong.
What makes the whole “one flesh” thing disturbing for me is the quotes I’ve seen where it was used to condone marital rape.
carbonbased
“I would not quote from the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which might seem to be just a bit biased” — Why not? Is it any more biased than any of the other versions? If there is an unbiased version, please point me in that direction.
“You are, as I said, giving a caricature of Christian belief, not the actual belief.” — I’m hard pressed to know what the “actual belief” of Christianity is. There are many Christianities, particularly when you look back in time. Which one are you thinking of? As I recall the passage from First Corinthians* and some others from the Pauline letters seem to be addressing the fact that some early Christians were abandoning their families (i.e. divorce), among other bizarre things, to prepare for the end because they believed god hated anything “of the flesh,” including marriage and sex. Vestiges of such Gnostic anti-physical beliefs do still lurk in some of the sects. You may note that some of the sects don’t allow their priests to marry because to be truly pure you must be celibate.
* Of course, it’s no more clear what “Paul” said than what god hates (god still hasn’t spoken) but even First Corinthians acknowledges a second writer. Paul is as much a fictional character as Jesus, and yet another messiah in the rather long list of them recorded in the Bibles.
Carbonbasedlifeform:
The text in the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible is the King James version, unaltered. I don’t think that can be accused of bias. It was the version read in every church I ever attended.
robro: I think we do have evidence of a “real” Paul. However, many of the writings attributed to him in the bible are not actually his work.
I have no idea about this particular passage, however. Richard Carrier would know. Or Robert Price. Or dozens of others.
But I think it’s a stretch to say Paul was fictional. Frankly, without Paul I don’t think Christianity would be anything other than a tiny splinter Jewish sect, following all the laws and commandments, but waiting for the messiah to return. They would be a deadly bore at parties.
In any event, I certainly agree with you that Jesus is fictional. Just how fictional is a subject of endless fascination for me. I waffle between “completely mythical” and “a composite character based on several to dozens of Messianic Jews of the era, later heavily mythologized by the Hellenes”.
But I do love the book of “Mark” (another mythical character, FWIW). Jesus the Demon Hunter. Joss Whedon must have gotten some of his ideas for Buffy the Vampire Slayer from “Mark”.
As far as Paul goes, I am fairly sure consensus says there was such a person. He made a complete bollocks out of what Jesus (or “Jesus” for the mythicists; I am not among that number!) actually said, and ironically that is good proof that there was such a person. To err is human and all that.
So far as “recruiting” goes, i know for certain in at least my own case it didn’t happen that way. When you know you’re gay before you know what gay is, when you realize that you feel about your female classmates the way boys are supposed to and don’t know why, well…no recruitment necessary. Or prior abuse; my sister is straight as an arrow, and she was not only abused but actually raped.
About a year ago on FB I saw someone’s post which said “Homophobia is the fear from a man that another man will treat them the way they treat women.” This may be at the base of a lot of this lovely gay-hating culture we’re seeing.
Sounds good; please post the link or the peer-reviewed journal reference and I’ll take a gander.
You’re thinking about Emperor Constantine, who saved the backwards social outcast Jewish sect from obscurity and propelled it into a mainstream state religion (source: Erhman. Bart D. “Misquoting Jesus”. HarperCollins. 2005. 74-75).
I supervised the creation of hundreds of zygotes today. Then I aborted them all.
Nothing sacred about it.
With Jesus himself not being the product of the union of a sperm and an egg (I assume–does anyone maintain that God the Father used SPERM to impregnate Mary? although come to think of it, what else COULD he use? Heh heh…I said “come”), what kind of monster/chimera/mutant-freak does that make JESUS using this biology lesson? Jesus the Biology Teacher is himself not the product of the biology he’s teaching about? I mean, at some point you just have to stop yourself and say, Gawd, this might all just happen to be pure bullshit. Ya think?
This is why I come to Pharyngula almost daily: because I learn such interesting things. For instance, before I read this article, I thought the reason for my wife’s infertility was scarred Fallopian tubes. But now I have seen the light: Jesus hates us!
Now we can skip that fertility doc appointment in an hour and just pray harder. Thank you, random homophobic street preacher.
It’s interesting that you mention your surety that there is consensus that such as person as Paul exists, but emphatically state that you’re not a Jesus mythicist when there certainly is no consensus that such a person as Jesus existed. In fact, it’s absolutely certain that the Jesus of the Bible did not exist. People who come back to life from the dead and perform miracles as attributed to Jesus are not real.
If you’re not a mythicist, then what is your position? It’s not enough to merely state that you’re not a mythicist. Do you believe in the existence of a Biblical Jesus? I might presume not and, in that case, I simply can’t imagine what alternative there is except that the Jesus of the Bible is mythical.
And by mythical, the Jesus of the Bible could be anything from entirely constructed from mythological archetypes or an amalgam of more-or-less contemporary (to the time of Jesus) messianic figures (with awesome and impossible feats fictionalised). Since there is a paucity (nay, an absence) of contemporary evidence for a Biblical Jesus and considering further that the Jesus as described in the Bible is an impossible being, some clarification of your position is warranted.
Thomathy:
It’s Bayesian =P And yes, I’m fully aware that one’s priors are simply a reflection of already-existing knowledge flavored by biases.
Basically, because I know there was a small flood (a plague?) of people like Jesus from ~100BC to ~100AD (that is, doomsaying, apocalyptic prophets with aspirations to messiahhood), I think it’s likely there was another one named Yeshua bar Yousef. I separate Jesus/Yeshua (Joshua!) from Christ; I am most definitely a “Christ mythicist” as are all non-Christians.
The “historical Jesus” people purport to know is likely an amalgamation of several people, but I do believe there was one person at the core; that is, that over time stories of other people, several of whom were named Yeshua, got added to the person. In effect I believe there were two layers of mythmaking, one done on Yeshua proper and another done to elevate composite-Jesus to Godhood.
An interesting but (as yet) unevidenced belief. Thanks, for the clarification!
Well…I’m not an expert on this. It’s almost purely guesswork. But at least it’s not unreasonable, and it doesn’t conflict with any known facts so far as I know. Whether Yeshua himself existed or not is almost moot, isn’t it?
Besides, people believe in a historical Sakyamuni Buddha, but wasn’t it almost 500 years between when he supposedly lived and when the texts about him were written?
Yeah, I hear that. The issue of historicity hinges on contemporary evidence. In the absence of that evidence and in the presence of other evidence (usually negative), the null hypothesis is reasonably that the person wasn’t real (was mythical).
However, in the case of the historicity of Jesus, there’s ample contemporary evidence for the existence of other ‘characters’ from the Bible (like Pontius Pilate), but literally none for anyone who could be Jesus. The juxtaposition of there being so much evidence for other historical contemporaries of the Jesus character and none for that Jesus character, not to mention the fact that the Bible is largely fictionalised, is enough to suppose as an initial premise that no historical Jesus existed.
And you’re right that it probably is a moot point, since the only thing that survives is the Biblical character and we can outright discount the existence of anyone like that. Still, it is extremely problematic academically and a very clear boundary crossing of Christian thought into the legitimate study of history to suppose that Jesus existed in the absence of any evidence and to try, as historians and scholars have done (and do), to grasp at any possible piece of evidence to fit their forgone conclusion about the existence of Jesus. It wouldn’t be so bad if so many people weren’t highly motivated by their faith to confirm their forgone conclusion, but unless you’re a Christian there really isn’t a reason to even suspect that Jesus ever existed.
I don’t know enough about the Buddha to know if there is contemporary evidence for his existence, but proving his historicity involves the same requirements, namely contemporary evidence. Even then, it’s not like we can ever know for sure, but it is certainly an issue of bias and misplaced motivation to go into some study with a forgone conclusion. I think you’ll appreciate why that’s extremely problematic to the study of something without me having to spell it out for you.
That would be the product of two fused ova from the same woman.
So, if such a baby were to be born it’d be:
1- Female
2- Homozygous for a high proportion of its genes, with all the widespread problems this causes for any lethal and/or severely debilitating recessive, as well as HLAs.
This was a question I always had at the back of my mind when I still believed as a teenager: where the fuck does Jesus’ Y chromosome came from ? If it came from god, does that mean god has DNA ? What would that look like ?
And yes, I’ve always been this terminally geeky, to the annoyance of a good many people around me, including the priest who was supposed to supervise our confirmation ceremony.
Kemist:
Stop THINKING. That’s a sin you know. God did it how God did it because God did it.
Milton did the whole ‘one flesh’ bit much better than Jesus and he didn’t even have to pretend to be a biologist:
I with thee have fixt my Lot,
Certain to undergoe like doom, if Death
Consort with thee, Death is to mee as Life;
So forcible within my heart I feel
The Bond of Nature draw me to my owne,
My own in thee, for what thou art is mine;
Our State cannot be severd, we are one,
One Flesh; to loose thee were to loose my self.
Chem @ 10;
I bet they would would be much less annoying than Jehovah’s Witnesses…
“a sperm and an egg form together, they match in a zygote and a new DNA is formed and it becomes one new human flesh.”
From what I understood, is it not possible to go to twins and beyond after this point? Also the lower bound is obviously zero. I tried to get the clowns at Catholic Fundamentalism to nail down for me exactly when their “soul” came into the picture in the beginning and left at the end. Apparently they had not considered the alternative possibilities.
You’re thinking about Emperor Constantine, who saved the backwards social outcast Jewish sect from obscurity and propelled it into a mainstream state religion
You’ve skipped the entire 2nd and 3rd centuries. Think about it: why would the Emperor, ruler of the known world, want anything to do with a “backwards social outcast Jewish sect”? By the late 3rd century, Christianity was anything but obscure. Cerainly Constantine’s boosterism was a pivotal development, but it did not “save” the church, which could not have functioned as a state religion if it were not already attracting adherents among the rich and powerful.
As regards the historicity of Paul, someone wrote a substantial portion of what are regarded as the 7 genuine epistles, so to that extent there must have been a “historical Paul.” What is in doubt is the extent to which that person’s life and career answers to either the one alluded to by passages in the letters or the legendary one narrated in Acts. I tend to side with the idea that “Paul” is a cipher, a concocted identity used to tame or rehabilitate the author of writings that had either become anonymous or were actually written by a known figure of dubious legacy.
Bronze Dog @ 30;
I have run into this too. There are plenty of fundamentalist arsehats who are champing at the bit to use that passage to try to roll back the (relatively recent) criminalisation of marital rape on the basis that the legal system has no authority to deny a husband his supposedly ‘god given’ right to his wife’s body on the basis that, since they are ‘one flesh’, it is not solely her body anymore.
Somehow I doubt that they would be quite so happy were the logical implications of that idea going two ways to be explored. Does it mean that the wife has the right to decide that the shared marital flesh should have a vesectomy? Or some pectoral implants? Or perhaps a tattoo saying “property of *insert wife’s name*” across the face of the part of the shared marital flesh that has a ‘Y’ chromosome?
Ah – how foolish of me. I keep forgetting that, in the world according to xians, only men are deserving of all these rights of bodily autonomy.
Living sex toysWomen need not apply. *retch*@aziraphale
I would disagree, but I see the overall point you’re making.
@kemist …
Um, Joseph?
kemist, if it wasn’t obvious where that Y chromosome came from, it’s easy. Mary was a chimera, with one testis and one ova.
Religion.
But then what’s the point of the whole virgin birth thing ?
I was a catlicker, and this thing was just as much part of what you had to believe as Jesus’ resurrection.
So I guess that’s what this “holy ghost” was.
A really weird teratoma.
As others have pointed out, Gordon Klingenschmitt is a nutter frequently mocked over at Ed’s blog. Here is a summary of Klingenschmitt from the Encyclopedia of American Loons:
gregpeterson:
The “H” in Jesus H Christ is short for “haploid”
@markw
Hah! Big ol’ +1 for you, sir!
Yeah, and in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul is saying that they shouldn’t do it. Saying that “Paul” is the author of the books attributed to him is, if nothing else, a convenience.
My point stands. Attack Christianity, certainly. But do not attack a caricature of it, since that just makes you look silly. To say to just about any Christian “God hates all marriage” will get you dismissed with derision, and rightly so.
Just the standard right wing false equating of marriage and procreation. And again, what is it with hard core xians and beastiality?
greg1466:
I appreciate that this may be an interesting sociological question, but I for one, don’t want to fucking know!