Cal Thomas fails the Bible test


I really don’t understand how these sanctimonious pious types can tell us to live by Biblical standards when they haven’t even read the damned thing.

Fox News contributor Cal Thomas argued over the weekend that polygamy and “adult-child marriage” could become legal in the United States unless the Supreme Court bases its same-sex marriage ruling on “scripture.”

King David? Numbers 31? How old was Rebecca when she was married off to Isaac?

How can you argue that making your laws Biblically based would prohibit polygamy and adult-child marriage?

Comments

  1. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    Cal Thomas argued over the weekend that polygamy and “adult-child marriage” could become legal in the United States unless the Supreme Court bases its same-sex marriage ruling on “scripture.”

    Is that what he calls a threat, to make us so scared we’ll beg the SJC to rule SSM unconstitutional?
    That if “same sex” can marry, everything becomes legal (if not disallowed). He is just throwing around that slippery “slippery-slope argument” to scare us into Bibble worship. Trying to pretzel-twist the outrage to Duggar to justify his homophobia.

  2. Sili says

    Why David? When you’re at Isaac, you might as well just look at his son and his two wives (and their slaves).

  3. PatrickG says

    Well, I’m fairly sure he’d be happy with having 700 wives of his own, a la Solomon. Not to mention the concubines!

  4. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Typical of a lot of religious types. They only read the bible lessons in their weekly pamphlet. Little snippets that support church doctrine. They have no idea of what lies in-between. The last thing the church wants is for people to actually read their bible. After all, that can lead to atheism, as most of us here know.

  5. Usernames! (ᵔᴥᵔ) says

    Ahh, Numbers 31 is a close rival for the “most depraved biblical morals” award with Numbers 21!

    So the latter approves of owning other human beings as property, passing them on to your heirs, beating and killing them–as long as you don’t kill them too quickly–and the former approves of human trafficking and owning other people as sexual objects.

    Reeeaaallly good morals they got there.

  6. Alverant says

    Hey, how old was the “Virgin Mary” figure when she got knocked up? The Protoevangelion of James says she was “not yet 13 summers” when she was visibly with child. Maybe the Duggar family are closer to biblical morals than everyone thought.

  7. paulbc says

    Cal Thomas failed the relevance test years ago. I didn’t even realize he was still alive.

  8. raven says

    Solomon was a big hero in the bible.

    Solomon had 700 wives and 300 sex slaves.

    Cal Thomas is so mentally fogged up, it is hard to tell whether he is lying or stupid.

  9. firstapproximation says

    A study looking at 26 pundits and how accurate their predictions were found that:

    Cal Thomas of the Chicago Tribune was the worst of all prognosticators in our sample. Scoring -8.7, readers could literally gain insight by believing the opposite of what they read in his weekly columns. Of the 15 predictions, 13 were wrong and only one was correct. [Emphasis added]

    The other prediction was deemed a ‘hedge’.

  10. randay says

    Numbers 30 competes for the most incomprehensible and repetitive books. It says the same thing three times over, which didn’t make sense the first time.

    Here Is Betty Bowers explaining traditional marriage.

  11. =8)-DX says

    #7 @Marcus Ranum

    how old was the “Virgin Mary” figure when she got knocked up?

    It wasn’t consensual; she was raped.

    Erm quite a bit of emphasis is placed on Mary explicitly agreeing to the whole thing. You could criticise the morality of the magical insemination as problematic because of coercion (the authority of the angel that appeared to tell her how lucky she was), psychological manipulation (can you freely consent to anything if this holy spirit malarkey fills you up?) or the age-difference of the paticipants, but that’s mostly speculation not present in the text, where Mary explicitly consented to the whole thing.

    “And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.”

    But then it’s an argument about a made-up period story – we might as well be discussing the trolley problem as far as its relevance to reality.

  12. David Marjanović says

    “And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.”

    Well… “consent”… to me this reads like “I can’t refuse this offer anyway, and you know it, so let’s get this over with”.

  13. wcorvi says

    So, I guess we need Sharia Law. The problem is, WHOSE Sharia? Now all the fundies are in favor of a theocracy, but once installed, christianity will break into factions, just like Islam, trying to get THEIR theocracy in power. No Jay-Dub would EVER live under a catholic one, and the catholics would have no other. &c, &c &c.

    I wish they’d let me live, just to see the bloodshed.

  14. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    speaking of anti-sharia law legislation [to personally derail]. It could well backfire in a schadenfraude (sp) sense. So far I’m seen antiSharia laws written, trying to avoid the 1st amendment, in a way to forbid ANY religious law to be enforced. Reading carefully, could disallow many of the xian laws they’ve been surreptitiously embedding in “common law”. To put it more offensively, antiSharia Law activists, if successful would be shooting themselves in the foot.
    [end derail]

  15. busterggi says

    Of course believers fail the bible test – unlike atheists they’ve never read the book.

  16. wsierichs says

    And as everyone knows, when they started letting white people marry black people, the next thing that happened was dogs and cats began living together. That’s one of the biggest proofs that we’re living the End TImes. The day the Supreme Court allows gay marriage, the world will finally go: Poof!

  17. porlob says

    Ugh. Every time I hear ANY variation of the “Biblical marriage” argument, my mind immediately goes to Deuteronomy 22, which states that if you’re a virgin woman or girl and are raped, you have to marry your rapist.

    And if you’re a married or betrothed woman? Welp, you’d better hope a neutral party discovers the act in progress, because otherwise you’ve proved that you really wanted it, and it’s the death sentence for you.

    How about we make our laws based on what is just, instead?

  18. Ganner says

    The whole pedophilia/child marriage bullshit argument ignores that it is secular society that has advanced increasing age of consent and the very idea of consent as necessary. In the late 1800s in the US – a more “biblical” society than now – age of consent was no higher than TWELVE in any state and as low as 7.

  19. Mobius says

    As the Bible clearly states in the case of Solomon, marriage is defined as between one man and several hundred women.