As one of those people who grew up in the 60s, and who tended to ignore the need for trimming one’s hair (still do, actually), I often heard that phrase “get a haircut!” It’s an attitude that has largely faded with time, fortunately, but it still lingers in Baptist churches from the pastors there.
“There are times my heart breaks, and this is one of those times. This past weekend, November 12, 2023, First Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana invited a group of men into their church to teach on creation. Then on Monday, these same men went to Hyles-Anderson College and taught the students. These men were not Baptists and do not claim to be Baptists. In fact, one is a member of a Reformed church, and another claimed from their pulpit that he is a Methodist,” wrote Domelle in his publication.
He then went on to criticize David Litty, one of the organization’s presenters as “a long-haired hippie” who should not be in the pulpit teaching Christians.
“A long-haired hippie teaching in the pulpit is in direct contradiction to Scripture. 1 Corinthians 11:14 says, ‘Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?’” wrote Domelle. “I don’t know anything about this man, but I do know that to have long hair is a shame. It does not matter what he was going to teach, the fact that he blatantly disobeys God’s Word should have alerted anyone to his spiritual discernment and that he is to be disqualified to teach people.”
Wow. I haven’t heard that kind of complaint in ages. Litty also used the wrong translation of the Bible. Burn the heretic!
By the way, Litty ran out and cut his hair. Some of these Baptists also went on to complain that they shouldn’t be fighting over hair length when they should be combatting Darwinian evolution. A pox on both sides!
As I said, these types are Too Good for God, for even Jesus couldn’t meet their expectations, that long haired, bearded hippie commie pinko.
So, 1 Corinthians 11:14 says to burn Jesus at the stake, lest he contaminate you with evil ideas of equality, peace and love, rather than conversion by the sword.
1 Corinthians 11:14 says, ‘Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?’
Um, no…’nature’ never taught me any such thing. Hair grows NATURALLY on men and women alike. Next question…?
If Jesus ever does return, these people will be splintering into opposing denominations within about ten minutes.
“The shoe is the sign!”
“No! Follow the gourd!”
Had one of those good Christian a**holes as a teacher in high school. He was a god fearing churchgoer who played the organ at his local church. He was also a sadist. One girlfriend told me about his daughters birthday party she attended. Their cat had just had kittens. For the party entertainment he put the kittens into a plastic bag and suffocated them. How did he treat the students. Well he was a woodwork teacher who had a habit of throwing tools at the students when he was angry. He also policed school uniform ruthlessly. That included hair length. An infraction meant a trip to the equally sadistic principals office. How sadistic? He once gave a boy 6 strokes of the cane for smiling on assembly he also strolled the assembly lines selecting victims for caning for the offense of being on the end of the line. Boys who had long hair were treated to a trip to a co-operative barber who administered a GI style haircut. One mother took exception to this abuse and marched into his office with her son demanding an explanation. When he proceeded to demean her son she grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face into his desk breaking his nose. I don’t know if she was ever charged. I would have given her a medal.
Clearly Jesus was a witch and should have been hung, burned, pressed to death, or drowned. Can’t be too careful about some dude saying he and god are the same thing.
So this guy is meant to be a Pastor yet he apparently doesn’t know about Samson or what his “kryptonite” was?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson
The real issue is what to do with those insisting on wearing tie-dye T-shirts which, as we all know, are abhorrent in the eyes of the Lord.
Hmmm, tie-dye camo T-shirts… ;)
Three models. Woodland colors, safety orange and green and plaid (just to trigger severe confusion on the part of the viewer).
StevoR @ 6
As we have discussed often, Christians are often hypocrites, or utterly ignorant of what their Holy Book says. Or both.
I just Googled “Jesus hair length.” Oooooo boy, prepare to go down a Bible-fucker’s rabbit hole.
Akira MacKenzie @ 10, to today’s fascist bible humpers, Jesus was a blonde haired, crew cut, blue eyed Aryan godling in an SS uniform.
Who throws Jews into ovens, but being a good example, made it short work by tossing himself in first.
1 Corinthians 11:14 is really about women covering their heads in church…or rather not covering their heads. To the prudish person who wrote 1 Corinthians, a woman with an exposed head of hair suggests naughtiness. Just as it was “natural” for men to crop their hair, which was a apparently a common style among Roman men in the day, so it was “natural” for women’s bare head to get men excited. So the women needed to cover their heads.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church and I never saw women cover their heads. I seem to recall preachers explaining why it wasn’t necessary for women to follow Paul’s admonition. In any case, I bet none of the women in that audience had their heads covered. As usual the preachers picks-and-chooses the parts they want to harp on.
Assuming a historical Jesus, we have no idea what he looked like. He could have looked conventionally Semitic for the day, but there were some Celto-Germanic people in the Levant in the first century so anything is possible. Of course, the easiest answer is there was no Jesus or certainly not a single Jesus.
I put the historical Paul in the same bucket as the historical Jesus. There’s no contemporary documentation of him outside of the writings in the New Testament, and scholars generally agree there are at least four different writers of the works attributed to him.
Leviticus 19:27 Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard would seem that the laws of their gawd would over rule anything said by man.
muttpupdad, that only applies to squares.
I’ll just get my coat…
@ 13
Silly atheist! Don’t you know that the Laws of Moses doesn’t count anymore… unless when we need them to.
@Feralboy12, #3: You might enjoy “Creatures of Light and Darkness” by Roger Zelazny. Lots of religious satire, including a shoe worshipping cult. “We worship thee in the full glory of thy shoeness…”
When I was about 15, in the mid-1970s, I had very long hair. I was camping with a friend and a boy scout leader was camping nearby. He had no qualms about coming over to a teen-aged kid he’d never seen before and lecturing me on my hair. I pointed out that Jesus had long hair, just to get his goat (I knew even then that our pictures of this possibly-mythical person were from an entirely different time and place). But he took me entirely seriously and seemed to have thought this through: He said that Jesus only had long hair after spending 40 days in the desert. It was all I could do to not burst out laughing. Even my friend, who was quite religious, told me afterwards that he almost did, too. But both of us got vibes from the guy that kept our faces straight. He seemed like he wanted an angry confrontation. We noticed that the kids he was leading seemed to go warily around him. We just got up and said we were going on a hike. He smiled, probably thinking, ‘Point to me, hippy.’ Sheesh.
And, damn, garydargan @4, Your description of that guy made me want to be at that meeting with the mom. And I wonder if it might have been the same guy as mine. But, nah, there are plenty of them out there.
Perhaps he had the flu for Christmas, and wasn’t feeling up to par? That might explain his paranoia…
Paul K @ 17, just a bully looking for what appeared to him to be easy pickings.
He’d never come up to bother me when I’m backpacking and despite needing a cane to walk, I still occasionally do go backpacking.
I’ve only gotten such nonsense on the street, in alleged civilization, whereupon I questioned the wisdom of the speaker attempting to start a conflict with someone perfectly capable of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt whose religion was correct with him and that life in prison or the death penalty isn’t much of a deterrent at my age. The shit spewer then decided to retire from the field.
I’ve never been in the shit business, so I don’t take any shit and I certainly don’t give a shit, so any shit distribution attempts promptly gets handed straight back to them.
And I’ve never suffered fools well at all.
Hold up. Jesus himself was a long-haired hippie!
I’ve had long hair since I was 15. In more than 40 years I’ve only once had a problem with anyone saying, “Get your hair cut!”; usually it’s just been friends making a joke.
About 15 years ago two teenagers in a flashy soft-top Mercedes drove past me in town and the passenger yelled, “Get yer fucking hair cut, you filthy hippy!”. He didn’t realise that the traffic lights 30 yards ahead had just turned red, so as I ambled up to their car I pulled my keys out of my pocket and held them in my fist. I asked the kid if he was going to apologise for being a shit-stained arsehole, to which he replied, “Fuck off!”, as I’d expected. I said, “OK, I’m fucking off, now that I’ve keyed your car,” and held up my fist full of keys. The driver leapt out screaming and ran round the back end to the passenger’s side; the flash car was almost certainly his dad’s. I hadn’t touched the bodywork at all, of course, but as I was walking away I could hear him find that out and still turn on his idiot mate, and everyone in the queue behind them hit their horns as the lights turned green.
It was a remarkably satisfying moment. I’m grinning from ear to ear just writing this!
Dunno about 1 Corinthians.
First, there’s doubt that Paul really wrote it, though it shouldn’t matter. It matters if a thing makes sense, not who wrote it. It’s just a problem for people who really really want Paul to have written that.
Second it seems to me that the author is talking about people fighting over details that don’t matter, like if a woman should cover her head, or if a man should have long hair. Just a bit further along they write,
11:17 But in giving this instruction, I do not praise you, because you come together not for the better but for the worse.
11:18 For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that divisions exist among you; and in part I believe it.
11:19 For there must also be factions among you, so that those who are approved may become evident among you.
11:20 Therefore when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper,
11:21 for in your eating each one takes his own supper first; and one is hungry and another is drunk.
(NIV)
So… my reading might not be how a Baptist reads that passage, since I’m an atheist. Make of it what you will
Helge @22, I make of it that it’s an opportunity to feature a most informative channel and series:
https://www.youtube.com/@UsefulCharts/videos
(I don’t think it’s unrelated or irrelevant)
Was “Paul” the sort of person any normal person would want to have a beer with?
John @23 – yea I’m subscribed to that channel. I recommend it as well for anyone who wants to learn stuff. Diverse stuff. Stuffity stuff. :-)
nomdeplume @24 – Paul became a religious zealot after trying to destroy the early Christian faith communities. I get the impression that neither before nor after the Road To Damascus was he the sort who’d have a beer with most people. I imagine you can think of a lot of people like that even today.
Helge, um.
Now I feel like I just tried to teach my granny how to suck eggs, type of thing.
(Ta, anyway)
@25 Helge – agree absolutely, before and after Damascus, one of the most unpleasant men of history, and an exemplar of Shakespeare’s “the evil that men do lives after them”.
It’s an ignorant answer. The consensus among relevant experts – including atheists, agnostics and observant Jews – is that there was a single individual who was the source of the (highly mythologised) stories in the gospels. Mythicism is a typical form of denialist nonsense, with different mythicists coming up with a wide range of implausible pseudo-explanations for how the apparently universal belief among both early Christians and their enemies in a single Jesus could have come about if there wasn’t one. Not one of the early anti-Christians whose words have been preserved (and there were quite a few) claimed he didn’t exist, or was multiple, nor did any of the “heretical” Christian sects deny his appearance on earth.
@ 24 Morales
Relevant-ish. (Long-haired hippie?)
“Earliest Depictions of Jesus in Art – YouTube”
This is so 1950s’ and 60s’ it’s unreal. This is 2023, not 1963 or 1953.
Thank you. Your post made me play “Almost cut my hair” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young which I didn’t do for ages.
robro @12
Not even with large, decorative hats? Churchladies seem to like those hats.
Brought back memories of me being 14 and having a long running battle with one of my father’s aunts over me covering my hair in church. I absolutely refused to and she absolutely insisted on hairpinning that tissue on my head if I “ forgot “ that little white triangular scarf we used to wear for church . I felt outraged by being told that my female bare head was insulting to God . I have no idea why that angered me so much but it did . Actually come to think of it, it was probably that I was sick and tired of my father’s unthinking restrictive misogyny . This was the 60s after all , right before the women’s lib movement took off