Nice Party

I enjoyed the party last night at my cousin's house. Everyone was very solicitous because of my loss of Bob. That was sweet. I ate some of everyone's dish. The food was really good.

The conversation was also very good except for the last one. This very nice Christian woman, who shall remain unnamed, was determined that all Muslims are terrorists who really want to kill us. She says they are infiltrating every country and it is their intention to take over them and then kill all the Christians because we are "infidels". I told her about my friend Mona, who teaches at the local community college and who brought food in the week Bob was sick and dying. She said, "does she wear the burka?" I said "no, she dresses just like us. She is Egyptian". She was still determined that because it says in the Koran somewhere that all infidels should be killed, that that is their intention. This was an educated and smart and otherwise very nice woman. I told her there was a place in the Bible where the writer said that God told the Israelites who were moving into Canaan to kill every man, woman and child in the land and to dash the heads of the babies against the wall. She had never run onto that passage. I told her that such customs, if you can call them customs, are cultural. I also told her that the God I know would not instruct anyone to kill babies and to dash them headfirst against a wall. The writer of that particular part of scripture believed God had told them to do that and justified their killing the people in that land by attributing the instruction to God.

Her pastor had instructed her well though. I also told her that in the Bible, until the time of Paul at least, women were considered property and it was quite common for fathers to give their twelve year old daughters to some old geezer king of another tribe as a wife..to keep peace with that tribe. It was also common to have widow cleansing like in the story of Ruth, Naomi and Boaz.

In the Old Testament, it plainly says if your children do not obey you, you should take them before the village elders and have them stoned to death. There's a lot of that cultural nonsense in the Bible and rather then following such instructions as to not wear two kinds of cloth at the same time and not to boil the calf in it's mother's milk, we should just consider the culture in which such stuff was written and not consider it "the word of God" applicable for today too.

I don't think I convinced her though. People get these weird ideas and turn off their common sense when it comes to the Bible. The Bible approves of slavery. In fact, those who owned slaves could quote chapter and verse approving it. Later writings, attributed to Paul, said women should keep quiet in the church and if they wanted to learn anything, they should ask their husbands. There are still churches today that believe that nonsense. Women cannot even vote in those churches. Now mind you, they set aside that instruction when it comes to teaching children..especially small children. But otherwise, women should take a back seat. :)

Anyhow, soon after that, I decided it was time to leave so I took my leave of the party, thanked the host and hostess and came home to let Slinky out of the garage. And was he glad!