Bingowings said:
In the Old Testament both parties were to put to death and the method of choice was stoning. The act had declared those practising it as dead to the nation. So they were given a violent live burial. The same was true with adultery.
I mentioned this in defense of religion. From my perspective the bigotry is in the text because of the bigotry of it's human authors not because of the a divine bigotry or any institution of bigotry from the religions that maintain the text.
Though removing it from the text would be a step in the right direction if a religious organisation wants to distance itself from the acts violence in the text.
i think there is a mix of the standard disgust response when discovering a group of people indulging a form of sensual pleasure that seems alien, coupled with a scripture led tribalism spread by bigoted clerics (of many religions).
The germ of that clerical led bigotry is the oft misquoted Old Testament prohibitions most of the time. Even the Indian Right Wing take the principle from it's colonial history.
Secular bigots draw from a religious cultural history when they make their proclamations of 'tradition' and 'natural law'. Just as secular charities also pool from a long history of religious good works.
It must be pointed out that any culture is ultimately derived from a religious cultural history, the good and the bad, the religious and irreligious. There is good is tradition and natural law, and often "progress" goes backwards or leads to instability.
Honestly, censoring the Bible is a disservice as well. Did you know that psychologists use data from Nazi experiments on Jews in the present day? What they did was horrible and wrong, unethical, immoral, purely evil. But there were things learned that could not be learned through any moral experimentation. What was done was wrong, but at least we can make positive use of such evil.
To censor the Bible would be trying to eliminate legitimate history. That was really Mosaic Law, not just the whims of some author. You can't erase history, even if you don't like it. It would be like censoring the Code of Hammurabi. The big difference is that the Bible is used at the present day and is treated as a sacred book. Better would be education and proper commentary, showing how even the Bible no longer endorses such things, giving historical context, enlightening its readers, and trying to remove fundamentalist extremism.
