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Matthew 5:34-37
But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

Fucking discuss.

Comments

  1. 1

    And yes, I know that the verse means “swear” as in “swear an oath.” I swear.

    But still an interesting prohibition, considering common legal practice today.

  2. 2

    “because thou canst not make one hair white or black”

    Obviously this was written before Clairol came on the scene.

  3. 3

    Some devout Christians, from Friends (Quakers) to Jehovah’s Christians, have long affirmed their statements in Court, rather than swearing an oath by the (ultimately pagan) Anglo-Saxon custom. Devout Jews similarly are forbidden to swear an oath in G-d’s name by Torah, and orthodox Jews will affirm their statements, rather than swear.

    BTW, I recommend The New Revised Standard Version as a reasonable modern English translation of the Christian Bible. The KJV is a wonderfully-written work, but at times it diverges drastically from the best original texts.

    But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No”; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

  4. 4

    Who is I?

    Matthew? Why would anyone care what some tax collector for the Romans had to say?

    Is I .. Me? Not so you can tell from the text?

    This seems to be little more that graffiti and hardly worth the attention of anyone serious about knowing My will.

    I am that I am.

  6. 6

    The terminology used is “do you swear or affirm to tell the truth” blah, blah, blah.

    The only exception is the Scalia rule.

  8. 8

    Blow up your TV
    Throw away your paper
    Move to the country
    Build you a home
    Plant a little garden
    Eat a lot of peaches
    Try to find Jesus on your own

    -John Prine

  10. 10

    @5 Funny how our wingnut friends are only in favor of Republican wars.

    Republican war = good
    Democratic war = bad

  13. 13

    Repost from the Weekend thread:

    Regular church attendance = obesity (Praise the Lard!)

    “Our main finding was that people with a high frequency of religious participation in young adulthood were 50 percent more likely to become obese by middle age than those with no religious participation in young adulthood,” says Matthew Feinstein, the study’s lead investigator and a fourth-year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

    “And that is true even after we adjusted for variables like age, race, gender, education, income, and baseline body mass index,” he added.

  16. 16

    @8 Amen.

    I just recently watch Agora it gets into the who idea of swearing allegiance to christianity. In the 4th century it was a deadly affair.

  18. 18

    Me think yawnway was still pissed about the Egyptian thang (dying hair black and gold), even unto the good news era, since hair dying dates back at least 10,000 years.

  19. 19

    Who Wrote The Bible and Why It Matters

    Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors — a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that — that the Bible actually contains lies?

    Most people wouldn’t put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle — Peter, Paul or James — knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.

    Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books “pseudepigrapha.”

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