Was the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah just like a bunch of prudes kinkshaming ancient Rome?

@Bashabez i can actually give a semi-serious answer to this tho this is probably not why you made such a toot:

it's far more about the towns violating hospitality culture at the time by offering up visitors as "lol anyone wanna come rape these guys" for the town, which is a seriously shitass move. ancient hebrews and surrounding cultures of the time were deadly serious about welcoming guests hospitably, and inviting people to sexually assault them was much more the serious violation

@wigglytuffitout holy shit, sorry to make the joke I made, I honestly didn't realize.

@Bashabez nah u good, it's honestly one of the most vastly misinterpreted parts of the old testament! or rather people repeat a fiction of what they think it is

which i think is a real shame because "god didn't appreciate them being gay" very much pales in comparison to "so god sent some angels in disguise and the response of the people there was to try to get everyone to come rape their guests, at which point god said Nuke It From Orbit It's The Only Way To Be Sure" lmao

@wigglytuffitout granted, the Christian God doesn't seem too approving of gayness in the old testament anyhow though

@Bashabez honestly there are quite a lot of ways to cut that one particular verse and you will find quite a lot of discussion on it, so it might be more ambiguous than you would initially think. tbh if you REALLY want to get into picking it apart hebrew letter by letter, jewish scholars are miles ahead of christians in that regard lmao, and have largely come to the conclusion that the talmud is ok with queer folks (from what i have seen of jewish friends discussing this).

@wigglytuffitout I'm not a religious person at all. Though, I love history. I do think that the Christian accepted text of the Bible has been bastardized through mistranslations and edits made by those tasked with reproducing the text through the hundreds/thousands of years since it's inception, as well as the modern misinterpretations of clear metaphors made therein, especially with a lot of the new sects springing up within america within the last hundred years or so.

@Bashabez to be honest, as someone who is on the other side of the whole atheism question but don't know as much church history as she should - it's even worse than that in some ways. the actual text often ends up remarkably well preserved, and then fighting begins with the translation of it - however, american anti-intellectualism has really meant that the whole idea of thinking of the bible *as an intellectual endeavor* has been rebuked entirely. >

@Bashabez my perfect example for this is young earthers. they're not supported by the text. they're supported only by a bad translation of that text *and* by the idea that *whatever you imagined reading those verses the first time must be right*... AND, even worse, by the idea that NOBODY HAS THOUGHT ABOUT THOSE VERSES BEFORE YOU, AT ALL. (i know you're at your keyboard all 'oh god, why me, so much text' but 🐻 with me a moment here) >

@Bashabez fact of the matter is that in church history, there had already been a lot of thought about this. medieval scholars around the time of thomas aquinas were coming at the same problem from a different angle - instead of "what if the length of a day in genesis was really long, thus supported by rock formation etc", it was "what if these things all happened near-instantly? what if the length of a day was really really short?" >

@Bashabez and ultimately they came up with what i think is the right answer - which was "the text just doesn't give us that many details, so we're going to have to respect that god made the world, and gave us clues in the formation of it, and use our brains as we take in new data". again, medieval scholars! after INTENSE debate! this is what they came up with. which i agree with, and i think is the best answer they could have found. >