And several times I had a little epiphany about how to handle that contention if I ever have the misfortune again; and today I actually remembered it long enough to jot it down here.
A lot of the right-wing narrative about social safety-net programs is that waah, waah, this isn't what Jeeziz was preaching when he said we should help teh poorz! Well, you know what? You're right. The purpose of welfare, food stamps, Pell and SEOG grants, corporate bailouts etc., is not to fulfil Biblical commandments to take care of the poor, and shouldn't even be thought of in that context! The purpose is to stabilize society by providing a "shock absorber" or "safety net" for society's most vulnerable members. The question of whether such a government program is necessary, proper or effective in its current form can be (and is) debated ad nauseaum, and not relevant to last week's Bible selections. Meanwhile, if you want to count the welfare portion of your tax withholdings as part of your almsgiving, as part of your accounting to God for what you do with your income? That's not the way I think about it, but it's not unreasonable, and nobody's business but yours and God's in any case.
So today I revisited this mini-ministry with a couple verses about racial, national and gender equality in God's Kingdom. Paul did write to the Corinthians that their women should be quiet and keep their heads covered in worship, but to other churches he said "there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor freeman, male nor female, we are all one in Christ". Some other commentator suggested that this had something to do with the pre-eminent role of women in the cult of Bacchus which was especially popular in Corinth at the time. So the idea there was that specifically Corinthian women, accustomed to a dominant role in Bacchanalia as well as to unseemly ecstatic expression, needed some extraordinary reining-in to align with Paul's idea of seemly worship, lest the Corinthian worship be disrupted and the church fractured or corrupted by collision with Bacchanalian practices.
Anyway, it sure is educational poring over conservative head-explodings in reaction to the proposition that "liberalism", not reactionary religious right-wing neoconservatism, is what's more in tune with Christian principles. Especially since the 'cons so regularly demonize, trivialize or straw-man us "liberals". Did you know? We're convinced of our superiority. We don't just we place our agenda ahead of Christ in our lives - most of us don't even subscribe to the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. We're moral relativists. We're intellectually lazy and dishonest, when we're not outright liars. According to the title of one popular right-wing bobblehead's book, our ideology is a mental disorder.
So after the non-issue of the unBiblicality of social-safety-net spending, what are the other contentious divides between Christian "liberal" and Christian "conservative"? Basically, a) abortion, b) gay rights, c) the sex industry, d) freedom of hate religious speech and e) separation of church and state.
What does the Bible say about abortion? It doesn't, as such; germ theory and sterile surgery procedures wouldn't be invented for another 1800 years. That's not to say that abortion wasn't performed. Abortifacients were known to medicine of classical antiquity. But for multiple reasons, medical lore just wasn't a big focus of the Bible. Also, the value of women in Biblical Judaism was often little more than childbearing. God promised kings of old that they would father whole nations, and the prevailing attitude seemed to be that women were a necessary evil toward this goal of nation-fathering. The worst curse the Bible lay on women, time and again, was to be infertile. So wanting to terminate a pregnancy, even for economic reasons, would be baffling to the Biblical Judean mind.
Right-to-lifers like to point to a couple passages from Psalms and Jeremiah about how God "knew me in the womb". Lesser known are the parts about how God knew me... woah, even BEFORE the womb! Personhood before conception is absurd, of course, and the context of the favorite right-to-lifer passages renders the doctrine of personhood at conception only marginally less untenable. Elsewhere in the OT, the draws the line at birth, and in at least one place, infants aren't to be counted until a month postpartum. And in a nation so obsessed with being fruitful and multiplying, what was the prescribed punishment (Exodus 21:22) for injuring a pregnant woman such that she miscarried? Just a fine. So to me the whole "God knew me in the womb" thing only speaks of the totality of our nakedness before God's prescience and omniscience... Not as a strangely-out-of-place plank on which to base a doctrine of personhood at conception. But all that is more than a couple of Bible verses can illustrate, and frankly I'm not sufficiently interested in mixing it up with reactionary Dominionist theocrat-wannabe fuckwits to post the Psalms and Jeremiah verses to kick off a round of Facebook headbutting, not when opening or changing of minds would be so unlikely.