Thread by @chelywright

Hi. It’s me again— the lesbian country music singer that won’t shut up about being gay. If you happen read any Tweet of mine in the course of your lifetime, please let it be this one.

So @Franklin_Graham is going on and on (again/still) about how members of the LGBTQ community cannot be real Christians unless we repent and change our ways; because he’s taking a swing at @PeteButtigieg, a candidate for President.

And now all kinds of Christians are responding. Some are pushing back against @Franklin_Graham, but most aren’t.

Most are citing cherry-picked Bible verses— many taken out of context— and slinging their half-baked ideas that they heard from their parents who heard it from their preacher who heard it from his parent’s preacher back around the time cars were invented.

Goodness gracious. Will you think and listen? Will you consider anything anyone else has to say? Suspend your beliefs for just a second— I know you can do it because you believe in God. Believing in God is the Olympics of suspending what you know to be true.

The Bible was written thousands of years ago. By man. Women weren’t allowed to weigh in back then, of course. Men wrote these chapters and these verses that so many Christians have turned to for guidance, inspiration and blessings. Me included.

We have five copies of the Bible in our NYC apartment where storage is always an issue; nevertheless, they remain because they're cherished. The Bible is an amazing book; a monumental piece of literature in every way. The Old Testament was written about 3,500 years ago- by man.

Those guys were the thought leaders of their time. They had access to more information than most and they had the capacity to actually write— to put pen to paper… few could at that time.

The men were held up as intellectuals— they knew best and were counted upon to record content and meaning, as they understood it. So they were the ones who wrote the Bible.

You know what happened much more recently than when the Bible was written, say like… 1,200+ years ago? A lot. Medicine, for instance, was practiced by the super-educated and most well-informed men of those times. Yep, they were “on it!”

Those were really modern times compared to when the old guys wrote the Bible “way back then”.

You know what those new fangled, modern men who practiced medicine 1,200 years ago thought and believed? With their evolved ideas and more information than mankind had ever had access to, they thought the following ideas were “good and right”--

Human excrement paste: This cure is absolutely horrifying to think about. A mixture of tree resin, flower roots & human excrement was applied to the inflamed lymph nodes of a plague victim, and then bandaged tightly. They more than likely developed another disease because of it.

Urine baths: People in medieval Europe thought that bathing in urine two or three times a day would protect them from all sorts of ailments. Doctors even recommended that people ingest a couple glasses a day, as well.

Dead mouse paste: This is a cure that you’ll never hear your dentist prescribe. In Ancient Egypt, toothaches were common because of the sandy environment. To prevent this, Egyptians made a thick paste out of dead mice and applied it to the infected areas of their mouths.

Sympathy powder: This cure doesn’t really make too much sense. Instead of trying to heal a victim’s sword wound, the actual sword itself had a powder applied to it. People thought that if they applied the substance to the sword, the wound that it caused would also heal.

Partial tongue removal: Also known as “hemiglossectomy,” this procedure was believed to help people who suffered from stutters. But, most of the patients who underwent the operation were never able to speak again.

Tobacco smoke enema: Medieval doctors based this procedure off of an old Native American practice of blowing smoke into the rear-end of anyone suffering from a cold, drowsiness or gut pain. This lasted until doctors realized that nicotine was a poisonous substance.

And you still cannot even CONSIDER that the men who wrote the Bible— thousands of years ago— might have possibly maybe misunderstood, misinterpreted or poorly wrote and characterized what God had intended that we know?

None of us in 2019 would allow our physical health and safety to be addressed by practices and ideas that are even 50 years old, not to mention 1,200 years old.

Why would we allow our spiritual health and emotional safety to be addressed and determined by a book written 3,500 years ago?

Respectfully,
chely