This pissed me off so fucking much when people defend Christianity by saying that all of the bad shit is in the Old Testament and that the New Testament is totally fine.
1 Corinthians 6:9
"Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,"
Gay people and gender non-conforming people are not allowed in to heaven
1 Peter 3:1
"Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands;"
It's still an extremely misogynistic book even in the new testament
Romans 1:26-27 ... 32
"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
...
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them."
Both homophobia and misogyny
I could go on and on, and I probably will in the comments, but it's pretty fucking clear that all the nasty bigoted shit in the book just doesn't go away in the New Testament
You cannot separate the bigotry from the Bible. The Bible is very clear that you cannot pick and chose, that you have to accept the full book or none of it, you can't just take the verses you like and still be Christian. To be a good Christian who follows the entire Bible you must be bigoted
Haha, possibly. The early conception of Thomas, throughout the Gnostic writings, Thomas was seen as Jesus' favorite disciple, even drawing the ire of the other disciples because of Jesus' supposed favoritism of Thomas. And interestingly, Thomas was seen as Jesus' "twin", in the Gospel of Thomas he is referred to as such, and John even mentions it in the Gospel of John:
So, Thomas was definitely seen as a special figure in the early Christian writings, which is interesting as he is now commonly remembered as "doubting Thomas", the disciple who doubted the resurrection initially. Seems like there was some in the early church that disliked Thomas' original prominence (perhaps due to the association with being an important figure to the gnostic sects) and basically character assassinated him in retribution.
Yeah, the early Christian development is quite fascinating. I was first exposed to it by Elaine Pagel's book "The Gnostic Gospels", which led to me doing a deeper investigation. It was interesting, since I was also heavily into reading Taoist philosophy at the time, and I could immediately draw the parallels between the Gnostic and some Taoist ideas. The Gnostic version of Christianity seemed to have far more in common with eastern spiritual traditions than other western religious thought. I very much see Gnosticism as a western spiritual kin to eastern systems of thought. It makes a lot of sense too, as I have no doubt that there was a lot of cross-pollination of ideas between the east and west at that time, leading to a synthesis of western thought with the ideas it encountered from the east.