So yet another angry group of people have decided to "refute the Bible" by printing a huge list of supposed "sins" according to the Bible in an attempt to make God look like an unreasonable idiot who doesn't deserve to be even thought about, much less followed. Unfortunately, they have outright distorted and sometimes lied about what Scripture says, so I have chosen to take their list of "sins" and explain what it's all about.
- Eating shellfish - This is one of the Old Testament rules on what creatures are and are not good to eat. However, there is no punishment listed for not holding to these rules, and they were arguably abolished in the New Testament with Peter's dream, in which God offered him "unclean" animals to eat and told him that they were now clean. I'd like to add, though, for the sake of completeness, that the animals labeled "unclean" in the OT are now known to carry an increased risk of food-borne illnesses.
- Wearing clothes made of more than one fabric - Again, this is a cultural requirement only. It has no punishment listed, and it is not labeled explicitly as "detestable" or an "abomination".
- Getting raped (this only goes for the ladies, but you can smooth things over by marrying your rapist, so…) - This one is an outright lie. The verse says that if a man *seduces* and lies with a virgin, that he can make it right by marrying her, unless her father refuses the marriage. In that case, he has to pay her three years' wages on the middle-class level. These days the payment would be approximately $180,000. Of course, seduction is not rape.
In fact, if a married woman has had sex with a man outside of the city, it is assumed that she was raped and so she merits no penalty whatsoever. The man, however, is put to death. There is no actual Biblical law regarding the punishment for rape.
However, we must remember that the Old Testament Law was a restraint, not the be-all and end-all of the country's laws. In a time when killing someone carried the punishment of your death and the death of all your friends and family, for instance, the OT law limits the punishment to the murderer. So to see what God's society did for rape, we have to look at the actual documented incidences of it. In every situation in which rape occurs, either the perpetrators were killed (sometimes very painfully) or the Bible makes it clear that their lack of punishment is in itself abhorrent. God does not treat rapists gently.
- Trimming your beard or sideburns - Cultural requirement only. It has no punishment listed, and it is not labeled explicitly as "detestable" or an "abomination".
- Getting remarried - Not according to the Old Testament, and in the New Testament it is only listed as a sin if your previous marriage was dissolved by what would now be called a "no-fault divorce".
- Planting more than one crop in a field - Cultural requirement only. It has no punishment listed, and it is not labeled explicitly as "detestable" or an "abomination".
- Having a wet dream - The term "unclean" is often misunderstood by non-Jews and non-Christians. Both Judaism and Christianity recognizes that we frequently fall short of the goal of utter righteousness. In other schools of religious thought, such as Secular Humanism, proving your own righteousness is very important. In Judaism and Christianity, it is not.
Anyways... back to uncleanliness. It is understood by Jews and Christians to be an inevitability rather than something to be avoided and feared at all costs. In addition, not all uncleanliness in the OT was a result of sin. Many times, it was a simple protection in the society. Any emission of semen made the man "unclean until evening", which was really a pretty lightweight requirement. Interestingly, the people who laugh at the Bible for requiring a man to wash his clothes after discharging semen all over himself are silent when it comes to the rules regarding diagnosis and treatment of mildew and mold in homes and clothing.
- Eating rare meat - Only meat that is rare enough to actively bleed. This had two uses. The first was hygenic... even today, we recognize that there are enough blood-borne illnesses to make drinking it a risky proposition. Secondly, the Old Testament is meant to teach humankind the importance of shed blood for forgiveness of sins, because that's the method Jesus had to use. For that reason, blood is especially sacred.
- Touching a dead animal - Cleanliness issue. The person has to wash and is "unclean until evening", meaning basically a temporary quarantine. He couldn't stick his hands inside an animal that died out in the field (this didn't refer to butchering your meat, by the way) and then proceed to knead bread for supper. Remember that the high death rate in childbirth a few centuries ago came from doctors who did not wash their hands when going from the morgue to the delivery room.
- Menstruating and/or earning your “red wings” - Issue of cleanliness, as with the semen, with an extra ritual required due to the blood, as described in the "rare meat" section. I'd like to add that the punishment for sex during menstruation was exile, not death.
- Getting a tattoo - Do not cut yourself or make marks on yourself for the dead. Whether this applies to all tattoos or just putting a permanent representation of your dead relatives on your skin is up for debate. It's also worth noting that people back then used to slash themselves with knives (and sometimes kill their own children) because they believed that their gods would not listen to them unless they suffered enough. God did not want His people developing that mindset about Him.
Hope this helps the next time someone starts spouting laws that they don't understand.
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