Domestic Violence

This week’s readings over domestic violence really raised some serious thoughts in my mind. In no way, shape, or form would I ever condone domestic violence, and I was very shocked to realize that you can actually very easily interpret readings from the bible to be condoning of domestic violence. To me, this was just further proof of the moral inaccuracies in certain parts of the bible and reasons why you should never take any texts from the bible literally. If the bible is capable of condoning something as horrible as domestic violence when taken literally, how could anyone ever believe that you should take biblical texts literally? I, personally, believe the bible just offers us loose moral guidelines to live our lives by and is not something that you take literally and live your life solely based off the literal messages and teachings of the bible. If you were to do this, you could easily find yourself finding domestic violence acceptable or doing other things that many of us would find morally unacceptable due to the many conflicting messages within the bible. When I thought about how you can find biblical texts supportive of domestic violence, it made me think about how you could probably find a biblical message supportive of nearly any argument. I feel as if the bible is almost like statistics in many ways. It is often said that you can twist and manipulate statistics to support yourself in any argument. I, personally, see the bible to be very similar to this. You could find a text in the bible that you could twist the interpretation to support yourself in nearly any argument I feel like. If you can find biblical texts that support terrible things such as domestic violence and slavery as we have seen so far in this class, then what types of issues would you not be able to twist a biblical reading into being supportive of? I am no biblical scholar or expert and I have not thoroughly read much of the bible, but it would not surprise me at all if someone was able to find biblical passages that you could twist to support issues, such as abortion or gay marriage, that modern devout Christians would be appalled to support.