[yawz]

Religions (and consequently certain traditions) that have survived until today have an incredible obsession with mensturation. This is just another stick to beat and humiliate women with. It is unbelievable (for a questioning, inquisitive human being) that Bronze Age traditions and beliefs are still revered today.

[nsxwolf]

I'm not aware of an obsession with menstruation in any major variant of Christianity.

[heartbreak]

I could only think of one verse off the top of my head, but here are several. The Leviticus 15:19-30 reads a lot like what was described in the article. http://www.openbible.info/topics/menstruation

[chad_oliver]

To be fair, that's Jewish civil law. The vast majority of Christians would agree that this doesn't apply to Christians today.

[Crake]

>The vast majority of Christians would agree that this doesn't apply to Christians today.

Jesus disagrees with that, as these people would learn if they ever actually read their holy text.

[chad_oliver]

Okay, Crake, I've got three questions for you:

1) Have you read the Christian holy text? I don't expect you to have read everything, but if you're going to make the claim that you did, you should have at least read the New Testament and the Pentateuch.

2) Could you please explain, in your own words, what the New Testament says about the laws presented in the Old Testament? Specifically, I'd love to know how you interpret Mark 2, Acts 10, Acts 15, and the book of Galatians, especially Galatians 2. Considering that Jesus himself didn't obey all of the Jewish civil and ritual laws (see Mark 2) yet proclaimed himself to be sinless, on what basis do you claim that Jesus teaches that Christians should obey the civil and ritual laws?

3) Isn't it a little bit arrogant to make a specious claim, thus demonstrating that you don't understand the Christian bible, then immediately accuse Christians of not reading their own holy book?

[nsxwolf]

I always find it interesting how people like you think your superficial, amateur exegesis of the bible trumps thousands of years of scholarly thought and debate. So Christians got it wrong from day 1, and kept getting it wrong for centuries, but then Crake came along and set us all straight.

[kiiski]

Maybe not anymore (at least in the west), but the bible does have that stuff in it too.

http://www.openbible.info/topics/menstruation

[nsxwolf]

These practices wouldn't have been observed by Christians, except perhaps by early Jewish converts.

[acqq]

Wouldn't because they are in Old Testament? Like the famous http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Exodus-22-18/ which was also "not" observed by Christians:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_Early_Moder...

[nsxwolf]

Yeah well, welcome to the early modern period. The Catholic Church from the beginning had outlawed the persecution of witches and condemned belief in their power as superstition. But people will still do crazy shit.

[Crake]

Yup. That's why old testament practices like male genital mutilation are no longer practiced by Christians today.

[yawz]

Woman being unclean during menstrual cycle is part of Abrahamic religions. But I guess this comes from the bigger problem of "sex" being wrong unless it constitutes "breeding".

[Natsu]

Actually some of those regulations are more akin to health regulations. Granted, they didn't understand disease at the time, but they were able to find things associated with it to avoid, like contact with blood.

[refurb]

The only Abrahamic religion that views sex as only for breeding would be Catholicism (and maybe a few other smaller sects). Judaism, Protestants and Muslims all believe sex is a normal healthy thing.

[nsxwolf]

Catholicism absolutely does not view sex as only for breeding.

[sergiosgc]

You may be reading it wrong. Sex is viewed by the Catholic Church as an act of love between man and wife, that can't be dissociated from breeding. It is not only for breeding, but it must be conducive to breeding.

It is laid out in very expressive form, if a bit long, in the Humanae Vitae Encyclical Letter by Pope Paul VI. If you don't wish to read the whole text, lookup points 12 and 14.

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/docume...

[dragonwriter]

You may also be reading it wrong. I suggest you look up paragraph 11, which directly contradicts your "must be conducive to breeding" claim:

"It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile."

Insofar as your claim "can't be dissociated from breeding" can be constructed as a correct claim, it requires understanding that to mean it cannot generally be actively sought to be dissociated from breeding, but even that is incompletely accurate as (per paragraph 16) "If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained."

(The position laid in Humanae Vitae has often been criticized for being somewhat incoherent, which isn't really all that surprising given its history. See, e.g., [1])

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifical_Commission_on_Birth_...

[Crake]

>Judaism, Protestants and Muslims all believe sex is a normal healthy thing.

LOL. Might want to give their religion's source material a read.

[chc]

That is not really an idea found in the Tanakh. I mean, the writers are unanimously in favor of breeding, but I don't think any of them suggest that sex is only for that purpose.

[nsxwolf]

Apparently there is an old Orthodox liturgical tradition that women abstain from receiving the Eucharist during menstruation, but it doesn't appear to be an official requirement.

[zacinbusiness]

Not to offend anyone but Christianity is basically just a crazy death cult. I've been fighting the ignorance of this religion my entire life.

[nnq]

Try travelling around the world a bit and see for yourself that there's more than to it than the "american brand" of Christianity. European Catholics are more "lightweight" when it comes to their belief and when science and reason contradicts religion they'll take the science/reason way in 9 out of 10 cases. Orthodox Christians in Eastern Europe and Russia have a similar mindset and and they also take things with a grain of humor (even more than a grain sometimes) and are ok even with making fun of their own beliefs :)

If you generalize a bit, you see that things went down hill since the protestants tried to reform Christianity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation , also, what I call "american brand C." is all a radicalized descendent of protestant reformation), had some mixed good and bad philosophical ideas mixed in with "faith", but mainly managed to take themselves waaaaaaay too seriously!

Mind it, I'm an atheist myself, but C. in not that harmful if not taken too far and it's sometimes good for humor ...now if only people could manage to also take Islam this lightly and look more at its funny sides :)

[zacinbusiness]

I'll agree here. The American brand that has spawned the tea party and is super racist is a crazy death cult. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that somewhere there are good Christians. But I just don't see it in my experience with thousands of then in the USA.

[chad_oliver]

That sounds like a very nuanced view of a complicated and diverse belief system with many different interpretations practiced by different people.

No; actually, it sounds like the sort of ignorance and stereotyping that people generally accuse religion of generating.

[zacinbusiness]

It doesn't bother me if someone that thinks the Earth is what...6,000 years old and that someone who is gay is a subhuman thing thinks that I'm the ignorant one. It would be like if an otter thought I wasn't a very nice person. The thing is that I've not seen any evidence of someone who has my set of beliefs willfully causing harm to anyone else. But it's pretty easy to see people willfully harming or contributing to the harm of other people in the name of the good book.

[nsxwolf]

When you say something completely ignorant and offensive you only make it worse by bracketing it with "not to offend anyone".

[zacinbusiness]

Yeah I know. It's sort of like saying things like millions of people should be treated like shit because somebody in a cave wrote some words in a book thousands of years ago.

[Crake]

I'd recommend reading the Bible. There's a lot on the topic to be found there.