1st Corinthians pt4

14

9 So with yourselves; if in a tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is being said? For you will be speaking into the air.

All that random "speaking in tongues" done in charismatic churches? Totally useless if it's not a real language that the people around you can understand. That was never the purpose of the whole speaking in tongues thing, to look mystical in front of other people by babbling made up words.

14
34 women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. F70

Oh, SHUT UP. In a verse I skipped typing up, he goes on and on about how God is the head of Christ and Christ is the head of man which makes man the head of his wife. Now, does anyone see the flaw in this? If man is to obey Christ, how did Christ treat women? He let them talk, and gave them positions of leadership. Plus, this all totally contradicts the fact that Paul seems to have many female friends who are preachers and missionaries. It shows up at the end of the chapter as this weird kind of afterthought, and the footnotes say that it is sometimes inserted after the last paragraph instead of just before. So it's a totally out of place verse, inconsistent with earlier teachings, and it keeps moving around. A later insertion, perhaps? Or is Paul just losing it? Some people have tried to explain it by saying Paul was referring to a specific problem in a specific church, where the women wouldn't shut up. But the way the verse is worded, it just doesn't look like he's addressing one specific situation. It looks like a blanket statement about all churches.

It sounds extremely familiar, and so I went and looked it up, and a famous early Christian bishop said a suspiciously similar thing-prior to the official creation of the NT. It would not surprise me at all to discover that Paul was judiciously edited. I just cannot figure this guy out.

You couldn't have paid me to be a woman in first century Israel, but then, you couldn't have paid me to be a man back then either. But I'm a little annoyed with how people always try to claim that Christianity's flaws all come from Judaism. First, because Roman paganism was not exactly uplifting for women all the time, and some of those Greek philosophers were quite misogynistic too. I think that what really happened with the sexism is the same thing that happened with the racism, the anti Semitism, the violence and the materialism. People started to follow Jesus, then a few generations later they realized his messages were going to require giving up things they enjoyed, just not workable in the world they wanted to create.