Blessed Indeed

In practice, Christians do not follow the dictates of the Old Testament. If they did, polygamy would be legal, and things like tattoos, wearing mixed fabrics, eating pork, and seeding lawns with a variety of grasses would be forbidden. If Christians followed the dictates of the Old Testament, then today if the parents of a new bride could not, upon her husband’s request, prove that she was a virgin, that bride would have to be stoned to death. Christians would also have to stone to death any Christian guilty of adultery. And the Christian day of worship would be Saturday, not Sunday. We follow the principles of the law not the letter of the law : • Matthew 22:37-38 Love God • Romans 13:9 Love your neighbour • Matthew 5:43-47 Love your enemies • Romans 13:10 Love does no harm to its neighbour By using these principles we can know how to live as Christians. Shall I be unfaithful to my spouse? Shall I IGNORE the homeless person asking for help? Shall I take revenge on m...

Christianity came out of Judaism, so Jesus was a Jew and grew up with the classical Jewish understanding of gender. It's very easy to assume that Judaism is an exclusively gender-binary religion as the Jewish obligation to observe commandments is traditionally divided along male/female lines: men pray three times daily, while women don’t have to; men put on tefillin, while women do not. We see it in assumed gender roles, in liturgy, in proscribed family responsibilities, and in both secular and religious laws. If, however, we look just a bit deeper into the sacred texts, the Mishnah and Talmud, the ancient Jewish law books that record the rabbi’s teaching on how to put the law into practice, we see lots of references to exceptions that have to be made to account for the people whose gender was not so clear cut. This description from Rabbi Elliot Kukla shows that classical Judaism actually had 6 genders: Zachar/זָכָר: This term is derived from the word for a pointy sword a...