Ex-Christian Rant

Time to rage.

As an ex-Christian it weirds me out when I see people who don't understand Christianity bringing out objections about tattoos and shellfish from Leviticus and why they don't still follow those rules too.

The Bible is pretty clear (not saying I agree with this either) – in summary:

• God laid down a whole bunch of laws. The Israelites failed miserably at them (usually within the first opportunity of being asked to follow them). They were supposed to fail miserably at them.
• The Israelites were taught to fix this by sacrificing animals (blood needed to be shed apparently for their sins to be cleansed).
• Then in the New Testament, Jesus ran around going “the only laws you need are love God and love your neighbour” and took constantly took issue with the Pharisees against the huge numbers of ridiculous Leviticus laws, pointing out how no one is without sin compared to God's standards.
• The New Testament explains that this was all preparation to demonstrate that nobody is perfect, that everyone needs God's forgiveness, and that Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice once and for all.
• Paul goes on to explain “the Israelites were like dumb kids, so God gave them very specific rules 'milk', but now post-Jesus we are grown up enough to handle 'meat' - less specific rules, more focus on where your heart is in your actions”, so the New Testament basically says you can stop with all the petty rules and sacrifices, and try to focus on actually being loving (which is why I get pissed of when I see “Judeo-Christian” hypocrites refer to the importance of the ten commandments to society, instead of the fruits of the spirit or Paul & Jesus's lectures on love & being humble).
• There is even a part in the New Testament where Peter (I think?) is presented with a vision of angels bearing “unclean” food for him and they are all like “no, it's cool now, if you're still worried about eating shellfish you're missing the whole point”.

If you want to argue with Christians, it's pretty easy to just focus on the killing babies and raping women of the Old Testament (since it's supposedly the same God all the way along? excluding a rather good essay I read about Noah's Ark, but not sure how Biblically justified versus biased wish-thinking its nice premise was). The Bible doesn't adequately justify that to me, and I'd rather risk not going to heaven than forcing my conscience to accept that those activities are okay somehow because “God's thoughts are higher than man's thoughts”. So that was pretty sufficient to de-convert me (thanks Christopher Hitchens's “God Is NOT Great” - much better than any of Dawkins's unnecessary straw-manning).

But arguing the tired old shellfish/mixed fabrics/tattoos argument is a strawman. You're not actually arguing against what Christianity says. Christians like to think they're good people (they're trying to be like God who is apparently good despite the killing babies and torture and telling people how deeply sinful they are), so that's the place to hit them if you want it to actually hurt. Not that I'm inviting you to attack Christians, just please at least give up that strawman if you are going to have a shot at it (or just lend them God Is NOT Great, and then kick back and relax and live your own life).  While it's sad for them (and they equally think it's sad for us), provided we focus our attention on making sure that Australia stays secular (so that people can freely follow their own values without interference, while not being able to force others to follow their values) there's not much more we should be doing.