I’ve been enjoying #ThingsJesusNeverSaid on Twitter as much as the next freethinker, but I do have trouble running the outsider test on these sorts of memes. For example, this cartoon from Pat Bagley:
"Corporations are people, my friends. But gays aren't." #ThingsJesusNeverSaid pic.twitter.com/1UlYWzhGNh
— Pat Bagley (@Patbagley) April 2, 2015
As a former evangelical Christian, I have to wonder who is the target audience here. Almost all Christians are Trinitarian, that is, they believe in a threefold Godhead, and most of those believe that the disincarnate aspects of God had a major role in deciding what words and commands ended up in holy writ. Many if not most also believe that the epistles of Paul were inspired by the Holy Spirit, including even his famously homophobic rant in Romans 1, which made it clear that same-sex relations were not on the Authoritative List of Old Testament Things Hereby Redacted Under the New Covenant.
Perhaps there are self-identified Christians who don’t really care about anything but the red-letter bits of the Bible, who sincerely believe the non-Jesuine moral commands and implications in the Bible are wholly optional. I’ve yet to meet any of these people in real life, but there is at least one historical example.
