Digg should never have done non-tech
Every now and then I go to digg without having logged in and I’m bombarded with left-wing-political craziness or anti-Christian “authorities” who seem to blast everything in the Bible. Usually these two go together. Digg was a great place when it was about technology. But when they decided to have extra news, things went from good information about new products/tech stuff to a veritable soap box for people to shout from about their personal beliefs about things, and then berate those who might disagree.
My favorite part is when anti-Christians try to prove a point about something using scripture. The most recent one I saw was about how the Bible does not say that homosexuality is a sin…I stared at the comment, then kept reading. Someone later posted that the Hebrew language had no word or phrase for homosexuality…again, more staring.
As someone who has studied a bit about the language used in the Bible (specifically the Old Testament), it is true that the vocabulary was limited compared to modern Hebrew. However, there are phrases which easily indicate homosexual relations. One of the earliest being In Genesis 19, when the angels of the Lord come to bring Lot and his family out of Sodom. When there are cases dealing with wording, since I can’t read Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek, I use Young’s Literal Translation to get a good idea of how the original text was phrased. In Genesis 19:5, the men of the town of Sodom call to Lot:
“Where [are] the men who have come in unto thee to-night? bring them out unto us, and we know them.”
As just about anyone who has read any Bible understand, to “know someone” in biblical terms means to have “sexual relations” with that person. Indeed, Lot’s response indicates this when he says:
“Do not, I pray you, my brethren, do evil; lo, I pray you, I have two daughters, who have not known any one; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do to them as [is] good in your eyes” Genesis 19:7-8 YLT
Again, this is a very literal translation – but Lot offers his daughters “who have not known anyone” to the men to do what they please. Lot also says that to do what the men want to do with the guests would be evil. This was before the 10 Commandments were written, before the New Covenant, before a lot of things (no pun intended). Yet Lot knew that for the men to have sexual relations with another many was evil.
Now, many would argue that the Old Testament is just that – old, not needed anymore after the New Covenant which was established by Christ in the New Testament. However, we know that there are many references in the New Testament to the Old Testament. Christ himself recites passages from and makes references too the Old Testament. At the risk of making a generalization, but without getting into a discussion of the canonization of the Jewish and Christian texts, the “Bible” of the apostles’ day was the Old Testament – it was what the knew and could reference.
This sort of discussion is good, but digg’s non-technology areas have become places where zealots from both sides are duking it out in a forum that has no merit. Digg should have never opened up the floodgates to any story come-what-may. I foresee more of these issues finding their way into the technology sections, and the story filters I have in place not being able to adequately keep the news of interest out of the news of fanatics. That will be a sad day for me….
