Saturday, October 16, 2021

Facebook Jail for citing the Bible

 I left the following as a comment on a FB friend's post. He is a somewhat progressive Methodist minister whose post was about how the Bible does or does not inform us on our obligations regarding immigrants illegally entering the United States. (That the same obligations would apply regarding those entering legally is not ever brought up, of course.) 

Below was my sole comment, which FB deleted because it "violated" Facebook's nebulous, never-public and ever-changing "community standards," which means it somehow presented a point of view that FB does not want to permit. 

See what you think. This is the verbatim, unedited comment except that I have deleted the name of the FB friend who posted it, nothing else. 

I am not disagreeing with you. But I am going to point out what a quite progressive pastor of my conference said at a ministers' meeting some years ago, I do not recall the context but I do recall her response. It was, "We are all biblical fundamentalists; it just depends on the topic."

There are definitely teachings, requirements, and admonitions in the Tanak about how the people of Israel were to interact with resident aliens. Should we adopt ALL of them as in force for our modern day and time? For example, there are clear, unambiguous mandates that marriages of Jews to foreigners is strictly prohibited. Can we go all fundamentalist with that today?

Then there are modern-day Jewish scholars of biblical Hebrew who say that the term "resident alien" is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word "toshav."

And finally, to close this comment, this article: "The Use and Abuse of the Bible in the Immigration Debate."

Here is the link to the article about the toshav by Joram Mayshar  of The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. 

So what exactly are the "community standards" that this violates? What are the biblical-interpretation credentials of the FB "fact checker" who yanked the comment (or more likely, what algorithm of FB's scanning software got triggered)? 

There is no logic or rationality to how or why of Facebook's cancel culture. 

Religion, science, God