Where did the idea that it is sinful to use "curse words" come from?

By -
The Bible only says one thing about "cursing": Don't take the Lord's name in vain.

If I say, "What the f*ck is that?" the Lord's name does not appear anywhere in that sentence.

I think what has gone on here is a conflation of upper-class behavior with righteous behavior.

Cursing is something done by dirty, sweaty, working men when they are angry.

When a rich person is angry, he has other outlets: he forecloses on your house, or fires you. So, no need to curse!

Comments

  1. Unknown12:54 AM

    Doesn't Paul say something to effect that it is not very christian like to use profane language. I don't believe that he considered it a sin or anything. I don't have my bible with me, so I am unable to verify.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Keshav Srinivasan2:02 PM

    Gene, doesn't the belief that profanity is sinful come from Ephesians 4:29, which says "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen."?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah12:24 AM

      Right, be see me remark about the little Italian grandma in my comment below: I say that is just a way of speaking, with nothing unwholesome about it. And that you can talk plenty unwholesome without using any four letter words!

      Delete
  3. Bob Murphy10:22 PM

    Gene, there are several passages that could plausibly mean, "Christians shouldn't swear."

    Here's a list, though some of these I think are goofy examples, meaning they aren't talking about swearing, even though the people making the list are arguing that they do. But some (mostly from Paul) are pretty clear-cut.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:16 AM

      I'd argue that what these amount to is, yes, one shouldn't tell someone, "F*&k you, you assh*&les," as a prominent Yale philosopher recently wrote. But if someone in Brooklyn vernacular, as I heard an old nonna do on her stoop, says "The f-ing beef stew Friday, it was f-ing fantastic,"I'd argue that the f-word has escaped its original context, and is merely a non-obscene intensifier.

      Delete
  4. Josiah Neeley11:03 AM

    St. Paul uses the Greek equivalent of the S word in Philippians 3:8.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more