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(continued here)
Q. A friend of mine feels that though eating shellfish is an abomination (Leviticus 11:10) it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
A. They are different words in Hebrew, so your friend is right. But in any case, the clean and unclean animals distinction has gone with Peter's vision. So the New Testament abolishes the Old Testament food laws. But the New Testament confirms that homosexual activity is an abomination. Shellfish don't agree with me, but that's another matter. You tuck in to that prawn curry.
Q. My friend tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone him as commanded in Leviticus 24:10-16 ?
A. Yes, because it is all a matter of due process. You are a bit for taking the law into your own hands, aren't you? Does your friend actually curse the Name of God like the man in Leviticus did? Anyway, next you must find a judge and jury who will convict him. Unless his blasphemy really is scurrilous, abusive or offensive to God, Jesus Christ or the Bible, and tends to vilify the Christian religion, you are unlikely to see a conviction in our land today. Best let your friend know how offended you are and if he persists, get another friend. He sounds a bad sort, anyway.
Q. My uncle has a farm. He violates Leviticus 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend).
A. Doesn't sound much of a farmer. How is he going to harvest it? Mind you, he could put a fence down the middle, then he would have two fields, and he could sow one crop on one side and the other on the other side, I suppose. As long as his wife does not wear a mixture of wool and linen, she should be OK to go and take part in ancient Israelite society. Back to the future!
Q. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws (Leviticus 20:14)?
A. You don't half have a vicious streak. Once again, in God's design for mankind, the State has the responsibility for the judicial death penalty, not the family. God's law does not allow people to put members of their own family to death. You are thinking of Islam and Hinduism. Oh, and Britain today. When our Parliament passed the Homicide Act 1965 and the Abortion Act 1967, they took away the death penalty from the guilty, by the State, where it belongs, and placed it on the innocent, within the family, where it does not. Macabre or what?
P.S. Another silly question was added later:
Q. A reading of 2 Chronicles, 4:2 makes clear that mathematicians have for many years been under a misconception that the number pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter) was a transcendental number which is approximately 3.1415. The true value of pi, as the Bible makes clear in this passage, is actually 3. Am I personally obliged to burn all maths textbooks, put to the sword as blasphemers all who propagate the false value of pi and forbid all false images of the true circle?
A. Do you really think the ancients didn't know the value of pi? What we have here is something us engineers call 'rounding'. You really must deal with your bloodthirsty nature, though. All this taking the law (or what you think it is) into your own hands just will not do. And nit-picking over a couple of Biblical decimal points is not blasphemy. My, isn't there some God-hating ignorance out there!
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