First of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down.
God doesn’t make mistakes.
So if God made somebody trans, then they’re trans.
Moreover, by their own stories not only did God intentionally make that person trans but God likely deliberately did so to test the people interacting with said trans person on if they could love the trans person as required by their faith.
But no. It’s never that because the religious argument is just a post hoc justification for the hate.
They’re not real mistakes. The end justifies the means and they think their god is only smart enough to go with this, basically.
The ends justify the means?
Hypotheticaly then: if I had a 100% guarantee that murdering all babies would get them into heaven, but you’d go to hell, is it morally right to murder all babies? The ends justify the means, do they not? We need to get babies to heaven! So murder them all!
No, it’s absolutely still monstrous. Because utilitarianism is stupid.
I like your way of thinking but for a Christian it doesn’t work like that. They will likely say that despite God’s intentions, this person went consciously against God’s will and decided to commit a sin (because God gave us free will).
And then good luck explaining to them how nobody in their right mind would want to be ridiculed, cast out, ostracised, hated by so many people and become trans just simply out of spite.
Not for nothing, but like for the first thousand years of Christianity they basically murdered each other over the question.
Meanwhile apocryphal Jesus was like:
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].”
- Gospel of Thomas saying 22
Or
For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.
- Gospel of Thomas saying 114 (likely a much later addition to the text reflecting later air of misogyny, but still)
My favorite Apocryphal Jesus story was when teenage Jesus got pissed at his friend and killed him, friend’s mom bitched to Jesus’ mom about this, so Jesus brought the friend back to life. Just imagine if White People Twitter had been around back then.
Yes, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
For years I thought that was a silly story showing the ridiculousness of the apocrypha, and it was only decades after first reading it in a high school class that I effectively realized it was subversive satire.
The Thomasine tradition was notoriously opposed to physical resurrection early on. Hence “doubting Thomas.”
This opposition to a core canonical principle was likely part of what led to the Gospel of Thomas eventually being punishable by death to even possess.
But here’s this text attributed to the Thomasine tradition that probably had more resurrections per page than maybe any other text in any religion, and certainly in Christianity. And so instead of needing to be buried in a jar like the other, it survived the dark ages and middle ages fine, just as this kind of weird text but dogmatically agreeable.
And yet the story in between kid Jesus smiting and resurrecting is all about how Jesus, despite being very bright, wasn’t able to learn his letters and looked at letters and words different from others. A weird focus for the text, and one that at its end overlaps with part of the opening of Luke.
Then if you look closer, some other details stand out.
For example, it mentions how the author ‘Thomas’ is a philosopher in the opening.
And through that lens, another detail stands out - the kid that falls off the roof to his death and then is raised back up is named Xeno - like the philosopher famed for his paradoxes of motion. Probably not a very common name in a Jewish town in 1st century Galilee.
These days that text reminds me of a famous adage, “the only way to tell the truth is through fiction.”
I think a group, that was on the outskirts of a growing organized religion that eventually becomes the canonical church, took their own stories about Jesus’s childhood where he was bright but struggled with learning letters and reworked them into a tale so over the top and ridiculous it was actively making fun of the canonical infancy stories that were being added to the Synoptics. But that the canonical group, blinded by their own beliefs, failed to even recognize the satire and ended up keeping the texts alive thinking that they were agreeing with them, even though it was effectively the philosophical sect of early Christianity taking the piss at their fantastical dogma.
And then today we just take it at face value as authentically intended and just think “man people back then believed weird stuff.”
I’ve recently been reading scholarly books about early Christendom and it was after Jesus and the first generation of Christians that apologists came up with the trinity. I don’t have the name of the guy who wrote that fanfic, but it was mentioned in Jesus the Jew by Geza Vermes. But that’s me being pedantic.
Christians: Jesus didn’t believe in pronouns! Jesus: I am he.
Bart Ehrman talks about how their conception of Jesus changed. Human dude chosen by god. Human dude turned holy by god. God dude born holy.
Something like that.
I just looked up some of his books and ordered this one: How Jesus Became God : the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Thanks for the tip!
