@Typo-MAGAshiv

I can certainly understand your revulsion at Abraham following the instructions.

If we don't interpret the text literally and understand it as allegorical historical-religious-political commentary on the era it was written (800-600 BCE), it makes much more sense, especially with all the locations deliberately mentioned in the source Abraham has gone to, which were pretty well known to the original audience at that time. And many of those points of interest only existed during that time.

Today historical-political commentary (religion is gone from it) talks about countries, people and their diplomatic/military/territorial conflicts directly, because literate people with a basic highschool eduation are able to understand that on a basic level nowadays. That wasn't the case in the Middle East 2800 years ago. So instead a goatherder story with some unexpected turns served as a foundation story of a state called Judea and could be understood by the primitive people living there.

@SeasonedRP The concept of "love relationships" originated in the 19th century, when it was used as code for infidelity to get around strict class and marriage rules, especially those about extra-marital sex. That means in the 19th century women pretended that they had that "innocent love thing" going on to save face in society, while in reality it was used as an excuse to employ the female sexual strategy we all know of.

Nevertheless, the behavior of humans is well known in the scientific fields concered with it, which is obvious to anyone reading the respective journals hidden behind paywalls (Yes, the human knowledge is NOT available on your fingertips, just because you own a smartphone). The "free" bro-science available on the Internet is just the crumbs falling from the table for the illiterate. That is specially well demonstrated with the Rollo's SMV graph.

@Whisper

Remember that you, as a young man

I'm not a young man, I reached peak SMV.

Churches exist, not just to tell you that certain things are true, but tell you to engage in certain behaviours on account of that.

Some of those behaviors are very useful. For example you can divert lots of tax money from woke government projects to a non-profit church just by making people donate, let them write off the donation and get a tax refund. This is net positive and fully legal, depending on local tax legislation.

This is control. This is a means of influencing you. Anyone who can control your beliefs can control your actions, because he can control the set of facts and assumptions you base your decisions on.

And now let me tell you something about FRAME. You act like a typical beta, because you're assuming frame of your local shepherd. As such you would probably orbit around some church girl as well.

Now a male, who is his own mental point of origin, establishes his own frame and puts the whole religious-social infrastructure to use for the benefit of young boys and men (and other people in need). With the same frame he influences women and their actions by managing their beliefs. Which is an extremely useful tool in the toolbox.

On top of that churches are important tribal gathering places, provide excellent networking opportunities and are by default non-profit which allows running projects with zero tax impact. If you deliberately decide to miss out on these options due to ideological reasons, you are hampering your potential.

@SeasonedRP However even being added later, scholars know that and agree on what (rather crazy things like drinking poison) it says there.

Now if some evangelical nutcase opens his bible, pulls up gMark 16:9-20 and says that Jesus after leaving the tomb banned sex before marriage as his first act, everyone would agree, that this is not what the source says there. But they like to twist and distort the Paul letters with lots mental gymnastic to rectify a purity cult with a religious source. It's an argument from authority mentioning a "law code", hoping that sheeple never really read it, especially not the Greek original - because they are all illiterate.

The writer addressing the Corinthians doesn't talk about extra-marital sex, he talks about marriage, how it's better for men to not have one (because it weighs him down and hinders progressing the new religious movement) and how he thinks it should look like (when in Rome do like the Romans do), if they must have it for God's sake.

Sexual intercourse leads to children, so marriage and sex go hand in hand in the ancient. Our current age separation of that and those funny relationship models (LTR, FB, FWB, ...)d on't make any sense in ancient context without the availability of contraception. That's the thing that confuses people the most. A standard question in youth groups is if Paul talked about "LTR". Yeah no, he didn't. "LTR" didn't exist in the ancient.

Now fundamentalists can't make up a good reasoning for their purity rules on their own, so they like apply them to the Graeco-Roman context and reinterpret the "authoritative" sources through that lens. For example prostitution is illegal in America (that's why Tinder exists), while in many other countries including my own, it's a legal profession, with health insurance and medical checkups, taxes and everything. Now when these evangelicals read a term like "porneia", they apply this to their own present purity context: "You swipe a whore on Tinder, you are a misogynistic asshole, muh, sexual immorality."

But that narrative doesn't make any sense in my own context. I could open the Yellow Pages, call up a number and have a sex worker sitting on my bed within the hour, I would check her medical, would get my protected service and get billed. I could write off taxes from that bill. There is no "immorality" in there anywhere. It would be a fully legal business transaction. Such as it was in the ancient polygynic patriarchy. Prostitution was fully legal back then, too. Nobody thought about "sexual immorality" when refering to legal services.