Jonathan Poletti
2 min readDec 22, 2022

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God never says the world is "bad." Whatever is going on with the "curse" of Gen 3:17-18—lifted in 8:20-21—the basic status of the Creation never changed. Whether or not it grows thorns, it is still growing.

And remember that "all things work together for good" in Rom 8:28, as Paul reflects on the "good" of Genesis 1 prevailing.

Strong's Lexicon re. Jeremiah 17:9 is just reinforcing the Christian translation. This often occurs: a Bible verse is translated by "tradition" and its meaning asserted, then the words are defined to support that translation. Scholars present new evidence and it's just ignored.

As Tzvi Novick lays out the references, "the verse speaks not of the heart's perversity but of its unfathomability."

Christians take any word or concept that seems to suggest humans are "bad" and lumps them all together as the same concept of human "badness." So Jeremiah 17:9, as you note, appears to say the same thing as Isaiah 64:6, or Ephesians 2:13, etc.

in fact, they are all separate concepts in a long story with many shadings and suggestions, from impurity around the Temple to idolatry. There is no statement of basic human badness.

There is no context of problems in human sexuality in Matthew 5:28 or any other reference you cite. That idea was imposed by Christian tradition, which chooses to overlook that the relationship with the deity is seen as a marriage—that Jesus is a "bridegroom" and other deities are presented as oversexual men—despite this being overt in prophetic passages like Ezekiel 16:32, etc etc.

Jesus speaks not as a moral prude telling everyone to shape up their sex lives, but as a prophet who sees deities and human communities as men to women, using the Old Testament vocabulary of deities. A human male does not have the same status as a deity, despite their so often thinking so.

The "porneia" problem does not concern which woman one is having sex with but which deity is being worshipped. Again, the problem is always the deity.

https://medium.com/belover/christianitys-porneia-problem-5df11c1e1db

Whenever "porneia" was used, Christianity attempted to make the context the rules around human sexuality—just ignoring the fact of the references pointing to Old Testament narratives of improper worship that did not suggest problems of unmarried sex, like Esau and the soup or the idolatry of Numbers 25.

As regards the "Holy Spirit," there is no suggestion this is a name. It's an emanation from heaven but not a named being. I linked two papers on that subject.

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