

The 'Good Samaritan' Story is About Violating Taboos - panarky
http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/12/hate-spewing-christians-need-to-listen-up.html

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panarky
Here's the Bible story:
[http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10:25-37...](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10:25-37&version=NIV)

And Fake Steve Jobs' interpretation: The Samaritans and Jews weren’t strangers
to each other — they hated each other. Like, seriously hated. Like, Jews
weren’t supposed to talk to Samaritans or they’d be unclean and need cleansing
or something.

But wait, there’s more. One of the guys who wouldn’t touch the beaten Jew was
a priest. The other guy was a Levite — meaning, a big deal super-duper high-
class extra-holy Jew. You know why those two guys walked by the injured Jew
and didn’t help? Because it was considered unclean to touch a dead body, and
they figured that if they tried to help the guy and the guy turned out to be
dead, they would be defiled. So they walked by.

Do you get it now? Jesus, your big hero, was saying that if you have some rule
or conventional wisdom that causes you to do harm to people, violate the
goddamn rule. You probably cannot understand how shocking this story was when
Jesus told it. Because this was really, really shocking. First, he’s saying
that the priests and Levites are jerks; and second, he’s saying that
Samaritans, the skankiest, nastiest, grossest, most reviled people in that
part of the world, were better than priests and Levites.

