A "fair tax" or "flat tax" is demonstrably unfair

The problem with a flat tax is that is disproportionately favors the rich and directly hurts the poor, which is why so many of the people at the top trying to drum up support for it are wealthy people, and the grassroots support is poor to middle class people who aren't great at math and who hate going to H&R Block every year. Currently our progressive tax system is as follows for 2013:

Married Filing Jointly or Qualifying Widow(er) Filing Status
[Tax Rate Schedule Y-1, Internal Revenue Code section 1(a)]
10% on taxable income from $0 to $17,850, plus
15% on taxable income over $17,850 to $72,500, plus
25% on taxable income over $72,500 to $146,400, plus
28% on taxable income over $146,400 to $223,050, plus
33% on taxable income over $223,050 to $398,350, plus
35% on taxable income over $398,350 to $450,000, plus
39.6% on taxable income over $450,000.

Say you split the difference there between 40% at the top and 10% at the bottom, and set the flat tax rate at 25%. For a family making minimum wage every year, that's a yearly income of $15,080/yr. Take away 25% of that in taxes, and they're out $3,770 instead of $1,508. That's $2,262 more than they would be paying under the current system. On a monthly basis, that's $189/month less over the course of the year, for people living at or below the poverty line. That's a monthly food budget right there, poof gone. People at that income level tend to spend whatever they make, the majority of it on necessities like food and utilities, so you'd be taking that money out of the local economy. 

Meanwhile, for the CEO making $450,000 a year, suddenly he's paying $112,500 instead of $178,200. He's paying $65,700 less than he had been, of course he's going to put his money behind lobbying for a "flat" or "fair" tax. It's much more fair... to him. Is he going to use that to hire more people? Of course not, because that's coming from personal income, not corporate income, and he doesn't get a tax break for it. Is he going to spend it in the local economy? Maybe, in the local economy where his yacht is parked in the Bahamas or around his ski chalet in Switzerland, but it's much more likely he'll put it into stocks and just make more money for himself with it. 

Or say you don't base it on income at all but on a kind of sales tax. This would push prices up much higher, create a thriving black market, and still punish the poor and middle class because the *basics* you need to buy are the same no matter your income level.

It's impossible to have a "flat tax" that doesn't punish the poor and reward the wealthy. That's why the wealthy keep trying to convince you that you want it.

Thoughts on a hidden message in Genesis and the myth of the Fall

The Garden of Eden was the womb of humanity.

That's the reason we can never return, the child once born cannot return to the womb.

The knowledge of good and evil is our loss of innocence, and our taking responsibility to grow and increase our knowledge.

We could not leave the garden until we were willing to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and take responsibility for ourselves.

In the garden we had a choice as a species, between eternal life in child-like stasis (the tree of life) and a chaotic life where we have to make our own decisions with the knowledge of the good and evil we're capable of doing.

We made the decision in the garden to grow and leave, instead of to stay the same, to live forever but never leave.

The tempter in the garden was like a midwife, assisting in our birth. Reaching in and pulling us out. Waking us up to the possibility that we even have a choice, but letting us make that choice.

Now, because all this happened, because the trees with the choices were in the garden-womb, because the tempter was in the garden-womb with us (and it's a metaphor for sex, the serpent coming into the womb and filling it with new ideas), and because none of this could have happened without God's approval, then it was God's intent for us to make our choice, and to have the capacity to learn and grow

If mankind had never fallen, the entire experiment would have been a failure. We would have been in the womb for eternity.

This means that Satan and God in the story, representing the forces of Chaos and Order, are on the same side, with the shared goals of teaching humans and helping us to grow.

As a result, the pursuit of knowledge, for both good and evil, is the most important thing we can do as a species. It is the only way we can grow, and failing to grow is death.

All this is right there in the Bible, intended both to trap people (whose ways of thinking are not developed) into taking the whole thing at face value, and to be a message for people who are able to grasp it.

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

Persecution through proselytizing prevention and prohibition

Air Force rules limit size of tattoos, role of gospel

Section 2.11 of the 27-page Air Force Instruction AFI 1-1 Standards of Conduct is the latest salvo in a battle over religious bias and Christian proselytizing in the military branch. It calls on officers and supervisors to "avoid the actual or apparent use of their position to promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion." 

The document's section on religion echoes a memo Schwartz sent out to all Air Force leadership on religion last September, but adds the threat of penalty for violations.

While this is being used by some as proof that the military has been taken over by islamofascist Obammunists, I wish they'd had this directive when I was in. When I was in Baghdad in 2005, I was prohibited by the chaplaincy from meeting with other pagans on our installation to practice our religion. And this is on top of the outright and directly proselytizing emails I got from the chaplaincy daily in the form of "daily devotionals".

Some examples:

The theory of evolution is not without its problems. One scientist says this about life starting on its own: "Amino acids would have to be arranged in an exact sequence to form a protein . . . just like the letters in a sentence. Mere laws of chemistry and physics cannot do that. The probability of a protein forming by chance would be 1064 [10 with 64 zeros after it] to 1!"Many people assume the theory of evolution to be true. But can it be scientifically proven? Something is considered scientifically true only if it can be repeatedly verified under laboratory conditions. The claim that life sprang up on its own out of a long impersonal process cannot pass this test of truth. That is why evolution remains only a theory.
So if you're ever tempted to doubt the Genesis account of the creation story, consider the alternative. The odds against even a simple protein creating itself are astronomical. How much more reasonable to believe God and His Word: "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible" (Hebrews 11:3).
Isn't it more reasonable to believe that God designed and created the universe? (Genesis 1:1).

I questioned that, and got from the Chaplain:

John,The Genesis account reports the creation of the world in six days not seven. It assumes an already created earth. There are hundreds of paleontologists, geologists, biologists, chemists, mathematicians, and geneticists who would disagree with you and your sophomoric assertions. 
We are working with com to devise a way to have those who want off of the e-mail to block it. They felt it was a better approach than creating a separate mailing list. However, if you are planning a lifetime of attacking Christianity and Christian beliefs you might consider keeping the e-mail so that you can learn more about what we believe.
I do not mind the discussions, but I do not attack you and your beliefs.
Hope you have a good day!Chaplain Harvell

Some more "devotionals"

There's a story about a group of scientists who decided that humans could do without God. So one of them looked up to God and said, "We've decided that we no longer need You. We have enough wisdom to clone people and do many miraculous things."God listened patiently and then said, "Very well, let's have a man-making contest. We'll do it just like I did back in the old days with Adam." The scientists agreed, and one of them bent down and picked up a handful of dirt. God looked at him and said, "No! You have to make your own dirt!"
In Jeremiah's day, the Israelites were living as if they no longer needed the Lord. They had entrusted themselves to other gods, even though their gods could not respond to their needs. Jeremiah confronted them about their rebellion, for they had forsaken the true God and shown disrespect for Him (Jeremiah 2:13,19).
Are we guilty of living as if we don't need God? We may know Him as our Savior but be worshiping the idol of our own wisdom or self-sufficiency. Could the Lord be saying of us, "They have gone far from Me"? (2:5).
Living far from God dishonors and displeases Him, and it will never meet our deepest needs. But we can return to Him today

-----

I've seen a number of recent reports about efforts to remove monuments with the Ten Commandments from public places in the US. It's regrettable, for the monuments celebrate righteousness, and "righteousness exalts a nation" (Proverbs 14:34). I believe that removing these reminders is a reflection of our crumbling moral foundations.There is one enduring monument to righteousness, however, that cannot be removed: the truth of Christ, written on human hearts by the Spirit of God (2 Corinthians 3:3).
Those who have the law of God written on their hearts love the Lord with all their mind, soul, and strength. They demonstrate this love to the world by showing honor to their parents, faithfulness in their marriage, and integrity in their work. They respect human life and treat all men and women with dignity and honor. They don't speak evil of anyone, no matter how much evil has been done to them. They are content with God and what He has given them, and they want nothing more. These are the outward signs that God's law is alive, written on our hearts "by the Spirit of the living God" (v.3).
You and I are living monuments to His grace. We must stand tall. The world is watching.

-----

What is the greatest challenge to us as Christians in the 21st century? Is it rampant immorality? Is it divisive social issues? Is it increasing hostility toward God? Those are dangers, for sure, but I would venture to say that our biggest threat is religion--religion that draws us away from the gospel.Some religions openly oppose Christ, but others are more subtle. They use language Christians already know, giving their faith a familiar sound. Then they add to it their own twisted brand of thinking.
If such groups sound Christian, how can we know if they are preaching "a different gospel"? (Galatians 1:6). Here are some false teachings to watch out for.
Salvation through anything other than faith in the finished work of Jesus on the cross (Acts 4:12). A refusal to see Jesus as the eternal God in the flesh, our only Savior (John 1). Giving more importance to the word of man than to the Word of God (1 Corinthians 2:12-13). Leaders who do not provide Christlike guidance through careful biblical instruction (1 Timothy 4:6; Jude 4). There are those who want to lead you into another gospel. Learn God's Word, so you won't be deceived.

I got all those (and many more) from the base chaplain at Sather AB in 2005, despite repeated requests not to get them because I wasn't comfortable with being preached to on a daily basis. 

And on top of that, I couldn't practice my religion, at least not with any other people around, unless we had a "Distinctive Faith Leader", and at the time, the military didn't recognize any ordaining body for pagans. Catch 22, it's a hell of a catch. We got around it by calling it a "non-religious discussion group" and included a Jesuit. 

So I couldn't practice my religion, but they could push their religion on me, and did until I finally got the base IG involved and cited the specific DoD regulations they were breaking. Now that the Air Force is expressly (finally) forbidding proselytizing, evangelical Christians are mad because they think they're being oppressed. Fuck them.

My experience are far from unique. From the original article in the link at the top of the page,

The conflicts have arisen over military leadership promoting Christian religious meetings through official channels, military courses incorporating Biblical material in coursework, officers trying to convert non-Christians and allegedly favoring "born again" Christians and using Christian doctrine and imagery in logos and official military materials and Christian prayer in official events.

I can vouch for having experience literally all of that. I had a supervisor once who told me I couldn't be a good airman if I wasn't a Christian. We were in Korea. He was cheating on his wife (also they had 2 kids together) with a female airman from another department who was 10 years and 3 ranks his junior. What a great Christian. 

I also remember when this happened, and when it was pulled back as a result of protests by people who were being oppressed since they couldn't hit us over the head with Bibles anymore:

In 2006, after complaints by non-Christians that they were being pressured by evangelicals to convert, the Air Force issued guidelines cautioning superiors from pressing their personal religious views on subordinates. But months later they eased the guidelines after Christian conservatives argued that the guidelines restricted freedom of religion.

Here's the story behind this most recent oppression of oppressors:

In Aug. 2011, in a victory for trying to extricate religion from military business, the Air Force suspended a course called “Christian Just War Theory” — which had been required for missile officers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The PowerPoint for the class drew heavily upon Bible passages and Christian imagery to teach morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons. In the class students were taught based on a passage in the Book of Revelations that Jesus Christ is a "mighty warrior" who believed some wars to be just, according to Truthout.com which broke the story. 

Shortly after this revelation, Schwartz issued a memo using language almost identical to that used in AFI 1-1 calling on all Air Force leaders to "avoid the actual or apparent use of their position to promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion." 

He went on to say that opportunities for worship, religious studies and prayer meetings can be promoted by chaplains, but not by commanders. And he instructed those who felt they were facing unfair bias on the basis of religion to contact a military attorney. 

In response to the memo, and other moves, 66 members of Congress led by Randy Forbes, president of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, wrote a letter of protest to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta blaming Schwartz for an "alarming pattern of attacks on faith in the Air Force." 

"We believe this statement exemplifies the troubling 'complete separation' approach that is creating a chilling effect down the chain of command as airmen attempt to comply," it said, according to a report in Air Force Times. 

For those who advocate a "complete separation" of church and state, the Schwartz memo would have been a victory, except that some commanders refused to disseminate the memo, according to Mikey Weinstein, founder of the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation.  

That omission prompted MRFF to receive "a literal torrent of complaints" from military members who Weinstein says are afraid to directly confront the pervasive Christian culture in the Air Force.

I know what they mean, as someone who did it, it's pretty fucking scary. It's that moment when you realize that your First Sgt, your supervisor, both the junior and senior base chaplains, and your base commander, are all sitting on one side of the table and have the ability to make your professional existence hell in a variety of ways, and you and the regulations are sitting on the other side of the table. This story goes back to August of 2012, but it has recently (slow news day?) been picked up by the lunatics at Fox News and the loonier lunatics at the tabloid trash website of the late and unlamented scumbag Andrew Breitbart.

Through the game of right-wing-conspiracy-theorist telephone, they've warped the story from one of the Air Force saying "Hey, don't push religion on your subordinates, because the last thing a guy in a war zone needs to hear is that he's going to hell for having the wrong faith", to now "PENTAGON MAY COURT MARTIAL SOLDIERS WHO SHARE CHRISTIAN FAITH". And what I've seen all over "social media" from these wackos is a belief that the Onward Christian Soldiers are about to get Soviet-style purged from "Obummer's new gay military". From the execrable comments section at the Breitbart website:

This is a Trojan-Horse Jihadist coup of the Pentagon and the U.S. Military. By forcing out or muzzling 95% of their ranks--Christian soldiers--the U.S. Military ushers in a Jihadist-tolerant force! Once trained and ready, the Islamicized military forces will turn on the American populace in a Religious Pogrom of devastating capacity!
C.A.I.R. and their American Caliphate...Research it NOW!

Classic. Muslims, representing 0.6% of the national population (and who are also prohibited from proselytizing in the military by the regulations), will take over and oppress Christians, who are 78.4% of the national population. 

With insanity like this, the whole talking snake and Adam and Eve thing seems a lot less far fetched. No wonder they're able to unquestioningly believe everything in the Bible and everything their pastors tell them to believe. 

What you mean when you say "gun show loophole"

I've noticed that after the recent bill expanding background checks failed, there seems to be a lot of confusion over what sort of background checks we have for firearms purchases in the US, and indeed if we have them at all. We do have background checks in the US. Any time you buy a new or used gun from a store or dealer with a Federal Firearms License (FFL) you need to fill out a Form 4473 and have a NICS background check called in on you. Gun dealers, who do the overwhelming majority of sales at a gun show, are all and in all jurisdictions required to do a background check no matter where they're selling at. This is true whether they're in a brick and mortar store, or whether they're at a gun show. Additionally, if you want to buy a gun from a private non-licensed individual in another state, they have to go to their local FFL (in gunowner parlance, LGS or Local Gun Store, which parallels the nerd term LGS meaning Local Gaming Store, makes things confusing for gunowner/nerds), and ship the firearm to an FFL near you. Then you go there, and get the 4473 and the NICS check, before you can buy the gun. 

The thing that is not regulated now is private person to person intrastate sales by unlicensed individuals. So, if you buy a gun, and a year later you decide you don't like it, you can sell it to your buddy (or a random stranger) without doing a background check. The federal law requires that you don't believe or know that they have any reason to be prohibited from owning a gun, and you can only sell to someone in the same state as you. 

So a lot of people who have a gun they're looking to replace will go to a gun show and either sell to dealers there to get money to put towards another gun (which is exactly what I did when I bought my 22 target pistol), or sell to another private person if they can get a better deal then they would from a licensed dealer. But they don't have to be at a gun show to do this. What you want to regulate is not "the gun show loophole" because that doesn't exist, there is no gun show loophole. You want to regulate "unlicensed person to person intrastate sales, and require all private sales to go through an FFL". 

Now you know the correct terminology to use if you want to reach gun owners, and at least begin to have an honest debate. You have to know what you're debating if you want to have a chance of success. There are major issues with trying to regulate private person-to-person sales, which is why we haven't done it before, but that is a discussion everybody can have. Among those issues:
1. This would require a background check to be done if you're, say, handing a gun to your spouse. Or inheriting a gun from a deceased family member. 
2. It's impossible to track violations of the law without establishing a national gun registry. I buy a gun. 6 months later I sell it to Bob. 6 months after that he sells it to Steve. Firearms generally aren't tracked by the serial numbers on them, not now anyway, as those numbers are not standardized. The only way to prove that I didn't go through the background check process when selling to Bob or when Bob sold to Steve would be if we had a national gun registry tracking all guns individually. 
3. Because of 2, it would be impossible to have a national gun registry without serious privacy concerns. Quoting from an ABC article:

They’re an invasion of privacy. 

As opponents of gun control warn about privacy issues, background checks are tangled up with another proposal, that records of gun sales must be kept. In a March 22 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, six GOP senators, led by Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, warned that they would oppose any measures that involved “government surveillance.” While it’s not entirely clear what policy those senators had in mind, the American Civil Liberties Union has raised concerns about both records and background checks. “You just worry that you’re going to see searches of the databases and an expansion for purposes that were not intended when the information was collected,” Chris Calabrese, an ACLU privacy lobbyist, told The Daily Caller last week. Meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has made it clear that a “national gun registry” is illegal and won’t be part of any Democratic gun bill.

There may be ways to resolve these issues. But they won't be resolved if the people involved in the debate don't know what they're talking about, and abandon reason and logic to focus on emotion and gut feelings.

Something else that doesn't help is when gun opponents say: 
"We aren't talking about taking anybody's guns" and then go on to say, explicitly or implicitly, "...but you shouldn't be allowed to have them and it means you're mentally ill and you have a small penis and nobody should be allowed to sell or buy guns and the 2nd amendment should be repealed."

And then after going through all the reasons why they think guns should no longer exist and should be taken away because everybody who has them is crazy, they say

"Why are you crazy people being so paranoid???"

Obsolete Amendments

Really tired of otherwise intelligent liberals, like Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Alex Bennett, saying that the Second Amendment is outdated and should be replaced because they don't like it.

Yes, and the First Amendment is outdated. It protects the freedom of the press, but the press at that time was a couple guys with a printing press putting out a paper. The Constitution didn't foresee a 24 hour news cycle, or multiple cable channels, why do we let people have all kinds of unreasonable and dishonest cable news channels? It allows religions to exist unmolested, even though now we've seen all kinds of damages done by religious fanatics. Surely it's okay to restrict religious freedom sometimes. How could the founding fathers have foreseen the dangers of religious extremism?

Why do we still have a Third Amendment? Don't need that. We don't have the money to have troops, no point worrying about quartering them.

The Fourth Amendment just protects criminals. If you haven't done a crime, you don't need to be afraid of searches or seizures, right? Your house should be open to police inspectors at all times, unless you have something to hide. Privacy is an outdated concept in the 21st century. Needs to be changed.

Fifth Amendment, don't need that. Like Attorney General Holder said, due process isn't necessarily judicial process, it's the process to which the government decides you are due. After all, if it's too dangerous to bring you to trial, if you're somewhere scary and risky like the mountains of Yemen or the slums of Detroit, we can just summarily execute you. If you were innocent, you wouldn't have fallen under suspicion, right?

Sixth Amendment, there's another one that just protects the criminals. Better scrap it. Speedy trial by jury? What do juries know? Can we risk having a bad guy go free because a jury makes a mistake?

Seventh amendment, there's those pesky juries again, and civil juries keep awarding greedy "victims" massive awards in lawsuits. Better just leave that to a judge.

Eighth amendment, gotta scrap that one, it keeps us from being able to properly and cruelly punish criminals with some great vindictive and medieval tortures. If we could kill somebody slowly and painfully, there's be a lot less criminals, right?

Ninth Amendment, what's the point of that? It gives people rights but doesn't say what they are? That doesn't help us at all, get rid of it.

Tenth Amendment, you can't limit the power of the federal government, look at how many bad decisions the states make. We fought a war for that in the 19th century, right? Get rid of it!

See, look how obsolete and outdated those amendments are. They only protect criminals and make the rest of us less safe. They're holdovers from a more innocent time. Get rid of them all, yeah?

Yes this is satire. 

Laws and their purposes (specifically regarding gun control)

There's two chief reasons for laws, depending on which legal theories and social theories you hold with. It's generally accepted that the two reasons for laws are 
1. To discourage transgressive behavior
2. To punish transgressive behavior
(This is according to my Criminal Law professor, who is also a sitting Judge with a good reputation)

The reason we have laws against things like rape, murder, and theft is because these acts trangress, infringe upon, our society's standards of behavior. There may be some people who would steal or kill but the potential punishments for that discourage them from doing this, and so they do not. There may be some people who would rape but don't want to wind up in prison if they get caught. 

However, for those acts that some slim minority of the population will engage in regardless of legality, laws serve the function of punishing them and protecting society from them. The laws for them exist to put them in jail after transgressive behavior. The objective of jail is to both separate the criminal from society, and (in a perfect world, or at least one with a much more enlightened prison system than ours) rehabilitate criminals for their eventual release. We would not be able to do that without laws against what they did. 

So, with that foundation of legal theory, the question becomes with regards to gun control "What is the behavior we're trying to regulate with these laws and how?" If the objective is to keep people from committing crimes with guns, it will not succeed, because people commit crimes with guns now. If the objective is to punish people who use guns illegally, it's not necessary, because crimes involving firearms already have higher punishments than comparative crimes performed without weapons. If the objective is to prevent people from owning certain types of guns, then all it does (since criminals will ignore those laws) is force people who follow laws to choose between being a criminal, or giving up the things that protect them from criminals. 

The problem with firearms restriction/prohibition is that it is an attempt to pass a "morality" law. There are people who think that not only is a crime committed with a gun a transgressive act, but the mere owning of a gun, or certain types of guns, is an immoral and transgressive act that harms society. The crime to them is not just whether or not you harm somebody with a gun, it is the fact that you own a gun at all. The reason that supporters of gun rights bring up Alcohol and Marijuana prohibition is because the laws banning those are also "morality" laws. With Prohibition, a crime committed while under the influence of alcohol, and the mere act of possessing alcohol itself regardless of what you do with it, were both considered transgressive. 

Laws based on attempts to force a specific group's idea of morality on a society are almost always going to fail, or to lead to a worse situation than there was originally. Laws prohibiting homosexuality did not stop homosexuality, they only punished people for doing what they really had no choice to do anyway. The laws against drugs and the ensuing "Drug War" have simply created a market for illegal drugs, a thriving business climate for the violent cartels, and excuses for domestic police departments to become increasingly militarized, as they load up on hardware that looked normal when I was in Afghanistan but is distinctly incongruous and intimidating on Main Street. With a law based on the belief that gun ownership, whether universally or of non-approved Scary Black Guns, is immoral, all you do is remove from law-abiding citizens the ability to protect themselves, while improving the ability of criminals to prey on law-abiding citizens. 

Admittedly if the factories are shut down, and the imports are closed off, and firearms are destroyed after being recovered by police in connection with a crime, then eventually through attrition you will reduce the numbers of guns in the country and potentially reduce gun violence. There are 300 million guns in this country, and much less than 1% of those guns are ever used in a crime. That's an awful lot of attrition to chew through, and that whole time the criminals will have fairly ready access to guns through the black market where they buy them now, and law-abiding citizens will either become criminals as they continue to own now-illegal methods of protection, or potentially become victims as the criminals who don't follow the laws are free to prey on them. 

Even once we reduce firearms violence, which is already dropping and has been dropping every year for years, and is likely to drop further as other societal conditions like the drug war are improved or ended, even if criminals no longer have access to guns, that won't stop them. Mass killers will find and have found a variety of other methods for their crimes. Common criminals in the UK (which actually has much less gun ownership than most of Europe, and has far more violent crime) have simply switched to different tools for their crimes, like knives and bats. Now they're trying to enact restrictions on knives.

Eternally brutal

You know, people attack Islam for the backwards stone age cultures that support "honor killings" in places like Pakistan and India... while simultaneously ignoring that this is also part of Mosaic Law in Deuteronomy.

Deut. 22:13-21

"If any man takes a wife and goes in to her and then turns against her, 14 and charges her with shameful deeds and publicly defames her, and says, ‘I took this woman, but when I came near her, I did not find her a virgin,’ 15 then the girl’s father and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of the girl’s virginity to the elders of the city at the gate. 16 "And the girl’s father shall say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter to this man for a wife, but he turned against her; 17 and behold, he has charged her with shameful deeds, saying, "I did not find your daughter a virgin." But this is the evidence of my daughter’s virginity.’ And they shall spread the garment before the elders of the city. 18 "So the elders of that city shall take the man and chastise him, 19 and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give it to the girl’s father, because he publicly defamed a virgin of Israel. And she shall remain his wife; he cannot divorce her all his days. 20 "But if this charge is true, that the girl was not found a virgin, 21 then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death because she has committed an act of folly in Israel, by playing the harlot in her father’s house; thus you shall purge the evil from among you," (Deut. 22:13-21).

As "Christian Apologetics" websites will tell you,
"Critics of the Bible must be careful not to impose their present day moral system upon that of an ancient culture found in Scripture and then judge Scripture as though it is inferior to their own subjective morality. The above verses were written 3,000 years ago in a very different culture and location. Sexual purity was very highly valued, unlike today, and when a man would marry a woman, her virginity was critical. In ancient times a dowry was paid to the father of the bride and the rightful expectation was that the bride would be a virgin."
and
"Of course, we do not advocate any type of honor killing.  We are simply stating what the cultural context was."
(source: http://carm.org/bible-difficulties/genesis-deuteronomy/stone-woman-not-being-virgin)

Right. Sure, there was a culture practice codified in the Bible that seems outrageous to us now, but we have to understand that it's a different culture. By the way, homosexuality is still a sin and totally not something where our understanding of it has changed as the culture has changed, right?

The problem, of course, is that this is a religion that claims its holy book was written by a timeless and eternal God, an omniscient and omnipotent being, existing in the past, present, and future, simultaneously. "I AM who I AM" and all that. The Alpha and Omega, who is, who was, and who is to come. Why, right there in Deuteronomy (same book that requires rape victims to marry their rapists and non-virgins to be stoned) it says "The eternal God is your refuge" (Deut. 33:27)

So the question becomes whether or not it is objectively wrong to force a rape victim to marry her rapist, and whether it is objectively wrong to honor kill a non-virgin. If it's objectively wrong no matter what, then an eternal God would have either said something about it back when He was supposedly dictating to Moses the Mosaic Law. I mean, there were no shortage of revolutionary ideas that this deity would go through any lengths to put forth. Things like dietary restrictions, circumcision, monotheism, etc. He gave Peter a vision of different types of food coming down from heaven just to say it's okay to eat pork if you're Christian. It would not have been a stretch, if God had a problem with it, for Him to say "Hey, don't kill a non-virgin. Maybe just fine her, or require a sin offering."

But he did not. The Mosaic Law says she will fucking die. Stoned to death! A form of death that, when we hear about it from these backwater stone age parts of the world now, we think it's horrific and outrageous. Rightly so, because it is. And this is what the eternal God, the Alpha and Omega, said had to be done.

Or else he didn't. Maybe the laws and restrictions of the Bible are reflections of their cultures, and not the divine word at all. Maybe in Timothy 3:16 when it says "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness", it's completely full of shit. Maybe homosexuality is just fine, and slavery is objectively wrong, despite the New Testament condemnation of the first and tacit approval of the second, because the New Testament was reflecting the culture of its time, not some objective grand unifying truth breathed by an eternal and unchanging omniscient Supreme Being.

And here we get to the root of all religions. Really, there's not a rock solid underlying truth to it all, and if there is, you're not going to get there with religion. No, the truth is that 9 times out of 10, religion is just used as an excuse for doing what you want to do anyway, for better or for worse. It can be distorted by its adherents, for good and for evil, because it's simply a reflection of who we are as humans. So if you find some good lessons in your holy book of choice, whether it's the Bible, the Quran, or the Bhagavad Gita, go with that. And if you're using your holy book as an excuse to be a dick to somebody, or somebody else is doing the same in their religion and their culture, don't blame the religion or hide behind it, blame the person. Take responsibility yourself for being a dick. You're not following the commands of an eternal divine being, you're just doing what you want to do anyway, for better or worse.