The Bible and sexy women

"True or false," Crazy Carl quizzed me, "the Bible says do not kill."  (Crazy Carl did not know my profession.)

True, I told him, and Crazy Carl gleefully told me I was wrong.  He tried to go on but I pressed him, telling him the Bible most certainly said that in both Exodus and Deuteronomy.  No, he told me, that's a common misconception.  The Bible really only says "do not commit murder."  I told him it all comes down to how you choose to translate ratsach (רָצַח).  That shut him up.

Actually, it really, really didn't.  He challenged me to a quick game of "Is it in the Bible" (which he failed at--see below).  He asked about a couple of sayings I can't remember, which were easy nos, along with "money is the root of all evil" ("the love of money is the root of all evil," 1 Timothy 6:10).

He then launched into a lesson on lust.  "The Bible says something about your neighbor's wife," he said, and I supplied him with the word "covet."  "Covet, that's it," he said.  "It doesn't say don't lust after her."

Actually, I told him, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully commits adultery in his heart.  I think he did a complete one-eighty on what he was going to say, because he started talking about how useful that is, because obsession is self-defeating.  Then he said he would definitely sleep with Catherine Zeta Jones, but she's married to Michael Douglas and that man is crazy.  So the Bible really gives good advice.

In the (very long) "women Crazy Carl finds sexy" portion of our conversation, Nadia Comăneci came up.  I'd never heard of her, but Carl informed me she was the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 in the Olympics and that she had scored a 9.5 the day after drinking a cup of bleach--just to prove her superiority.  The first is true (1976), but I could find no reference whatsoever to the second story.  She did cut her hand on a bar, get a blood infection, leave the hospital against doctors' orders and score a 9.95, so maybe that story just morphed.  A lot.