Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

A chart showing the descendants of Adam, in the bible. Image source.

I recently read "Genesis for Normal People," and I want to talk about the story of Cain.

This story is from Genesis 4. Adam and Eve (the first humans) have 2 sons: Cain and Abel. Cain murders Abel. And then the part I want to talk about is what happens after that. 

As punishment for murdering Abel, God says that Cain will have to wander the earth. Cain is really not happy about this- he is afraid that "whoever finds me will kill me." So God puts a mark of some kind on him to tell people not to kill him. Then Cain moves away, and he and his wife have a child, and he builds a city.

"Genesis for Normal People" says this (page 33):

If you have ever read this story to inquisitive children, you know what's coming next-- the dreaded question that terrified Sunday School teachers pray is never asked: "Where did Cain get his wife from?" (I don't know, Susie. Ask your parents.) Along with that question, we can also add, "Where did this posse come from that Cain is so afraid of, and why exactly would one man in exile build a city?"

Even children recognize that if Adam and Eve were the first humans, and if Cain and Abel were their children, and if Abel is dead-- that leaves three people on earth. So Genesis 4 just drops a bunch of other people in our laps without bothering to explain where they came from.

Some, who still want to read Genesis 2-4 as another account of creation, find an answer in Genesis 5:4, where we learn that Adam had "other sons and daughters." So are we supposed to believe that Cain married his sister? Besides the fact that that's gross and a little creepy, let's also remember the story doesn't say that or even suggest it. That is a made-up explanation. And besides, Genesis 5:4 seems to say that these other children were born after Seth, Adam and Eve's replacement child for Abel-- all of that happened after the banishment of Cain and his marriage to his mysterious wife. And finally, think about this: for Cain to find a wife among his sisters while wandering around as a fugitive would mean that at least one sister (actually, a lot of brothers and sisters since Cain builds a city) would have been banished too. But again, the story doesn't say any of that.

Here's a simpler explanation: there were other people living outside of the Garden of Eden all along, even if the story doesn't explain it. Which leads to this: maybe the story of Adam and Eve isn't about the first human beings. Maybe it's about something else. And that something else is this:

The Adam story is a story of Israel in miniature, a preview of coming attractions.

!!!!!! Oh, yes, I read all the apologetics books back in the day, and yes they certainly do talk about the question "where did Cain get his wife?" The answer that's given in the apologetics books is: Cain must have married his sister or niece. And this was okay back then because Adam and Eve had completely perfect genes. But later, many many generations after Adam and Eve, the effects of sin in the world had caused more and more mutations in people's genes- so incest is a bad idea now, but back then at the creation of the world, it was fine.

Yes, really, if you believe that Adam and Eve were the first 2 people, and everyone is descended from them, then you have to get into these fan theories about how sin causes genetic mutations. You have to make arguments that incest was okay back then but not okay now.

"Genesis for Normal People" points out that NONE OF THAT IS IN THE BIBLE! The bible does NOT say "Cain married his sister." People just made that up because it follows logically from Adam and Eve being the only people on earth originally. But don't take it that seriously! It's not a true story!

It's just FASCINATING how Christians go from "I believe the bible" to "incest was okay during the time of Adam and Eve and I will die on this hill" when the bible doesn't say that at all! It doesn't!

(I mean, if you want actual bible stories about incest: Abraham and Sarah were half-brother/half-sister. Jacob married his cousins Rachel and Leah. The bible has incest. But the story of Cain doesn't, unless you need it as part of your fan theories.)

When you believe in inerrancy, and you read the bible, you see things in the stories that actually aren't there. Like the incest in the story of Cain. 

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Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related

Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations" 

Cain and Family (A Logic Problem) 

The Bible and the Pixar Theory

"The Case for Open Borders": Stay at home

Migrant children. Image source.

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". From pages 139-140:

A number of refrains were repeated in the first half of 2021 as the Biden administration explained that they were working to reinstate the asylum and refugee programs that the Trump administration had gutted: "It takes time," "We're working on it," and, simply, "Do not come." The president, the vice president, the press secretary, and dozens of officials repeated the messages, primarily to Mexicans and Central Americans: Stay at home, Quédate en casa. But you can't ask someone whose home was destroyed by a hurricane to stay at home. You can't ask a parent whose child is hungry to wait a few months. You can't ask someone running for their lives to slow down to a walk.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Court fails transgender youth (June 23) "If the law treats you differently than it treats someone else, there has to be a reason for it. And the reason can’t just be that the people who make the laws don’t like you."

2. Repentance Theater and the Evangelical Closet (June 24) [content note: sexual assault mention] "Let’s be honest. If Tait had come out years ago as a gay man, even one striving to live in harmony with his faith, he would’ve been excommunicated by CCM and booted off Christian radio so fast, his dreadlocks would’ve flown off." Very true.

3. GOP Lawmaker Nearly Dies Due to Abortion Ban—Then Blames the Left (June 24) "But Florida’s six-week abortion ban, which had just been enacted, made those medical professionals hesitant to save Cammack’s life because they feared they’d lose their licenses, or even be prosecuted and sent to jail."

4. Microbial evolution…in spaaaace! (June 21) "Anyway, they swabbed the crew quarters and discovered a novel bacterial species, Niallia tiangongensis."

5. Farads (June 23) From xkcd.

6. Zohran Mamdani Beats Andrew Cuomo for NY Mayoral Bid—Without Abandoning Trans People (June 25) "Mamdani is also the only mayoral candidate out of the crowded Democratic pool who appears to have participated in the protests against NYC hospitals complying in advance to Trump’s anti-trans health care legal threats."

7. Journal Club: Asexuality and Birth Order Effects (June 26) "We thought it might be too early read into the particulars of the results."

8. How many kids go to work instead of school? (June 26) "Asia has embraced that philosophy with positive results. The percentage of children who work has dropped from 13% in 2008 to just 3% in 2024 — from 114 million to 28 million."

9. “No War Here”: The Iranian Couple Who Escaped Conflict to Sell Out at China Expo (June 25) "'Everyone simply wanted to help a couple who had gone through so much to come here from a war-torn country,' Sun said. 'They just wanted to make a little money, and we were all willing to help fulfill that wish.'"

Also from Sixth Tone: Second Life: China’s Top Resale App Now Fuels Its Wildest Gig Market (June 27) "For 40 yuan ($6) an hour, Huang Mingyu hired a 25-year-old to roam the streets of a small city in eastern China, asking strangers if they’d seen her missing bird."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. What Should You Do if ICE Comes to Your Restaurant? (June 23, via) "While you’re recording, say all the things like You don’t have a warrant. We don’t authorize you to be here."

2. Stop asking the wrong question. Be a neighbor. (June 25) "Here, as ever and as always, the most important question is the one asked 2,000 years ago by an unnamed Bible scholar talking to Jesus of Nazareth: 'Who is my neighbor?'"

3. ICE is Helping Predators Scam Immigrants (June 18) "In the case of undocumented immigrants who sought out the con artists specifically because they do not – can not – trust American law enforcement officers to abide by the law and protect their rights, how can we expect them to go to the police, or the FBI, or even their local city council meetings? We as a society have abandoned them, and an abandoned person is just fresh meat for the next predator to come along."

4. ICE arrested a 6-year-old boy with leukemia at immigration court. His family is suing. (June 25) "'Hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding noncitizens have been arrested in immigration courts in recent weeks, despite a federal court ruling that the new ICE courthouse arrest policy is unlawful and unconstitutional,' she said. 'Targeting children under this policy is simply unconscionable.'"

5. Kilmar Abrego Garcia to stay in jail as lawyers spar over potential deportation if he is released pending trial (June 25) "At bottom, the government asks the court to save it from itself because it may suffer irreparable harm completely of its own making."

On Living Far Away From One's Family For Financial Reasons

Cruise ship. Image source.

I have a couple anecdotes to share about families where one or both parents live in a different city from their children, in order to make more money, because there aren't good enough job opportunities in their hometown.

This is a well-known phenomenon in China. They are called "migrant workers" and "left behind children." It sounds awful, being away from your kids, only able to see them once a year- but it's inevitable that this happens, because of the economic disparity between the big cities and the countryside in China. In big cities like Shanghai (where I live), the salaries are higher and the cost of living is higher. In small cities or rural areas, salaries are lower and the cost of living is lower. So, mathematically, the way to earn the most money for one's family is for a parent to live in a big city and earn a higher salary, while the child stays in their hometown where the cost of living is lower. This kind of situation is always going to exist when there is such a big economic gap between different places.

I have several anecdotes about what I've seen in Asia:

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When I was in college in the US, I had a friend who was an international student from China, let's call her Anna. She helped me a lot with studying Chinese. At one point, she told me about a movie called "Last Train Home," which is about Chinese migrant workers traveling home for Chinese New Year. They only get to see their children 1 time out of the whole year. Anna organized a film screening in one of the classrooms on campus, and a bunch of us got together and watched this movie.

Unfortunately, I didn't really have any empathy about it, back then. My feelings were "why are we supposed to feel bad for these people who are only able to see their children once a year? They chose to move to a different city. Nobody was forcing them. They shouldn't have done that." I had a sort of "family values" mindset where we imagine what a "family" is supposed to look like, and if anyone can't live up to that, we naively blame them and say it's because they didn't value their family enough.

And also, I had sort of a "just world fallacy" thing going on. I didn't want to believe that we really live in a world where, for some parents in some places, there is actually a convincing argument to be made that "maybe the best thing I can do for my children is move far away, and leave them behind, and earn more money and send it back so they can have a better life." That's really awful to think about. It's really awful to face the reality that some people truly are in that situation. That, in some places in China, it's extremely normal for the parents to be gone, and the children are raised by other relatives and only get to see their parents once a year.

I didn't want to believe that that was real, so I just thought to myself "I would never do that" and decided that the parents in "Last Train Home" should just simply have not moved away from their children. Like it was that easy.

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Sometimes I see "heartwarming" short videos on Chinese social media about parents who make such long and difficult journeys home to see their kids for Chinese New Year. I feel these are in the same genre as American news articles about "these kids got together and had a bake sale to pay off their classmates' school lunch debt" or "these employees all donated their vacation time so that their pregnant colleague could have maternity leave, how heartwarming." It's not heartwarming- it's messed-up that this situation even exists in the first place.

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Years ago, at a previous job, working as a software engineer in Shanghai, I had a coworker whose wife and child lived in a different city near Shanghai. This coworker would live in Shanghai from Monday to Friday, and go home on the weekends to be with his wife and child. This is a thing that people do, because you can get a better salary and better job opportunities in Shanghai than in other nearby cities.

That was before covid. Now that covid has made it more normal to work from home, I think someone in that situation should try to make an arrangement with their employer where they always work from home on Mondays or Fridays, so they only have to be in Shanghai 4 days out of the week, instead of 5. (I know that in the US, many jobs are fully remote now, because of the societal changes that came with covid, but I haven't heard of fully-remote jobs in China.)

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I have an American friend in Shanghai, let's call her Chelsea. Her husband is Chinese, and his parents live in a different city.

When Chelsea was pregnant, she told me, "my mother-in-law says we can send the baby to live with her?????"

And I said, "Make sure you make it very clear that your answer is NO. Because she's not joking about that."

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Since both me and my husband have full time jobs and don't really want to do housework, we hire an ayi. "Ayi" is what female nannies/ maids/ domestic workers are called in China. It's common for people at our income level to hire an ayi to do housework/cooking/childcare.

We had always hired Chinese ayis before, but at one point, around the time our second child was born, we decided to hire a Filipino ayi. The situation with Filipino ayis is, it's not legal for them to work in this job in China. But, there is demand for them, because they speak English. International people, like me, want to hire Filipino ayis because they speak English so it's easier for me to communicate with them. Chinese people want to hire Filipino ayis who will talk to their kids in English, to help the kids learn. Filipino ayis are generally believed to be better trained and more hard-working, compared to Chinese ayis.

Anyway, we found a Filipino ayi, let's call her Brenda. When we first had her come for a job interview, she told us about her legal situation- she entered China on a tourist visa, and overstayed it, and that was years ago. She has no valid Chinese visa. It's illegal for her to still be in China. She hasn't traveled back to the Philippines, because then she wouldn't be able to enter China again. Within China, she doesn't travel on trains or planes because there's a possibility that they might discover she doesn't have a valid visa. If she has to travel somewhere, she has to ride in somebody's car.

She said that at one of her previous jobs, the family that employed her heard that police were in the area looking for Filipinos working illegally, so they warned her about it and she had to move elsewhere and find a different job.

I felt bad for her, but also I believe that feeling bad for someone is not a good reason to hire them, because then you'll have weird emotions about how you're doing such a noble thing for them, and you expect them to perform gratefulness, etc. Weird strings attached.

Also, I wasn't sure about it, because I felt I didn't clearly understand the legal situation enough to know whether I was putting myself at risk. I'm an immigrant in China too. I don't want to get in trouble. 

But, I also wanted to find out more about Filipino ayis who work in China. 

But also, Brenda didn't have any experience caring for newborn babies, and I knew in the long term I would need an ayi to take care of the baby full-time when my maternity leave ended. Brenda wouldn't be the right person for that. (In China, daycares typically start at around age 2. Before that, usually people get a grandparent to come and take care of the baby while the parents are at work, or hire an ayi.)

Anyway, we decided to hire Brenda temporarily- and I told her this pretty early on- I said she would probably work for us just a few months, and then we would need to find someone else who had experience with newborn babies.

Brenda was great. She had a good attitude, worked hard, always asked me questions to make sure she was doing things the way I wanted. She was really good to work with. It was easy to communicate with her because she could speak English. I speak Chinese, so that's how I've communicated with Chinese ayis in the past, but it's just easier in English. And my son (who was preschool-age) loved her. (He loves everyone though.)

We paid her more than we would have paid a Chinese ayi. In my experience, Chinese ayis get a salary around 40-50 RMB/hr (this is about 6-7 USD), but we paid Brenda around 60-70 RMB/hr (about 9-10 USD). Actually I have no idea what the normal hourly rate is for Filipino ayis in Shanghai. We just asked her what her previous salary was, and believed whatever she said, and based it on that. I was okay with that because I knew it would just be a short-term thing. If she was going to work for us longer, I would have put more effort into figuring out what a reasonable salary would be. 

But, yeah, I felt it didn't make sense to have her work for us long-term, because what I really needed was someone to take care of the baby, and why would I pay so much extra money when she hasn't even worked with newborn babies before? (And she was also looking for more hours than what I wanted to give her- so it just wasn't going to work out long-term. But we really liked her and I'm glad to have met her and found out something about what life is like for Filipinos working illegally in China.)

There were several instances where I felt like, I'm so privileged and out-of-touch with what her life is like. For example, right when she started working for us, I tried to get a key card for her so she could get into our building. You have to go to the apartment management office with your ID and register in order to get a key card. Brenda was very much NOT willing to do that. I felt like... I'm asking her to do something that might put her at risk. Like I'm so out-of-touch, I don't even understand what I'm asking her to do. Fortunately (???) our apartment complex doesn't actually care about security, and the building door is always left open, so she was able to enter the building even without a key card. 

Also, sometimes she came with me to pick up my son from school. When we were waiting outside the gate with all the other parents, she would kind of nervously side-eye the school security guards. And I felt like she was being paranoid- but what do I know? It's easy for me to say "she's being paranoid" and judge her, when I'm not the one at risk of being deported. It's not right for me to judge what level of "paranoid" she should be.

She told me she has friends who never even take the subway, because there are police there. She took the subway herself though.

She didn't have a bank account in China. I used WeChat to pay her. (WeChat is a Chinese app for texting and social media, and it also has a payment function- you can easily send people money, and stores in China all accept WeChat Pay, so there's no problem using your WeChat wallet to buy stuff.) She couldn't open an actual bank account because banks require international customers to have a valid visa.

And here's another weird thing- one time, we were cleaning out our kitchen and found an old rice cooker, and we were gonna get rid of it, and Brenda asked if she could have it. To mail to somebody in the Philippines. I found it hard to believe that somebody in the Philippines would want our old rice cooker (do they even have the same kind of outlets there? The US has different outlets than China, I have no idea what they have in the Philippines) but she really wanted it, so we gave it to her. Another time we found a box of cables from old electronics, and we were going to throw them away because we didn't even know what they were from, and Brenda wanted those. I think maybe she could get money from recycling them. In the places we've lived in China, there have always been people looking through the trash bins, looking for things they can get money for. Mostly cardboard boxes and plastic bottles. If we hadn't given those old cables to Brenda, I'm sure somebody else would have taken them out of our trash. 

She said that she's heard from other Filipinos that one strategy would be to marry a Chinese man, in order to get legal immigrant status. But, she said, she doesn't really want to. I said, yeah you shouldn't marry someone if you don't want to.

And, yeah, I believe it's a bad idea to marry someone if you don't want to. But I also think it's a bad idea to live in China as an illegal immigrant, but I can't judge because obviously I don't know what her situation was in the Philippines, and why she decided to come to China, and how long she initially planned to stay, and if her life is better in China than it would have been in the Philippines, and if she is earning money for the purpose of supporting family in the Philippines, etc. (Her situation is different from the other anecdotes in this post because she doesn't have kids.) I didn't ask her any of that because it's none of my business. (Also there is a power difference, because I was her boss- she has to act like she cares about my problems, regardless of whether she does or not. So, try not to exploit that.)

There are people in this world who chose to get married for those kinds of reasons, not because of a romantic "I want to spend my life with this person." There are people who are in a situation where that is actually, somehow, a good idea.

From my point of view, it doesn't make sense- she can't even have a bank account, she can't go home and see her family, she can't really travel in China, she always has to be worried about police, she always told me about problems she was having with her landlord, probably it's easy for a landlord to exploit Filipinos who are in China illegally, especially since she couldn't speak very much Chinese, and so on and so on- why would someone choose to live as an illegal immigrant in China? But she knows her own situation, and I don't, so I can't judge. There's a lot of information I just don't have.

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We went on a cruise from Shanghai to Japan. In the ship's main dining room, we were assigned to a certain table, so we had the same waiter every night. Towards the end of the cruise, we were friendly enough with him to chat about what life is really like for him on the cruise ship. He was also from the Philippines. Let's call him Daniel.

We chatted about a LOT of things with him! He said he was happy to talk to us because a lot of the passengers only speak Chinese, which makes it hard for him because he doesn't speak Chinese at all. I started out asking him if the ship only travels between Shanghai and Japan, or if it also goes to other places. And I asked if they have cruises all the time, or if there are some days in between cruises where they don't have any passengers. Turns out, they have cruises ALL the time. Daniel said that after we all leave, the crew has to work hard cleaning all the rooms to get ready for new passengers to arrive that same day. They even bring the waiters in to help with cleaning the rooms.

I asked him if the rooms for the crew were smaller than our rooms (yes).

We had seen the waitstaff all having a meeting in the afternoon, when the dining room was empty, so we asked him what that was about. He got talking about the expectations for their work performance, and how if some customer gives them an 8 out of 10 review, they get called in to the manager's office, like "What did you do???!!!!" (I said, "wait, 8 is bad???") Daniel says, "What can I do, some people just never give anything higher than a 7."

(A week later, when I got the email about filling out the survey, I gave the staff all 10 out of 10. And there was one question on there, "Was there any crew member that told you to give them a good review?" and I put "no" because probably they get in trouble for that. Later there was a question "Was there any crew member that did a really good job?" and I put his name in there, and also the assistant waiter and the woman who cleaned our rooms.)

My husband and I had been wondering about the people who work on the ship- we felt like maybe it would be a good job to have when you're young and want to see the world and you don't have any family commitments. So we asked Daniel about that. He said, his wife also works on the ship. Yeah, it's common for the crew to get married to each other, because you're on a ship in the middle of the ocean, where else are you going to meet anyone?

He said, they have a son. The son is in the Philippines- the grandparents are raising him. And Daniel misses his son a lot, but working on the cruise ship he's able to earn more money than he would in the Philippines, to give his son a good education. And last time he visited home, his son was crying at the airport telling him not to leave... And how he hopes that soon his wife will stop working on the cruise ship and go back home, and hopefully in a few years he will too.

The cruise ship had an activity where you could pay 100 dollars per person to take the "behind-the-scenes tour." No need to do that- you can just talk to the waiter. (I also talked to the Chinese woman who cleaned our room every day.) The people who work on the ship, they know a lot of things. Many of those things they probably aren't supposed to tell you- their job is to give you whatever you ask for, and be extremely polite, and pretend to be happy even if the customers are really annoying and unreasonable, and give you a perfect vacation experience, and make you feel like the world revolves around you...

If you want to ask them things, for your own curiosity, obviously don't do it at a time when they're busy. That's annoying. You should thank them for the work they are doing, show them you appreciate it, be friendly, maybe from there you'll have a chance to ask them about their life, or the practical logistics of the cruise ship, or whatever, if they're willing to talk about it.

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This is a real thing in this world- people who are in a situation where their best option is to live far away from their children. And this will inevitably be true, when some places have much better job opportunities and a higher cost of living, compared to other places. Mathematically, the way to earn the most money and to have that money be used most effectively, is to have the income-earners of the family live in the places with higher salaries, and the children to live in places with a lower cost of living. I feel sad about it, but it's not something that can be easily changed- it's entirely based on the very big economic differences between different places in this world.

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Related:

That's What Radicalized Me (a post about immigration)

"The Case For Open Borders" (book review) 

"The Case for Open Borders": Remittances

On "Unjust Marriage" 

Dog Hotels and Poverty Existing at the Same Time

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. These evangelical men saved sex for marriage – they weren’t well prepared (June 17) "The experience has shaped how the couple are raising their six-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son. 'I want my daughter to have full information about her body – I don’t want her to go through what I did,' said Katy. As for their son, 'I just want him to understand that women are people,' said Nate."

2. This abortion method doesn't involve doctors — and many of them consider it safe (June 22) "Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the hotline has only grown. It now has dozens of volunteers, including clinicians as well as people who provide logistical support. The hotline gets thousands of calls and texts every month."

3. A cancer center in Jordan treats kids from Gaza, but only a few dozen have arrived (June 20) "All of Gaza's hospitals have been either damaged or destroyed in Israeli airstrikes."

4. Do You Want to Build a Snowman - 10 YEARS, SAME ANNA! (2024) OH MY GOODNESS this is amazing.

5. What’s the Right Way to Translate Chinese Dish Names? (June 20) "Semantic translation, on the other hand, conveys meaning rather than form. Traditionally, it prioritizes fluency and naturalness in the target language, even if that means departing from the original wording — rendering the Chinese shizitou as 'meatball,' for example. However, semantic translation can also mean literal translation, even if the result seems foreign or puzzling — such as translating shizitou as 'lion’s head.'"

Hmm. Yeah I would describe shizitou [狮子头] as a meatball, but 丸子 are also meatballs, but they are different. I guess then you have no choice but to translate 狮子头 as a lion head meatball? It's pork, though, okay.

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Protest sign that says "No kings / Yas queens!" Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Relief and a raised fist as Mahmoud Khalil goes free – but release ‘very long overdue’ (June 20, via) I'm glad to hear this. But it's not over- his immigration case is still ongoing.

Mahmoud Khalil emerges from airport security with his wife Noor and newborn, legal team and Rep. AOC.

[image or embed]

— Gwynne Hogan (@gwynnefitz.bsky.social) June 22, 2025 at 1:37 AM

'They wanted to separate me from my family': Mahmoud Khalil speaks after ICE release (June 23) "They absolutely showed me nothing. They had over 100 days to do that, and I dare Trump, [Marco] Rubio, and their administration to substantiate these claims with anything, because they did not refer to anything."

2. One daughter's search for a father detained by ICE (June 21) "Urizar had no idea where her father was being held or how to reach him."

3. The Antisemites In and Around the Trump Administration (June 17) "I mean the kind who proudly performs a Roman salute or two on a national stage, like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, sure, but you already knew about those. There are many, many more."

4. U.S. Supreme Court allows — for now — third-country deportations (June 23) "In a searing dissent, the court's three liberals accused the conservative majority of 'rewarding lawlessness.' Writing for the three, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said 'The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone, anywhere without notice or an opportunity be heard.'"

"The Case for Open Borders": Disease

Travelers wearing face masks. Image source.

Here's another quote from the book "The Case for Open Borders". This part is talking about the idea that we can't have open borders because there's a risk of immigrants bringing disease into the country. From pages 135-136:

One form of nonhuman migration that's an obvious concern is disease. Certain dangers do undeniably exist, as evidenced by Europeans bringing smallpox to the Americas, or Rome spreading malaria to the outer regions of its empire. But migrants today are less threatening pathogenic vectors than are trade or international business. 

Take the US-Mexico border. About 350 million people cross it every year, the vast majority of them local residents going about their daily lives: businesspersons, as well as tourists and the curious, all browsing la frontera. The number of migrants who cross the US-Mexico border varies by year, but it's typically less than one million. For the majority of the COVID-19 pandemic, standard cross-border traffic was not shut down along the US-Mexico border, but migrants and asylum seekers were barred from crossing, even when infection rates plummeted. Scientifically, the discriminatory cordon sanitaire made zero sense. To keep a disease behind a border would require a shutdown of the entire capitalist system, not just attempts to stop asylum seekers.

Yeah, when people talk about how we need to restrict immigration because of the risk of disease, they're not talking about rich people's business trips and vacations. They're talking about undocumented people. Even though in sheer numbers, the rich people with business trips and vacations have a much bigger effect.

To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?

A person's hands writing on a scroll. Image source.

I recently read "Genesis for Normal People", which discusses the biblical book of Genesis in terms of what the ancient writer meant to say. Reading it "with ancient eyes," not bringing our modern ideas into it. And, in particular, this means reading the bible without the assumption that it's true, and without the assumption that it has meaningful moral lessons to teach us. ("Genesis for Normal People" doesn't state this so explicitly; this is *my* summary of it.)

It's *just* about what the writer meant, and how the ancient readers would have understood it. (I'm sure the authors of "Genesis for Normal People," Enns and Byas, have opinions on the connection between the bible and truth/morality, but this book didn't get into that.)

Which leads me to ask the question: To what extent do *I* care what the biblical writers meant?

Evangelicals are SO INTO figuring out what the bible originally meant, to its original audience. Because, in their ideology, the bible is inerrant- meaning, whatever the writer originally intended it to mean is inerrant. (I discussed this at length in my 2017 post, "The Author of Leviticus Would Have Been Cool With It" - how can you separate the literal words of the text from the author's meaning? And how can you separate the author's meaning from the author's underlying beliefs and assumptions? And how can you separate the author's beliefs and assumptions concerning what they wrote in the bible, from their beliefs and assumptions about EVERYTHING, many of which must be completely wrong, because all of us have some beliefs which are completely wrong? And how can you claim that the literal words of the text, and/or the author's intended meaning, are inerrant, without also claiming all of the author's biases about everything are inerrant? I think about these things because I can speak Chinese- language is a rolling ocean, not an absolute solid ground. It's the words themselves but it's also an entire society's experiences with those words. Communication is not just about the words, but about having shared background assumptions. How do you say "cookie" in Chinese? Well, a dictionary will tell you it's 饼干 [or maybe 甜饼 or 曲奇, honestly 甜饼 probably gets my point across the best, in terms of what I imagine when I think of a cookie, and what I want to communicate to people about it; and 曲奇 I think sounds a little silly because it's a transliteration, not something native to Chinese], but you need more than a dictionary- you need to know that most Chinese people don't really eat cookies. Also 饼干 usually means a cracker, which is completely different from a cookie, but Chinese people have a hard time grasping what the difference is. There are plenty of examples in the other direction too- I've met Chinese people who find it just UNBELIEVABLE that the English word for 米粉 is "rice noodles." Doesn't "noodles" mean 面条? [Well, no, not exactly. 面条 in Chinese does not mean the exact same thing as "noodles" in English; 面条 is *only* the noodles that are made from flour, not other kinds of starch like rice or potatoes.] 米粉 and 面条 are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! But in my opinion, they're not really that different? This must be how Chinese people feel when I insist that cookies and crackers are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS. The layers: the words, and what the writer meant by those words, and what people normally think is meant by those words- how can you draw a line and say where the "inerrant" layer ends and the "just regular fallible human thoughts" layer begins?)

Where was I? Ah, yes, evangelicals are SO INTO figuring out what the biblical writers originally meant. Evangelicals are all about looking up Greek and Hebrew words, debating the merits of different English translations, looking up anecdotes about whatever was going on in their society back then, which the bible makes reference to, etc. We need to know what the biblical text originally meant, because that's what it means for us too. 

In evangelical ideology: Our English translations are not necessarily inerrant. Whatever you initially understand a particular bible verse to mean is not necessarily inerrant. But what it originally meant, that's what's inerrant. 

(Or rather, the average churchgoer might understand inerrancy to mean an English translation is inerrant, or that whatever mental image they had while reading is inerrant- but if you ask extremely pointed questions about what inerrancy means exactly, the official answer is this "only what the author originally meant was inerrant" idea.)

And "Genesis for Normal People" is all about what the biblical writers originally meant, but in a way that's obviously off-limits for evangelicals. "Genesis for Normal People" gives examples where "what the biblical writers meant" was simply incorrect- for example, about the existence of the firmament. Like, yes, they really were writing about the firmament. And no, the firmament does not really exist. So they were wrong. But if you're a good evangelical, you can't even imagine the idea that the biblical writers would have been talking about something that clearly (we know thanks to modern science) doesn't exist. The belief in inerrancy blocks you from actually understanding what the text originally meant.

As for me, I'm not evangelical any more, and- okay I'll be blunt about this- wow it's so freeing to not have to obsess over the meanings of ancient Greek words in order to figure out if I'm allowed to treat gay people with basic decency. The bible is not in charge of me; I do *not* view it as an authority which teaches us morals. I care about "what the biblical writers meant" as a matter of intellectual curiosity, rather than an anxiety-fueled quest to determine the commands by which I should live my life. (See: It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce)

But reading "Genesis for Normal People," I'm wondering, wait, do I *actually* care what the bible originally meant, from an ancient near east perspective?

For example, the book discusses the Genesis flood story, in comparison with other flood stories from other ancient cultures. I'm interested to read that, but it's... it's just the way I'm interested to read cool facts about history. It's a different feeling from how driven I am in my love for the bible and for Jesus.

So I've come to this conclusion: As an ex-evangelical, I'm not *primarily* interested in the original meaning of the bible. What I'm actually interested in is the [white American] evangelical construct of what the bible is and what it means- and how I react to that and critique it.

You grow up in the evangelical church, you read the bible every day, you believe it's inerrant, you devote your life to the God you find in its pages- all of this will result in you having some kind of imagined concept of what the bible is. And even though that concept is more about evangelical culture than about what they were actually writing about thousands of years ago- even though it's very far from what the actual text of the bible originally meant- it's real, in a certain sense. It's a powerful cultural construct.

And when I talk about the bible, I want to talk about it in terms of a reaction to that cultural construct. Which has had a much greater effect on me than "what the writer meant."

For example- I wrote a bunch of blog posts about the book "Womanist Midrash", because that book is about examining the characters in the bible from a womanist/feminist perspective. The reason I was so interested in it was that I know all these characters. I know them, I know them very well, I've been reading these stories my whole life, but always through an evangelical lens, with a bunch of assumptions about what the bible is. I am so into the contrast between evangelical readings of these bible characters, and feminist readings.

And yes, "Womanist Midrash" is based on a lot of good research about language and culture and history- it *is* about "what the bible really meant back then." But what interests me specifically isn't "what the bible really meant" but the contrast between that view and the evangelical view.

And, as another example, when I write fanfiction about the bible, it's because I am Making A Point about evangelicalism. Sure, sometimes I might write it in a way that's like "here's what it was really like for these characters" but my point isn't simply "here's what it was really like" but "evangelicalism gets this completely wrong." And my Noah fanfic is full of modern American evangelical talking points about hell and salvation and what the gospel is- this is an intentional anachronism; my point was not that Noah really believed those things (because of course he didn't) but to use the Noah story to make a point about modern evangelical beliefs.

So I don't necessarily care what the bible really is/ really was to its writers. I care about what evangelicals say it is, and I react against that. And yes, learning about its history from an academic perspective, as we see in "Genesis for Normal People" is an aspect of that, but for me it's not the main thing.

Okay, so, next question: Is it a problem that I'm interested in the white American evangelical construct of the bible, rather than the actual bible?

Well... the white American evangelical construct of the bible is real, though. This imagined version of what the bible is- it's *not* actually what the bible is, but it's *real* in the sense that there's a whole culture and ideology surrounding it, and that culture and ideology has had a big effect on my life. 

It's like... "The Lion King" is based on "Hamlet", but "The Lion King" is worth analyzing and enjoying in and of itself, even if you don't care about its connection to "Hamlet." Plus "Hamlet" didn't have all those great songs. Can you imagine if people were walking around saying "it doesn't matter what you think about 'The Lion King,' it doesn't matter if you like the songs or whatever, it's just an imperfect retelling of 'Hamlet', that's all." No, it's more than that.

And this evangelical ideology, with its biblical inerrancy and all the beliefs that come with that- this is where I first loved the bible, and where I first loved Jesus. This is what the bible meant to me, for many years- so of course I have things to say about that, more so than I have things to say about the fact that there are similarities between Noah's flood and the epic of Gilgamesh, or any other point that biblical scholars present about what the bible really is.

So I do want to read more about actual academic scholarship on the bible, but that's not necessarily the main point for me.

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Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related:

The Bible and the Pixar Theory

Figuring Out What I Believe About "The Prince of Egypt" 

"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. SCOTUS Allows For Trans Discrimination In Medical Care: A Full Analysis Of Today's Ruling (June 18) "The ruling effectively greenlights medical care bans across the country and may pave the way for broader restrictions, including for adults, while leaving lower court rulings on bathrooms, schools, sports, and employment remain intact—for now."

Really not good for trans kids. We have to keep doing what we can to support them.

And from Law Dork: Where is the outrage over Skrmetti? (June 20) "In its U.S. v. Skrmetti ruling, the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees shaved off the edges — if not more central parts — of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in order to uphold laws that bar an exceptionally small number of teens from receiving a type of medical care that only one group of teens need."

The reasoning in this Supreme Court decision is about how the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment applies (or doesn't apply) to trans people. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor draws comparisons with the Loving vs Virginia case, where the Supreme Court ruled that states could not ban interracial marriage. I guess in the Skrmetti case, the majority opinion said that both trans and cis children cannot get treatment for gender dysphoria, so it's not discrimination. And this is like how the argument to ban interracial marriage was that people of every race are equally not allowed to marry outside of their race, so it's not discrimination. And the Skrmetti decision is really opening the door to a skewed interpretation of the equal protection clause, which could lead to rights being eroded in so many other areas.

I'm literally in an interracial marriage, but I never thought about "hey my marriage is about the 14th amendment" or anything along those lines. Learning about Loving vs Virginia in high school, it felt like ancient history, like of course people can marry a partner of a different race, why would that be an issue, aren't we glad we don't have those racist laws like they did back then. When I got married, I didn't think about "some of my ancestors thought this shouldn't be legal" or anything like that- it never occurred to me that anyone would think there would be a legal issue. 

BUT ALSO I grew up evangelical and so back then I totally bought into all the anti-queer stuff, like we can't let gay people get married, we can't let trans people have rights, etc. We usually didn't talk about the details about how you turn that into an actual legal argument, but apparently one argument that was being used in court was "both straight and gay people aren't allowed to marry a same-sex partner, so it's not discrimination."

ANYWAY my point is, I should read more about the equal protection clause. It turns out to be related to a lot of things.

Also related to Skrmetti: After Getting The Ruling It Wanted, New York Times Publishes 6 Anti-Trans Articles (June 20) "In all, at least half a dozen articles have been published by the Times in the 24 hours following the ruling—ink still drying—spreading misinformation, shaming transgender people, and giving prominent space to voices that seek to strip us of our rights."

2. Baby of brain-dead Georgia woman on life support delivered via C-section (June 17) Not sure what to say about this- if I died and was pregnant, I would want them to continue the life support to save the baby. But the key thing is, it should be the family's choice. This case is horrific because it was forced on this family by faraway politicians and heartless laws.

3. The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it (2016, via) "The result of a media — and education system — that fails to present quantitative information on long-run developments is that most people are very ignorant about global development and have little hope that progress against serious problems is even possible."

4. HIV prevention drug hailed as a 'breakthrough' gets FDA approval (June 18) 

5. The Meta AI App Lets You ‘Discover’ People’s Bizarrely Personal Chats (June 12, via) "It’s unclear whether the users of the app are aware that their conversations with Meta’s AI are public or which users are trolling the platform after news outlets began reporting on it. The conversations are not public by default; users have to choose to share them."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Federal Judge Grants Class Status To Trans People In Passport Case In Massive Win (June 18) "According to preliminary conversations with expert attorneys, whether transgender people should submit a passport update request immediately depends on their risk tolerance and individual circumstances. A motion to stay the ruling could come within days. Those most likely to benefit from applying immediately are individuals with incorrect gender markers, those seeking their first passport, or those with expired documents who need to travel soon. Expedited processing may increase the likelihood of receiving a passport before any potential appellate or Supreme Court intervention."

2. FULL SPEECH: Sen. Padilla speaks on Senate floor after removal from DHS press conference (June 18) 14-minute video. "If that is what the administration is willing to do to a United States senator for having the authority to simply ask a question, imagine what they'll do to any American who dares to speak up."

3. Trump administration cuts specialized suicide prevention service for LGBTQ+ youth (June 18) "'This is devastating, to say the least,' Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, said in a statement. The Trevor Project is one of several nonprofits administering the services. 'The administration's decision to remove a bipartisan, evidence-based service that has effectively supported a high-risk group of young people through their darkest moments is incomprehensible.'"

So, now would be a good time to donate to The Trevor Project.

4. Trump administration actions contradict MAHA rhetoric on toxic chemicals (June 18) Oh, so it turns out, when RFK said we have to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals in the environment that are harmful to children, he didn't mean it like 'let's actually fund the scientists who are doing good work studying which chemicals are harmful.' He meant it like 'here are some words that we will use as an excuse to be mean to autistic children.'

5. The ABA Declares War (June 18, via) "The American Bar Association (ABA) just dropped a massive federal lawsuit against the White House. And it’s not messing around. The lead counsel filing suit on behalf of the ABA is Susman Godfrey, one of the firms Trump targeted. The complaint names the Office of the President, but for good measure, it also names each and every high level government department along with every cabinet official."

6. Federal immigration agents asked to leave Dodger Stadium parking lot, team says (June 20) "Dozens of federal agents with their faces covered arrived in SUVs and cargo vans to a lot near the stadium’s Gate E entrance. A group of protesters carrying signs against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement started amassing shortly after, local media reported."

7. ‘Code Adam’ (June 19) "That video shows Villareal, wearing his blue Walmart vest, approaching the agents and asking them questions. That video shows the agents mobbing him, throwing him to the ground, and hauling him away."

"The Case for Open Borders": Climate Change

Hurricane. Image source.

Here's another quote from the book "The Case for Open Borders". This is from page 126:

The United States spent eleven times more militarizing its borders than on helping poorer countries mitigate the effects of climate change. Canada, the worst offender, spent fifteen times more on border enforcement. In effect, those countries, the report concludes, are trying to build a "climate wall" to keep the effects of climate change-- displaced people-- out. Mohamed Nasheed, former president of Maldives, a country that is literally being washed away by rising seas, had a message for Western countries, as reported by writer Suketu Mehta: "You can drastically reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so that the seas do not rise so much. Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can let us in. Or when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can shoot us. You pick."

Opening borders, it bears repeating, is not the solution to our climate crises, but it will help mitigate some of their worst effects. Opening borders will also prompt a reevaluation of the extractive/exploitative capitalist regime that is driving the hyper-carbonization of the atmosphere, the acidification of the oceans, the kindling of the rainforests, and the general trashing of ecosystems. Ruling regimes rely on borders to paper over these egregious harms, find loopholes in protective legal systems, and leverage differentials in labor laws to maximize constant production and growth, the flip side of which is constant destruction and waste-- or, to use a scarily apt neologism: ecocide.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. ‘He stole a piece of our souls’: Christian music star Michael Tait accused of sexual assault by three men (June 13) [content note: sexual assault] I posted a different link about this before, but this article is good because it gives a whole overview of the context: the culture of CCM (contemporary Christian music), DC Talk, the way we made it part of our identity to be labelled "Jesus freaks", Newsboys, Christian nationalism. I'm so mad.

Hemant Mehta also reports on this: After assault allegations, Christian music icon Michael Tait admits preying on multiple men (June 16, via) "More than a decade after its release, God’s Not Dead is still finding new ways to disappoint everyone."

Mehta talks about the gay dimension of this... which is... yeah... I know there must be conservative Christians whose takeaway from this story is "Michael Tait is gay." Completely missing the point. 

2. How Muppets Break Free from their Puppeteers (June 13, 12-minute video) This is really cool! It's about the practical effects that the were used in the Muppets movies, basically to hide the puppeteers when the characters were in a big wide-shot scene.

3. I Was A Juror On A Murder Trial (June 13) "I’ve never seen anyone say 'actually, it’s a good idea to lie to police officers because it will make the jury think you’re too stupid to commit premeditated murder,' but it did work in this case. Maybe this is the new murder meta."

4. The Moderate Case Against Trans Youth Healthcare Bans (June 13) "Even for those uncertain about the evidence behind transgender healthcare, in cases where there is ambiguity but a clear potential for benefit, decisions should be left to parents, patients, and doctors—not politicians. This is a majority opinion found in many polls."

5. Exoplanet System (June 16) From xkcd.

6. Shell Game: In China, a $14K Reward for a Turtle That May Be Extinct (June 17) "Only one Yangtze giant softshell turtle is known to exist in China. Nicknamed Susu, the turtle is at Suzhou Shangfangshan Forest Animal World, formerly known as Suzhou Zoo, in eastern China, and is believed to be over 100 years old."

7. Menstrual products and rural Indian women (2016) [content note: menstruation] A post about the various ways that rural Indian women deal with their periods. This is really surprising to me, because the narrative I always heard was "women in developing countries don't have menstrual products, oh that's so terrible, can you imagine, and sometimes girls even drop out of school because they just have no way to deal with their periods." Ohhhh turns out I always just assumed that since *I* have no idea what one would do if one didn't have disposable pads, that meant that there just *is* no way to manage without disposable pads. Well that is not true.

I think there probably is some truth to the idea that not having access to period products is an issue we should care about, related to women's rights, but we have to listen to the women (and/or people who have periods) who are actually there and know what the current situation is like.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Photos: See No Kings protests around the country (June 14)

And: No Kings San Francisco (June 14)

Trump ‘doesn’t care about any of our founding fathers’ principles’: Mark Ruffalo joins NYC protests (June 15, 6-minute video) "Trump is trying to take our freedoms away, so we have to [be] re-reminded of what those freedoms actually are."

Photos: ‘No Kings’ Day Protests (June 14, via)

(Oh also, my husband- a Chinese guy- was really unimpressed with the military parade because it was very much amateur hour compared to China's. For what that's worth.)

2. ICE directed to pause immigration arrests at farms, hotels and restaurants, sources tell CBS News (June 14) What? I mean, this is good news if true (though obviously you can't really trust anything the MAGA government says), but like... it's like it *just occurred to him* that arresting farm workers might have an effect on other things~ surprised pikachu.

Oh wait, nevermind. No need to spend time reading that link, because: ICE walks back limits on raids targeting farms, restaurants and hotels (June 18)

3. An AIDS orphan, a pastor and his frantic search for the meds that keep her alive (June 13) "'We've been so close to truly having an AIDS-free generation of kids,' says Dr. Rachel Vreeman, chair of the Department of Global Health and Health Systems Design at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. 'And that is completely at risk right now.'"

4. ‘How many people were arrested?’ is a lousy way to cover protests (June 12, via) "Don’t focus solely on what the police say."

5. Press group sues L.A., alleging police abuse of reporters at ICE rallies (June 16) "An Australian television correspondent was shot by a law enforcement officer with a rubber bullet during a live shot as she stood to the side of protests in downtown Los Angeles. The officer taking aim could be seen in the background as it happened."

6. How to ACTUALLY Deal with Tear Gas (June 13) "Do not panic. Move out of the area as safely as you can, ideally to higher ground because tear “gas” is actually a particulate and will fall to the ground. Do not rub your face."

7. Trump admin continues its destructive path, but groups, judges keep pushing back (June 17) "That attitude kept moving right into Monday, when the American Bar Association sued the Trump administration over Trump’s attacks on law firms and the legal profession."

Related to that: ‘My duty is to call it out’: Judge accuses Trump administration of discrimination against minorities (June 16) "'I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,' said U.S. District Judge William Young, a Massachusetts-based jurist who took the bench in 1985."

And: After court rules against NIH, researchers wonder if their canceled grants will be restored (June 17)

8. NYC Comptroller Brad Lander arrested by federal agents at immigration court (June 17) "'I will be fine, but Edgardo is not going to be fine,' he said. 'And the rule of law is not fine and our constitutional democracy is not fine.'"

"The Case for Open Borders": Keeping only some people out

Photo from inside the library on the US-Canada border. Image source.

Here's another quote I want to share from "The Case for Open Borders". This is from pages 118-119:

Another popular defense of borders is that, as Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed, "We don't have a country without a border." Similarly, Obama White House advisor Cecilia Muñoz said that "[t]here are policy decisions to be made about who should be an immigrant, and that includes removing folks who don't qualify under the law. That's, I think, just the reality of being a nation."

But how does a closed border legitimize a country? The US border is wide open to goods, money, the well connected, and the wealthy-- so why is keeping poor people out important for maintaining a nation state? Though there are no formal financial requirements for Mexicans obtaining nonimmigrant visas to enter the United States, consular officers consider a person's finances and employment before issuing a visa, and poor people almost never get the pass.

In other words, the border is supposed to keep only some people out. Compare the triple fencing, watch towers, paramilitary Border Patrol, ground sensors, drones, and billions of dollars spent keeping people out of Southern California to the Derby Line in Vermont at the northern US border, where an opera house is literally divided down the middle between United States and Canada, where the international divide is marked by a strip of black on the floor of the town library's reading room. You aren't legally permitted to enter and remain in the United States from there, but unless you're looking down, your book-browsing could take you back and forth across an international divide without any notice.

I googled this Vermont library because it sounds cool, and it turns out that now the felon is closing access from the Canadian side, because I guess we can't have nice things.

Blogaround

Hey, all the links today are news. You may be thinking to yourself, "Does Perfect Number just go read NPR and then copy all the links to here?" Well, that's a big chunk of it, yes.

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Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Guns are the leading cause of death of kids and teens, and state laws matter (June 11)

2. Unanimous Supreme Court makes it easier to sue schools in disability cases (June 12) "'This is bigger than our family,' Aaron Tharpe, Ava's father, told NPR. Tharpe said the most important thing about the ruling is that it gives other families who don't have the resources he does, the tools to fight back."

3. EXCLUSIVE: American Security Contractor Unloads On US-Israeli ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (June 12, via) "We all got in a line and began pushing these people out. We’re telling crying women trying to pick up food for their families that they had to go. They were looking at this food on the ground that they desperately needed, and they couldn’t take it. It was absolutely horrific."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Where are the people the Trump administration has deported? (June 12) This is a good summary of a bunch of the cases we've been hearing about, though it certainly doesn't include everyone who has been deported.

2. Rep. McIver is indicted on federal charges related to tussle at immigration facility (June 11) "'The facts of this case will prove I was simply doing my job,' the representative said in a statement. She called the proceedings against her 'a brazen attempt at political intimidation.'"

3. Federal court orders resumption of legal services to separated families (June 11) "The ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government over “Zero Tolerance” in February of 2018, arguing that separating families was unnecessary under the law and that the policy deprived migrant families of their right to due process."

4. How a shoplifting arrest in upstate NY summoned ICE and separated a family (June 11) "The case is one of several recent incidents fueling an ongoing debate about immigration among lawmakers. Should New York become a sanctuary state, following some of its biggest cities in passing a law to limit all local cooperation with immigration agents? Or should local law enforcement be compelled to contact ICE every time they cross paths with an undocumented immigrant – even people suspected of the smallest of crimes?"

5. Senator Alex Padilla handcuffed and forcibly removed from Kristi Noem’s LA press conference (June 12) "'If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question, if this is how the DHS responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they’re doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers, throughout the LA community and throughout California and throughout the country,' Padilla, the son of immigrants from Mexico, told reporters. 'We will hold this administration accountable.'"

Also about LA: Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence (June 9) "All I've read about so far in L.A. is property damage by protestrs, while we've seen many kinds of violence and intimidation from the heavily armored and armed thugs serving the Trump Administration's war on immigrants."

6. Despite ongoing Taliban threats, the U.S. is ending some protections for Afghans (June 12) "The administration's claim that Afghan security and its economy have improved is widely disputed. The State Department strongly advises against travel to Afghanistan, 'due to civil unrest, crime, terrorism, risk of wrongful detention, kidnapping, and limited health facilities.'"

7. The GOP's massive bill would benefit the rich the most — while hitting the poor (June 12) 

8. ICE's novel strategy allows for more arrests from inside immigration courts (June 12) "Under the new approach, after their case is dismissed, immigrants are arrested again, at times before even leaving the building — as happened with Aliaksandr Bulaty. Then they're put in a process called expedited removal: a fast-track for deportation that does not guarantee the right to a day in court and comes with a five-year restriction on attempting to return to the U.S."

9. ‘Too Big a Risk’: Chinese Students Rethink the American Dream (June 13) "Lin, who was preparing to study law at the University of California, Berkeley, went straight to the U.S. visa site to try and book a visa appointment. For the next several hours, she cycled between browsers, devices, and VPN nodes, fighting her way through the overloaded visa portal. Each time she got close to booking an interview, the system crashed."

10. To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction (May 11) "Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life. Babies are born every day without their fathers – not because their fathers chose to leave, but because they are taken by war, by bombs, by prison cells and by the cold machinery of occupation. The grief your mother and I feel is but one drop in a sea of sorrow that Palestinian families have drowned in for generations." By Mahmoud Khalil.

When the Bible is Racist

Map of the nations in the middle east during bible times. Image source.

I recently read "Genesis for Normal People". I want to talk about what this book says about the curse of Ham.

What is the "curse of Ham," you ask? Well, you know the story of Noah's ark? Well, after Noah and his family survived the flood, after the water all receded and they were able to get out of the ark and start a new life, Noah got drunk and lay in his tent naked, and his son Ham saw him and went to tell his brothers about it. Kind of in a disrespectful, mocking way, I guess. (The other brothers, Shem and Japheth, got a sheet to cover Noah.) When Noah wakes up, he curses Ham's son Canaan- "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers." He says Canaan's descendants will be slaves to Shem's and Japheth's descendants.

That's the story of the "curse of Ham." Yeah it doesn't exactly make sense that Noah cursed Ham's son Canaan, when he was mad at Ham, but that's what the bible says.

Later in the bible, the land of Canaan is the "promised land" that God leads the Israelites into, and God commands them to kill all of the Canaanites and take their land.

Page 59 of "Genesis for Normal People" says:

The flood story is Israel's vehicle for talking about how their God is different from the gods of the other nations. It is also a vehicle for the later Israelite writer to explain why the hated Canaanites deserved everything they got, including being violently driven from their homeland so it could be given to the Israelites: they have been an accursed race since the beginning-- because Ham saw Noah's nakedness.

In other words, the book says that the story of the curse of Ham was invented for political reasons- the Canaanites were the Israelites' enemies, and so the Israelites told this story to justify the claim that the Canaanites are all bad and deserve to die. See, their ancestor Ham was weird/disrespectful/creepy that one time when he saw his father naked, and so Noah cursed Canaan, and yeah all the Canaanites are trouble.

This is racist.

Like, I hope this is obvious to everyone. You tell a story about how some group's ancestors were bad, and therefore the whole group is bad and deserves to be punished- that's racist. That's just what it is.

But hold that thought, because first I want to talk about how I viewed this story (and similar bible stories- there are many of them!) when I was evangelical and believed the bible was inerrant.

I wasn't really aware that the "logic" of stories like this was "Ham was bad, therefore all of Ham's descendants are bad and deserve to be driven from their homes and/or killed." Because, uh, that doesn't make sense. I had no idea that when we read this story, we're supposed to make a connection between the bad behavior of the ancestor and the bad behavior of the demographic group that came from that ancestor. I didn't think that way at all- that would be racist, obviously. Everyone is their own person and can make their own choices- you can't just say an entire ethnic group all has the same bad character traits. That doesn't make any sense at all.

Also, it doesn't really make sense to talk about "the descendants of Ham" as a separate thing from the descendants of Shem or Japheth. The bible says the only humans who survived the flood were Noah, Noah's wife, Shem, Ham, Japheth, and their three wives. You would have to have some incest going on after that. In the universe of this bible story, all of us are descendants of Shem and Ham and Japheth.

So these origin stories for the "bad" nations in the bible were kinda lost on me. Sure, I knew that the bible said their ancestor did this or that shady thing, but I didn't think that really had any bearing on what their descendants would be like. Sure, I knew that God said the Israelites should kill all the Canaanites- and I agreed with that because I was a good evangelical and I was required to agree with it- but that was because of the Canaanites' own bad behavior, and didn't have any connection to what Ham did.

But reading "Genesis for Normal People," I'm realizing how racist these bible stories were intended to be. "Genesis for Normal People" says we should read the bible with "ancient eyes"- don't bring in our modern ideas about how it's illogical to say that a group of people is bad because their ancestor was bad, or how racism is wrong, or how the flood was a genetic bottleneck. Just read it for what the writer was trying to say to the original audience. 

Importantly, this means we shouldn't expect the bible to be true, and we shouldn't expect the bible to teach us meaningful moral lessons. If we expect those things from the bible, then we read the story of the curse of Ham with the assumptions "this story couldn't possibly be saying all the Canaanites are bad because Ham did something shady- that makes no sense" and "the bible couldn't possibly be making a racist argument here." And so we miss what the biblical writer was actually saying.

How bad is it to miss what the biblical writer was saying about the curse of Ham?

Well. Unfortunately, the curse of Ham is a big thing in the history of anti-Black racism in the US. There's a fan theory that says Black people are the descendants of Ham- and so Black people are under the curse of Ham, and they're supposed to be slaves. Really. This is a real thing that white American Christians have preached.

I never heard about that, until I was in college and started attending a racially-diverse church, and I heard a sermon that said "no, the curse of Ham does NOT mean Black people are inferior" and I had such a hard time figuring out what the pastor was even talking about. Sure, I knew the bible story, but this bible story doesn't say anything about race or skin color or Africa or anything along those lines. I didn't know that in modern times, white people used this story to claim that Black people were inferior and cursed.

It's important for white American Christians to know this history, though. To know what our ancestors did, the way they used the bible as a justification to mistreat other people. I don't mean "our ancestors did something bad, so now we should be punished"- I just said I don't believe in that- but we need to learn from this. We need to learn from what they did, to make sure we are not doing the same things.

So I didn't believe that entire populations in the bible deserved to die because their ancestor did something bad- that would be racist, of course I didn't believe in that. Instead I believed that entire populations in the bible deserved to die because they were worshiping the wrong gods, or some other such sin.

Uh, that's also kinda racist.

Ah, see this is the problem. When we read the bible, believing that it is our authority that teaches us morality- then we are unable to see the racism it promotes, even when it's right there staring us in the face. We aren't able to see that and call it out and say "hey, let's NOT treat people like this." And then we end up at the same place- the belief that sometimes an entire ethnic group deserves to die- but it doesn't register as racism because we just got there from following what the bible says, and of course the bible wouldn't be racist. Right?

Yes, we need to call it out. This story, about the curse of Ham, was written to justify Israel's hatred and violence toward the Canaanites. The message the reader is supposed to get is "the Canaanites are bad, just like their ancestor Ham was bad." Let's recognize this as racism, and say "This is wrong." The writer of the bible was wrong. And we need to learn from that, so we don't do the same thing.

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Posts about "Genesis for Normal People":

"Genesis for Normal People": Separating "what the writer meant" from "what is true" and "what it means for us"
God Made the Firmament
When the Bible is Racist
To what extent do I care what the biblical writers meant?
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain

Related:

For the Sunday School Kids Who Never Heard About "the Curse of Ham" Or "Black Simon" 

The Bible Lied About Lot's Daughters 

This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now

The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus