On just giving people money

Cow and calf. Image source.

Here's a good post from Ozy Brennan: The joys of cash benchmarking. It's about comparing the results from a charity program (for example, giving cows to poor people) to the results for a different charity program which used the same amount of money, but just directly gave the money to the recipients, rather than giving them a specific thing or service. Ozy says that the majority of the time, cash outperforms other charity programs, when you measure the effects on people's health, economic situation, etc, and therefore our default stance should be to just give people cash, unless we have a good reason to think that some other approach will outperform cash.

The default thing to do with your altruistic dollars should be:

1. Find the poorest person you can.

2. Give them some money.

If you do anything with your altruistic dollars other than find the poorest person you can and give them money, you should have an explanation for why this is better than finding the poorest person you can and giving them money.

The post says that there definitely *are* charity programs that outperform cash- for example, preventative health care, like vaccines and anti-malarial mosquito nets. It's often the case that people don't take initiative and choose to spend their money on preventative health care (I think when you're extremely poor, you never have enough money for everything, and there will always be some other expense that feels more urgent than preventative health care), *but* if you do that math, it is better and more cost-effective to spend money on preventative health care rather than taking your chances on getting sick.

So because this is a known weakness of human psychology, charities can help by specifically providing preventative health care, and this can be more effective than giving cash. So yes, some charities do outperform cash- but most do not, and Ozy argues that in general you should just give cash unless you have a good reason to think a particular program will outperform cash.

And yes, there are charities that straight-up give cash to people living in extreme poverty, like GiveDirectly.

So, while I was reading this post, I felt like... Intuitively, I think it can sometimes be good to spend money on a specific *thing* instead of just transferring cash directly to the recipients, even if statistically that is "less effective." But maybe I'm wrong about that? So I want to think through it, and write this post about it.

Ozy is coming from an effective altruist perspective, and the whole idea behind effective altruism is that we should give money to charity in a way that maximizes the amount of good that results from it, as measured in lives saved and improvements to people's health and quality of life. But I think, for people who aren't effective altruists, there's sort of a different motive when donating to charity: You have an idea in your head for how you want the world to be, and you give money to a charity that is working to move things in that direction.

So, for example, the charity that gives people cows. Imagine a poor person, living in extreme poverty in the developing world. Now imagine that they are given a cow, and they then have the benefits of getting milk from it, or killing it and selling the meat. That world seems to be a better world than the world where they don't have a cow- and guess what, *you* can make it happen! You can change the "this specific poor person does not have a cow" world into the "this specific poor person has a cow" world.

Whereas the "giving people money" story looks more like, imagine a poor person, struggling to have enough money to meet their basic needs for food, shelter, and health care. Okay, now give them a few hundred dollars. Well, that's great, that will help them a lot with whatever their current needs are- but they're still living in extreme poverty. It doesn't really change the situation. This is a much more boring story than the "give them a cow" story.

(I notice that on GiveDirectly's website, they have a bunch of examples of how the recipients used the money to start a business that totally turned their life around. This is because donors want to imagine that the world where people receive this money is a world that looks different- in obvious ways, which feel good to the donors- from the world where they don't. But realistically, I don't think most of the recipients are using it for something that makes for a good story. I think they're using it for things they really need.)

But if you think about it for a second, you'll realize that it's more helpful for someone to receive money equivalent to the price of a cow, rather than receiving a cow. If the recipient believes a cow would benefit them, they can go buy one- so, this is the same result as if they were just given a cow. And if they feel like something else would help them more, then they can use the money for something else. So, they have more options than just getting a cow- so this is better. (And maybe you've had the experience where you are having financial problems, because of something boring like rent or medical debt- and then someone gives you a juice machine as a birthday gift, and you're like, well, that's nice, but I would have preferred to just have the money.)

Anyway, in the cow example, I do agree that in general you shouldn't donate to charity programs to "give someone a cow", and should donate to something else instead. As a donor, you imagine that hypothetical world where some poor person receives a cow, and how that's better than the current existing world- but I think there is such a huge difference between our lives and the lives of people living in extreme poverty, and therefore, whatever we're imagining about the lives of people in extreme poverty, it's probably wrong. So, not really a good idea to make decisions based on that. Give it to the recipients as money, because they actually know their own situation.

(However, for a donor who is either going to donate to the "give someone a cow" charity or not donate at all, "give someone a cow" is the better option! There are plenty of people who donate in that way, so, it does make sense that such a charity exists.)

I think it's often true that when people donate their money, they aren't trying to help the recipients as effectively as possible, but they're trying to address a specific problem. For example, if you give money to an organization that helps victims of domestic violence. This is not because you want to help these victims *in general* but you want to help them with problems that were caused by the domestic violence. Right? Maybe I shouldn't speak for everyone, but when *I* donate money, it's not because "I want to make people's lives better overall" but more like "I want to counter the effects that this specific problem has had on people's lives." (Or, "I want to prevent this problem from happening.") Effective altruists would strongly disagree with this- the entire point of effective altruism is that we should do whatever gives the most benefit (when you measure lives saved, health, quality of life, etc), and we should *not* focus on a specific problem. So the top charities recommended by effective altruists are charities that fight malaria, because the way the math worked out, those ones save the most lives per dollar. Not because there's any particular reason that we should care about malaria more than other problems. 

But I'm not an effective altruist; I see specific problems in the world and I want to do something about them, because I have feelings about them, rather than doing something about other problems that I don't have feelings about.

So, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I do feel that "I want to help people with some specific problem that emotionally resonates with me" is okay. It doesn't have to be about "I want to help in whatever way does the most good."

But also, sometimes this leads to weird results. For example, suppose you have a family member who has some specific disease, call it Disease A. And so you want to help people who have Disease A. You donate to an organization (let's call them Charity B) that pays the hospital bills for their treatment.

But then, another charity comes along, Charity C. And Charity C says, yes it's great that Charity B is paying for people's medical treatment, but in practical terms this often is not good enough- the medical treatment is still inaccessible because there are very few hospitals which can provide the treatment, so most patients have to pay a lot of money to travel, in order to get the free treatment that Charity B is paying for- and many patients can't afford the travel costs, so they can't get treatment at all. But, good news, Charity C has been set up specifically to pay for people's travel costs, hotel, lost wages, etc, all that overhead that is necessary in order for them to even come and get the treatment.

And so, since you care about people who are affected by Disease A, you decide you also need to donate to Charity C. You hadn't realized that many of these patients couldn't access the benefits of Charity B, but of course you want them to be able to. So, you reason, yes we need Charity C.

And then another charity comes along, Charity D. And they say, there's another disease, Disease E, whose symptoms are pretty much the same as Disease A, but it doesn't get any media coverage. So, this is really unlucky for people who have Disease E, because they are pretty much having all the same problems as people with Disease A, but they're not eligible for any of the support from Charity B or Charity C. A new charity has been started, Charity D, to help people with Disease E.

And so you donate to Charity D too- because your original motive for donating is that you knew someone who had Disease A, and so you care about people who have Disease A- but in your opinion, Disease A is pretty much the same thing as Disease E. If your relative had had Disease E rather than Disease A, well, it would have been the same thing, from your perspective.

So there are always going to be cases along the lines of "I'm donating money to help people with some certain problem. Oh, but, turns out, there's another problem which is pretty much the same as that problem, but which doesn't fall under the technical definition that the charity is using to choose its recipients." 

Wouldn't it be easier to skip all this and just find the poorest person and give them cash? 

There's sort of a mismatch... the donor has this idea in their head about what the problem is and how to help with it, and the charity has a program that is doing concrete things related to that problem- but the practical implementation of it probably looks very different from whatever fantasy the donor is imagining.

Anyway, I just wanted to write down my thoughts on this, because when reading Ozy's post I had this feeling like it *can* be a good thing to donate to a charity that does a specific thing, rather than giving cash and letting the recipients choose what to do with it- even if it's not like one of Ozy's examples where data shows it's "more effective." Maybe as a donor, you don't want the recipients to just choose whatever they feel is most useful, but you want to help them with a specific problem. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's definitely something we should be aware of and think about. How to balance what you want, as a donor, with what the recipients feel is most useful. (Effective altruism says we shouldn't balance this at all, but only do what the data has shown to be most effective in improving people's lives.) 

Also, if we're talking about helping people in extreme poverty in developing countries, most of their problems do stem from the fact that they don't have enough money, so I agree that it's better to give them money rather than giving them something that feels "fun" to the donor, like a cow. There's not going to be some cool clever trick that totally changes their lives- the problem is poverty, the problem is money. The problem is not that it just never occurred to them that there are benefits to owning a cow.

But if you want to help people in the US, or other developed countries, who are having a problem that you relate to and you feel is important (note that effective altruists don't do this at all- they give their money to developing countries because a dollar goes much farther for recipients in extreme poverty), then I think there is more room for the donor's own feelings and opinions on how they *want* the problem to be solved. What kind of world they want to work towards, rather than just what's going to be most immediately useful to the recipients.

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Also, if you want to just give people cash, you can donate to GiveDirectly

Related

"Portfolios of the Poor" (book review)

My Weird Hangups About Charity

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Pagoda Puzzle: What Can Save China’s Oldest Wooden Tower? (April 21) "First, the pagoda’s unique structure and scale make the risk of disassembling and replacing original components extremely high. It is a spatial high-rise framework, not a conventional single-beam structure. It would be extremely difficult to reset tens of thousands of rotted, cracked, and deformed components, restore the structural logic of the hidden layers, and avoid secondary damage during disassembly and reassembly."

2. Falling Leaves and Failing Arguments: Why Autumn Adaptation Doesn’t Prove Irreducible Complexity (April 21) "This is the kind of question that sounds simple but turns out to be remarkably difficult for young-earth creationists to answer consistently. Either the pre-Fall world had deadly winters and needed deciduous trees, or it didn’t and the whole system was purposeless until after the Fall."

3. Gene therapy for a rare type of deafness shows lasting results (April 22) "The results indicate that this could be a one-and-done treatment that lasts a lifetime, profoundly transforming patients' lives, Chen says."

4. Journal Club: Sexual pain in Christian Women (April 22) "In the lit review, the paper says that sexual pain may affect up to 46% of women, and that 6.2% of White Christian women report lifetime sexual pain with obstructed penetration."

5. Penn & Teller & the Supreme Court & BS (April 23) "Despite the fact that he had an alibi and bore no resemblance to the witness’s sketch, the police were sure Flores was the second man and they arrested him. So they brought Barganier back in and an officer “hypnotized” her in order to improve her recollection, telling her that hypnosis allows her to tap into the “tape recorder” in her brain."

6. The Onion has agreed to a new deal to take over Infowars (April 20) "Families of those killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who sued Jones for defamation, want the sale to happen. They're still waiting to collect on the nearly $1.3 billion judgment they won against Jones for spreading lies that they faked the deaths of their children to boost support for gun control. That prompted Jones' followers to harass and threaten the families for years."

7. We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI (March 6, via) "A student praised for years for being an exceptional writer now feels like a cheater because she had to learn how AI detection works in order to protect herself from being falsely accused. The surveillance apparatus has turned writing talent into a liability."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. The tariff refund process has begun for businesses. What about customers? (April 22) "That's because a product, like a TV, often has parts from multiple countries, and each was hit with different tariff rates. Those rates changed over time by presidential decree, which makes calculating a customer's actual cost even more difficult. Plus, the retailer likely absorbed some of that tariff expense. The tariff burden was also shared up and down the supply chain, between vendors, distributors and finally customers."

2. More immigrants are being held in detention for over a year. NPR followed one family's ordeal. (April 22) "This isn't legal. According to a decades-old federal settlement, children can't be detained for more than 20 days. But data from the non-profit newsroom The Marshall Project shows, since the start of Trump's second term, more than 1,600 children have been detained for longer than that."

And update on that: Alleged Colorado attacker's family released after nearly a year in detention (April 27) "Back home in Colorado on Saturday, two days after their release, El Gamal and her children reported to an ICE office for a required check-in. There, ICE detained them again, told them they were being deported to Egypt, and rushed them onto a plane, their lawyers said."

3. They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things (April 22) "They were taught 2 Timothy 3:16 as a promise and a contract. They were told what they could and should expect to gain from reading every word of every scripture and they were told what others would expect them to gain from it, and so what they learn — not just from this single passage, but from the entire experience of cover-to-cover reading — is to cultivate those expectations while ignoring the often-boring or confusing or unexpected aspects of the actual text itself."

This! This is exactly what it's like, being evangelical and really taking seriously the "read the entire bible" task that evangelicals are always saying we should do. You have an idea of what the bible is, and what the experience of reading it is supposed to be, and then when the actual bible itself doesn't match those expectations at all, you learn to subconsciously ignore what the actual bible is saying.

Also from the Slacktivist: Text and contexts: More Bible in the news (April 23) "That gets very antisemitic and very blasphemous very quickly, and it’s particularly dumb and dim as a reading of this passage, which involves God making a promise. See, the whole basis of supercessionism is that God’s promises are not worth diddly squat and can be revoked at any time because God is a capricious liar."

4. A chaotic White House Correspondents' Dinner, as told by NPR reporters in the room (April 26) "Just minutes into the dinner, guests heard muffled popping sounds as a gunman attempted to charge past a security checkpoint."

5. Justice Department makes it easier to deport those with DACA status (April 25) "DACA, created in 2012 to protect children who arrived in the country illegally prior to 2007 from deportation, now covers around half a million people. Starting last year, DHS officials began urging DACA recipients to self- deport, arguing that the program itself does not equate to automatically providing legal status."

The Kingdom of Children: Theology and Play

A set of toys that teaches kids about the parable of the sower. Image source.

I've been reading "The Kingdom of Children" by R. L. Stollar. In this post I want to talk about the way the book portrays it as a good thing for children to develop their own theology.

I want to know, *why* is it a good thing for children to develop their own theology? Like, my *feeling* when I read this is that I agree it's a good thing, but I want to think through the reasons why. If they're making up their own beliefs about God, aren't most of those beliefs going to be wrong? As an ex-evangelical I can tell you that evangelicals would be very concerned about the idea of children coming up with their own beliefs about God- no, we need to teach them the *correct* beliefs! It's very important! If people don't believe the correct things about God, they will go to hell! They will sin- and every sin hurts God infinitely, this isn't something you can just play around with like it doesn't matter. And if people have incorrect beliefs about God in some areas, even if it's just some minor little error that doesn't seem significant, WELL IT IS- those will lead to even worse incorrect beliefs about God, and worse sins. We have to make sure everyone believes all the correct things!

Yes, it's a very big deal in evangelicalism, that people have to believe the "correct" beliefs, and it would be terrible to just let everyone develop their own theology from their own thoughts and experiences. By contrast, liberation theology is based on the idea that people should make their own theology. It seems like a very key foundational aspect of liberation theology, a point where liberation theology is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from what I was taught in evangelicalism. I feel like, I agree with it, but I still want an explanation, because coming from an evangelical background, it's not obvious why it would be a good thing to let people figure out their own religious beliefs.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Make It Myself (April 15) From xkcd.

2. Why cheap waste management is key to stopping plastic pollution (March 16, via) "In many low- and middle-income countries, people find themselves in a very different situation: less than half of solid household waste is collected. People often have little choice but to burn or dump it. But even the waste that is collected is often left in open dumps, where it’s at risk of leaking into the environment."

3. He won a major school prayer case. It took years to get a proper obituary. (April 16) "Despite all the backlash and threats his family received, Jaffree told an audience at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s convention in 1985 that he would do it all over again because he was 'absolutely committed to the idea of separation of church and state. There’s no question that my religious view is a minority, and unless people like me are willing to challenge these cases, then we don’t have a chance.'"

4. Trolleyology bad (April 20) "Do we believe this stipulation? To state the obvious, it’s ludicrous."

5. Here's some good news: Despite Apocalyptic Warnings, California Fast Food Wage Hike Didn’t Kill Jobs (April 9, via) 

6. Chinese humanoid robot beats world record for fastest human half-marathon | ABC NEWS (April 20) This is really cool, and also you have to watch the video of the robot running- it looks very funny.

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Democrats file articles of impeachment against Hegseth for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ (April 15) He absolutely should be impeached. This particular attempt isn't going to get anywhere, because the Republican Congress members have all sold their souls, but it's good that Democrats are at least trying.

2. Businesses race to apply for tariff refunds (April 20) "In fact, many retailers find themselves in a similar quandary because tariff refunds will go to whoever paid the actual customs bill. It's unclear how, or if, the refunds might trickle down to store owners who paid tariff surcharges to their suppliers."

3. Logjam of U.S. immigration applications puts millions at greater risk of deportation (April 17) "The 11.6 million pending applications in the "backlog" include forms to become a citizen, acquire a green card, work or seek asylum. There are also 247,974 applications in what USCIS calls the "frontlog," which is tracked separately. Those are applications, likely sent by mail, that have been submitted but that the agency has not physically opened and assigned a category."

These are people who are following the rules, jumping through all the bureaucratic hoops, and the government is making it harder for them. I know a lot of average Americans say the problem is just *illegal* immigration, and want a system that works for people who are doing it the *legal* way- but the MAGAs in the government *never* wanted that.

4. Epstein survivors have mixed feelings on Melania Trump's call for hearing in Congress (April 10) "'You want to retraumatize us and ask us to go in front of Congress and tell them our story, which we have told some of them already,' Lacerda said. 'And then do absolutely nothing.'"

5. ICE deported 174 Daca recipients through most of last year, agency head says in letter (April 18, via) 

6. The white evangelical Bible in the news (April 16) "And so it was darkly hilarious to watch white American evangelical leaders rushed to Twitter and in front of the cameras to proudly reveal that they cannot recognize the Bible when someone quotes it back to them." This whole entire post is spot-on.

7. Montana Supreme Court Rules Its Constitution Entirely Protects Trans Citizens In Landmark Ruling (April 17) "Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Federal Judge Vacates Kennedy Declaration, Permanently Blocks Trump's Trans Youth Care Hospital Threats (April 21) "On the government’s core argument—that the Kennedy Declaration was merely Kennedy’s personal, non-binding opinion—the judge was withering: 'Defendants’ jurisdictional arguments are based on the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care. This Court is not persuaded by Defendants’ attempts to gaslight it into believing that the Kennedy Declaration does anything other than what it says.'"

Faith, Fruit, and "Do you actually believe your religion?"

Fruit tree. Image source.

In my post The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology, I had a little parenthetical aside that said:

And, to clarify, I'm not saying being religious is better than being non-religious. There's a wide range of different ways that people map their religious beliefs [or lack thereof] onto questions of morality/purpose/how we should live our lives, and I would not say that religious people's mappings are better than non-religious people's.

In other words, we should look at the way that a religious [or atheistic] belief affects people's views on "morality/purpose/how we should live our lives", and that's how we say if the belief is good or bad. We have some sort of "common sense" feel for what good morality is, and that is the yardstick we use to measure and judge religious beliefs.

Here's the thing, though: Yes, that's how I see it now. But when I was evangelical, I would have disagreed with this. I would have said, we can't judge our religious beliefs based on the effects we observe in the real world; the whole point of religion is that we're claiming there is something bigger than the physical world. In view of this bigger spiritual "reality", our behaviors and morality are good and right, though they might appear to be harmful and wrong if you're only looking at the physical world we can see. And if you judge the religious beliefs only by their observable effects in the physical world, you're already assuming an atheistic worldview, where none of the religion's claims are true.

One could argue, if progressive Christians want to live according to the reality of the physical world, and never do anything that seems like a bad idea (but is actually a good idea if the religion's claims about the spiritual world are true), why not just go all the way and be atheists? If you never side with your religion, when assessing a concrete truth claim that people outside your religion would disagree with, which has practical effects on the choices you make in the real world, do you even believe your religion?

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How a Buddha Got Its Sight Back (April 13) "The small circular cavities visible on their faces once held inlaid ceramic or glass pupils. These were fixed in place using a technique known as qianmu, in which the eyes were inserted into carved sockets. Over the centuries, as Yungang’s soft sandstone yielded to wind and rain, and later to war and theft, these fragile elements loosened, slipped free, and vanished."

2. Countdown Standard (April 13) From xkcd.

3. ‘Everything is gone’: Israel destroys entire villages in Lebanon (April 12, via) "The tactic of mass destruction of homes in Gaza, where Israel has been accused of committing genocide, was described as domicide by academics, a strategy that is used to systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable."

4. “They Hopped” — Ken Ham’s Answer to Kangaroo Ark Migration Based on False Information (April 11) "The only placental mammals that appear to have reached Australia before human arrival are rats. And rats, as anyone who has studied dispersal biology knows, are perhaps the single most capable overwater dispersers among all mammals. The fact that only rats made it is actually powerful evidence for how difficult the crossing was, not evidence that a land bridge made it easy." (Similar to the video I wrote about here: Kangaroos and Creationist Fan Theories.)

5. 【可一儿歌】050 小燕子丨KeYi Children's Song丨【三淼儿童官方频道】 For those of you who are interested in what kind of Chinese songs my toddler is listening to.

6. Newcomb’s Paradox occurs in real life (April 17) "I’ve never heard anyone say, 'I’m a one-boxer if the second box contains $1M, but a two-boxer if the second box contains $1,001.'"

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ‘One of the good ones’ obscures a dangerous lie (April 9) "So this man who had fled a country where he had been beaten and imprisoned by military police for no reason encountered America’s militarized police who beat and imprisoned him for no reason."

2. And this take from the Onion (parody site, not actually true): Melania Trump Slams Baseless Reports Linking Her To Wrong Wealthy Pedophile (April 10, via) 

3. The American Gulag (April 6, via) "Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons put it last year, 'like Amazon Prime for human beings.'"

4. Trump's 'Praise Be to Allah' Easter Taunt Should Be Immediately Recognizable to U.S. Christians (April 7, via) "When the Roman state executed Jesus, according to John 19:19, it placed above his head a sign that read Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."

5. Conversion therapy is soul-crushing — and it doesn't work (April 2, via) "I know this because I lived it for eight years. The guidance I was given ranged from the practical — “Don’t watch gay porn” — to the outlandish — “By developing platonic relationships with other men, my sexual desires for them would disappear.” But what it truly does is try to disintegrate a person’s body, mind and spirit."

6. Hegseth leads Pentagon prayer service with faux Bible verse made famous by ‘Pulp Fiction’ (April 16)

7. ICE detains 86-year-old in US to marry long-lost love, family says (April 15)

Update on that: 85-year-old French widow detained by ICE returns to France (April 17)

8. Amid quarrel with pope, Trump strips Miami charity of funding to house migrant kids (April 15) "'It’s incredibly psychologically harmful to be moved,' sometimes as stressful as serious illness or a death in the family, Latham said. 'For little kids, moving repeatedly creates bonding issues and destroys the sense of both self and community. They don’t know who they are and where they will be' from day to day."

9. Minnesota has charged an ICE officer with assault for alleged actions during immigration surge (April 16) "One victim told state law enforcement the encounter led them to believe there was a "crazy person driving down the road aiming guns at people," the complaint says."

10. She Helped the Authorities Deport Her Abuser. Then They Deported Her Back to Him. (April 6) "Carmen’s lawsuit, ICWC v. Noem, accuses the Trump administration of ignoring deferred action status and removing survivors from the country anyway; the administration is also deporting people like Carmen who don’t yet have the status but may be eligible once USCIS reviews her application. The case was filed against ICE and USCIS and seeks to represent a wide class of survivors who applied for U visas, T visas, and other protections under the Violence Against Women Act."

Really rich that these MAGAs are claiming they're "protecting women" by being mean to trans people. Here's something that would actually protect women: Don't deport immigrants who are survivors of domestic abuse.

Do Straight Men Exist?

Image text: "Are the straights okay?" Image source.

[content note: it's about how childbirth is gross. also NSFW because I used the word "vagina" a lot]

Here in China, some women don't want their husbands to be there with them in the delivery room while giving birth, and some hospitals don't allow men to be there, because of this reason: What if the man sees how gross it is, when all manner of disgusting things are coming out of his partner's vagina (amniotic fluid, blood, a slimy baby), and then he is no longer sexually attracted to her, and never wants to have sex with her again? Wouldn't that just be terrible???

Who knows if this has ever actually happened, but it is definitely a concern I've heard from women in China.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Overton (April 8) From xkcd.

2. 'We are bonded forever': Artemis II astronauts speak about completing their historic moon mission (April 12) This is so cool!

3. National puppetry group faces backlash for platforming anti-LGBTQ Christian puppetry group (April 10) So, there's apparently a Christian puppet group, which requires its members to sign a statement saying marriage is "a man and a woman" and being trans isn't a real thing. I feel like... this kind of thing is extremely normal for conservative Christian organizations- requiring employees to agree to some kind of "statement of faith" which includes anti-LGBTQ beliefs. (Or at least it was normal 10 years ago and then I stopped paying attention?)

For me it's a dealbreaker because I'm queer. And I think it's a good thing that there was backlash against this. But also, this is really normal within that conservative Christian subculture, and groups that have these anti-LGBTQ "statements of faith" do have good people in them, doing good things. The anti-queer beliefs are just background noise, something you're required to believe if you're in that space, but not the front-and-center message the group is promoting. But still, it's not okay that they are discriminating in this way.

Anyway, glad Hemant Mehta's post is getting the word out that these nice-sounding Christian groups often explicitly bar queer people from working for them.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Birthright Citizenship: Supreme Court Could Create an Exploitable Noncitizen Class (March 30) "Trump’s bid to strip birthright citizenship from millions is a moral, administrative, and legal catastrophe that the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted to prevent. That’s why he’s pursuing it."

2. The ‘pedagogy of moral accommodation’ (April 7) "Belief in eternal hell deforms the moral imagination. It trains Christians to call evil good. It instructs them to bless what, under any other description, they would condemn as cruelty."

This is so spot-on, and it applies to a lot of things in evangelical Christian ideology. So many apologetics answers for why some horrific thing (genocide commanded by God in the bible, sending the majority of humans to suffer in hell forever, oppression of women and queer people, etc) is actually good, and how dare you question that.

3. Donald Trump Impeachment Backed by Most Americans: Poll (April 8) and Iran ceasefire fails to quash Dem calls for Trump's removal (April 7) via

4. Did Donald Trump threaten the Pope? Here is what we know (April 10) Fascinating how the pope's bland statements about how peace is good and war is bad, which is something popes say all the time, are being viewed as an extremely political statement against that felon.

Trump posts image of himself as Jesus after attacking Pope Leo (April 13) What on earth. That felon is really posting AI images of himself as Jesus.

5. Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán is ejected after 16 years in a European electoral earthquake (April 13, via) "It was a stunning blow for Orbán — a close ally of both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin — who quickly conceded defeat after what he called a ″painful″ election result."

6. Judge dismisses Trump's $10B lawsuit over the Wall Street Journal's Epstein reporting (April 13) "Trump filed the lawsuit in July, following up on a promise to sue the paper almost immediately after it put a new spotlight on his well-documented relationship with Epstein by publishing an article that described a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper said bore Trump's signature and was included in a 2003 album compiled for Epstein's 50th birthday."

7. 2025 was one of most volatile years ever for U.S. naturalizations (April 13) "'What we see this administration doing is targeting even people who have followed all the rules. The administration is changing the rules on those folks,' said O'Herron, of the Brennan Center for Justice. 'That unpredictability creates a real sense of fear.'"

8. There's growing disquiet in the military. The Iran war made it worse (April 10) "'We've had a lot of calls from people who don't identify as nonviolent or pacifists,' says Woolford. 'They identify as everyday service members who are willing to defend the country but feel very unsettled and suspicious about the ways the military is being used now.'"

Excluding People In Case God Wants Us To

At the moment of Jesus' death, "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom." (Matthew 27:51) Image source. 

In some churches, women aren't allowed to volunteer as ushers, or to serve communion, or to read Scripture to the congregation. Because, the bible says women should not speak in church, and a woman must not have authority over a man.

There are also churches that believe men and women are fully equal, and women can have all the same leadership positions that men can. They interpret those bible verses as only applicable to the first-century churches they were written to, and not absolute rules for all time.

Suppose you don't know which side of this debate to believe. It certainly seems sexist and wrong to put restrictions on women, but at the same time, it's right there in the bible, so maybe God really does want us to do it?

Maybe it would be wise to err on the side of caution, and not allow women to do things. It's difficult- it's difficult to obey God in this way- everyone will call you a sexist, and also if you exclude all the women volunteers, maybe you don't even have enough men volunteers to run your church service. One could argue that obedience to God is in fact supposed to be difficult like this. It's so hard, it's a sacrifice, look how we are sacrificing so much for God. Much more righteous than taking the easy way out and just letting women have all the same roles that men can have, right?

The problem with this framework is, it has God above us, and we are down here trying to please him, trying to follow the rules correctly, for him. God has high standards, and we have to work really hard, exclude people just in case God wants them excluded, the narrower the better, no sacrifice is too great if we are doing it for God.

But God is not up there, waiting for us to present our carefully-screened representatives to perform worship in our best attempt to follow Their rules. God is here. God is in us. All humans bear the image of God. If your church excludes women from volunteer/leadership roles, you are excluding God.

If you restrict women, you're not "erring on the side of caution." You're cutting off part of the body of Christ. You're cutting off God.

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Gay Christians face a similar debate. The traditional interpretation of the bible says only hetero relationships are allowed, and sex is only for one-man-one-woman marriage. On the other side, you have gay Christians making the argument that those bible verses were written for the people in the ancient Near East, and they don't apply to us now.

But if you're not sure who to believe, what do you do? Maybe don't ever date a same-sex partner, just in case it's a sin. Maybe a church should not do same-sex weddings, or have queer people in leadership. High standards, for God.

But again, you're cutting off God. God is in queer people, queer joy, the way that we thrive when we're able to accept ourselves for who we are. Don't ask people to repress themselves for God- you're repressing God. All the diversity and beauty of the image of God, living in so many different people with so many different experiences and perspectives, and we're trying to cut it down, fit it in a box, make it fit the straight and narrow "rules."

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Another example is that time in college that we brought a friend to church, and he said he was a Christian, but we "knew" he wasn't a "real" Christian. I wrote about this in my post The Worst Bible Story:

On another occasion, a friend of mine, let’s call him Hector, brought another friend, let’s call him Carl, to church. Carl claimed to be a Christian, but he hadn’t been attending church or anything, and Hector and I knew that he didn’t have a real “relationship with God”, you know, because evangelical Christians are all about judging who is and who isn’t a “real Christian.”

So Carl came to church. And that week, we had communion, and Hector stopped him and explained, you know, honestly, you’re not a real Christian, so you shouldn’t take communion. And Carl was really hurt by it (can you imagine), but I admired Hector for taking a stand like that. Defending the wafers and grape juice from those who don’t have the “correct” view on Jesus.

I would never have done what Hector did, because I was not confident enough in my understanding of 1 Corinthians 11 and I had never seen anyone stopped from taking communion before. ...

I would never have done that, but I really admired Hector for the way he stepped out in faith and took a stand for God, even though other people didn't accept it.

Excluding Christians from communion because we think they're not "really" Christians. Because we believed God was above us, judging whether we stayed in the lines or not, and God was offended by anyone who came forward and ate a little wafer but didn't meet the standards of how to believe in Jesus the "correct" way.

We thought that if someone felt hurt by being blocked from taking communion, well, that was a small price to pay to keep up the highest standards of respect for God. Making sure that only people who were definitely the right kind of Christian were allowed to participate.

We were actually excluding God.

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Matthew 1 contains [one version of] Jesus' genealogy. It traces his ancestry from father to son, through Abraham, down through David and the kings of ancient Judah, down to Joseph, the husband of Mary. I've often heard Christians point out how interesting it is that this genealogy mentions some women. I mean, it's a typical patriarchal genealogy in that it's all about "so-and-so was the father of so-and-so," but at a few points in the list of fathers and sons, it also mentions who someone's mother was.

Specifically, the women included in the Matthew 1 genealogy are: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.

Tamar, whose first husband Er was wicked, so the Lord put him to death. Then she was required to marry his brother, Onan, who was also wicked and the Lord put him to death. Then she was supposed to marry the remaining brother, but her father-in-law Judah didn't let her, so she disguised herself as a prostitute to get Judah to have sex with her, and she became pregnant that way. 

Rahab, a prostitute and foreigner, a resident of Jericho, whose city was attacked and the people killed by Joshua and his army.

Ruth, a widow and foreigner from Moab, which was one of Israel's enemies.

Bathsheba, who was raped by King David. She became pregnant, so David murdered her husband Uriah, and married her.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was a virgin but probably had people judging her for being unmarried and pregnant.

This is not exactly the dream team that you would assemble if you wanted good, respectable, uncomplicated role models. So why did Matthew go out of his way to point out that these women were part of Jesus' family line? 

One way I've heard this explained is, this is great because it shows that even if we're not perfect, we can still be part of God's work. God can still use us to do amazing things, despite our flaws.

I want to spin it a little bit differently, though: God lives in the women that society rejects. The widows, the immigrants, the sex workers, the women in bad marriages, the rape victims. To exclude them, to say Jesus needs a perfect pure genealogy... you're excluding God.

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Christian missionaries go to different parts of the world, encounter diverse and interesting cultures, where God is already there and alive, and tell the people to stop doing all that and follow the missionaries' religion instead.

God was already there, before any Christians came. The people have the image of God, and they have their own culture and religion, which is important and meaningful to them. The missionaries tell them to cut it off, to repress it, that it's *bad* because it's worshipping the wrong gods- you're cutting off God.

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Deuteronomy 23:1 says, "No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord."

Hundreds of years later, an Ethiopian eunuch met Philip, one of the early Christians. Philip told him about Jesus, and he believed, and said, "Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" Is this legit? Can he be baptized? Can he be welcomed and included?

Philip didn't think it was an issue at all. Philip baptized him.

Throughout the bible, there are some passages about excluding people who have some kind of imperfection and therefore don't meet the standards and can't enter God's presence. And then there are other passages about God's radical inclusiveness, about marginalized people who were accepted and approved of by God. Slaves, people from the wrong nations, people from the wrong religions. 

I don't think this is a simple Old Testament/ New Testament split- it's common for Christians to claim that the Old Testament was about rules and the New Testament is about God's love- but the verse that says women can't speak in church is from the New Testament. And the Old Testament has stories about welcoming immigrants, which stand in contrast to its laws about killing everyone in every city you conquer. 

The bible has all of these threads running through it; we use our own beliefs about the nature of God to decide which bible passages to emphasize and which to disagree with.

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1 Corinthians 12 says that we are the body of Christ.

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

This passage is about diversity. About how we need diversity, or else we are actually excluding parts of Christ.

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The Christians who want to exclude people... well, God is in them too. We can't cut them off either. 

In practice, that means thinking about how to get people who disagree to coexist in a church. You can't just say we all accept each other even if we disagree, because these issues are about one group's basic rights on one side, vs another group's bigoted opinions on the other side. 

So you need to make sure you set up a system where people who want to exclude and restrict others are not given the power to do that. And okay that sounds complicated- but really, you have to do that anyway. All the groups of people I've mentioned in this post, as examples of people who bear the image of God and shouldn't be excluded- well, they are all imperfect people who have conflicts sometimes. We all are.

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Is God above us, waiting to see if we are good enough to meet Their standards, requiring us to restrict and ban people who aren't good enough to participate in worshipping Them? More restrictions, higher standards, the eye saying to the hand, "I don't need you."

No, God is with us, in us, and when we exclude people, we are excluding God.

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Related:

What kind of God will judge how we treat immigrants?

Don't Protect God

"The Only Moral Virgin Birth Is My Virgin Birth"

Blogaround

Photo of the earth, taken from the Artemis II space ship. Image source.

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Touch - Stan Bush (HD Restoration) A song from some 1986 transformers movie.

I watched this video with my son standing next to me telling me the Chinese names of all the transformers. None of the pregnancy books prepared me for how much transformers lore I would be required to learn as a parent.

2. Artemis II astronauts swung by the moon, broke an Apollo record, and saw an eclipse (April 7) "Just minutes later, the crew reached the mission's maximum distance from Earth at 252,756 miles, beating the previous record set by the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 by 4,111 more miles."

3. These blind students say their college blocked their education. A new rule could help (April 6) "For many assignments – say a PDF document from a professor – most students simply click "download," and read it. But that same assignment is more complicated for students who are blind."

4. In 1978, they stopped buses — and helped launch a disability rights movement (April 3) "The Gang of 19, as they'd be called, demanded that the city install wheelchair lifts on more than 200 newly-ordered buses, so they could ride public transit. The protest lasted some 24 hours. At night, some of the protesters got out of their wheelchairs and slept on the hard asphalt."

5. Day Counter (April 3) From xkcd.

6. On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse (March 28, via) "A decolonial critique of technology is not simply "the internet was always bad." It is rather: the conditions that made the internet harmful to specific communities were never peripheral to its design; they're an integral part of it. And any politics that aims to restore something like the pre-enshittification internet without reckoning with those conditions is doomed to reproduce them."

7. When Genomes Fail: Serial Cloning, Mutation Accumulation, and the Case Against Creationist’ Genetic Entropy (April 6) "By the 57th generation, the mice carried approximately 3,700 single-nucleotide variants, 80 insertions or deletions, and at least 16 large structural variants that had not been present in the original donor. The birth rate declined steadily after generation 27, and the 58th generation was the last. Every mouse born in that final generation died within a day."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. The president is posting on social media to threaten genocide. He must be removed from office.

Trump post on Truth Social: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again. I don’t want that ‌to ⁠happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We ⁠will find out tonight, one of ​the most important ​moments ⁠in the long and complex history of ⁠the ​World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

We have the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Now is the time to use it. (April 8) "Any federal official who does not respond to Tuesday’s threat in a manner befitting their own constitutional obligations in light of Trump’s past actions will bear a part of the responsibility for what follows."

2. Trump fires Pam Bondi as attorney general (April 2)

Pam Bondi is out — and that is a good thing. She was Trump's lawyer, and DOJ paid the price. (April 3) "She has caused incalculable harm to the Department, the rule of law, and the nation. All in service of Trump. That is, and will always be, her legacy."

3. She paid into Medicare for years. Trump's immigration policy will end her coverage (April 6) "She's contributed tens of thousands of dollars into Medicare and Social Security over 24 years, according to her Social Security Administration earnings record, reviewed by El Tímpano and KFF Health News. But Carranza and an estimated 100,000 other lawfully present immigrants will soon be cut out of Medicare."

A Box of Kiwis

Someone gave my husband a coupon for a box of kiwis, as a gift. This is a thing in China- giving a big box of fruit as a gift. If you got to someone's house, you should bring a gift, like a nice big box of fruit. Chinese people like fruit. My kids are Chinese and they eat fruit all the time.

Anyway, we had this coupon for a free box of kiwis, so we filled in our information on the fruit company's app and they sent it in the mail.

Here it is!

Behold, the kiwis!

When I first came to China and saw gift boxes like this, it struck me as really weird. I guess this particular kiwi box isn't super fancy, pretty much a regular grocery-store fruit box- but sometimes these boxes are really nice, red, for gifting. Fresh fruit- something that you have to eat fast because it will go bad- seemed to not really be the right thing to put in a many-layers-of-nice-packaging gift box. (Like, we immediately put all these kiwis in the fridge and threw away the box.) But somehow this is a really common thing.

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Related:

German Christmas Market (Shanghai, China)

Highway Rest Stop in China (photos)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Hand-Waving at the Fall: YEC Explanations of the Origins of Defense Structures (March 23) "If God “pre-programmed” organisms with hidden venom systems, parasitic capabilities, and predatory anatomies—knowing they would be activated by the Fall—then the distinction between a “very good” creation and a creation designed for predation and suffering becomes vanishingly thin. This is not a creation that was corrupted by sin; it is a creation that was engineered from the beginning to produce suffering upon activation of a divine trigger."

Also, I was struck by the part about "different use" (ie, young-earth creationists claiming that maybe predatory and/or defensive features of organisms' biology were adapted from some other purpose), because seriously, most creationist arguments are along the lines of "look at this complex system that this creature uses! So many different parts, and they all have to interact just right, and it if only worked partly, that would be totally useless and natural selection would not favor it- there's no natural explanation for this, it must have been God designing it! Wow!" but now that they've noticed the awkward theological implications of claiming that animals' abilities to kill other animals are specifically designed that way by God, it's "oh, well this was probably *not* originally designed that way by God, probably just adapted from a system that had some other purpose NOTHING TO SEE HERE!" 

So KIND OF THE EXACT OPPOSITE.

2. "I am Jesus Christ" and Other Games About Jews (February 21, via) I laughed so hard at "But as a popup tutorial informs us, you can turn water into wine by first pressing right click and then holding left click." Also, I hadn't heard of the "Bible Adventures" video game before, but I am 0% surprised that Christians made a not-very-good video game with extremely shallow representations of bible stories and then marketed it as a godly alternative to mainstream video games.

This video is about what it means for a video game to be Jewish, what it means to play a video game in a Jewish way, and the search for video games which reflect what it's like to be Jewish.

3. A series of posts from the Slacktivist:

Texts of terror? Terrific! (March 25) "This is such a non-liturgical white evangelical idea. The rest of American Christianity gets to watch them awkwardly attempt to rediscover and reinvent the lectionary without realizing that’s what they’re doing."

You have heard it said, but I say this instead (March 26) "But the real obstacle for Olson here is not any notion of inerrancy or infallibility. It’s the dogma of univocalism — the idea that all of the Bible is a single text that speaks with a single voice without internal debate or contradiction or contention."

Team Everybody sliding into our DMs (March 28) "This is what we find, too, when we turn to “the Bible.” It affords and accommodates different and opposite meanings, depending on how we choose to read it. We can choose to view it as a text assuring us that we are the special ones who will get to “possess” every last remnant of the lands and legacies of “Edom” and of all the excluded whose birthright we have taken for our own. Or we can choose to read it as a text that calls us to call in “the rest of humanity,” so that Everybody may seek the Lord."

And from Paul Davidson: Why Scholars Date the Book of Daniel to the Second Century BCE (March 5) "You know how in movies based on true events, multiple historical individuals are often combined into a single movie character for simplicity’s sake? That seems to be the case here, with the historical Nabonidus subsumed into the literary character of Nebuchadnezzar."

4. Satellite Pollution (March 27) 

Also from xkcd: Creation

5. Under New Olympic Sex Testing Policy, A Cis Woman Who Gives Birth Could Be Considered Male (March 31) "And it is not the first time the Olympics has subjected women to mass sex testing—the last time it did, from 1992 to 1999, the results were disastrous, with cisgender women discovering they had intersex conditions they never knew about, leading to public humiliation, career destruction, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished."

And more on that from Skepchick: Olympics Committee Punishes Trans & Cis Women (March 31) "Because as a reminder, girls as young as 11 compete in the Olympics, and now those children, too, will be put under the microscope to determine if they’re truly “woman” enough. It’s disgusting, and the Olympics staff should be ashamed."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Supreme Court Rules Against Conversion Therapy Bans On Transgender Day Of Visibility (April 1) This quote from Justice Jackson: "A state license used to mean something to the patients who entrust their care to licensed professionals—i.e., that the person is certified to be one who provides treatments that are consistent with the standard of care. That stops today."

6. The Final Word (Michael Card) - I've probably posted this before. I like this song about Jesus.

7. Liftoff! NASA astronauts have launched on a historic journey to the moon (April 1) "The crew members will first orbit Earth so that they can check out key systems on their spacecraft, including life support, communication, and navigation. Then they'll fire their vehicle's propulsion system to send themselves on a looping figure-eight path around the moon and back, ending with a splashdown into the Pacific Ocean."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Lebanon faces ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ under Israeli assault: UN (March 27, via) "The families are … living in constant fear, and the psychological toll, particularly on children, will last far beyond this current escalation."

2. Photos: 'No Kings' protests across the country (March 28)

Millions turn out for "No Kings" rallies held worldwide to protest against Trump (March 28)

No Kings Protests Failed To End Fascism on Saturday. Curious. (March 30) "They watched 200,000 people gather in Minneapolis, a city that was terrorized by the president's secret police for a solid month, and they were not impressed, not in the least."

3. Trump Must Resign (March 24) "It’s true that Trump is very unlikely to willingly step down. But calls for resignation can be powerful in themselves if repeated consistently and forcefully."

4. Franklin Graham told Trump he can still get into Heaven. That’s the problem. (March 30) "On a side note, it’s wild that Graham is explaining Christianity 101 to Trump more than a decade after conservative Christians tried to convince people Trump was already one of them. (James Dobson said of Trump in 2016, 'He did accept a relationship with Christ.')"

5. The Largest Physician Organization In The US Reaffirms Gender-Affirming Care Is Medically Necessary (March 27) "The American Medical Association (AMA) has reaffirmed that gender-affirming care for trans minors, including surgeries, is medically sound—and that access to this life-saving care should not be impeded."

6. Federal judge rules DHS illegally stripped immigration status from thousands who entered through CBP One App (April 1) "'Our clients followed the law: they waited, registered, were inspected, and were granted parole under the law,' Perryman said in a statement. 'The Trump-Vance administration's effort to tear this status away overnight was unlawful and cruel.'"

"P is for Passover" (kids' book review)

Book cover for "P is for Passover"

Here's a nice little book about Passover: P is for Passover by Tanya Lee Stone. I read this to my son recently. I think this is a good book for giving kids a basic introduction to what Passover is, and some of the modern traditions associated with it.

We're not Jewish, but I wanted to teach my son about Passover because I'm a Christian and Passover is in the bible, and also it's good for him to learn about different religions. 

This book goes through the letters of the alphabet, and lists something related to Passover for each one of them. Each one is just a short description, so the book is useful as a simple overview of different aspects of it, and my son asked lots of questions, wanting to know more details. 

Some of them are elements of the Exodus story from the bible. ("B is for burning bush / Flames Moses saw / God sent him a message / He listened in awe!") I know this story, so I was able to explain all those ones to him. Some of them are traditions that modern Jewish people have, for celebrating Passover, and most of these I don't know. ("A is for afikomen / The search will be fun / The broken matzah is hidden / And our story's begun!") I had to tell my son "we'll have to google it." I bet the experience of reading this book is different if you're a Jewish family and your kids are already familiar with these traditions.

I guess I should warn you that if you teach your kid about the story of Passover, it means you have to explain slavery to your kid. (Also infanticide...) But I don't think we should avoid it for that reason. It's an important story. 

Anyway, in summary, I recommend this book as a good introduction for kids who don't know about Passover.

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Related

Reviews of Kids' Books 

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

Retconning the Old Testament

In evangelical ideology, sin is bad because it separates you from God, not because you hurt another person

Image text: "Isaiah 61:1a. The spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor." Image source.

Here's a good post from Sheila Wray Gregoire: Who Is the Real Victim When Men Lust? Every Man’s Battle Says It’s Men! It's about how the book "Every Man's Battle" (a best-selling book in Christian culture) seems to have the assumption that the reason it's bad when a man lusts is that it damages the man's purity. The authors of "Every Man's Battle" don't seem to have any awareness of how men's lust can be harmful to the women who are being objectified/harassed/assaulted because of that lust.

This is a very good point, and I want to talk about how it connects to evangelical Christianity's overall concept of what sin is, and what the gospel is. 

Evangelicalism teaches that this is the main message of Christianity, the "good news" we are supposed to share with the world: We have all sinned, and therefore we all deserve to go to hell. God cannot tolerate any sin at all- only perfect people who have never sinned can be in God's presence. But, fortunately, Jesus lived a perfect sinless life and died for us. This solves the problem of us being separated from God because of our sin (which is the biggest problem we have)- when we believe in Jesus, God forgives our sins, and we can go to heaven.

In this framing, when someone sins, it's bad because it means they have committed a terrible offense against a holy and perfect God, and therefore they deserve to go to hell. They desperately need Jesus' forgiveness. When I was a little kid, hearing gospel presentations in Sunday school, it was all about making us feel bad for how terrible we are because we are sinners and God is judging us.

So when they talk about "sin", as an abstract concept, it leads us to have empathy for the sinner. We feel bad for them because they are in danger of going to hell, and we want to save them. And also, we can't really judge them too much, because we are sinners too.

There's very little concern for the victims of your sin- the people you are sinning against. Actually, the way that I understood the definition of "sin" when I was evangelical, it doesn't even need to have a victim. It just meant I was breaking God's rules. Like if I had a selfish thought, or I didn't prioritize my daily bible reading, or if I dated someone that God didn't give me permission to date.

(The example that really takes the cake is Psalm 51, where David writes, "Against you, you only, have I sinned". Yeah, this is after David raped Bathsheba, then when he found out she was pregnant, he had her husband killed, and married her, then the prophet Nathan came and said that was wrong, and as a punishment, the baby would die. In David's prayer of repentance he says, "Against you, you only, have I sinned" as if the problem was just between him and God and didn't really affect anyone else.)

Reading arguments from gay Christians in support of same-sex relationships, that's where I came across the idea that sin is defined as something that hurts people, and it blew my mind. I had never thought about sin that way before. Upon hearing this, I listed a few commonly-recognized sins- lying, stealing, cheating on one's spouse- and was surprised to find that they did share a common thread of you're doing harm to another person. Was that really what "sin" meant? Well, Romans 13:8-10 says it is:

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

The apostle Paul is saying here that all you need to know is "Love your neighbor as yourself." Similarly, Jesus said the 2 greatest commandments are to love God and love your neighbor as yourself, and "All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." Sin is *not* about reading through the bible and making a list of everything God said not to do, however arbitrary it may seem. Sin is hurting people. 

And the gospel... In evangelicalism, the gospel is good news for people who feel bad about their sin and worry that it means they will go to hell. Evangelicalism claims that this is the main problem that we need to be saved from. But check this out; I believe something completely different now: I believe the gospel is good news for the victims, for the marginalized, for those who are suffering, for those who are suffering the effects of other people's sin.

Sin is not just between you and God, where you did something bad, and so you are deserving of sympathy because now you are at risk of going to hell. No, sin affects other people, and the sympathy should be for the people on the receiving end of it.

The starkest example I have experienced, of these two opposite ways of understanding "sin" and "the gospel", was when I was part of a Christian group in college, and we were planning a series of events we called Human Trafficking Awareness Week. (I wrote about this in 2013: How "the gospel" almost stopped us from fighting human trafficking.) We knew that human trafficking was bad, and we wanted to raise awareness and take action against it. And also, we were evangelical, so we felt it was important to "share the gospel" at our outreach events.

But we couldn't figure out how to get from "let's fight human trafficking" to the gospel. We thought long and hard, and couldn't come up with anything that could work as a natural connection between the two. We believed the message of "the gospel" was "you, as an individual, have sinned against God, and so you deserve to go to hell, but good news! Jesus forgives you!" And that didn't seem to have anything to do with the realities of injustice in the world, and our obligation to take action to fight it.

And now I'm like, really? Seriously? We couldn't figure out how freedom for the captives has anything to do with the main message of Christianity? I guess we never paid attention to how Jesus began his ministry on earth by proclaiming:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

    because he has anointed me

    to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

    and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Proclaim good news to the poor! Set the oppressed free! Freedom for the captives! *This* is what Jesus came to do. It's not about how every individual needs to make a private spiritual deal with God in order to escape hell; it's about transforming this world into the kingdom of heaven, defined by love, justice, and freedom.

That's the gospel. And, I would say, if our Christianity is not "good news to the poor", then it's not good news at all; it's not the gospel. 

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And also, I didn't want to get into this because it could be a whole separate post, but: the power dynamics about what sorts of "sins" result in people being shamed and labelled as "sinners." Why is it that when Christians say someone is "living in sin", they mean a couple who is living together and presumably having sex, without being married? Why don't we say that employers who don't pay their workers a living wage are "living in sin"?

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Related:

Being Right vs Doing Good

"The Big Wide Welcome" (kids' book review) 

Forgiveness for Sins You Don't Know You've Committed

Why did I think David was the good guy in the story of Abigail?

Don't Protect God

Yes, I Want Justice (A post about white evangelicals and #BlackLivesMatter)

"Christians Aren't Perfect" When It's Convenient