Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. First things first: Biblical priorities (September 4) "This is the first thing we hear God telling us — the first thing God has to say. Religion without justice is detestable." Preach.

2. Texas lawmakers approve letting private citizens sue abortion pill providers (September 4) "Opponents see it as not only another way to rein in abortion but intimidate providers outside Texas who are complying with the laws in their states. They also say it would encourage a form of vigilantism."

3. The Super-Weird Origins of the Right’s Hatred of the Smithsonian (August 21, via) "Childress relied on Victorian reports about large bones that Powell’s team, led by Cyrus Thomas, had dismissed in 1894 as unevidenced. Hundreds of such reports littered the papers in the late 1800s, and claiming to find the bones of giants became a popular appeal to “prove” the Bible’s superiority to Darwin. The Smithsonian politely informed inquirers that these bones did not belong to the mythical Nephilim."

I never heard about this "we found the bones of biblical giants" when I was a young-earth creationist, but I gotta say I'm 0% surprised. Like, OF COURSE there's some young-earth creationist crackpot out there claiming they found the bones of biblical giants, and that scientists are trying to cover it up because they hate the bible or whatever. I've definitely heard of YECs claiming "we found Noah's ark!" and this is basically the same genre.

4. Israel is blasting through Gaza City neighborhoods, but people have nowhere to go (September 5) "The International Committee of the Red Cross says the evacuation of Gaza City cannot be done in a safe or dignified manner, calling it "unfeasible and incomprehensible." It noted that people are starving, wounded and unable to relocate, and that no area in Gaza can handle an influx of displaced people due to extreme shortages of food, water, shelter and medical care across the territory."

5. Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure (September 5) From xkcd.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. President Trump plans to rename the Defense Department as the Department of War (September 4) Uh, wtf

2. Senators from both parties grilled RFK Jr. on vaccines and more (September 4) "Another Republican physician on the Senate Finance Committee, Dr. John Barrasso of Wyoming, joined Democrats in criticizing Kennedy for undermining vaccines."

3. How Trump's latest crypto launch enriches his family (September 3) Corruption.

4. 'Founders Museum' from White House and PragerU blurs history, AI-generated fiction (September 3) What on earth. What. They "used AI" to make videos of the founding fathers, and they're showing these at a museum? 

5. Trump keeps moving the U.S. closer to being the fascist war machine he wants (September 5) "Earlier this week, in one of the more alarming actions of this administration, Trump ordered the murder of 11 people that the Trump administration claims were drug traffickers on international waters."

Also from Law Dork: Holding vigil in "a post-USA America" as Trump orders the vigil gone (September 6) "As The Washington Post reported last month, 'The demonstration is widely considered to be the longest continuous act of political protest in U.S. history. It has survived seven presidents, countless global conflicts, hurricanes and blizzards, heat waves and floods. It has outlasted several U.S. wars, including the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.'"

6. Trump walks back Chicago 'war' threat, but vows to 'clean up' cities (September 7) "In response to the post, Illinois' Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, wrote on X that Trump was 'threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal.'"

7. In April NPR profiled people who couldn't get their HIV drugs. How are they faring now? (September 6)

8. Judge steps up to block ICE's kidnapping of Guatemalan kids (September 4) "It was a remarkable display of judicial tenacity. It was also a testament to how thoroughly the Justice Department has shredded its credibility with the courts in just eight months." I posted a link about this before, but this gives a lot more detail. It is just shocking to me how ICE got children out of their beds in the middle of the night, with only a few hours' notice, and was going to send them to Guatemala. How can people do that, to children? But I guess this kind of cruel, inhumane behavior is what ICE does every single day.

Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I

King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. Image source.

I've been reading Wilda Gafney's book "Womanist Midrash," and it's got me thinking about the story of Michal, in the bible. Let's talk about Michal.

Specifically, I want to talk about the scene where Michal judges David for how he worships God. But, "Womanist Midrash" has made me realize we can't just look at that 1 passage by itself. We need the whole history between David and Michal, the way he treated her. So here it is:

• Michal was one of Saul's daughters. Saul was chosen by God to be the king, but later God rejected him and chose David instead. So you've got this awkward period of time where Saul is still the king, but David has God's promise that someday he'll be king, and there's conflict between Saul and David because of that.
• Anyway, Saul sees that his daughter Michal loves David, so Saul tells David he can marry her, and the bride-price is 100 Philistine foreskins (wtf). Saul hopes that maybe David will die in battle fighting the Philistines. But David succeeds and comes back with 200 Philistine foreskins (WTF). So he and Michal are married.
• Then Saul decides to kill David. He sends men to David's house. Michal helps David escape out of the window, and she lies to the men, saving David's life.
• While David is on the run, he marries a few other women: Abagail and Ahinoam. Saul ends up giving Michal in marriage to another man, Paltiel.
• Oh and at some point David married 4 additional women: Maakah, Haggith, Abital, and Eglah.
• Years later, after Saul dies, Saul's son Ish-Bosheth becomes king. There is conflict between David's supporters and Ish-Bosheth's supporters. Finally, Abner (who was originally on Saul's side) comes to David to negotiate how to make David king. One of David's conditions is that Michal comes back to him. So, she is forcibly taken from her husband Paltiel, who follows after her, crying, until Abner tells him to give up and go home.
• Even though David and Michal were "together" again, it seems he wasn't having sex with her, or acting like a husband at all really. We can infer this because he's having lots of babies with his other wives, but none with Michal.
• And then, after all this, we come to the scene where Michal criticizes David for how he worships God. Now, after establishing all this history, we can talk about that.

2 Samuel 6:12-23

Now King David was told, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and everything he has, because of the ark of God.” So David went to bring up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing. When those who were carrying the ark of the Lord had taken six steps, he sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf. Wearing a linen ephod, David was dancing before the Lord with all his might, while he and all Israel were bringing up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets.

As the ark of the Lord was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart.

They brought the ark of the Lord and set it in its place inside the tent that David had pitched for it, and David sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings before the Lord. After he had finished sacrificing the burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord Almighty. Then he gave a loaf of bread, a cake of dates and a cake of raisins to each person in the whole crowd of Israelites, both men and women. And all the people went to their homes.

When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, going around half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!”

David said to Michal, “It was before the Lord, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the Lord’s people Israel—I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in honor.”

And Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death.

Back when I was a good evangelical, "on fire for God," I loved this passage. I danced at church when we sang worship songs, and I had complicated feelings about it... I felt good, I loved God and wanted to express it in that way, but I also felt very self-conscious and kinda embarrassed. What if everyone is looking at me and thinking I'm weird? What if I'm bad at dancing? What if this is just super awkward?

I always heard Christians say "worship is just you and God." Meaning, we shouldn't care what people think. We should just repress those feelings of embarrassment; all that matters is that in God's eyes, you're genuinely expressing your worship towards Them.

And I truly believed that was the ideal. I strove to worship God in all the big wild ways I wanted to, and to repress my fears that I was being weird and people were judging me. This passage about David was an inspiration to me. The way I understood it, David was being a role model of what worship should be like, dancing in the streets without caring about how weird he looked, and Michal was being a wet blanket and judging him. She was in the wrong, and he told her so. He even told her "I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes." That verse was one of my favorites. It's all about expressing our love for God, I thought, regardless of what other people think.

(There's even a song about it, "Undignified" by David Crowder Band.)

But now that I'm reading "Womanist Midrash," which has a section on Michal, tying together all these events from her life, giving the reader a clear picture of how David and Saul mistreated her throughout her life, now I'm seeing 2 Samuel 6 completely differently.

Now I see it like this:

When Michal judged David for how he worshiped God, it wasn't about "wow you look so weird, dancing in the streets in your underwear, you should feel embarrassed about that."

Instead, her feelings were more like this: "You love God? You love God? After what you did to me, you have the audacity to go out there in public and act like you're just so wholeheartedly devoted to God? Come on."

She had loved him. She saved his life. And he used her as a political pawn in his quest to become king. (Both David and Saul used her in their struggle for power.) He tore her away from her husband, purely as a symbol of his dominance over the house of Saul, and then he didn't even seem to want her as a wife. Just the status, no actual relationship.

You can understand how, if someone treats you like that, and then they're like "I LOVE GOD SO MUCH, I SIMPLY MUST DANCE," you might hate them.

It's like the apostle John says in 1 John 4:20, "For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen." David treats Michal this badly, and then he's all excited about worshipping God- no. Michal doesn't buy it.

It's like Jesus said in Matthew 5:23-24, "Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift." I remember reading that long ago, reading it as Here Are The Rules For How To Worship Correctly. The hoops that God has arbitrarily set up for us to jump through to get our worship to "count." But wait a minute, maybe it's not about that at all. Maybe Jesus is saying, if you've wronged someone, you need to go make it right, and that's a higher priority than coming to church to participate in "worship."

Maybe Jesus is saying, your relationships with other people have to come first, before your relationship with God. It's not "just you and God."

I think of Michal looking out her window at the way David performed his worship in front of everybody, playing the part of "a man after God's own heart," and I think of sexual abuse coverups in the modern church. Victims are told that they shouldn't speak up, because their abuser is such a good man of God, doing great things for God's kingdom, and to tell the truth about their abuse would [supposedly] be going against God's work.

She saw David dancing, and "despised him in her heart." We see an echo in the words of God, in Amos 5:21-24,

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;

    your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

    I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

    I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!

    I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,

    righteousness like a never-failing stream!

Michal was right.

Let justice roll like a river. And after that, you can dance for God.

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Posts about the book "Womanist Midrash" by Wilda C. Gafney:

Womanist Midrash 
The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus 
The Second-Worst Bible Story 
Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I
Why did I think David was the good guy in the story of Abigail?
David's Womanizing
The Bible and "Purity"

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Related:

Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"

The things I've never let myself say about worship 

"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me" 

For Rizpah (or, a post about human sacrifice in the bible)

Blogaround

1. Trip.com Offers Employees 50,000 Yuan Subsidy for Each Child Born (June 30) "China is grappling with a significant decline in its birth rate and the subsequent challenges posed by an aging population."

2. Don't use AI detectors for anything important (June 30) "All these AI versions are rated as more likely human-written than my original unaltered text."

3. Amos and Acts (June 30) "The fascinating thing about the passage Brueggemann highlights here is that the book of Amos was written a very long time before the book of Exodus was. Amos 9:7 presents one side in an argument about the meaning of the Exodus, showing us that both sides of this argument existed centuries before the book of Exodus itself was written. Amos is one of the oldest books in the Bible — possibly the oldest — so the tension between the two sides of this argument date back to the very beginning."

4. The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier. (June 29) "Obviously, my parents were horrified. Obviously, they pulled me out of that school the next year and put me into a predominately Black public school. Obviously, I learned that not everything white people say is true. But Thomas is the guy who never learned: He never figured out how to disregard what white people say about us. Learning how to ignore white folks and their stupid racial theories while living your full life is pretty much the final test towards emancipation, and it’s one that Thomas seems to have flunked for his entire professional life."

5. Death of Coco Lee Triggers Public Discussion on Depression in China (July 7) [content note: suicide]

6. Rating Articles About Twitter Alternatives (July 8) "Rating: written for the kind of person who'd be shocked to learn about the concept of a fursona"

7. The universe is humming with gravitational waves. Here's why scientists are so excited about the discovery (July 3, via) Cool!

8. Let's Talk Emotional Labour of Birth Control (July 10) Wow, is this really a thing, a man claiming that he doesn't want to wear a condom, so he expects his partner to take birth control pills which cause a lot of problems for her? I guess this makes me glad I'm asexual- I do have sex, but if I had to take birth control pills in order to do it, I would NOT, it is NOT worth that trouble. (Though I'm guessing a lot of this is women being coerced by societal expectations- it's not about women feeling like "I really really want to have vaginal sex, I want it so much that it's worth taking birth control pills that change my body.")

God of Bad Snaps

Football players ready for the snap. Image source.

[content note: abusive Christian theology]

All right, I read this extremely bad, abusive article on Desiring God and, you know, God called me to blog about this crap: God Wounds Us Because He Loves Us.

(You can tell from the title it's going to be bad. It's actually worse than you think.)

Here's a bit from the beginning section:

Sometimes the Lord’s love for us feels like the opposite of love, but that’s only because we can’t see everything he sees. Behind the real pain he allows is an even more real love for those for whom he sent his Son (John 3:16).

The world would never call any kind of pain “love.” The world simply does not have categories for God doing whatever necessary to draw us to himself — his strength, his righteousness, his help, his peace. But his love for us explodes the world’s small categories and far surpasses its weak expectations.

First of all, "Sometimes the Lord’s love for us feels like the opposite of love, but that’s only because we can’t see everything he sees" is pretty much the dictionary definition of gaslighting. Telling someone that they're wrong about their own emotions, and they don't truly understand what they really need, so they need to just trust someone else to know what's best for them. Even though that someone else is hurting them. See, it's not really hurting them, they only think it's hurting because they don't really understand. Ugh. Gross.

And this kind of crap can be used to justify any type of immorality under the sun. Oh you think xyz is bad? Well, God says it's good, so clearly you are wrong. This ideology trains people to ignore their own conscience and simply follow an authority figure. Because they just don't know what's good for themselves. 

(Any time people start believing that the true nature of reality is something other than what we're perceiving with our own senses, you get into some very dangerous territory. That's how people justify killing in the name of God. Oh, it may look like they're doing something evil when they kill people, but actually they're doing a good thing because of these beliefs about the spiritual world which can't be proven or disproven. And the killer might truly, genuinely believe this.)

Also, I love how the writer of that Desiring God article says "The world would never call any kind of pain 'love'" as if his readers are going to be like "ah, the world, they're so foolish, they don't understand how pain can be loving", but, seriously? I read that and I was like "yep I will stick with 'the world' then. Pretty sure causing pain is NOT love."

It gets worse when the article starts giving us examples from the book of Amos:

We see this kind of unexpected and painful love in Amos. God has done everything reasonable to awaken his people to their sin and to rescue them from their rebellion against him, but they simply will not relent.

He withheld food to make them hungry: “I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in all your places, yet you did not return to me” (Amos 4:6). God was willing to watch them hunger if that’s what it took for them to hunger for him, again.

He stopped the rain to make them thirsty: “I also withheld the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest; I would send rain on one city, and send no rain on another city; one field would have rain, and the field on which it did not rain would wither; so two or three cities would wander to another city to drink water, and would not be satisfied; yet you did not return to me” (Amos 4:7–8). God was willing to let them thirst if that’s what it took for them to thirst for righteousness.

He corrupted the fields to ruin their harvest: “I struck you with blight and mildew; your many gardens and your vineyards, your fig trees and your olive trees the locust devoured; yet you did not return to me” (Amos 4:9). God was willing to compromise his people’s livelihood if that’s what it took for them to look to him for all they needed.

Most devastating of all, he even killed their loved ones: One last time from Amos: “I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt; I killed your young men with the sword, and carried away your horses, and I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils; yet you did not return to me. . . . I overthrew some of you, as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were as a brand plucked out of the burning; yet you did not return to me” (Amos 4:10–11). God was willing even to see them die if that’s what it took for them to truly live.

Wow, I mean, God is REALLY BAD AT THIS, huh? Like, you want people to like you, so you cause terrible things to happen to them? What? Does God not understand human emotions at all?

This isn't love. This is using threats and violence to control people. If you can get them so desperate that they fear for their lives, they might choose to beg for help from their attacker. Make a deal with the devil, so to speak.

Also, wtf is going on with the "God was willing to watch them hunger if that’s what it took for them to hunger for him, again"? It's phrased as if God is the one suffering, like we should admire what a noble sacrifice God is choosing to make just because he wants so much to be close to his people. WTF? This is like in the movie "Shrek" where Lord Farquaad tells his soldiers, "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make." Y'all realize that was a joke, right? You know that line was meant to show that Lord Farquaad is a heartless jerk, right?

The god described here does not actually love these people. He is not interested in giving them blessings and happiness; what matters the most is that they worship him. If they experience blessings and happiness but ignore him, well he's not okay with that.

There are lots of things in the world that only make the news when somebody screws them up. If they do their job properly, nobody ever hears about it. Like a bad snap at the Superbowl- normally, people don't think about who is snapping the ball, but then somebody screws it up and we all learn his name and blame him.

(For those who don't know football: The "snap" is the start of a play, where the football is originally laying on the ground and then the designated player "snaps" it up so the play can start. This happens maybe 100 times each game. Occasionally there's a "bad snap" which means the player who was supposed to snap made a mistake and the football went flying or rolling on the ground in some weird direction.)

The God of evangelical Christianity is like that football player, snapping the ball. Going along, doing his job well, and he's not happy about it because he doesn't have fans. He feels like nobody appreciates what he does. Even though his work is contributing good to the world, allowing the game to happen- that's not what he wants. He wants fans.

If he is making people happy and successful, but they don't realize it's because of him, he's not okay with that. Because his goal isn't actually to make people happy or successful.

So he starts messing up the snaps. He starts dropping the ball, every single time. The whole team is thrown into confusion, trying to figure out what on earth has suddenly gone wrong and why they can't even run one play.

And his team loses. Over and over and over, because you definitely can't score any points on offense if you never have a successful snap. The snapper isn't doing his job, and it causes a huge crisis. Snapping the ball is one small simple thing that usually goes well and his teammates don't have to worry about it. But if he doesn't do it, it ruins everything for his team.

So they come and ask what's wrong and why can't he snap the ball correctly. But he still refuses, because they're not worshiping him yet. Finally it's at the point where all the players and fans are begging and offering him ANYTHING just PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE we'll do ANYTHING, if you would just snap the ball correctly. And then he agrees, and goes back to doing his job the right way. But if they ever stop worshiping him, he'll ruin the game again.

Because he's not really concerned with how other people feel. He doesn't really want to do good for the world. If his team wins but he doesn't have many fans, he counts it as a loss. If his team loses but suddenly tons and tons of people are paying attention to him, begging him to snap the ball, he calls that a win.

This is a god who's not okay with helping people if he doesn't get the credit for it. He hates it when people are living their good happy lives but not worshiping him. He believes they must be punished for that sin. He can't stand anything that's not all about him, no matter how beneficial it is to people.

That's what we see in those examples from Amos. God thought the people didn't love him enough, so he destroyed a bunch of their things, and even killed some of them.

If you ever meet a god like that, don't worship them. Don't love them. Because they never loved you. They never wanted you to have a healthy and happy life. They just want fans.

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I was called by God to write blog posts in response to the abusive theology of John Piper/ Desiring God/ The Gospel Coalition. Here are some of my other posts:
I knew Desiring God ideology is spiritual abuse, but wow.
"The Authority of Scripture" is One Hell of a Drug

Blogaround

Image source.

1. The Prophecy of Amos, Revised (posted May 8) "You go to church wearing clothes made by sweat shop workers / And drink coffee grown and picked by enslaved children."

2. John Oliver Slams America’s Mother’s Day Hypocrisy: Not Providing Paid Leave for New Moms (posted May 11) "You can’t go on and on about how much you support mothers and then fail to support legislation that makes life easier for them."

3. Black Magic! Phono-Semantic Chinese Characters (posted February 3) Chinese is easier than one might expect. ^_^ (But I totally don't buy the claim that this applies to "90-95%" of Chinese characters.)

4. Every Part Of The Trinity Is “She Who Is:” Resisting Roger Olson’s Boxes For God (posted May 11) "Though the Bible is fine with addressing God as “Our Rock” and “Our Strong Tower,” addressing the first person of the Trinity as “Mother” is apparently taking it too far. Inanimate objects are appropriate. Feminine names? Not so much."

5. Art As Protest? Rihanna's "American Oxygen" (posted May 11) Worth watching.

6. 11 recurring mistakes in the debate over the “historical Adam.” (posted May 11) "Literalism is a hermeneutical decision (even if implicit) as much as any other approach, and so needs to be defended as much as any other. Literalism is not the default godly way to read the Bible that preserves biblical authority. It is not the “normal” way of reading the Bible that gets a free pass while all others must face the bar of judgment."

7. Star Trek Fan Turns Basement Into The Starship Enterprise ! (posted May 14) Cool!

8. Reading the Bible with a Red Pen (posted May 15) "I swore then that I would never ever be a part of anything—not a religion, not a culture, not a club—that would teach, even accidentally, that certain kinds of people were people that God would want to punish."

9. Jason Chu on Asian Privilege and Freddie Gray (posted May 15) "A new spoken word music video, "THEY WON'T SHOOT ME (I am not #FreddieGray)," by Los Angeles-based Asian American hip-hop artist Jason Chu about the death of Freddie Gray while in Baltimore police custody highlights the educational and economic privilege of some Asian Americans and calls on Asian Americans to choose to use that privilege to build solidarity with other less privileged communities."

10. The God of the Lesser Things: Denny Burk is Wrong About "The Least of These" (posted May 15) "It is interesting that the least of those to whom we are supposed to lend our hand are those refusing to extend their hands to others. It is even more interesting that the position creating a false dichotomy between LGBT people and the church has somehow become 'gospel.'"

11. Tsarnaev Sentenced to Death in Boston Bombing Trial (posted May 15)

12. teaching virginity is anti-Christian (posted May 15) "You start out “clean,” and either you make it to marriage or you’re sullied."

13. Harriet Tubman stole from the rich and gave to the poor (posted May 13) "Putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill is appealing because it addresses four different problems at the same time: 1) Andrew Jackson was a murderous jerk who contemptuously violated his oath to defend the Constitution and he shouldn’t be honored with a place on our currency; 2) no American bills have women on them; 3) no American bills have people of color on them; and 4) Harriet Tubman was just incredibly awesome and we can’t say that often enough."

Maybe the Old Testament God isn't the Worst God Ever?

So here's a question: What if the violence God did in the Old Testament was to punish people for doing bad things to other people, instead of being the wrong religion?

As Psalm 79:6-7 says,
"Pour out your wrath on the nations
    that do not acknowledge you,
on the kingdoms
    that do not call on your name;
for they have devoured Jacob
    and devastated his homeland."

Not "for they follow the wrong gods" or anything like that. No, it's because of the war crimes committed against Israel.

Another example: Amos 1. Judgment is prophesied against many of the nearby nations, and the reasons given are all massive human-rights violations: killing civilians, forcing people into slavery.

(However, Amos 2 gets around to condemning the nation of Judah- God's people- for not keeping God's law. Seems like they're held to a different/higher standard?)

When Israel's God commanded his people not to follow other gods, perhaps it was because of what other religions did, not because "hey if you refer to God by the wrong name then you make him very angry." The Old Testament mentions two incredibly shady aspects of the other religions at the time: temple prostitution and human sacrifice.

Temple prostitution:

Passages explicitly mentioning temple prostitutes: Deuteronomy 23:17 ,1 Kings 14:24, 2 Kings 23:7 (why are all of these about male prostitutes? I'm assuming it's because female prostitutes were normal, so they didn't bother to write that part down?)

Passages which used terms related to prostitution as a metaphor for following other gods: Exodus 34:15-16 plus commentary, 2 Chronicles 21:13, Isaiah 57:5 plus commentary, Jeremiah 2:20, etc, this theme comes up a lot. So, I'm going with the assumption that talk of lust and adultery was not just a metaphor for God's people chasing other gods, but that their religious practices actually involved having sex.

(Wait a minute... I'm starting to think this is totally not a metaphor at all... wow I've been reading the bible completely wrong.)

I'm not sure how exactly the temple prostitution worked, but given the patriarchal culture of the time, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was not very nice to women.

(see also the wikipedia page on sacred prostitution)

Human sacrifice:

Worship of the god Molech involved sacrificing children. That is MESSED-UP, dude.

See this list for biblical mentions of Molek.

Also this list of references about sacrificing sons and daughters.

This is not really the best thing to be googling late at night. Image source.

So, if this were true, if the people God killed in the Old Testament were all guilty of horrific human-rights violations, that would make the God of the Old Testament kind of reasonable and not the worst God ever.

But.

But this can't account for everything. Sure, crimes like this were occurring- but do you really think every single man, woman, and child killed by God's punishments was personally involved in these crimes?

Why was God's response just about killing and punishment? What about trying to help the victims?

Does it make any sense to say, "Some of the people in [place] are mistreating other people in [place], so we should punish this crime by killing everyone in [place]"?

It's like God/ the biblical authors see it as "well these things are happening so that society is totally messed up- gotta totally get rid of it."

And the religion that Israel's God established still commanded genocide and horrible stuff like that. This theory doesn't make it all better.

But I really do think the problem was that different religions were actually different, and had religious practices that hurt other people, and that's what made God angry. Not worshiping in a temple that's a different shape or whatever.

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This post is part of a link-up on the topic of Psalm 79. To read other people's posts, click here: Where is Jesus?