Showing posts with label Joshua. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joshua. Show all posts

Saturday, March 21, 2026

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. If AI’s Native Language Is English, Where Does That Leave China? (March 12) "Many non-English languages are often what researchers call low-resource (e.g., Swahili) or medium-resource (e.g., Vietnamese) languages. This means there might not be enough diverse and high-quality digital texts — such as scientific papers, business case studies, or legal documents — available in those languages to train AI models on."

2. Conquest Narrative // Good Relation (March 16) A Jewish take on the biblical story of Joshua. "We could stop here, read the Conquest Narrative as both warning and foreshadowing, and move on. But there’s something that sits wrong with me about this solution."

3. Apples, Oranges, and Genomes: A Critique of Dr. Carter’s Claims about Human-Chimpanzee Genetic Similarity (March 12) "Christians deserve better than to be told that the latest Nature paper confirms their faith when in reality that paper’s authors see nothing in their data that challenges the standard evolutionary framework, and when the data actually strengthen the evidence for common ancestry by providing a more complete picture of genomic evolution across the ape lineage."

4. Why Complementarianism Isn’t Actually About Men Really Leading (March 18) "Male leadership in complementarianism is not about men leading, but instead about men being free from accountability and responsibility." Yeah this is what happens when you have an ideology that says the husband is the leader because he's a *man*, so he just *is*, regardless of whether he actually has any qualities that fit any normal definitions of "leadership."

5. The structure of ideological abuse (March 9) "You must never require someone to share their inner life with you without their free, full, informed consent."

6. Cesar Chavez abused and raped women and girls, NYT investigation says (March 18) [content note: rape] "In a statement posted to Medium on Wednesday, Huerta wrote: 'I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.'"

7. Chuck Norris, martial arts master and actor whose toughness became internet lore, dies at 86 (March 21)

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ICE agents reveal daily arrest quotas and surveillance app in rare court testimony (March 13, via) "In the hearing, an ICE agent identified as JB testified that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests a day."

2. Hypothetical Legal Advice to SecDef Hegseth on “No Quarter” Statement (from Office of General Counsel) (March 14, via) Hegseth keeps talking about how enthusiastically he wants to commit war crimes. WTF? Can we impeach him or something?

3. FCC chair threatens TV networks amid Iran war coverage — but his warning rings hollow (March 16) 

4. Top US counterterrorism official resigns over Iran war, urging Trump to 'reverse course' (March 18, via) "'This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,' the letter continued. 'This was a lie.'"

5. One Year Later: The Effect of US ‘Chainsaw’ on Global Health (January 20, via) "To date, 757,314 people – the majority children – have died from the funding cuts, according to ImpactCounter, which tracks the effect of USAID cuts via sophisticated modelling tools."

6. Zionist Institutions Spread Antisemitic Propaganda (March 15) "Israel and Zionist orgs in the US have effectively been releasing huge amounts of antisemitic propaganda, linking Jews to the action of a violent nation state and its policies of sweeping censorship, apartheid, genocide, and war."

Also from Everything is Horrible: Dems’ No Tax Proposals Are Reactionary Garbage (March 17) "When people say that US society is not affordable, they are saying they’d like to pay less for groceries. But they are also very much saying that US society is constructed in a way that is inhuman, cruel, and un-navigable for everyone but the ultra-rich."

7. Judge ends asylum claims for Liam Conejo Ramos and his family, orders family's removal (March 18) "Attorney Danielle Molliver, with Nwokocha & Operana Law Offices, told MPR News on Wednesday that the firm is appealing the decision handed down by U.S. Immigration Judge John Burns. Molliver said an appeal could take months or years."

8. Trump is dismantling democracy at 'unprecedented' speed, global report finds (March 20)

9. ICE officers are taking DNA samples from protesters they've arrested (March 19) "'What you worry about is an officer making a decision in the field that a person committed a crime when they might not have. Maybe they were doing something protected under the First Amendment,' Kerr says. 'The officer says, 'I think you crossed the line, I'm going to arrest you.' It turns out the officer was wrong, but the DNA test has been conducted, and the information has been entered into the database. What then?'"


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Saturday, April 19, 2025

Children's Bibles and "presenting mass slaughter to children"

Artwork showing Samson knocking down the pillars, causing the roof to collapse onto a crowd of terrified men and women. Image source.

I've been reading the book "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles." This book is great.

One of the chapters is called "Samson's Suicide and the Death of Three Thousand Others in Children's Bible Stories through Two Centuries," by David M. Guan. This is about the bible story where Samson is captured by the Philistines, and he knocks down the pillars of their temple, causing the building to collapse and kill a huge number of people, including himself. The bible (and children's bible stories, in my experience) portray this as a good thing because the Philistines were the bad guys.

Guan's essay analyzes the illustrations in children's bibles which tell this story. I want to show you this one quote in particular from page 242:

It may not be easy for artists to make doomed Philistines look like wicked people. Illustrators work under various constraints, including the space and frame available, and such considerations may account in some cases for few Philistines and lone Samsons. But as the example of the escaping Philistines suggests, there are likely to be other factors involved in the design of these illustrations. One obvious factor is adult concern about presenting mass slaughter to children (let alone any respectable person).

Wow, there it is. "Presenting mass slaughter to children (let alone any respectable person)."

This is huge, honestly, and I'm glad someone is calling it out. The bible has a lot of stories about mass slaughter- in particular, stories where mass slaughter is portrayed as a good thing, where the bible heroes kill "enemies" in the name of God. There are even some stories (like Joshua's conquest of the land of Canaan) where God commands his people to commit genocide- to kill all inhabitants of all the cities in the promised land. The story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho is one of the classics you always see in children's bibles- God commanded his people to walk around the city for 7 days, and then miraculously, the walls collapsed, and then God's people went in and killed everyone (except Rahab and her family because she had helped them). Yes, really, we really are teaching little kids in Sunday School that God commanded his people to kill everyone in Jericho (except Rahab's family) because they were bad guys.

"Presenting mass slaughter to children (let alone any respectable person)."

In the children's bibles I've seen, these stories sometimes are cleaned up a bit and they don't mention all the murder. For example, when we tell kids the story of Daniel in the lions' den, it's common to end the story right after Daniel comes out of the lions' den safely (uh spoiler warning?), and not mention the part where Daniel's enemies and their wives and children were then thrown into the lions' den and killed by the lions. But for other stories, they're not "cleaned up" to get rid of the mass murder- we tell kids that the bible heroes killed people in the name of God, and that it was right (as in the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho).

(These are the 2 approaches I discussed in my post 2 Wrong Ways to Write Bible Stories For Kids.)

I'm very interested in the essays in "Text, Image, & Otherness" which analyze this weird contradiction- that conservative Christians believe it's good for everyone (including children) to read the bible, and we can always learn some good lesson from it- BUT ALSO we don't necessarily want to explicitly show kids these scenes of over-the-top violence- BUT ALSO it was right for these bible role models to commit violence in God's name, it is right to commit genocide if God commands it- BUT ALSO wow yikes, we're not actually going to draw a picture of it and show it to kids.

If you're writing and illustrating a bible for kids, you SHOULD be confronted with the problem of "presenting mass slaughter to children (let alone any respectable person)." 

Personally, I believe that the writers of the bible were wrong when they said God commanded and approved of this violence. And furthermore, if your God tells you to kill someone, you should just quit religion right then and there, okay? Don't, like, actually do it, my god. 

But if you believe in biblical inerrancy, you don't have the option to say the biblical writers were wrong. So you're stuck in this weird position where you're teaching children that sometimes mass murder is good. I seem to recall that Jesus said it would be better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around one's neck.

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Posts about "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles":

"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)
David and Jonathan's (One-Sided) Friendship 
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is) 
The way we write children's bibles is "an act of bad faith" 
Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories
Children's Bibles and "presenting mass slaughter to children"
Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations"
Children's Bibles and the Victims of the Flood 
The Problem of Equating the Bible's God with a Real God

Related:

2 Wrong Ways to Write Bible Stories For Kids 

Good Friday is R-Rated


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Thursday, August 16, 2018

Blogaround

Image of Inigo Montoya, with the text "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." Below that, this text: "Remember Inigo Montoya: 1. Polite greeting. 2. Name. 3. Relevant personal link. 4. Manage expectations." Image source.
1. Purity Culture & Weight: Jesus Loves Skinny People​ (posted August 8) "I still have to bite my tongue when it wants to apologize to my husband for not losing the baby weight."

2. The reporter was six weeks too late to write about the dilemma facing that white Alabama church (posted July 25) "Anybody who imagines that the moral atrocities of Trump and Trumpism begin and end with adultery is not someone who’s going to let his adultery worry them either."

3. ‘This is it for you. You’re fu**ed.’: Inside Trump’s abuse of migrant kids at an old Walmart (posted July 19) This is bad.

4. Journey Through Scripture: Colonization in the Bible (posted July 25) Austen Hartke's review of the book of Joshua. I really like this whole series he's doing~

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Saturday, March 10, 2018

Perfect Number Watches VeggieTales "Josh and the Big Wall" (1997)

I was taught that we need to follow God even when he tells us to do things that make no sense. And here are all the effing receipts.

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To see all my VeggieTales reviews: Perfect Number Watches VeggieTales (Master Post)

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Monday, August 10, 2015

Blogaround

Image source.
1. Michael Farris Doesn’t Read the Bible (Apparently) (posted August 3) "Surely I am not the only product of a devout evangelical upbringing to note the close resemblance between Price’s situation and a certain parable told by Jesus in the Bible."

2. INFOGRAPHIC: Sandra Bland's Death Is Not an Anomaly (posted August 3) "73 percent of deaths in jail occur among people not convicted of a crime."

3. To Slide or to Slice? Finding a Positive Sexual Metaphor (posted 2014) "Simply reaching each base and moving on to the next is what our culture values most. ... The baseball metaphor presents a fictitious hierarchy of sexual activities. In real life, there is no universal ranking of most enjoyable or desirable activities."

4. China's Severe Crackdown On Crosses Leads To Outrage And Tears For Christians (posted August 5)

5. How Not to Discover God’s Will For Your Life (posted August 6) "Presumably, if everybody had followed God’s will and bought the toothbrush ordained for them before the foundations of the world, nobody would have gotten hepatitis."

6. The Courage of Being Transgender in Public (posted August 6) "These events always make me think back to the first time that I ventured outdoors dressed in women's clothing. A stranger in a car drove up, called me a "he-she" (an old derogatory term), and ordered me into the car. He followed me the wrong way down a one-way street. I eventually lost him by running across an interstate highway."

7. The Day the Sun Stood Still: Interpreting the Miracle of Joshua 10 (posted July 30) "Joshua’s brief, mid-day return to the camp at Gilgal is a 90-km detour each way. And that’s not to mention the tour of Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, and Debir that follows—which the text seems to suggest all occurred that same day. And then there is one final return to Gilgal (v. 43). This is a campaign that should have taken weeks."

8. Masturbation: A Selfish, Addictive, Vicious Cycle (posted August 6) "Because I’d never really gotten intimate with myself down there, I had no idea what I wanted my husband to do or touch to give me pleasure. This frustrated him, because he wanted to bring me pleasure but was almost as new to this as I was and I couldn’t tell him what I liked. To fix this, he encouraged me to masturbate more to figure out what I like, so that he would know how to pleasure me. True story!"

9. The Abortion I Almost Had (posted August 7) "I realized that all those tactics I was taught were important and necessary for a pro-life politics – the emotional shock that justifies the use of those pictures, of those lies – were not ethical, helpful, loving things done out of good intent. They were intended to manipulate, to achieve the ends of stopping abortion, no matter the emotional or physical cost it would take on women."

10. The "New" Testament: the writers and our experience (posted August 7) "If all we had was a letter written by Moses explaining his rationale for striking the rock at Kadesh without describing the later consequences, we’d have a very different view of what happened. But that’s all we have when it comes to Paul and Peter talking about this supposed 'male headship.'"

11. These little ducks sliding down a slide. Adorable!

12. The Definitive Ranking of Christian Parody Music Videos (posted August 7) LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!

13. Christian Teabagger Reps Have Terrific Plan To Hide Real Affair, With Pretend Gay Hooker Scandal (posted August 7) "As of press time, neither representative has said how they plan to explain this to the children."

14. Focus on the Family (posted August 7) [trigger warning: Bill Cosby] "I do not want her to be polite to him, to acquiesce to his charms or flattery. I do not want her to have to smile awkwardly at his jokes or flirtations, I do not want her to make herself small to make even more room for him. I do not ever want her to feel alone, as though she is the only one responsible for keeping herself safe."

15. Unarmed College Football Player Shot Dead By Texas Police During Alleged Robbery (posted August 8) Christian Taylor.

16. The Chrome extension that makes Republicans palatable (by replacing 'political correctness' with 'treating people with respect') (posted August 9) "Black Lives Matter controversy is treating people with respect 'going amok'"

17. Meals Ready to Eat: Expedition 44 Crew Members Sample Leafy Greens Grown on Space Station (posted August 7) Cool!

18. The Big Secret of Abortion: Women Already Know How It Works (posted August 9) "Women know about blood. We know about discharge. We know about babies, and many of us also love them, their little feet and hands and eyelashes. And, yes, we know that those bitty features develop while the fetus is inside us. We also know the physical, economic, and emotional costs of raising those children outside our wombs."

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