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."

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?'"

Retconning the Old Testament

Text written in Hebrew. Image source.

The Christian bible is divided into 2 parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The New Testament is the part about Jesus- but, you know Christians, we try to make everything about Jesus. We try to make the Old Testament about Jesus too.

In this post, I'm going to call it the Hebrew bible, instead of calling it the Old Testament, because I want to make the point that it belonged to Jewish people first. It was already a thing, even before Jesus was born. It already meant something and could stand on its own- it wasn't incomplete, waiting for Jesus to come along so it could finally make sense.

The way Christians tell the story, though, is that the Jewish people were waiting for so long, looking forward to when the messiah would come. There were prophecies, there were signs that pointed forward to Jesus. And finally Jesus came, and lived and died and rose again, and this ties the whole story together. Now it finally makes sense, and the whole bible is about Jesus.

This is a retcon. As originally written, the Hebrew bible is not about Jesus. Christians read it through the lens of Jesus' life- and yes, I'm a Christian and I do this- but that's putting our own spin on it, and we shouldn't forget that. Our Christian take on the Hebrew bible is not its "real meaning."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Scott Adams, 'Dilbert' creator and conservative commentator, dies at 68 (January 13) 

2. China’s Viral New App Is a Safety Tool Called ‘Are You Dead?’ (January 13) "The app, known as Demumu abroad, functions as a daily check-in. Users input emergency contacts, then press the check-in button on the interface’s home screen each day. If a user misses two consecutive check-ins, the app alerts their contacts via email."

3. Planetary Alignment (January 9) From xkcd.

4. The lumpers, the splitters, and me (January 13) "So when somebody like Matthew Avery Sutton comes along and says 'evangelicalism is best defined as a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics' it can feel for them exactly the way it has felt for them over the past several decades when the gatekeeping goons said to them — repeatedly and regularly — 'You are a fake Christian and your story of being born again and transformed by your religious experience must be a lie and you must hate Jesus and the Bible because what it really means to be an evangelical is to be like us — to be part of a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement seeking power to transform American culture through conservative politics.'"

5. The Rape of Dinah and The Shame of Adults (January 10) [content note: rape and victim-blaming] "Dinah’s rape and her brothers’ reactivity show us the shame of adults: that adults will, time after time, do nothing but negotiate and cover up the rape of their children by powerful people."

6. This country taxes menstrual pads as luxury goods. She's aiming to end the tax (January 15) "The link to child marriage contributes to the secrecy around periods and makes it an extremely isolating experience."

7.  Sesame Street: ABC-DEF-GHI Song Love this classic Sesame Street song.

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Image source

Image source

Links related to the antichrist:

1. In Defense of Pretexts (January 9) "What I came to is this: For my entire adult life, I've watched American leaders justify war and atrocity with lies about democracy and freedom and self-defense."

2. Chaos continues (January 12) "Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait formy takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business."

Also about Minnesota: Minnesota federal prosecutors resign after DOJ push to investigate Renee Good's widow (January 13) "The investigation allegedly centers around any possible ties to activist groups [Becca Good] may have. That, of course, is protected First Amendment activity."

A Common Occurrence (January 14) "I’m sharing this so you’re aware that the ICE abuses we’re seeing since Renee Good’s killing is – aren’t new."

The Fascists are Lying about ICE Murdering an Innocent Woman (January 14) "Fuck Michael Shermer and the rest of his rightwing pro-murder pro-fascism sniveling grifters, who spread this lie even as we see ICE now enabled to literally go door to door, breaking into people’s homes, and dragging them away with zero accountability."

3. US aircraft that attacked suspected drug boat reportedly disguised as civilian plane (January 13) "'Fundamentally, the debate about ‘war crimes’ is a distraction – the whole operation is illegal, and the conduct of an extrajudicial execution by means of a plane with civilian markings is in fact reminiscent of a death squad operation,' Bhuta said."

4. Hundreds of nonconsensual AI images being created by Grok on X, data shows (January 8) [content note: contains descriptions of sexually explicit images (does not contain the images themselves)] 

Elon Musk's X faces bans and investigations over nonconsensual bikini images (January 12)

5. For Immigrants, Citizenship Now (January 13) "We have effectively created a class of criminalized residents who do not have full rights and protection under law. Immigration enforcement is a small fascist state within our polity."

I can't really agree with this without seeing an actual policy with more details- automatic citizenship? for who exactly? wouldn't there have to be some kind of criteria, like how long they've lived in the US? What about people from countries that don't allow dual citizenship, so they would have to renounce their other citizenship in order to get US citizenship, and they might not want to do that- there should be a way to have them legally protected anyway. It sounds too big and pie-in-the-sky to actually be a real policy- but, what if we think about it this way instead: What if the path to get US citizenship was a lot easier? What if it was less about bureaucracy and proving that you're "good enough," and more about a principle that people who live in the US and want to be US citizens should have a reasonable pathway to do so. Yeah, I support that.

6. Hillary Clinton May Finally Get Lock-Her-Upped For Refusing Stupid Subpoena From Dipsh*t James Comer (January 15) "You should definitely give the full Clinton letter a read, because it lays out not just why the Clintons won’t go along with Comer’s attempt to shift attention away from Trump and the DOJ’s foot-dragging, but also why this government’s corruption must be resisted wherever possible, from the streets to closed-door hearing rooms."

7. A federal judge dismisses the DOJ's effort to get voter data from California (January 15) "In 2017, one Republican secretary of state famously said the Trump administration could 'go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.'"

8. Behind the front lines of the legal battle against Trump's National Guard deployments (January 15) "Earlier this month, President Trump pulled hundreds of National Guard troops from California, Oregon and Illinois after the Supreme Court ruled against the administration in the Illinois case."

9. UPenn faculty condemn Trump administration’s demand for ‘lists of Jews’ (January 13, via) WTF

My Ex-Evangelical Take on "The Year of Living Biblically"

Book cover for "The Year of Living Biblically"

I read the book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A. J. Jacobs, and here are my thoughts on it. I wasn't planning to blog about this- I don't blog about every single book I read- and I thought the premise of this book was kinda silly and wasn't going to cause me to have any profound insights to post on the blog. But now that I've read it, it turns out that I do have things to say. 

(Judging whether these are "profound insights" is left as an exercise for the reader, I guess.)

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Overview

Jacobs sets out on this weird experiment/ performance art, where he decides he is going to extract every single command from the bible and try to follow them all literally, for 1 year. He also interviews a lot of Jews and Christians who claim to be following the bible- to some extent, he participates in the ways that they follow the bible, but overall he wants to be true to the literal text itself rather than later interpretations of it.

Jacobs is Jewish but wasn't religious before this. He felt this experiment would also help him connect with his heritage.

This book was published in 2008. I remember I saw this in a bookstore, years and years ago, when I was evangelical, and I kind of scoffed at it. I thought, "Here's a book where someone tries to 'follow the bible literally' to prove how ridiculous the bible is. This is NOT how you're supposed to follow the bible. Some rules apply to us now and some only applied to the original audience, and we have logical, reliable ways of knowing which is which. We're supposed to use this framework and only follow the ones that still apply to us now, not take every single command literally. He's totally missing the point."

Please note, Jacobs's goal was NOT "to prove how ridiculous the bible is." His initial thinking was, yeah some of the commands are silly and he's not going to get anything out of following them, but a lot of the commands really are meaningful, and it could be good for him to become more religious, and maybe he'll learn something.

I've heard that this book was part of the inspiration for Rachel Held Evans's book "A Year of Biblical Womanhood," (2012) where she spent a year literally following the bible's commands to women. (I have not read it, and I really want to. It's on my list.) Her goal was different from Jacobs's- she was coming from an evangelical background, where she constantly had to deal with other Christians claiming that women need to do certain things and be restricted in certain ways, because that's "biblical womanhood," that's "what the bible says." And she was making the point that no, these modern American Christian "biblical womanhood" people very much are NOT "just following what the bible says."

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The main thing I want to say is, Christians should learn from Jewish people

The bible is divided into 2 sections: the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. (Christians call the Hebrew Bible the "Old Testament" but here I am going to call it the Hebrew Bible because it belonged to Jewish people first.) Jacobs spends the first 9 months of the year focusing on the Hebrew Bible, and the remaining 3 months on the New Testament. The New Testament is the part about Jesus and the early Christians.

This makes sense, proportionally. The Hebrew Bible is much longer than the New Testament. But, reading this as a Christian, it surprised me. Jacobs wants to follow the bible literally, and then he spends 9 months seeking out Jewish people who are extremely dedicated to their faith, and he listens to them and follows their advice.

Why on earth did this surprise me? Isn't it OBVIOUS, if you think about it for a second or two, that if you want to take the bible very seriously and learn from it, you should talk to Jewish people? They were taking the bible very seriously for thousands of years before Christians came along.

In the section of the book focused on the Hebrew Bible, most of the experts that Jacobs talks to are Jewish, and there are only a few Christians. He interviews young-earth creationist Ken Ham (a Christian) in an early part of the book about the creation of the world. He talks about modern Christians who are obsessed with the "end times" and prophecies about a red heifer- and there are also Orthodox Jews obsessed with this, and they are working together with the Christians, even though they have very different beliefs about whether it will be good or bad for the Jews when they finally get that red heifer. And maybe a few other Christians here and there, but overall, in the section about the Hebrew Bible (which is the majority of this book), he's learning from Jewish people.

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The evangelical take on why Jewish people are wrong about the bible

In all my years growing up in the church, I don't think I ever came across the suggestion that we should learn about the bible from Jewish people. Obviously, Christianity is the right religion, and all the other religions are wrong- why on earth would we listen to other people's wrong religious beliefs?

(I thought it was so cool, when I was reading the book "Womanist Midrash," how author Wilda Gafney brought in Jewish and Muslim sources, in addition to Christian ones. Other religions have useful things to say about the bible, and we can learn from them! I don't think I had ever seen anything like that in a Christian book.)

In general, Christians believe that the laws in the Hebrew Bible don't apply to us anymore, because Jesus changed all that and set up a whole new system. Christians have various schemes for how to define which laws from the Hebrew Bible still apply- basically if it's a "moral law" (rather than a "ceremonial law"), and if it's reaffirmed in the New Testament, then it still applies. I always got the impression that this categorization scheme was uncomplicated and self-evident and totally made sense, and therefore the people who are trying to score points on the internet by pointing out weird laws in the bible are just uninformed and missing the point. But NOPE, turns out that stuff about "moral law"/"ceremonial law" is just somebody's fan theory. 

So my point is, Christians believe we don't have to worry about all those bizarre laws. Just the obvious things, like pray, and love your neighbor, and don't be gay. Just the simple obvious things. (sarcasm)

More important than following the laws, though, is to believe the right things about Jesus. I thought it was very interesting when Jacobs discussed this in the book. When he got to the last 3 months and started to work on following the New Testament, he wondered if it was enough to just follow the laws, or if he would also have to believe in Jesus. He got different answers about this from the different Christians he asked- on the more evangelical end, people told him that the most important thing was to believe in Jesus, and if you're not doing that, the rest is meaningless. On the moderate/mainline side of Christianity, people told him that following Jesus' teachings is a good thing and can help us be better people, even if you don't believe in Jesus. For his part, Jacobs didn't want to believe in Jesus, because it felt like abandoning his heritage as a Jewish person. (In contrast, when he followed the rules in the Hebrew Bible, he felt like he was connecting to his family heritage.)

And in my experience, Christians have nothing but eye-rolling and mockery and pity when we see Orthodox Jewish people following strict religious rules. Rules about what to wear, what to eat, not doing any work on the Sabbath. We always looked at it like, they're spending so much effort keeping all these meaningless rules that are just silly and don't matter, and they're missing the whole point of what God wants us to do.

I had a Jewish friend in college that I used to discuss the bible with, let's call him Isaac. He told me that he had gone through phases in his life where he tried to be really serious about keeping the Sabbath and eating kosher foods, and also phases where he didn't do all of that. Thinking about it now, I would love to ask him what motivated him to sometimes choose to follow those rules, and does he think he benefitted from it? But at the time I didn't ask him anything like that; I was evangelical, and evangelicals don't want to actually understand people, they want to talk them into converting.

He told me about some of the rules for kosher foods. Exodus 23:19 says, "Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk." Whenever I had read that in the bible, I thought to myself, well I'm never cooking any young goats at all, so I don't have to worry about if I'm breaking this rule or not. But, Isaac explained, the principle behind this rule should apply not just to goat meat but other meat too. And, it doesn't just mean don't literally boil the meat in milk- it means don't eat the meat of an animal together with dairy products made from its mother's milk. And really we should just never eat any meat and dairy together, because you never know. Like, what if by some coincidence, the cow your burger came from is the offspring of the cow that produced the milk used to make the cheese on your cheeseburger? You never know! So that's why you can't eat meat and dairy together.

And I thought to myself, this is ridiculous and overly-literal and misses the point, and is like the Pharisees. Ah, yes, Christians have this stereotype about the Pharisees (whom Jesus interacted with in the bible), that they were working so hard to keep all these meaningless religious rules, and they were missing the point of how God actually wants us to live. I believe this is an anti-Semitic stereotype- yeah, I know it's in the bible, but it's still an anti-Semitic stereotype.

Evangelical Christians believe that, when people follow religious rules which are more strict than the ones we follow, they are being legalistic and missing the point, and that's bad. And when they are less strict than we are, they are being wishy-washy and watering down the gospel and being led astray by our sinful culture. *Our* rules were the exact right level of rules. *Our* rules had actual good reasons, unlike those legalistic people who were just following rules for the sake of following rules.

Here, a sampling of some of the evangelical rules: You shouldn't say "oh my god." Girls shouldn't wear a 2-piece bathing suit. Girls shouldn't wear tank tops that don't cover up the bra straps. Probably you shouldn't lay on a bed near your boyfriend because what if "one thing leads to another"? Also, every day you need to read your bible. And there was a whole culture war about the Harry Potter books and how they PROMOTE WITCHCRAFT and so you SHOULDN'T READ THEM. 

Well, those things aren't "legalism"! When *we* make weird little rules, they have good reasons behind them! When *other people* make weird little rules, it's for no reason and it's legalism.

Here, I'm gonna blow your mind: What if other people's weird little rules also have deep reasons behind them? What if they are the same as us- they are doing their best to follow the bible, out of a genuine desire to obey God, like us?

Even if we think they're wrong, we should still learn from them. They are the same as us. If they're wrong, maybe we're wrong in the same ways.

The Jewish experts that Jacobs talked to in this book, who walked him through the nuances of how they understand and obey obscure biblical rules- I think if I had read this as an evangelical, I would have been really dismissive of this. Like, the whole thing is pointless. All the effort they are putting into following these literal rules, which God doesn't require us to follow. But now I feel like... I can recognize their motivations, their feelings. I know what it is to feel like "I would do anything for God" and "God must have a good reason for this rule, so it truly is in our best interest to obey it." To feel connected to God as I put in the work to obey Their rules.

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The literal words vs the traditions

Jacobs's main goal was to literally follow the bible. In pursuit of this goal, he felt it would be useful to interview Jews and Christians who also claim to be following the bible, so he could get insight on how to interpret and obey the biblical rules. 

There were many cases where Jewish people told him about traditional interpretations of bible passages, which don't follow the literal meaning but soften it or apply it to totally different situations. (Seriously, Jewish people have been discussing this for thousands of years. They have a lot of insights!) Sometimes he ended up following his own understanding of what the literal words said, and sometimes, if that was impractical, or if a later tradition seemed interesting or meaningful, he followed the later interpretations.

Evangelicals make a big deal about how we're simply following the bible, NOT imperfect human traditions. We're Protestants. Those Catholics are all wrong, the way they treat their church history as important and meaningful, rather than only following the bible. Sola scriptura.

What this means in reality, though, is evangelicals *do* follow our own traditional interpretations, built up over generations, very much influenced by our own culture, rather than just "following the bible"- but we can't be honest about it. We don't even realize we're doing it- we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're just following the bible, that our modern American [white] way of reading the bible is the obvious one and there aren't other interpretations.

I want to share a quote from the book here. This is the part where Jacobs was hosting a Passover dinner with his relatives. He made sure to follow the rules that Moses gave for the first Passover- eat with your sandals on and your staff in your hand, paint blood over your door, etc. (Turns out it is illegal to sell lamb's blood, so Jacobs used the drippings from the meat instead.) But he also learned about his own family's memories of Passover dinners over the years, and found that was more meaningful than just following the literal commands himself. This is from pages 235-236:

I close my Bible and let the story sink in. "Does anyone else have anything they want to say?" I ask.

My dad does. He has brought a packet of photocopied handwritten pages. They are a collection of childhood memories that his mother-- my grandmother-- had written before she died. My dad reads the section about her memories of family sedars in the 1920s.

Before the sedars, my mother would buy a very large live carp and bring it home (how, I don't know). She put it into the bathtub to swim until it was time to prepare the gefilte fish we all relished so much. We kids loved watching it swim, but it was so big it could barely (and sometimes not at all) negotiate a turn at the end of the tub. We all took our showers downstairs until after the fish was removed.

She wrote about how the kids would file up and down the stairs carrying kosher-for-Passover dishes, "all of us like ants, trip after trip, one after the other." And about how Uncle Oscar once ate a dozen hard-boiled eggs on a dare. About how, when the sedar dragged on, the prayers went "express, no local stops."

Her writing is vivid, fresh. The references to the customs are no longer confusing or foreign. The whole thing felt familiar. My Biblical rituals-- the door painting and sandal wearing-- were interesting on an intellectual level, but, frankly, I wasn't as moved as I hoped I might be. I didn't feel like I had been swept back to the time of the Pharaohs.

But this writing from my grandmother-- that did sweep me back. Perhaps to make a ritual resonate, I can't skip directly from my stain-resistant dinner table in New York to a desert three thousand years ago. I need some links in between. I need my grandmother and her memories of the leviathan-sized carp of Hinsdale Street in Brooklyn.

Maybe religious rituals are meaningful because they connect us to other people, to history, to our ancestors, to our culture. Maybe the point isn't that God said to do this, so you as 1 individual have to do it, following the exact instructions found in the bible.

It's not "just you and God" (as evangelicals like to say). You live in the context of your culture, and that matters, and you connect to God through that culture. Through your family, your history, your traditions. Through people, and the things that have been emotional and meaningful to people for many generations.

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A few weird commands I want to mention

Leviticus 19:23-25 says that when you plant a tree, you shouldn't eat the fruit from it until the 5th year. I've never spent any time thinking about how to follow this command because I don't plant fruit trees, I just buy fruit from the store, so surely it doesn't apply to me. But Jacobs wanted to follow it, so he contacted fruit companies to ask them about how old their trees were. He received replies that said they aren't able to tell him the ages of the specific trees that specific pieces of fruit came from.

He did more research into the life cycles of fruit trees, and found that some kinds of trees will bear fruit after just 2-3 years- he then avoided those fruits. But cherry trees take over 5 years to mature and bear fruit, so he would be safe if he only ate cherries.

Another weird one: Deuteronomy 22:6-7 says, "If you come across a bird’s nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life." In this book, Jacobs says this is generally interpreted to be about kindness to animals. *But* some Jewish people have a ritual related to this, explained in this quote from page 186:

But the actual wording of Deuteronomy 22:6 is solely about birds and nests, and it is this formulation that Mr. Berkowitz-- along with others in his community-- has taken to the literal limit. He has set up two pigeon nests on his third-floor windowsill in his northern Manhattan apartment. Whenever there's a newly laid egg, he allows a faithful seeker to come over, pay one hundred dollars to charity, shoo the mother pigeon away, pick up the egg, hold it aloft, say a prayer, place it back in the nest (or, in some cases, eat it), and thereby check off this commandment as officially "fulfilled."

Jacobs goes and actually does this. It's so strange and I love it.

And one more thing I want to mention: In researching some of the biblical commands, Jacobs found that the intention behind them was to help the poor. For example, locusts are kosher. You can eat them. The bible says you can eat them. In this book, Jacobs buys chocolate-covered crickets and eats one. 

He says, even though the bible says people are allowed to eat locusts, that doesn't mean it was actually a common thing back then. He came across one interpretation that says maybe the purpose of this bible passage is to provide for people if their crops have been eaten by locusts. Instead of starving, you are allowed to eat the locusts. So, commands which seem extremely weird might actually be based in a desire to help people.

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Conclusion

The reason I wanted to blog about this book is because Jacobs got a lot of good input from Jewish sources, which felt surprising to me, but then I realized, well, OBVIOUSLY. You want to talk about how to take the bible extremely seriously, you need to talk to Jewish people. When I was evangelical I never did that, though, because only Christians had the "truth" and all other religions were wrong, so why would we listen to them.

Also, I was interested in how this book explores religious traditions and rituals as a way to connect to a tradition, a culture, a history, a family. Maybe the point is not just doing it so you as an individual can be a person who obeys God correctly. Maybe it's about human connection and knowing our history.

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Related:

"Ceremonial Law/ Civil Law/ Moral Law" is Just a Fan Theory 

Maybe Jesus Was A Pharisee

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Real Talk: Why China’s Deaf Creators Feel Pressured to Sell Out (September 15) "In this context, the recasting of deaf people as “cute, submissive, and longing for love” trivializes Deaf culture as something to be consumed rather than taken seriously."

Also from Sixth Tone: Street Smart: Why China’s 5-Star Hotels Are Now Cooking Curbside (September 18) "At Kang’s hotel in Henan, a 398-yuan set meal was quickly undercut by rivals offering similar packages for 358 — then 298 yuan. 'Now everyone’s on the street,' he said, 'selling even cheaper takeaway.'"

2. A humanitarian expert says civilians in Gaza City are facing an 'impossible choice' (September 17) "Right now, people in Gaza City are facing an impossible choice: live under bombardment and famine or risk the dangerous journey to the south, where they know that there are no services that can accommodate them, that there's no aid to be distributed to help them in their displacement.What we are witnessing is mass forcible transfer of Palestinians from Gaza City, which is a war crime and must be stopped."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause (September 16) "Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself."

And: Why did alleged assassin target Kirk? Evidence paints complicated picture (September 18, via) Yeah, the "leftist" parts of the internet are all taking this "he was a groyper! he was far-right!" and running with it, but I don't think we really know that for sure. Let's not spread misinformation. I don't like the idea (which both sides are promoting) that once we find the killer's motive and ideology, we can use it to make big sweeping statements about "the left" or "the right."

Sen. Chris Murphy warns Trump is exploiting Kirk's death to squash dissent (September 16)

2. Who Can Get a COVID Vaccine? (September 17) "So! I know that it’s all very confusing, but please don’t just get overwhelmed and give up."

3. GOP lawmaker pulls measure to allow Marco Rubio to revoke US passports (September 16) "But the new measure would have significantly escalated these efforts by targeting US citizens."

4. ABC pulls Jimmy Kimmel off air after comments made about the Charlie Kirk killing (September 18) In all the coverage I've seen of this, I haven't seen any actual comments from Kimmel saying anything bad about Charlie Kirk. He just said the right is politicizing it, that the killer is also far-right, and that the president doesn't seem to be mourning like a normal person.

WGA Statement on ABC’s Decision to Pull Jimmy Kimmel Live! (September 17) "Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth."

5. Trump moves to scrub national parks sites of signs that cast America in a 'negative light' (September 17) "Park employees also flagged a panel that reads: 'As the new federal government embraced the lofty concept of liberty, slavery in the President's House ... mocked the nation's pretense to be a beacon of liberty.'"

6. Most American Jews say Trump is using antisemitism as an 'excuse' to silence free speech at universities (September 17)

7. RFK Jr. wants to end mental health screenings in schools. Experts say it's a bad idea (September 16) "U.S. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and Education Secretary Linda McMahon want schools to do away with mental health screenings and therapy. Instead, they argue in a Washington Post opinion piece that schools 'must return to the natural sources of mental well-being: strong families, nutrition and fitness, and hope for the future.'" Oh, so just telling everyone to try harder to be normal, instead of recognizing that mental health is a real thing.

This article does a good job explaining what school mental health screening is and why it's just a common-sense way to identify kids who might possibly need help. Not about labels and stigmas.

8. Judge criticizes Trump admin, blocks effort to quickly deport children to Guatemala (September 19) "The administration’s initial argument that the effort was all about reunifying children with their parents, Kelly wrote, 'crumbled like a house of cards about a week later.'"

9. Judge orders Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil to be deported to Algeria or Syria (September 18, via) "'It is no surprise that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of free speech,' Khalil said in the statement. 'Their latest attempt, through a kangaroo immigration court, exposes their true colors once again.'"

His lawyers are still fighting this though. It's not over.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Defunctland After Dark: That Helicopter Thing at Chuck E. Cheese (June 7) 18-minute video. Oh my goodness, I love this so much. Kevin goes down the rabbit hole of trying to find information about this helicopter ride thing that Chuck E. Cheese apparently used to have. (I didn't even know this thing existed, but I am still SO into this video.) This is exactly what it's like, looking for information that you feel surely must exist somewhere on the internet, and you try all sorts of variations on search terms, scouring different websites that might possibly be related, etc.

2. The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel (August 26) 2-hour-22-minute video from Lindsay Ellis. Wow, this video is incredible. It starts out with the criticism that Ms Rachel (who makes educational videos for toddlers) is getting for speaking up in support of the children in Gaza, and then it covers EVERYTHING: Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, the way that children's education should include emotional intelligence as well as numbers/letters/etc, this newfangled right-wing idea that empathy is a sin (??????), a weird children's TV channel created by The Daily Wire as an alternative for parents who clutch their pearls because there's a family with 2 dads on Sesame Street, the entire history of the Jewish temple system, the entire history of Christianity, the entire history of anti-Semitism within Christianity, dog whistles for anti-Semitism, the Left Behind books, the definition of genocide, the Rwandan genocide, Schindler's list, the inadequacy of using statistics to describe atrocities, and what's currently going on in Gaza.

Really a must-watch if you want to understand American right-wing Christians' reasons for supporting Israel, and the whole history and context around all of it. Including the way the MAGA government is using "fighting anti-Semitism" as an excuse for doing whatever they want, meanwhile Elon Musk is on stage doing Nazi salutes.

3. New Mexico to become the first state to offer universal child care (September 10, via) "Starting in November, the state will offer child care, or reimbursement for child care costs, to every family in the state, regardless of income. Lujan Grisham’s office said the program’s expansion will save families in the state $12,000 per child per year on average."

This is really interesting! I always thought of this "the government should give us free childcare" as an unrealistic pie-in-the-sky idea, but here's New Mexico actually doing it. I have many questions! Will this result in better pay for childcare workers? Will there be requirements about what kind of expenses "count" as childcare expenses that can be reimbursed- surely there must be some requirements for a business to be a legit childcare provider. Does this plan also require the government to help more childcare workers get trained and more daycares to open? 

Really interested to see the results from this. It sounds like it could be a really good thing! But I grew up Republican so a whole bunch of "here's why this is actually bad and will ruin the economy" spring to mind. But let's *do it* and then analyze the results to find out what really happens.

4. Biblical slop (September 10) "There’s a great deal that could be said about the “translation” of biblical text to biblical imagery, and the choices that requires visual artists to make, whether it’s for an illustrated Bible or a “biblical” film or TV series. ... But we should save that discussion for situations where actual artists are making actual choices and doing actual work, which isn’t the case here. The only choice being made here is the choice not to do any of that actual work, or to hire actual artists, or to put any thought whatsoever into any of this beyond whatever pop-culture references to include in the prompts fed into the plagiarism machine."

!!! This is such a good point! I read a whole book earlier this year, Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles, about the way that children's media presents bible stories to children. A LOT GOING ON THERE! It's not like you can simply tell the story and that's all- there are so many choices that need to be made along the way, and those choices say a lot about your own point of view, what you think the bible even is, etc. If you just throw it into an AI, well, it's going to spit out *something*, but would that *something* be worth anyone's time to read?

5. What We Find in the Sewers (August 25) A long article about the history of how societies have dealt with sewage. I didn't really know anything about this before. I learned things~

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Charlie Kirk, Trump ally and rightwing activist, shot and killed at Utah university (September 10) "'Political violence has no place in America,' said the former vice-president Kamala Harris in a statement. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, expressed a similar sentiment: 'Political violence of any kind and against any individual is unacceptable and completely incompatible with American values.'" Agree with these statements- political violence is not okay.

And more on that:

Charlie Kirk’s killing, and Trump’s response, are a danger to liberalism (September 12)

Politicizing Charlie (September 12) "Now, color me skeptical."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links related to the antichrist:

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

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

[image or embed]

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

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

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

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

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

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. 9 different density layers (April 18) 44-second video. Wow this is really cool! It's a science experiment about liquids with different densities, settling in layers on top of each other, and then you drop objects into it to see how far they sink.

2. Failed Soviet Venus lander Kosmos 482 crashes to Earth after 53 years in orbit (May 10) "Kosmos 482 launched toward Earth's hellishly hot sister planet in 1972, but a problem with its rocket stranded the spacecraft in an elliptical orbit around Earth. For the next 53 years, atmospheric drag pulled the probe down slowly but surely, leading to today's dramatic denouement."

3. Sell All You Have and Give to the Poor (May 3) "When Jesus then tells them that, effectively, none of the other rich and powerful are going to be persuaded to join them either, what is perplexing the disciples is how the Jesus movement can now possibly succeed."

4. Should A Woman Be Forced To Carry A Dead Fetus For Weeks? South Carolina Says 'Yes!' (May 9) "In an update, Weber explained that she was told both by the doctors and by a lawyer that the way the South Carolina law works is that, if she were to have gone to an appointment where the doctor detected a “heartbeat” (not a heartbeat), and then gone to a second appointment where they didn’t detect one, she would have been able to get the D&C or abortion pills right away. However, if you go to your first appointment and they tell you there’s no heartbeat and the fetus has been dead for three weeks, as happened with her, you have to wait two weeks to get one. If you go to the emergency room and get a more comprehensive diagnosis, they’ll shorten the waiting period to 11 days. Does this make sense? No, of course not. But it’s what happens when you have people with no medical background, who don’t know what they’re talking about, writing laws based on their own personal feelings."

5. Why Hospital Policies Matter in States That Ban Abortion (May 7) "ProPublica has documented widespread differences in how hospitals across the country have translated abortion bans into policy. Some have supported doctors in treating active miscarriages and high-risk cases with procedures technically considered abortions; others have forbidden physicians from doing so, or left them on their own to decide, with no legal backing in case of arrest."

6. The FDA approves first U.S. at-home tool as a Pap-smear alternative (May 10) !!!!!! This is great news! Instead of going to a gynecologist to have a pap smear, you can use this tool to collect your own sample and send it off to get screened for cervical cancer. Very excited to hear this, as a person who used to have vaginismus and has had a lot of problems and trauma related to gynecological exams.

(But also, I had complicated feelings reading this article, when it describes pap smears as "a procedure generations of women have dreaded and often found painful." Really? Generations of women? Since when? Then why did everyone act like *I* was the one being unreasonable when I found it to be painful and traumatic? ... I guess this is sort of a #metoo thing- it turns out that a lot of us have experienced this trauma, and we were all pressured to downplay it, and treated like something was wrong with us if we weren't able to pretend everything was fine. But it turns out that this is actually a widespread problem, and it's time to speak up about it.)

7. Pascal's Law (May 9)

8. The Moderate Case Against Transgender Sports Bans (May 12) Good article. I think for a lot of people, when they hear about the debate over trans women playing in women's sports, they imagine that the pro-trans side is saying that any man can just decide "I identify as a woman" and then immediately compete in any women's sport- and that seems really wrong. Well, no, fortunately, it doesn't work that way. That is NOT what trans people are arguing for. 

The guidelines should be different for different sports, and different for different levels (professional sports, high school teams, little kids just running around on a soccer field, etc). The sports organizations should be making their own rules based on what's reasonable and fair for their specific sport. That's not what these political trans bans are doing at all- they're just about hating trans people.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Zero ships from China are bound for California’s top ports. Officials haven’t seen that since the pandemic (May 10)

But here's an update about that: US and China agree to slash tariffs for 90 days (May 12)

2. MAGA melts down over ‘WOKE MARXIST POPE’ who is a ‘Never Trumper liberal’ (May 8) A reminder that normal human decency will have MAGAs shrieking that you are a "WOKE MARXIST"- so like, don't try to contort yourself in an effort to present yourself in a way that will not lead to them saying that- it's not possible, they're going to say that anyway.

3. Rümeysa Öztürk, Tufts student held by Ice, vows to continue legal action after jail release (May 11)

4. First, do no harm—unless you're intersex or trans (May 6, via) "Lurie, however, kept its “pause” in place even then. New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell removed references to gender-affirming care from its website—even striking puberty-pausing medication from its list of services—but still promotes surgery to reduce “enlarged” clitorises on intersex six-month-olds."

5. Alliance Defending Freedom: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (May 12) !!!! Really glad to see John Oliver doing an episode on ADF. I grew up evangelical- my family got the newsletters from Focus on the Family and ADF (back when its name was Alliance Defense Fund). I read them all. They sent us the book "The Homosexual Agenda" and I read it. I really believed all their bullshit back then.

ADF wasn't just about opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage. They opposed any kind of legal protections for LGBT people at all. Seriously. It is not just about same-sex marriage. It's about queer people existing at all.

When I was in high school in the 2000's, there was this thing called "Day of Silence" when some students who were LGBT/allies would not talk for the entire day, as a way to call attention to the struggles that LGBT people face. ADF came up with a competing event called "Day of Truth," where students could go to their school and hand out literature about how gay people need to just repress themselves and follow God's law, and God will help free them from that "lifestyle" and become straight. That's the sort of thing ADF was into.

This is why I'm so angry, whenever I talk about what evangelicals think about queer issues- because I really did believe all their bullshit propaganda back then. Gay people are one-dimensional villains twirling their mustaches and plotting to destroy marriage because they hate God and they are into disgusting obscene sex stuff. Then eventually- because of the internet- I started reading what actual gay Christians had to say, and it turns out none of that was true.

I had believed ADF because... we were Christians, right? The leaders of ADF were good Christian role models, working so hard to follow God, to live the way God wanted us to live, to fight for what was right. Just like little teenage Perfect Number. And then to find out that all of it was bullshit, that their entire schtick is spreading hateful lies about a group of people. They know it's lies. They know. Is that what Jesus would want? This is why I'm so angry, as a queer Christian.

So yeah, nowadays, every lawsuit that Republicans are involved in, trying to ban abortion or be mean to queer people or generally force Christian symbols on all parts of government/schools/society- yeah, it's ADF lawyers doing it. Of course it is.

(One thing I will say about John Oliver's take, though- about the part where the conservative cake shop guy says he won't make a cake for a gay wedding, just like he won't make a pedophile cake- and John Oliver is astonished at how bizarre of a concept it is, a pedophile cake. Uh, that's one of the huge talking points from evangelical anti-gay groups- that homosexuality is adjacent to pedophilia. That gay people are more likely to be pedophiles and therefore shouldn't be allowed near kids. That if same-sex marriage is legal, there's no reason it shouldn't also be legal to sexually abuse children- there's no actual meaningful difference that would lead society to allow same-sex marriage but draw the line at child sexual abuse. This is an extremely common anti-gay talking point. I am 0% surprised this cake guy talks about being asked to make a pedophile cake as if that's the natural thing that would happen next if he made a cake for a gay wedding.)

Oh, and in case it's not obvious: They also believe trans people don't really exist.

6. “They’re Trying to Kidnap Someone” (May 10, via) "Surrounding them are a few dozen community members who were tipped off about the ICE raid and got to it before the police did. Before I arrived, they demanded to see a warrant. The ICE agents refused to provide one, so they created a human chain, which the ICE officers eventually broke through."

7. Episcopal Church leader says helping Afrikaners over other refugees is 'unfathomable' (May 13) "And the idea that we would be somehow resettling Afrikaners at this point over other refugees, who have been vetted and waiting in camps for months or even years, is unfathomable to us."

8. Rabbi and Cantor Alums of Brown Write To the University: (April 17) "President Trump’s attack on Brown and other universities has nothing whatsoever to do with combatting antisemitism. It weaponizes antisemitism and could, ironically, evoke classical sentiments of resentment toward the Jewish community, whose name is being scapegoated as a conduit for an ulterior motive."

9. Trump administration's universal flu vaccine project puzzles scientists (May 13) At first I was like, "a universal flu vaccine? Hey, if it works, that would be great!" But then I read the whole article and now I'm like, "this sounds like a bad idea."

"'We're going back to technology that was used 40, 50 years ago or more. So this is a little surprising to me why you would go backwards to this technology? It's a very old technology,' Poland says. 'This is what influenza vaccines in the 40s, 50s and 60s looked like.'"

10. A matchmaking service with a twist: Connecting big givers to programs cut by USAID (May 13) "'I think it's clear that private philanthropy is not going to be able to fill all the gaps,' says Weiss. 'But what we can do is staunch the bleeding, keep projects functioning so that it's possible for local organizations or local governments to take them over.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The great global redistributor we never hear about: money sent or brought back by migrants (January 13, via) "According to the UN, migrant workers send back about 15% of their earnings on average. But even a little money from rich countries can make a big difference in poorer ones. For example, 15% of the average annual income in the United States is nearly twice the average annual income in Colombia."

2. The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing (January, via) "But I think a second, larger reason is that misophonia is weird. It’s hard to explain and difficult to understand and doesn’t make any intuitive sense. After all, everyone hates the sound of chewing."

3. Democrats unveil legislation raising federal minimum wage to $17 an hour (April 8) It's a good idea. I'm skeptical about its chances of passing though.

4. Pulling Out The Big Guns For Needle Phobia In An Insane World Where Nobody Seems To Take It Seriously (February 20) I'm linking this because, I don't have needle phobia but I have similar things... This post takes it seriously and gives extremely practical suggestions, which is really rare to see. Usually people just treat you like you're being silly and making a big deal for no reason, and everything would be fine if you would just "relax."

5. Tidy Profit: Camera Captures the Cleaners Changing Lives (April 16) An article about women in China working as domestic workers (they are called "ayis" in China). We have an ayi who works for us, to take care of our baby while we're at work. (This is common in China because there aren't really daycares for infants.) She also does housework. In China if you can afford it, it really helps a lot to have an ayi.

6. Intuit, Owner of TurboTax, Wins Battle Against America’s Taxpayers (April 17) "Instead, it continued cajoling lawmakers and the White House into forcing millions of Americans to shell out hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars to file with expensive and confusing tax prep software."

7. Holy Saturday (April 17) "And now it’s Saturday and Jesus is dead and we’re all going to die and everything I’ve told you about him turns out to be in vain and everything I’ve staked my life on turns out to be in vain. Our faith is futile and we’re still hopeless in our sins. Jesus is dead and we are of all people most to be pitied."

8. Life and Living Not Death and Dying (April 17) "Christian theologians from multiple marginalized communities have spent years critiquing a theology that centers the good news on Jesus’ suffering rather than how life triumphed over suffering by undoing, overturning, and reversing that death."

Related to that: Good Friday Without Divine Violence (April 17) 

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. The Trump Administration Threat To Transgender Adult Care Is Growing At Lightning Speed (April 16) 

Also from Erin in the Morning: Washington State Passes Bill To Cover Some 12-Month Hormone Therapy Stockpiles (April 17) This is good news for trans people in Washington state. The thing that really surprised me was, it says actually hormone replacement therapy is usually for other health issues (menopause, etc)- trans people are only a small fraction of the people who need this kind of medical care.

2. THE GOOD TROUBLE CHECKLIST (April 3) "Figure out what your lane is. Then figure out who is local to you and already doing some of that work. How can you be useful? How can you extend existing efforts? How can you show up and raise hell? Do something."

3. 'Homegrowns are next': Trump hopes to deport and jail U.S. citizens abroad (April 16) WTF. And remember, he sent immigrants there without showing any proof that they were "gang members." He also wants to send US citizens there without showing any such evidence.

4. Trump exploiting antisemitism fears to undermine rule of law, warns Jewish coalition (April 16) "'Our safety as Jews has always been tied to the rule of law, to the safety of others, to the strength of civil society, and to the protection of rights and liberties for all,' reads the statement."

5. In the middle of a hepatitis outbreak, U.S. shutters the one CDC lab that could help (April 16)

6. Confusion reigns as asylum seekers who used CBP One receive notices to leave U.S. within 7 days (April 16) "'We have families who said ‘well, I’m just going to hide, because I can’t go back to my home country, I will be killed, so I prefer to hide,’' she said."

7. U.S.-born American citizen under ICE hold in Florida is released (April 18)

8. Exclusive: Senator Chris Van Hollen talks with Rachel Maddow live from El Salvador (April 17)

And: A Maryland senator visits his wrongfully deported constituent in El Salvador (April 17) "'I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar,' Van Hollen wrote on X. 'Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love.'"

Maybe Jesus Was A Pharisee

Jesus talking to Pharisees. Image source.

A few posts from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg which are worth reading (via):

Jesus and the Jews: Part One
Jesus and Beit Hillel (Part 2!) 
Wrapping up Jesus

These posts explore the possibility that maybe Jesus was a Pharisee, who followed the ideas of Hillel, and when the bible talks about Jesus having disagreements with "the Pharisees" (which happens A LOT), it's about his disagreements with other Pharisees who followed the ideas of Shammai.

Let me give some background here about what I was taught about the Pharisees, when I was evangelical: The Pharisees were religious leaders who were really into following the exact rules, and they totally missed the point of why God gave us the rules. They totally missed that God wants us to love and care about people. Instead, they would make more and more rules, and work very hard to follow them, just to be sure that they were obeying God correctly. 

In the modern evangelical church, if you call someone a Pharisee, it means they are being more strict about religious rules than you think they should be. For example, when I was growing up, girls were taught that we needed to be "modest", ie, we needed to wear clothes that boys would never interpret as sexy. (LOL have you met teenage boys?) My church taught this, but also looked disapprovingly on other conservative Christians who also taught modesty but added more specifics than we did. Those other, more fundamentalist Christians were measuring the exact length of girls' skirts, to make sure they met the "modesty" standards. We said that was "legalistic" and "like the Pharisees." We believed modesty was supposed to be more vibes-based, and shouldn't include extremely specific rules like that.

Looking back on it now, it's so ridiculous how each specific brand of conservative Christianity draws a line in some certain place to define the rules that Christians are supposed to live by, and declares that anyone who draws the line in a more permissive spot is rejecting God's law, while anyone who draws the line to be more strict is being too legalistic, like the Pharisees. We were like, "lol can you believe these senseless rules that these extreme fundamentalist Christians follow? They are completely different from the rules we follow, which are the correct rules given by the bible." Were they though?

When I was in the process of leaving evangelicalism, and I read a lot of ex-evangelical blogs, that's when I first heard that there's A LOT of anti-Semitism baked into evangelical Christianity. I had no idea before. A lot of very normal things you hear in church are anti-Semitic. Honestly, ex-evangelicals should be doing the work to unlearn that anti-Semitism- especially those of us who continue to be Christians. (Basically we believed something along the lines of "Jewish people were wrong about what their own scriptures meant [and Jews today continue to be wrong about that] and then Jesus came along and set them straight.") And the evangelical view of the Pharisees is one of the big examples of this anti-Semitism.

Evangelicals use the term "Pharisee" as a shorthand for "someone who is so fixated on rules that they miss the whole point." And the bible does portray them this way- honestly I would say the bible does portray them as this one-dimensional caricature, which is really not fair to them. The Pharisees were an actual serious group within Judaism back then. Jesus criticized them sometimes, but that doesn't mean their ideas were all bad. It *is* anti-Semitic for Christians to insult other Christians by saying "you're being like the Pharisees." (I've seen ex-evangelicals questioning the rules we were taught, and coming to the realization "oh my goodness, it was us evangelicals who were being like the Pharisees all along!" It's a good sentiment, but please leave the Pharisees out of it! See what I mean about how ex-evangelicals need to unlearn this anti-Semitism?)

And I'm aware that I titled this post "Maybe Jesus Was A Pharisee" and from an evangelical perspective, them's fightin' words. Like I'm saying "maybe Jesus was a heartless jerk who cared more about rules than people." Using "Pharisee" as a slur. No, I'm not saying that- what I mean (and what Rabbi Ruttenberg is saying) is, maybe Jesus was a member of this specific group of Jewish scholars who spent time discussing the nature of God and how we should live.

(Probably it's not just evangelicals who view Pharisees in this way. Probably there are other Christian groups which do too.)

Anyway, that's the background I wanted to give before discussing Rabbi Ruttenberg's blog posts. She presents the idea that maybe Jesus was a Pharisee, and the bible records the intracommunity debates that he had with other Pharisees. It's a good blog series, you should read it if you're really into the bible. It's especially good to get this historical background, from a Jewish perspective- this isn't something I had ever heard from Christians before.

I want to quote a few parts here which really stood out to me. There's this:

The Pharisees had Jesus’ back!

At that very hour some Pharisees came, and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” (Luke 13:31)

I read that and I was like, oh wow. Ruttenberg reads this as the Pharisees trying to protect Jesus- wow, I totally never read it that way. I always read that verse as "some Pharisees, who were always criticizing Jesus and trying to tell him what to do, came and said 'get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you,' ugh how annoying, what is these guys' problem?" Ruttenberg says "The Pharisees had Jesus' back" and I'm like, oh wow, I totally never ever thought that when I read that verse.

But her reading is very reasonable, right? If you read this in a totally different context, like "[somebody] came and said to [somebody else], 'Get away from here, for [somebody] wants to kill you,'" probably you would read it as them being concerned and trying to be helpful by warning him. 

It's just because it's Jesus and the Pharisees, and as evangelicals we always viewed the Pharisees in this way- that's why I always read this passage as an example of how the Pharisees were always causing trouble for Jesus and not believing in him like they were supposed to. It's mind-blowing to me to realize, just now, that that's not what this bible verse says at all. 

Another example from Rabbi Ruttenberg's posts is about handwashing. She discusses how the followers of Hillel and the followers of Shammai had debates about the correct order of operations when mixing wine- do you wash your hands before or after? Going through and nitpicking the logic of whether or not the water residue on the cup makes your hands unclean, etc. And then she presents this passage about Jesus:

When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. But the Pharisee was surprised when he noticed that Jesus did not first wash before the meal. Then the Lord said to him, “Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? (Luke 11:37-40) 

A lil' bonus antisemitism thrown in for funsies, but you see that Jesus either doesn't wash, or doesn't wash first, and Jesus snarks at our Pharisee friend for worrying about external cooties. He very well could be harshing on the Beit Shammai position.

Wow! Okay, this is FASCINATING! The hand-washing thing was a real debate among the Pharisees back then. Maybe Jesus had experience thinking through the logic of how one should wash one's hands, and participating in debates about it, and that's where he's coming from here. I always read this passage completely differently, like he's an outsider looking at the Pharisees and mocking them for being so silly.

Is it a very simplistic and shallow "haha look at those weirdos over there"? Or is it "I know what they're talking about. I know it too well, because I am one of them"?

Is it like... like some conspiracy theory that I have never had any interest in, like "flat earth" for example? You tell me some people believe the earth is flat, and I'll be like "lollll do they not use GPS, or?" My feeling is that it's so obvious that it's wrong- I just mock them with a one-liner and move on, with no interest in actually understanding their thinking. That's how I always read Jesus' interactions with the Pharisees in the bible. Like they were just stereotypes who were so obviously wrong.

Or is it more like, say, my experiences with believing in biblical inerrancy? Yes, I used to be evangelical, I used to believe the bible is inerrant, and all the layers of logic and reasoning that go along with that belief. Occasionally an atheist would come along and say something like "the bible is full of contradictions!" or "the bible says pi is equal to 3, lololol" and none of that affected me because those are extremely shallow criticisms from people who don't know anything about what it actually means to believe the bible is inerrant.

But I know how it really is. How in the bible, God commands genocide, and if you truly believe in inerrancy, and you get really into apologetics, you have to become the kind of person who believes genocide is right sometimes. I know how that is; I've been there. And I know how it is when you finally have permission to believe "these bible stories didn't really happen" or "they believed that God commanded this, but they were wrong," and the joy and freedom you feel when you don't have to be that kind of person any more. (Thank you, Peter Enns.)

I know how it is, and when I criticize the idea of inerrancy, or even joke about it, it's not just some shallow drive-by mockery. I understand what it's like to think that way.

Was that how Jesus was, with the Pharisees? Ruttenberg makes the case that Jesus may have been a Pharisee from the school of Hillel, and he argued with the Pharisees who followed Shammai. Both groups would have known the ins and outs of each other's arguments, and understood and respected each other, even though they strongly disagreed on some things. When you view it this way, it puts those bible passages about Jesus and the Pharisees in a totally different light.

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Related:

My mind is blown by how cool the Synoptic Problem is 

No One Can Take The Bible From Me