For quality biblical education, I am partial to the Brick Testament. Here is their illustrated guide to Iron Chariots.
In addition to what DocCathode said, I feel obliged to point out that in Satan’s one unambigulous OT appearance, he is clearly on the staff of the Lord of Hosts. The LoH is on his throne, getting reports from his courtiers, and when Satan shows up, no one screams “Security! Get this rebel out of here! What is this, Wolfram & Hart?” Instead, the LoH and Satan chat quite amiably, and it is the former who brings up Job and starts the whole “let’s persecute the righteous man and murder all his family because i am bored” bit.
Here’s the lolcat translation of the verse in question.
Really this isn’t to hard to fanwank. The Lord was “with them” in that he was providing moral support and whatnot. He wasn’t firing supernatural artillery or anything. Rather just supernatural cheerleading as he continues the slow fade into abstraction that characterizes the OT.
“Yeah, we lost. And y’know what? You watched us. You coulda turned the chariots into steam or the iron into snowflakes. You coulda teleported them to Mt. Ararat. But you didn’t lift a finger. You’re driftin’ outa touch Yahweh. God help us all.”
There’s one interpretation that the problem wasn’t God’s inability to defeat iron chariots, but Judah’s lack of faith in his own ability to defeat iron chariots even with God’s help.
That’s an interesting out. Similarly, Barbara Gordon was not crippled by the Joker because Batman was not there to save her, but because she did not BELIEVE enough in Batman’s power and suspected that later that night he might actually be sharing a laugh with the clown…
If anyone is interested in a large and well-researched compendium of quotations and historical data concerning Christian doubt and agnosticism, one can be found here.
You can skip the first page or three if you like; it gets meatier as it goes along.
Glad to hear an update on Jess…what a sharp kid!
This is quite an educational thread; I didn’t know about the LOLcats Bible Translation.
teh METALZ!!!1!
Actually the story makes me sad when I think about it too much. She’s going to spend the next four years with her parents, aunts, uncles, most of her cousins, and many of her peers trying to break her spirit on this issue.
Just be thankful she’s not a gay boy in her situation - no offence but your family sounds like the kind of people who’d go for electro-shock therapy first and wonder if it’s the right thing for their child later.
I think she should make up a verse entirely, and vaguely claim “It’s in there somewhere”.
I think it’s great you’re supporting her. You may or may not want to have a conversation with her about the difference between giving in and picking your battles.
My favorite verse (especially for that situation) is Matthew 6:5-6.
And if I wasn’t already advising her to not piss of her parents just for the sake of doing it, I might wonder what they’d do if they found a bunch of printouts of blog entries like this:
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/03/h-e-double-hockey-sticks.html
(he’s a committed Christian who is … annoyed… at fundies’ theology, and refutes it in a very intelligent but deeply caring way).
Honestly, I think she picked a pretty good battle. She did exactly as she was asked. She might have fudged a bit more on her explanation why she liked the phrase, but if they tell her she’s wrong, whe can at least have the pleasure of watching them squirm while coming up with a more “acceptable” interpretation.
And the prophet put on the seer stones Urim and Thermim and said “I guess I look pretty Devo, right?”
Batman was in the Bible?
This I missed!
BOT.
You should print out these updates and discussions for future reference for Jess when she is old enough to know how hard it was for you to watch her go through this crap and how a bunch of random internet strangers are all in the bleachers cheering for her ( RAH!) and giving the stink eye to her nuttier than squirrel poo parents ( BOOO!)
That lolcat bible is what was missing from my years in forced religious edumacation. 25+ years of not caring about any of it. Go me!
Nice link! Thanks for sharing that.
I’m all for questioning religious authority. Any faith weak enough that reasonable questions need to be swatted away immediately doesn’t deserve to survive.
I still think it ends in tears, and as I mean that literally, I am torn between advising her to be all ballsy and stuff and never tell a lie and telling her to keep her head low and her true opinions to herself.
Ah, but she has a lot of spirit…and she has you (and your family) for support. Yes, the next four years are going to be rough, but she has a good approach here: keep asking questions. She won’t convince her family to actually think for themselves, but their inability to answer will just reinforce her ideas.
I can’t really say that I have any useful advice but I was in a situation that had some similarities to your nieces (my parents aren’t quite as extreme, but still not anywhere near what I would call moderate or liberal christianity). A large part of me wishes that I had not kept quite for the four odd years that I did, because in the end it still blew up and I think it might have actually been made worse by letting it simmer for all that time. It was one of the major reasons why my father and I did not speak for over a year after a lifetime of being very close and I really think that that consequence could have been avoided if I had done things differently.
That said I do think I would have been a lot happier during those years had I had a friend or relative who I could have talked to about the issues that were troubling me rather than having to go through all of it on my own. So I guess that I think what you are doing is the right thing, it may well end in tears as you say, but, based on my experience, I think it would be worse if you advised your niece to keep her head down
Oh, I like slacktivist- good recommendation! Someone on this board turned me on to him a while back. He does harp on the same notes occasionally, but it’s still pretty good reading.
And Skald, good for you for providing Jess with a safe place to be where she can think her own thoughts in peace. It takes at least as much backbone to deliberately not engage your relatives for her sake as it does to blow up at them. I’m in my early twenties watching a bunch of my friends reject the rather strict Christianity that they grew up with almost violently, and it really does strain their family relationships. Good for you for providing a safety valve, giving her the chance to carefully and thoughtfully come to her own conclusions, be they Christian or not.
Well, you can sneer, of course. And given that the OT credits God with creation of the universe ex nihilo and every living thing in it, eradicating all but one boat-load of life with a flood, making a 99-year-old postdiluvian[sup]*[/sup] woman suddenly fertile, loosing a whole series of plagues on Egypt culminating in the selective death of every firstborn except the Israelites’, drowning Pharaoh’s armies in the Red Sea, feeding a wandering horde with manna from heaven, and too many more beside to list individually, then yeah, there’s a good chance He’d find iron chariots a bridge too far. Still, perhaps you ought to look at the Israelites’ history from Exodus onwards of flinching, trembling, prevaricating and vacillating, and consider where that might plausibly have something to do with the events in Judges 1:19, and so might your niece.
But when you selectively pick a verse from the Bible and tailor your interpretation of it simply in order to declare brattily “See? God’s not so great after all!”, then don’t be over-surprised when you piss off the people you were trying to piss off, and really don’t try to pretend that’s not what you were doing. It’s that whole rational clear thinking thing.
Because before the Flood it was nothing out of the ordinary for people to be reproducing at well over a hundred, that’s why “postdiluvian”