Hello, and way to completely miss the point, Homebrew, as has repeatedly happened since about the first time you ever got athwart my hawse. Discussion of Judges 1:19 is meaningful only against a background in which the other events in the OT are assumed to be as true as the verse under discussion. If, as you wish to assert, the other events to which I allude are all made-up shit, then we might as well dismiss the iron chariots story as made-up shit, rendering further discussion moot. I apologise for not spelling this out, but I thought it was self-evident.
Good for you. But if God was helping the Israelites as recently as the first half of the verse, perhaps it’s because it was only when they looked into the plains and went “Eek, iron chariots - we are so not going there!” that they suffered this crisis of confidence.
My advice to your niece? Sit tight until she has a place of her own where she can log on to the Dope, if it still exists by then, where she can post all the anti-religious snark she likes and get all the back-patting she could ever wish for. Catch you elsewhere, Skaldy.
I don’t think that is a very good idea. I think that she should tell her parents that while they are able to enforce outward conformity, her mind is still her own, and that no amount of intimidation and/or bullying can change that.
Then again, what do I know? I simply cannot imagine being in that type of situation. I grew up in the fundamentalist Church of Christ, but I certainly never experienced this type of “my way or the highway” behavior from my mother.
I feel for Jess, and I hope that she makes it through the next few years okay!
To the contrary, I think you are giving bad advice here. It is not unheard of for religious fundamentalists to throw kids out on the street for such open defiance, or even beat them to death.
I think her best bet is to keep her head down as much as possible, and have a kind of mantra ready for them. “I’m so sorry, mom & dad, I’m really trying but I have these doubts. I’ll keep working on it though. I want to be in the light of God’s love. And I love you both.”
Okay, you are probably right about that. Your advice is better than mine.
I was going back to my childhood and teenage years. I think that most of the “Church families” that I knew as a youth realized that you simply cannot command belief from another person, even one’s own child. You can only enforce behavior and “hope for the best”, whatever that means.
You know, when I apply this sort of logic to, say, an underwritten episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it gets sneered at as fanwanking. But when you do it with the Bible, everyone calls it theology.
Lying is really hard work. It’s my opinion that trying to keep up a lie like that would be more punishing and exhausting to her than the exorcisms would be.
I’m also unconvinced that she could even pull it off. Her parents are keenly suspicious of her (lack of) faith, and pulling a gigantic long-term lie over people who are expecting to be lied to is a task meant for more subtle and slippery people than Jess seems to be.
Realistically, what kind of college would Jess be going to? Local community college, or university where she’d be in a dorm or apartment? If her parents think she’s bad now, wait till she moves out and hangs with like-minded classmates and professors.
Skald, you fucking rock. If I’m ever in your neck of the woods, I’d like to buy you a beer or lunch or an ice cream cone or something and just chat. And I think your “supportive but silent” approach is prolly best. I know from Pentecostals, and they is crazy. Not the good crazy either.
Jess, you fucking rock, too. Keep your chin up, your mouth closed, and start planning how you can be self-sufficient ASAP. Get your Uncle Skald’s advice if you can, pay attention to what he says, and know that better, more rational days will be yours.
FWIW, I wouldn’t go fawning to Mom & Dad. Just stay quiet, do what they want, and when they ask questions, answer with the bare minimum that will satisfy them. They obviously just want to hear what they want to hear. Let them, and know that survival is a task and a skill set; there is no shame in doing what you must to survive a bad situation.
What if her parents will only pony up to send her to some place like Bob Jones or Regents, where “like minded classmates” means “like her parents”?
Skald you better be prepared to counter this in a few years. To talk her parents out of such a move, or to convince Jess that she is better off turning down the money and strking out on her own, rather than submit to another 4 years of brainwashing, by experts.
Of course, and we call it fanwankery when we argue whether Vulcan has no moon or seven, whereas when we peer closely at the orbital perihelion precession of Mercury and find it doesn’t agree with Newton’s Theory of Gravity we call it physics. One of these things is not like the other, even though they’re both discussions about heavenly bodies; one deserves to be taken seriously, the other doesn’t.
Would you care to review my earlier post and, without necessarily considering the OT from start to finish as anything other than a story, explain how it is that the God-character would be presumed incapable of dealing with iron chariots, given the stated character’s other supposed extraordinary feats?
If you wish to advance the hypothesis that the author of Judges wasn’t on-message with the author of Genesis, say, then you can account for why the author of Judges later credits God with granting one man the ability to rout a thousand iron-wielding Philistines while armed only with the jawbone of an ass.
If we actually get as far as reasoning that God as written elsewhere would not have the slightest difficulty in dealing with iron chariots, perhaps we can then discuss where the weak link might actually have been in the incident described.
In case it needs to be said: I am strongly opposed to the physical chastisement of teenage girls, and I also personally dislike being made to pick favourite Bible verses and explain why they’re my favourite. I always struggled with house meetings over this kind of thing.
Today’s shirt on woot made me think of your niece, Skald, especially the first paragraph of the description. I wish her all luck in surviving the next few years. It has to be very hard to watch for you.
Only up to the point where someone starts suggesting that the orbit of Mercury is being affected by Klingon warships. At that point, neither subject deserves to be taken seriously. The question of why the Israelites were unable to defeat the people of the valley (whoever they may have been) is a matter of legitimate history. Until you start injecting supernatural explanations, at which point you have reduced the discussion to the level of arguing about where that polar bear came from in Lost.
Right, just as I said: you want me to fanwank the story so that the portrayed events don’t contradict the established premise. As far as such things go, “The Israelites pissed off God, so he stopped helping them,” is a decent enough fanwank. But as someone is always compelled to point out in these sorts of threads, the book doesn’t actually say that. At one point God is helping them drive their enemies before them, and then at another, they’re getting their asses kicked by chariots, with no intervening action to explain why God isn’t still on their side. It’s easy enough to invent that action to explain it, but you’re still creating an extra-textual explanation to defend an apparent inconsistency. And at some point, the volume of fanwank necessary to to force a text into continuity with itself overwhelms the value of the text itself, and the reader is forced to concede that the text simply lacks internal consistency, and is insufficient to the task of maintaining suspension of disbelief.
So I see that you are in fact unable to demonstrate that the God-character in the made-up story of Judges simply finds iron chariots beyond his ability to deal with. Good, we’ll call that settled then - with the side note that any third party who does so conclude is reaching a conclusion not supported by the text.
Per your first paragraph, I really don’t get why you should be opposed to discussion of what a supernatural character in a story about a supernatural character could or could not do. That’s kinda sorta what the whole discussion was about in the first place.
Well, it’s pretty heavily implied. We start out with God helping the Israelites defeat the enemies from the field. Then the iron chariots show up, and the Israelites can’t beat them. There’s no mention of God not being in the field with them, as he was earlier in the same sentence, so it’s reasonable to assume that he’s still in the picture. The idea that he bugged out at the comma splice because the Israelites were insufficiently pious is not found in the text. It’s a reader’s necessary invention to maintain the internal consistency of the work. And it’s not difficult to invent equally supported alternative explanations. For example, we could just as easily reason that the charioteers had their own god in the field, and that thier deity sent Yahweh packing.
I’m not at all opposed to it, so long as it’s clear we’re discussing fiction. However, we’re not talking about people discussing fiction as fiction, we’re talking about people arguing fiction as fact - and that’s where inconsistencies like an omnipotent God suddenly making himself scarce in the face of iron-age military tech become significant. Sure, you can invent all the excuses for that you want: but it doesn’t change the fact that your excuses are entirely extra-textual.
I agree that the author of Judges 1:19 leaves us with a little work to do in puzzling out exactly why the wheels ironically fell off the Israelite campaign at that particular time, and since the verse doesn’t tell us we are forced to supply our own explanation. All I am arguing for is that “This proves that God, far from being omnipotent, was simply too weak to deal with iron chariots” is as unsupported by the text as any other possible explanation we might devise. I hope that is a modest enough target for you to find acceptable. I certainly don’t intend at this time to argue for the literal truth of every miracle described in the Old Testament.
We may consider alternatives:
God, as asserted by Skald’s niece, could not deal with iron chariots
God, as you suggest, was opposed by another local deity and forced to remove himself from the action
God, as I suggest, was well able to deal with the situation, but the Israelites refused to confront the charioteers, so God let them deal with the consequences of their fear, doubt and disobedience
Some other explanation
And why not? Alternatives are good. All I ask is that, before advancing the first of these as the likeliest explanation, you explain how this is supportable. You talk of inconsistencies: I say that a God that is unable to deal with either iron chariots themselves or a pesky local deity is thoroughly inconsistent with the view of Him presented elsewhere in the text; weak and vacillating Israelites, a good deal more consistent.
If you want to view the whole work as fiction, I’m not about to tell you not to. The trouble then is that you can’t reasonably use Judges 1:19 to show that God isn’t all that.
She’s my cousin. First cousin once removed. Her mother’s my first cousin; “Jess” and I are first cousins once removed. “First cousin” means that the nearest shared ancestor is a grandparent to one of us; “removed” means that we are not of the same generation distant from said grandparent.
Which is not to say that my actual nieces wouldn’t face similar opposition if they were to declare themelves agnostic, atheist, B’hai, Muslim, Jewish, lesbian, or anything other than Chuch of God in Christ.
Anyway… as Jess tells it, she got in trouble for asking a theological question her parents couldn’t answer, and for suggesting that the King James Version of the Bible cannot be inerrant, taken literally in every verse, and consonant with their church’s teachings, which, frankly, are moronic. (COGIC teachings, I mean.)
