I bought The Gospel According to Peanuts when I was a kid too young to understand it wasn’t a real Peanuts book, and was severely disappointed. Archie pulled the same bait and switch…
I have no problem saying it’s important to study the Bible. Knowing the context for many of America’s most powerful political movements is crucial to understanding the country. Understanding our history without reading the Bible would be like trying to understanding the history of the People’s Republic of China without reading Mao’s Little Red Book.
Then you shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your daughters whom the Lord your God has given you, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy will oppress you.
Further, you will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters you will eat.
I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters
etc., etc.
Are you also unfamiliar with God’s psychopathic tendency to smite at the least provocation? Also his affinity for beetles. Smiting and beetles seem to occupy much of his attention, I grant that advocating eating your own children is only a side-gig.
You need a decent grasp of Harry Potter to understand the Bible.
Yes, and? All those passages use cannibalism in the same way, as an archetypal illustration of the horrors to which people can be driven by extreme famine. Where do you get “advocating?”
I’m certainly not denying that the Bible DOES advocate lots of stuff that’s horrific by modern standards, but this particular charge seems off base.
That would be in the “you shall” and the “you will” and “I will make them” parts. But perhaps my skills at exegesis are less sophisticated than yours.
I think it’s pretty clear that all those "you will"s are used in the future tense, not the command voice. It’s not saying “you SHOULD eat your kids”, it’s saying “you will be in a position where you won’t be able to resist doing so”. I don’t know Hebrew well enough to say whether the ambiguity of the English translation is also present in the original.
I’m certainly not aware of any Jewish or Christian source that interprets these verses as commands. Which is kind of the point; if you want to know what religious people think, you have to actually ask them. If you, as a person unfamiliar with the cultural and theological background of the text, pull some translated verses of Scripture completely out of context and say “Aha! This is what you REALLY believe!”, all you do is look like a fool.
Which is precisely the value of well-taught “Bible as Literature” type courses; just like the works of Homer, Beowulf or Gilgamesh, and even Shakespeare, a modern English speaker isn’t going to be able to make any sense out of a straight translation, much less appreciate it for its literary merits. You need extensive footnotes and a good teacher to give you the background to appreciate the text on its own terms.
No, you don’t. They’ll tell you.
Which is exactly what the people pushing for these classes are NOT looking for. They want indoctrination, pure and simple.
Oh yes, I agree that the class discussed in the OP is a complete travesty on both pedagogical and Constitutional levels.
There goes my home state, makin’ me proud, again!
Of course, I’m being facetious. I’m really tired of this religious shit!
Now you’re just preaching to the choir.
Amen ta all that, brother!
That seems like a fine distinction, when an omnipotent God could clearly avoid condemning them to such dire straits altogether.
And eating your own children is hardly something that would occur to psychologically healthy people, even in a siege. Why is God so pathologically focused on this outcome? Wouldn’t psychologically healthy people usually do the opposite - give all available food to their children, and risk starving themselves?
And you conveniently ignored these:
I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters
Therefore, fathers will eat their sons among you, and sons will eat their fathers; for I will execute judgments on you and scatter all your remnant to every wind.
So God is fine with letting his people starve in a siege, and has a bizarre and unnatural obsession with the idea that people starving in a siege will specifically eat their own children. And he also thinks it’s perfectly justifiable to punish naughty people by forcing them to eat their own children.
Perhaps “advocating” was not the perfect word for all this. But if you think the fine distinction in meaning exonerates God’s psychotic inscestuous-cannibalism fetish, I commend your faith in his benevolent intentions.
Don’t forget the It’s okay to dash the brains of the children of your enemies out against a wall part to say nothing of raping their wives.
Of course, that’s God 1.0, not 2.0 so it’s all good. 
Yeah, those Jews sure are bastards!
Slaying all enemies, children and cattle included, was Bronze Age SOP. But yes, giving the Philistines hemorrhoids was pretty bastard there.
Surely you’re not implying that this means the content of the Bible comes from Bronze Age people rather than the immortal and benevolent mind of God?
Yes I am. And don’t call me “Yea Verily.”