The Republican rule of law is if a sixth grader feels “uncomfortable” with a book, or a school board deems it “pornographic,” that book must be banned from the library.
And I agree.
It isn’t enough to suggest that parents who are moved by sex, simply to tell their children not to read it. And it isn’t enough that parents preclude their children from going on the Internet, where every type of sex is readily available.
The Internet should be banned, too.
And as everyone knows, homosexuality is, by definition, pornography, so any book that involves gay, loving couples also should be banned. And I agree with that, too.
And if you disagree, my beliefs take precedence over your beliefs.
Therefore, I want — no, demand — that the book containing the following passages be removed from all libraries, public and religious.
Our children (who never hear such language from their friends) should not be exposed and made to say they feel “uncomfortable” (although that’s not the language a sixth grader would use without extensive coaching from his parents.)
OK, so there is no actual evidence that reading about sex has any adverse effect on a child, but I know what’s best for my kids and for your kids, too.
Here are the offending passages from that filthy book:
“You also took the fine jewelry I gave you, the jewelry made of my gold and silver, and you made for yourself male idols and engaged in prostitution with them.” (Ezekiel 16:17)
“If two men, a man, and his countryman, are struggling together, and the wife of one comes near to deliver her husband from the hand of the one who is striking him and puts out her hand and seizes his genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; you shall not show pity.” (Deuteronomy 25:11-12)
“When she carried on her whoring so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her, as I had turned in disgust from her sister.
Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose issue was like that of horses.
Yes, you know what “members” are.
Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts.” (Ezekiel 23:18-21)
“A loving doe, a graceful deer — may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love.” (Proverbs 5:19)
“Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.” (7.3)
“Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit.” (7.7)
“My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.” (1:13)
“I am a wall, and my breasts are like towers. Thus I have become in his eyes like one bringing contentment.” (8:10)
“Blow on my garden, that its fragrance may spread abroad. Let my lover come into his garden and taste its choice fruits.” (4:16)
And that isn’t a garden she wants him to blow on.
“My beloved put his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.” (5:4)
A “door”?
Saul replied, “Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’”
Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines. When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law.
So before the allotted time elapsed, David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law.
Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage. (1 Samuel 18:25-27)
“And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.
And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.
Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.” (Genesis 19:33-36)
No one should be forced to read that. Of course, no one ever is forced to read it, but anyway . . .
Now when she had brought them to him to eat, he took hold of her and said to her, “Come, lie with me, my sister.”
But she answered him, “No, my brother, do not force me, for no such thing should be done in Israel. Do not do this disgraceful thing! And I, where could I take my shame?
And as for you, you would be like one of the fools in Israel. Now therefore, please speak to the king; for he will not withhold me from you.”
However, he would not heed her voice; and being stronger than she, he forced her and lay with her. (2 Samuel 13:11-14)
If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you. (Deuteronomy 22:23-24)
I don’t object to the part about stoning people to death. It’s the sex that kids shouldn’t know about.
While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house. Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, “Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him.”
The owner of the house went outside and said to them, “No, my friends, don’t be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don’t do this outrageous thing. Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish.
But as for this man, don’t do such an outrageous thing.”
But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight.
When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, “Get up; let’s go.”
But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home.
When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel. (Judges 19:22-29)
Again, I don’t mind if my child reads about cutting up a woman into twelve pieces and strewing them about. But that reference to rape is disgusting.
Now, some of you heathens may not object to these passages, but sex is filth, filth I tell you, and it has no place in the home or in the library.
My blissful children have been tutored that babies come from the stork. That’s how I was raised, and my ignorance is as it should be.
So, I insist that the book be banned. If your kids need something to do, give them guns so they can stand their ground against rampaging gays.
P.S. Of course, it already has happened.
When book banning begins, there always will be someone whose morality or judgment is superior to yours, and they object to something.
And for some strange reason, the objectors seem to get their way. I wonder why.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell
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This is exactly why the future belongs to homeschooling, not the babysitting factories where minds get poisoned to death.
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If “poisoned to death” means instilled with anti-black, anti-red, anti-yellow, anti-brow, anti-gay, anti-nonChristian, anti-science anti-woman bigotry plus pro-gun idiocy, I nominate homeschooling as a great source. Kids aren’t born bigots; they learn it at home.
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And no more dangerous “sardine can” transportation.
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I know I have a soft bigotry of low expectations for certain groups [evangelical homeschoolers especially] that was picked up at home. https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Bush-fears-soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-is-5393680.php
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expenditures https://www.colorado.edu/education/sites/default/files/attached-files/Welner%20%26%20Weitzman_The%20Soft%20Bigotry.pdf
Some have high expectations for AI both juicing their profits and permanently replacing a great many of their remaining workers with all their long tail costs.
“We won the poorly educated vote. I love the poorly educated” – Trump Not a joke. Not parody. Not out of context. Trump ACTUALLY said this.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-socialmedia/trump-loves-the-poorly-educated-and-social-media-clamors-idUSKCN0VX26B
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“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” — Seneca
Pious fraud is used to describe fraud in religion emanating from a belief that the “end justifies the means”.
A pious fiction is a narrative that is presented as true by the author, but is considered by others to be fictional albeit produced with an altruistic motivation. The term is sometimes used pejoratively to suggest that the author of the narrative was deliberately misleading readers for selfish or deceitful reasons. The term is often used in religious contexts, sometimes referring to passages in religious texts.
In Plato’s The Republic, a noble lie is a myth or a lie knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony.
https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/2016/04/waj408011 From Plato to Moses: Genesis-Kings as a Platonic Epic
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper remarks, “It is hard to understand why those of Plato’s commentators who praise him for fighting against the subversive conventionalism of the Sophists, and for establishing a spiritual naturalism ultimately based on religion, fail to censure him for making a convention, or rather an invention, the ultimate basis of religion.” Religion for Plato is a noble lie, at least if we assume that Plato meant all of this sincerely, not cynically. Popper finds Plato’s conception of religion to have been very influential in subsequent thought. https://web.archive.org/web/20071209060939/http://www.positiveliberty.com/2007/07/open-society-vi-on-religion-as-a-noble-lie.html
Religion serves to make the inferiors accept their station in life, while the superiors — those who are in on the secret — will do their utmost to make sure that the inferiors continue to believe the noble lie. The superior men (and, Plato seems to say, the inferiors too) will reap the benefits of religion’s enslavement, an enslavement that the superiors know to be founded on a lie.
But at this point the debate tends, mysteriously, to bog down. Discussion of the possibility that religion might actually be a noble lie usually proceeds as follows:
One party will say that it is no such thing, for his own faith is sincere. This sort of begs the question of whether religion actually is a noble lie, for this party may well be lying — even, perhaps, to himself.
Then a second party, loosely following Pascal, will observe that religion has good effects for everyone, and so perhaps it does not matter much if it happens for some to be a noble lie.
A third party will suggest that religion has more bad effects than good, and that the lie is therefore vicious, not noble. He may well demand that the sincere stop following their sincere beliefs, and that the liars stop lying.
And a fourth party — who speaks in part for me — will opine that there is never anything noble about lying, and that the consequences in the long term will certainly be bad. (The first party to the discussion will hasten to agree, of course, and then to insist that he believes his religion to be true.)
But there is another question to consider here: The notion that religion might be a noble lie, and that only an elect few should ever know the truth, is found everywhere in western philosophy. What can it possibly mean, if we are all participating in something that we all acknowledge might actually be a noble lie? We can’t all be Nietzschean supermen, or Platonic philosopher-kings, at once.
It’s worth reviewing briefly how common this idea really is: Plato openly recommended the noble lie. Machiavelli praised Roman paganism because to his mind it had been exactly what Plato described. Pascal candidly considered it, and permutations of the idea can be found in Hume, Mill, and Marx. It’s even to be found in Nietzsche, who praised religion’s ability to bring out great deeds in past civilizations, even if any particular ancient religion really was false or arbitrary. Indeed, most students of the intellectual history of the West are virtually guaranteed to meet the idea of the noble lie at some point or another.
And so the idea of the noble lie, known only to the elect, begins to dissolve of its own accord: If everyone who ever bothers to learn about political thought will soon meet with this idea, then “elect” is no longer the right word for the knowers. The lie is no longer secret; it is universal. Potentially, we are all lying to one another — while knowing, quite openly, that the whole works may be founded on a lie. A shared lie, “common” in both senses of the word.
Devilish questions arise: The noble lie, as originally stated, is designed to rule over the inferiors among us, to civilize them, or at the very least to render them useful cannon fodder for the good of their betters (Popper subsequently denied that he accused Plato or later Platonists of this last, but the implication seems fairly strong to me all the same). Will the noble lie still work even now, when the supposed social inferiors are nearly all literate and have usually encountered some rough idea of how the noble lie works?
If all of us are pretending to religion, and if all of us know, or at least suspect, that the others may be lying — then who, exactly, is being kept under control? Ourselves? Our baser instincts, understood now to exist universally, and to whom we are obliged to lie? What if the lie is designed so that we will all seem good to one another in public, while we each practice our vices in private, hoping that someone else (everyone else?) is going to be virtuous? What if we think that this is a defection in the prisoner’s dilemma (individual or collective) — but, in reality, it’s not, because the consequences of our defections are not as severe as we collectively think they are?
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Religion is claiming to believe in “law and order” while supporting Donald Trump.
Religion is claiming to be pro-life while supporting easy access to guns.
Religion is claiming that your god is all-knowing, all-powerful, and always right, while claiming that other gods are false gods.
Religion is claiming to know for certain what cannot be known for certain.
Religion is claiming that those who do not believe what you believe are evil.
Religion is claiming to protect children from facts while indoctrinating them with your nonfactual beliefs.
Religion must have a Darwinian purpose, because despite initiating massive pain, suffering, and death, it persists through the centuries in all cultures.
Don’t you wonder whether animals have religion? Does my dog believe I am God?
Is it right?
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Plato advised that the chosen population of a most perfect state should be divided up into twelve tribes — sound familiar? — those dumb evangelicals are still wondering what happened to ten of of those tribes who went missing at some point.
Argonauts of the Desert’ presents a revolutionary new commentary on the Bible and its origins, arguing that most biblical stories and laws were inspired by Greek literature. From Genesis to Kings, the books of the Bible may have been written by a single author, a Hellenized Judean scholar who used Plato’s ideal state in The Laws as a primary source. As such, biblical Israel is a recreation of that twelve tribes State and the stories surrounding the birth, life and death of that State were inspired by Greek epics. Each chapter presents the biblical material and compares this to the Greek or Roman equivalents, discussing similarities and differences. https://www.amazon.com/stores/Philippe-Wajdenbaum/author/B003IOA8IY?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible for the first time compares the ancient law collections of the Ancient Near East, the Greeks and the Pentateuch to determine the legal antecedents for the biblical laws. Following on from his 2006 work, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, Gmirkin takes up his theory that the Pentateuch was written around 270 BCE using Greek sources found at the Great Library of Alexandria, and applies this to an examination of the biblical law codes. A striking number of legal parallels are found between the Pentateuch and Athenian laws, and specifically with those found in Plato’s Laws of ca. 350 BCE. Constitutional features in biblical law, Athenian law, and Plato’s Laws also contain close correspondences. Several genres of biblical law, including the Decalogue, are shown to have striking parallels with Greek legal collections, and the synthesis of narrative and legal content is shown to be compatible with Greek literature.
All this evidence points to direct influence from Greek writings, especially Plato’s Laws, on the biblical legal tradition. Finally, it is argued that the creation of the Hebrew Bible took place according to the program found in Plato’s Laws for creating a legally authorized national ethical literature, reinforcing the importance of this specific Greek text to the authors of the Torah and Hebrew Bible in the early Hellenistic Era. This study offers a fascinating analysis of the background to the Pentateuch, and will be of interest not only to biblical scholars, but also to students of Plato, ancient law, and Hellenistic literary traditions. https://www.amazon.com/Plato-Creation-Hebrew-Russell-Gmirkin/dp/0367878364/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
The Elephantine papyri predate all extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, and thus give scholars a very important glimpse at how Judaism was practiced in the fifth century BCE. They show clear evidence of the existence in c. 400 BCE of polytheistic Jews who seem to have had no knowledge of a written Torah or the narratives described therein:
“So far as we learn from these texts Moses might never have existed, there might have been no bondage in Egypt, no exodus, no monarchy, no prophets. There is no mention of other tribes and no claim to any heritage in the land of Judah. Among the numerous names of colonists, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, David, so common in later times, never occur (nor in Nehemiah), nor any other name derived from their past history as recorded in the Pentateuch and early literature. It is almost incredible, but it is true.” — Arthur Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C. pg. xxiii [published at Oxford in 1923]
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