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There are parts of the Bible where a prostitute is mutilated, butchered, and shipped to her rapists [1], parts where a woman fantasizes about men with donkey di

There are parts of the Bible where a prostitute is mutilated, butchered, and shipped to her rapists [1], parts where a woman fantasizes about men with donkey dicks and horse cum [2], parts where a father is seduced by and impregnates his daughters [3], children being murdered for making fun of a bald guy [4], and many, many more things that I don't think would be appropriate for a small child. It's fine if you believe this stuff, and maybe these are layered with beautiful metaphors and it's beautiful when you know the subtext, but I don't think it would be appropriate to read a lot of this to a young child. Maybe you don't agree, but I think it can hardly be surprising that people wouldn't want their kids to read it until they are at least a little older. [1] Judges 19 [2] Ezekiel 23:20 [3] Genesis 19:30–38 [4] 2 Kings 2:23–25.

carlosjobim 2y ago
A lot of the Bible is tales of what incredibly evil people do, not an endorsement of those actions. A lot of the tales is also sins and mistakes normal people make, because they aren't saints. You need to have a certain level of maturity to be able to read and understand the Bible and other ancient books. If you don't have that, it's like believing that the TV news is endorsing serial killers, wars, and natural disasters, because they are reporting on them. You can find the truth of human evil told repeatedly in the Bible, it's not a fairy tale, so you should forget about that perspective. The Bible is absolutely not suitable for children, except for choice parts. Those people who thought it was a good idea to teach the Bible to small children did a great disservice to those people and to religion. It's a hard core book for adolescents and above.
- tombert 2y ago
  > A lot of the Bible is tales of what incredibly evil people do, not an endorsement of those actions. Mostly agree, though not completely. There are actions that are kind of deemed "moral" that I don't think are good, e.g. Abraham being super willing to murder his son to make God happy. Or Moses killing all the first-born children of Egypt with the Angel of Death. That's pretty evil, and Abraham and Moses are kind of the "heroes" of those stories. I agree that there is wisdom to be found in there, and that it requires a level of maturity and literary understanding to parse that sometimes. It's a book written over the course of several hundred (thousands?) of years with hundreds of stories, it's not weird to think that there would be some good stuff in there. > The Bible is absolutely not suitable for children, except for choice parts. Yeah, I agree with that. The "do unto others" stuff is perfectly fine to teach to small children, and even stuff with slightly more nebulous but ultimately clever themes like the Prodigal Son are fine. I think I'd save the stuff about murdering and mutilating concubines until you're comfortable with them watching R-rated movies. That's not a dig in itself, though. My favorite movie of all time is Ghost in the Shell (1995). It's got lots of wisdom and cleverness and to me it's nearly perfect, but if I had kids I don't think I'd let them watch it until they were 13 or 14, even though I don't think that the themes in it are harmful or endorsing bad behavior.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > I think I'd save the stuff about murdering and mutilating concubines until you're comfortable with them watching R-rated movies. Really? Do you feel the same way about Bluebeard? Cinderella? This isn't a rare motif in children's stories.
    - tombert 2y ago
      I'm not sure I know what Bluebeard is, so I can't comment on that. The original somewhat gory Cinderella stories? I might wait until they're a bit older. I don't have kids, so this is all hypothetical, of course.
      - tmtvl 2y ago
        Bluebeard is a fairy tale about a lass who marries a guy called Bluebeard and he gives her the keys to his house and tells her not to go into one specific room and that room contains the bodies of his former wives. I might be misremembering it somewhat, but I believe that's the gist.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    > Abraham being super willing to murder his son to make God happy. Sacrificing your own children is a human behaviour so common through history and with different cultures, that it's basically a biological instinct. Even today parents send their sons to die in industrialized war to prove their faith for the government, as well as sacrifice their children in ways that are less explicit than that - always to prove their faith and loyalty to the entity they worship religiously, whether that's a man worshipped as a god, or a disembodied concept that they worship, such as "the state". The story of Abraham is a way to break that spell. The primitive human instinct is to worship by giving gifts, and then naturally giving the greatest gift you can give to prove your faith, which is your child. I interpret the story of Abraham as a clever way to break one of the most evil and persistent traditions of humanity, which is child sacrifice. And the story is much more efficient than simply saying "You shouldn't sacrifice your own children". Put yourself in his shoes (there have probably been thousands of Abrahams through time). If he says "I'm not going to sacrifice my child", the tribespeople will say that his God is weak because Abraham dares to give less of a sacrifice than the best, or that Abraham puts his own desires in front of what's good for the tribe (pleasing God or any god). If God told him to sacrifice his son and God later changed his mind, that's another thing. The story puts an effective limit on the level of worship. Sacrifice animals sure, but don't sacrifice your own children. Human sacrifice and ritual cannibalistic wars of genocide is the natural condition of humans as a species. That is the simple answer to why humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without making any progress before something strange happened and we became enlightened. Seeing as the Bible is a collection of stories that where told for thousands of years before being written down, I would think that there are entire generations and cultures who have live by those stories and commands for longer than the Bible has existed in any form. Pre-civilization tribes that we know nothing about. The Bible is our deepest probe into deep time, and absolutely fascinating.
Aeolun 2y ago
If they're old enough to be able to read it, I'm inclined to believe they're old enough to figure out that the 0.01% of weird shit that happens in it is not representative of the whole. Kids aren't stupid. Also, it seems an outlier amongst outliers that your child manages to read through the whole of a version of the bible that actually includes those sections, and does it without you noticing and/or explaining that not everything in there should be taken literally.
TrnsltLife 2y ago
It's not beautiful, it shows humankind's failures and depravity. Besides Jesus, every major hero in the Bible is shown with major flaws. From Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Elijah, to St. Peter and St Paul, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". It's reasonable to supervise what parts of the Bible your kids read at a given and. Sunday schools and kids' Bible story books are usually curated and not teaching those particular parts to kids. (By today's standards, Lot was date raped, not seduced. Not that that makes it a better story for an 8 year old.)

carlosjobim 2y ago

A lot of the Bible is tales of what incredibly evil people do, not an endorsement of those actions. A lot of the tales is also sins and mistakes normal people make, because they aren't saints. You need to have a certain level of maturity to be able to read and understand the Bible and other ancient books. If you don't have that, it's like believing that the TV news is endorsing serial killers, wars, and natural disasters, because they are reporting on them. You can find the truth of human evil told repeatedly in the Bible, it's not a fairy tale, so you should forget about that perspective. The Bible is absolutely not suitable for children, except for choice parts. Those people who thought it was a good idea to teach the Bible to small children did a great disservice to those people and to religion. It's a hard core book for adolescents and above.

tombert 2y ago
> A lot of the Bible is tales of what incredibly evil people do, not an endorsement of those actions. Mostly agree, though not completely. There are actions that are kind of deemed "moral" that I don't think are good, e.g. Abraham being super willing to murder his son to make God happy. Or Moses killing all the first-born children of Egypt with the Angel of Death. That's pretty evil, and Abraham and Moses are kind of the "heroes" of those stories. I agree that there is wisdom to be found in there, and that it requires a level of maturity and literary understanding to parse that sometimes. It's a book written over the course of several hundred (thousands?) of years with hundreds of stories, it's not weird to think that there would be some good stuff in there. > The Bible is absolutely not suitable for children, except for choice parts. Yeah, I agree with that. The "do unto others" stuff is perfectly fine to teach to small children, and even stuff with slightly more nebulous but ultimately clever themes like the Prodigal Son are fine. I think I'd save the stuff about murdering and mutilating concubines until you're comfortable with them watching R-rated movies. That's not a dig in itself, though. My favorite movie of all time is Ghost in the Shell (1995). It's got lots of wisdom and cleverness and to me it's nearly perfect, but if I had kids I don't think I'd let them watch it until they were 13 or 14, even though I don't think that the themes in it are harmful or endorsing bad behavior.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > I think I'd save the stuff about murdering and mutilating concubines until you're comfortable with them watching R-rated movies. Really? Do you feel the same way about Bluebeard? Cinderella? This isn't a rare motif in children's stories.
  - tombert 2y ago
    I'm not sure I know what Bluebeard is, so I can't comment on that. The original somewhat gory Cinderella stories? I might wait until they're a bit older. I don't have kids, so this is all hypothetical, of course.
    - tmtvl 2y ago
      Bluebeard is a fairy tale about a lass who marries a guy called Bluebeard and he gives her the keys to his house and tells her not to go into one specific room and that room contains the bodies of his former wives. I might be misremembering it somewhat, but I believe that's the gist.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  > Abraham being super willing to murder his son to make God happy. Sacrificing your own children is a human behaviour so common through history and with different cultures, that it's basically a biological instinct. Even today parents send their sons to die in industrialized war to prove their faith for the government, as well as sacrifice their children in ways that are less explicit than that - always to prove their faith and loyalty to the entity they worship religiously, whether that's a man worshipped as a god, or a disembodied concept that they worship, such as "the state". The story of Abraham is a way to break that spell. The primitive human instinct is to worship by giving gifts, and then naturally giving the greatest gift you can give to prove your faith, which is your child. I interpret the story of Abraham as a clever way to break one of the most evil and persistent traditions of humanity, which is child sacrifice. And the story is much more efficient than simply saying "You shouldn't sacrifice your own children". Put yourself in his shoes (there have probably been thousands of Abrahams through time). If he says "I'm not going to sacrifice my child", the tribespeople will say that his God is weak because Abraham dares to give less of a sacrifice than the best, or that Abraham puts his own desires in front of what's good for the tribe (pleasing God or any god). If God told him to sacrifice his son and God later changed his mind, that's another thing. The story puts an effective limit on the level of worship. Sacrifice animals sure, but don't sacrifice your own children. Human sacrifice and ritual cannibalistic wars of genocide is the natural condition of humans as a species. That is the simple answer to why humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without making any progress before something strange happened and we became enlightened. Seeing as the Bible is a collection of stories that where told for thousands of years before being written down, I would think that there are entire generations and cultures who have live by those stories and commands for longer than the Bible has existed in any form. Pre-civilization tribes that we know nothing about. The Bible is our deepest probe into deep time, and absolutely fascinating.

Aeolun 2y ago

If they're old enough to be able to read it, I'm inclined to believe they're old enough to figure out that the 0.01% of weird shit that happens in it is not representative of the whole. Kids aren't stupid. Also, it seems an outlier amongst outliers that your child manages to read through the whole of a version of the bible that actually includes those sections, and does it without you noticing and/or explaining that not everything in there should be taken literally.

TrnsltLife 2y ago

It's not beautiful, it shows humankind's failures and depravity. Besides Jesus, every major hero in the Bible is shown with major flaws. From Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Elijah, to St. Peter and St Paul, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". It's reasonable to supervise what parts of the Bible your kids read at a given and. Sunday schools and kids' Bible story books are usually curated and not teaching those particular parts to kids. (By today's standards, Lot was date raped, not seduced. Not that that makes it a better story for an 8 year old.)