Barmy Bible Study - Abraham and Isaac: A Tale of Unconditional Love

Raising adoring eyes to the heavens, Abraham prepares to slaughter Isaac. Now, that's what I call love!

It's Wednesday night, again!  That's right, time for Barmy Bible Study!

This week in Barmy Bible Study we will discuss the story of Abraham and Isaac. Our text for tonight will be Genesis, 22:1-18 (New International Version):

(Note: Atheists and other haters of GOD'S HOLY WORD, scroll past the blue text)

Genesis 22

Abraham Tested

 1 Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”

   “Here I am,” he replied.

 2 Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

 3 Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. 4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. 5 He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”

 6 Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, 7 Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”

   “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.

   “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

 8 Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.

 9 When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”

   “Here I am,” he replied.

 12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

 13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram[a] caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided.”

 15 The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16 and said, “I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring[b] all nations on earth will be blessed,[c] because you have obeyed me.”

This delightful demonstration of fatherly devotion has been a Sunday School favorite for generations.  Christians believe that little children can learn valuable lessons about unconditional love from the story of the father who was willing to murder his own child, and the Heavenly Father who commanded him to do it.

Study Questions for Abraham and Isaac:

1. What did God command Abraham to do?

2. Why did God command Abraham to do this?

3. How does the Bible tell us that Abraham reacted to this command and what does his reaction teach us?

The Biblical god, Yahweh, was one among many ancient middle eastern gods. At some point in history, not long before the Hebrew Bible was set down on scrolls, a sect of Jews had split away from the polytheism of the region. Although most other people in ancient Israel were still worshipping Canaanite gods, the Hebrews selected Yahweh, (but not his consort, the goddess Asherah), an Edomite warrior god, for singular status. Thus monotheism was born.

Monotheism was a very useful concept in the ancient world, just as it is today. When two people had a dispute, they could fight each other and the stronger might win the dispute, but if they were of relatively equal strength, each could point to hir favorite god and claim that the god demands that the dispute be settled in hir favor. But the mythology confirms that not one of the gods could ever be counted on to reliably settle an argument with hir fellow deities - Athena and Aphrodite or Thor and Loki seemed inclined to continue to duke it out forever. The ancient Hebrews solved this problem by elevating one of their gods to special, singular status and - voila! Their god was bigger than all the other peoples' gods!  Finally, the buck stopped there. After choosing Yahweh as their supreme deity, the Hebrews began referring to themselves as the "chosen" people.

Still, even the top god - the god of gods - can feel a little lonely and jealous from time to time, especially when the other gods are always basking in the fragrant smoke wafting up to the heavens from the burning flesh of children! The Bible tells us that while human sacrifice was still practiced during Abraham's day among populations that worshipped the numerous other gods mentioned in scripture, the people who worshipped Yahweh had evolved a more humane moral conscience. Instead of sacrificing virgin children to appease Yahweh's capricious temper like his rivals' worshippers did, the Hebrews had switched over to spilling the blood of lambs, kids and calves and then burning the slaughtered animals instead. Anyone can see how much better that was and it was usually very pleasing to Yahweh.

It is a burnt offering to the Lord: it is a sweet aroma, an offering made by fire to the Lord. Exodus 29:18

Not good enough, Abraham.

At some point, however, Yahweh needed to know if, in fact, his followers loved him as much as those other gods' followers loved them. The Bible tells us that after finally sending a son, Isaac, to Abraham, Yahweh began to wonder if Abraham might start to love Isaac more than he loved his god.  Because of these perfectly understandable feelings of insecurity,  God decided to test Abraham's love. And what could be more natural than demanding a human sacrifice? After all, the other gods did that all the time. And, since it was Isaac whom the god feared Abraham might be coming to love more, it makes perfect sense that Yahweh commanded Abraham to prove his devotion by slitting the throat of his only legitimate son and burning him to death on a sacrificial altar.

You might think that Abraham would have been paralysed with horror at this commandment and might even have refused to obey it, but you would be wrong. Abraham was a godly man who loved Yahweh.  He was a True Believer™, which meant there was nothing he would not do to demonstrate his loyal devotion - murder, lie, cheat, steal, rape, pillage; everything is permissible when God commands it and whatever God commands must be obeyed, if one is a True Believer who loves God. Abraham did not hesitate. He packed up his donkey, slaves, some firewood and Isaac and set off for Moriah with confidence and, apparently, without a flicker of uncertainty. He lied to the slaves as he left them to take Isaac up the mountain to his doom, and because he was a loving father, he soothingly lied to Isaac when the boy asked where the sacrificial lamb was.

"God will provide" said Abraham, and indeed he had perfect confidence that this would be so. He knew that God had provided for him in the past - hadn't Yahweh finally given him Isaac? - and no doubt he would provide a great reward for the filicide that Abraham was about to so willingly commit. Besides, compared to the glorious works of God, a sign of devotion seems like so little to ask of a filthy sinner. Anyway, as the Bible explains, Yahweh did not really intend to let Abraham go through with the murder. He was just looking for a little love, that's all.

Really excellent advice,
but unfortunately
Bible-believers rarely follow it.

The Bible story of Abraham sets the bar pretty high for most Christians (also the other "people of the book"- I'm looking at you, Muslims and Jews), but millions of the faithful throughout history have valiantly striven ever since to match his devotion to God. Sadly for Yahweh, most fail, because their fatally flawed humanity renders them incapable of the ruthless sociopathy required of a True Believer. Abraham's unquestioning, uncritical willingness to gut and burn his own child is an example of godliness to which all true Bible-believers aspire. For although no one has ever seen God (John 1:18), the idea of the almighty deity is an awesome idea. Indeed, it is an idea which has inspired rare godly men to do unthinkable things for several millennia. The problems of God's invisibility and the unknowability of His will are nothing but a mirage when compared to the certainty of a True Believer. Just as the Bible-believer does not have to see God to know He is there, so s/he does not have to hear God to know what He commands.

Abraham knew what God commanded of him, and he set off immediately and apparently without a qualm to commit a murder. He knew that what he was preparing to do was righteous, godly and just, because it was God's (unknowable, invisible) will. Filled with the joy of knowing God's love in his life, Abraham was ready, willing and able to plunge a dagger into the body of a child to prove his obedience and devotion to God. Even when it turned out that God was only testing him by demanding the blood of Isaac, Abraham did not chastise the deity. Instead, he pulled a ram out of the bushes, plunged his dagger into it instead and offered it as a burnt offering in praise and glory to God.  

Now that's unconditional love!

Class dismissed.

For the LORD your God in the midst of you is a jealous God; otherwise the anger of the LORD your God will be kindled against you, and He will wipe you off the face of the earth. Deuteronomy 6:15.  Understandable, amirite?

Evolu- er Variation! Yeah, That's It!

via Pharyngula: Potholer and Hovind Come Together!

Would you like a quick, easy-to-understand explanation of speciation? Potholer is your man!

This brief, funny video explains everything (even Kent Hovind!)

Tuesday Tonic - Save the Rich!

Sit back and enjoy a bit of awesome on a Tuesday morning.

Garfunkel and Oates:  Save the Rich  (language may be NSFW)

"Save the rich, it's so easy to do!

Just let yourself be ignorant to what's been done to you.

Save the rich, by doing nothing at all

deny all sense and logic and just think really small

You should think really small

Or just don't think at all

and save the rich."

Tuesday Tonic - Sex With Ducks!

Sit back and enjoy a little musical awesomeness on this Tuesday morning.

Garfunkel and Oates:  Sex With Ducks

EDIT:  Unfortunately, this video seems to have been taken off YouTube some time since I tucked it away in my "awesome stuff" folder. Please see above for another great video by these two talented young women. 


EDIT 2:  Well, hooray!  Looks like the video is up again!  A daily double of Garfunkel and Oates.

Wait, Consent Means WHAT?

The future of American women?

Individual freedom and the right to bodily autonomy - the principles behind our understanding of consent - were the principles upon which many of us assume the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision was based, although the case itself was focused on a citizen's right to privacy around making decisions concerning her bodily autonomy and medical care.  Laws which deny a woman the right to bodily autonomy - including laws that deny a woman the right to control what happens to her own body in favor of giving any potential fetus the "right" to use her body against her will or without her consent - are an unconstitutional denial of individual freedom because they relegate a woman to a legal status that is less than human. The legal precedent that a woman actually has the right to consent to the risks and responsibilities of pregnancy, and an equal right to decline consent to those risks and responsibilities was thought to be finally established. But since Roe v Wade was argued as a case for privacy, it has never been a guarantee of women's reproductive rights. It has always been vulnerable to attack, either through court challenges or through legislation which has chipped away at it.

One way or another, the
Republican Party will find
a way to control those sluts!

From the moment Roe v Wade was decided, the religious right began working to overturn it. Outraged that women had at last been granted the right to choose if and when to be pregnant -  a right which conflicted with the patriarchal order which demands that men have complete authority over women - the "moral majority" began a campaign of slut-shaming, raising the specter- never far beneath the surface in any misogynist culture - that uncontrolled women would engage in wildly promiscuous and "irresponsible" sex and darkly warning that the new law would bring about the downfall of American civil society  However, when this tactic initially only gained traction within the most conservative and misogynistic segments of society, conservatives realized that the problem was that a majority of Americans in the late 1970's actually respected a woman's right to choose - and that most Americans believed that the consensual sexual activity of women was no more society's business than the consensual sexual activity of men.

Religious conservatives soon zeroed in on "consent" as a potentially malleable concept that they might be able to use to drive a wedge between women and their human rights, thereby setting the stage to put women back in their traditional place.  In order to overcome the legal issue of consent, religious and political conservatives began working tirelessly - using tactics including slut-shaming, abstinence-only purity campaigns inserted into public schools, and falsely equating microscopic blastocysts with full term babies - to entrench the notion that recreational sex involving the conscious avoidance of pregnancy is shameful and that only marital sex which welcomes the prospect of conception should be recognized and supported by society. Their aim was to increase public acceptance of explicitly Christian sexual mores in order to garner voter support for their social agenda. The ultimate goal was to get this explicitly Christian theology enshrined into law: that whenever a woman has consented to sex, she has automatically consented to pregnancy, too.

That's right, ladies, when you consent to sex, you consent to
pregnancy. And when you don't consent to sex, you
consent to pregnancy, too! You and your uteri are in a perpetual
state of consent to pregnancy! Ain't patriarchy grand?

Eventually, extreme conservatives began to worry that exceptions for rape and incest could possibly become a loophole through which some lying women could escape unwanted pregnancy, leading to the push for the elimination of exceptions for rape and incest as legal justifications for abortion. Building on the false premise that a conceptus is equal to a full-term baby, conservatives argued that a fertilized egg, no matter how it came into existence, is an innocent life deserving of protection. Completely ignoring the question of whether a woman who has been raped is deserving of society's protection and adroitly sidestepping Roe v Wade, forced-birth groups wrote bills denying abortion rights to women even in the case of rape or incest which their political arm, the Republican party, sponsored in state legislatures. In one giant leap of cruel imagination, conservatives managed to establish as a serious idea that even when a woman does not consent to sex, her consent to pregnancy should be automatic in the eyes of the law.

Lest there be any doubt about the intentions of the religious conservatives and their hired guns in the state and federal legislatures to render the legal notion of female consent completely irrelevant and completely powerless, forced-birth organizations created "personhood bills" which they instructed their Republican lackeys to sponsor and pass in various states. "Personhood" bills, if signed into law, would confer the full rights of a "person" - a deliberately vague term, but generally considered to be equal to a live-born child - to all fertilized ova. Such laws would criminalize most forms of female-controlled contraception, emergency contraception, assisted reproduction and, of course, all abortions. They would also open the door to state-sponsored invasion of women's privacy and health care rights since legally protected "persons" could potentially be "murdered" before a conception is discovered to have taken place. Furthermore, such laws would criminalize anyone who attempted to help a woman abort the conceptus "person" either by performing a surgical procedure, providing medical abortifacents, or driving a woman across state lines to obtain an abortion in a non-"Personhood" state.

Got that, gals?

"Personhood" laws are the holy grail of the forced-birth movement and the ultimate goal of religious conservatives. If passed, such laws would strip women of all bodily autonomy in matters of reproduction. Women would be denied female-controlled birth control, they would be denied emergency birth control if their partner's birth control fails or he refuses to use it and they would be denied abortions - even if they are impregnated by rape and even if their health or lives are endangered by a pregnancy. In short, thanks to the twisted culture of "life" pushed so ruthlessly onto them by religious conservatives, women would be compelled to sacrifice their happiness, risk their health and even lose their lives because a single-celled conceptus has been granted a right to occupy her body which supersedes all of her rights including her humanity, her dignity and her right to life.

Keep that contraception out
of those sluts' hands!

The Republican Party, which has degenerated to little more than the political arm of the conservative religious right, has been striving relentlessly to ensure that women will be legally forced to bear all of the negative physical, social and most of the financial repercussions for any unplanned pregnancy, while the churches themselves underline and enforce the subordinate and inferior position of women in the culture. Through tireless efforts to withhold access to contraception from women, the religious right ensures that reproductive control remains primarily in the hands of men. Thanks to ideologically-driven appointments to the FDA and the business interests of both drug companies and the medical establishment, only male-controlled methods of reliable contraception are available without a prescription, forcing women to navigate (and pay for) "care" from layers of medical and pharmacy gatekeepers before they are permitted to obtain reliable female-controlled contraception.

Religious patriarchy allows society to label unplanned pregnancy a "women's issue" in spite of the fact that it takes both a man and a woman - both failing to use effective contraception - to create an unplanned pregnancy. The fact that society allows unplanned pregnancy to be framed as a women's issue reveals the depth of the unconscious misogyny which lays the responsibility for - and the consequences of - an unplanned pregnancy squarely in the woman's lap, while little thought - and almost no censure - is directed toward the "guilt", the "promiscuity" or the "irresponsibility" of the man involved.

The old joke about keeping women
barefoot and pregnant?
Not so funny anymore.

More insidiously, when pregnancy and the laws restricting women's rights over when and if they will become pregnant is framed as a women's issue, conservatives ensure that half the population at least may ignore the very real danger to women's health and safety. Few men pay attention when women's rights are being stripped away because the phrase "women's issue" is unconsciously received as a signal that the subject is unimportant and less than men's other concerns. Even men who love the women in their lives are lulled into a false sense of "nothing to worry about" as their wives, their sisters and their daughters are slowly but surely reduced to the legal status of walking wombs compelled under threat of criminal prosecution to gestate the offspring of any man who succeeds in impregnating them - whether by mutual and loving consent, by accidental failure of birth control or by force.

In this way, the religious patriarchy ensures both that women cannot control their own reproduction completely (since women - even abstinent women - can be, and often are, the victims of forced impregnation) and that no man - not even a rapist - needs to accept the decision of a mere woman on the question of whether or not he can use her body to reproduce. That is because the "right to life" of a conceptus is, in fact, really just an extension of men's rights. A conceptus is always some man's potential offspring, and at its core, religious teaching is all about enshrining the right of every man to reproduce. If women are allowed the freedom to choose, some men would almost certainly have difficulty finding a willing mate with whom to procreate. Religions which enforce the authority of men over women and which restrict the freedom and choices of women therefore speak to the root of cultural misogyny - men's fear of the potential power of women to control their (men's) ability to reproduce. "Right to life" is actually the trojan horse by which male rights over women are being inserted directly into women's uteri. That's right. It's a great big legal 'fuck you, women'!

While religions pay lip service to condemning male brutality and offer assurances on how a "godly man" behaves, they strenuously resist efforts to enact laws which could increase rape prosecutions or extend protections for women against sexual assault, citing concerns about - you can guess - men's rights. The ultimate social priority of religion is to confirm and enforce the authority of men over women. To that end, religious conservatives - and their men in government - are willing to grant even rapists and abusers privileges over women, to safeguard the authority of "godly" men. In short, in order to protect the privilege of all men, themselves included of course, even "godly" men who profess to abhor rape willingly award rapists and abusers the right to reproduce using women's bodies against their will. As always, there is no thought spared for the humanity of the women who would be sacrificed to this Christian ideology. At best, they are dismissed as the "blessed" recipients of a "gift from God".

This is already a real thing in
the conservative Christian world

In the Republican vision of the future - as in the past it idealizes - "freedom" and "rights" will only fully belong to men and to the potential offspring of men, while women will be, at best, reduced once again to second-class citizenship, and, at worst, returned to sexual and reproductive slavery. Political, financial and social oppression of women, reproductive slavery and viciously misogynistic church-mandated rules of correct behavior and dress (for women only) are the unceasing reality for millions of women in theocracies around the world.  All of these forms of oppression of women are rooted in the desire of these conservative societies to control the sexuality and reproductive freedom of their women. Almost without exception, societies based upon religious laws which both deny women fully human status and hold them accountable for the sexual activity of both genders strictly limit female freedom and impose exaggerated requirements for modest dress on their women and girls.  If a Christian theocracy is successfully installed by conservatives in the United States, ever-deepening oppression will become the inevitable future for women and girls here.

Religious conservatives want Roe v Wade overturned because they oppose the principles of individual freedom and the right to bodily autonomy for women upon which the decision was based.  That denial of those rights would relegate women to less than human status is exactly the point. Second-class status for women would be a feature, not a bug, for Christian conservatives since the Bible commands that women are not equal but subordinate to men. Bible-based religion asserts that man is the original human and woman, taken from man, is less than human. This is the reality of Bible-based governance. It seems like a nightmare from the dark ages, or some dystopian futuristic novel, but this is really happening right now in the land of the free and the home of the brave.