if I could ask God anything and get the real, genuine answer, I’d ask him why He commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He knew He was going to stop him. He knew that He’d never truly ask him to do it. He knew that if he went through with it then His promise would be frustrated.
The thing is… the story has led parents to think it’s okay to sacrifice their children, metaphorically and sometimes literally, for a false sense of moral superiority. How many LGBT+ children have been sacrificed in the supposed name of Christianity? How many autistic children? How many orphaned children? How many abused children?
Maybe it was the right lesson for Abraham, especially about how it paralleled Christ’s atonement. But it’s not a story that has translated well into modern times.
do you want the Jewish answer? It was to challenge him to think critically about commandments from g-d (and translating to religion as an institution, rulings from religious leaders and scripture), and it’s a challenge he failed. He was supposed to, theoretically, fight g-d and say “no, by no means am I going to do this. I don’t care that you created everything, that is my child and my world, and I’m not going to do it just because you said so.”
Instead, Abraham royally screws up, traumatises his son, and in doing so, loses his son, loses g-d’s will and favor, and in the Tanakh we never really hear from Abraham again after this point, because he failed.
It’s a story about someone blindly following in faith, and losing the most important things to them because they never stopped to think “Wait, did I hear this right? And if I did hear this right, am I so sure that this is something I want to follow?”
Isaac was Abraham’s only son at the time, and the child he had fought so hard to have. Him following an order blindly without thinking of the consequences is not supposed to be a good thing (It just kind of benefits the feudal society that eventually embraced Christianity, which is why the understanding was changed in Christian worldviews.)
I wish I could say I was surprised at the totally different meanings being derived here…
I am growing very, very tired of hearing that this is The Jewish Answer to this particular question. Because there is no The Jewish Answer to anything.
Jews have been discussing the Tanakh for as long as we have existed, and if you have ever encountered a difficulty within that vast and rambling text I guarantee you we have discussed it, interrogated it, weighed it, and absolutely not resolved it definitively. The idea that Abraham was supposed to refuse or question God’s order to sacrifice Isaac, and that he actually failed the test, is ONE (1) of VERY MANY Jewish takes on the story.
And it’s one that I personally can’t make ring true, because God tells Abraham he did right and will be rewarded for it. And what is the point of a test if you tell someone they passed when they failed? If Abraham has lost God’s favor, why does God tell him the exact opposite of that?
(Does that mean this interpretation is wrong? Of course not. Just that it doesn’t work for me. I’m sure I’m not the first to raise that particular difficulty, and I won’t be the last, and difficulties aren’t disqualifying.)
The fact that any parents anywhere think this story means they should sacrifice their children is, of course, a monstrous misreading – as is (in Jewish thought, generally, at least) the notion that the Binding of Isaac foreshadows the Crucifixion. The former assumes that God’s exceedingly specific commandment to Abraham is in any way intended as a general instruction to future parents; furthermore, both of these misreadings lose sight of the crucial climactic moment of the story, in which the child-sacrifice is prevented, because it is not something that God wants anyone, ever, under any circumstances, to actually do.
But I don’t think that necessarily means Abraham was supposed to argue, or refuse. I think Abraham was asked to do it specifically because he knew it wasn’t what God really wanted, and maybe the point of it was to see if his loyalty to this God of his was actually contingent on the fact that unlike most of the other religions around at the time, this one wouldn’t demand that he sacrifice a child. So is he really in this because he thinks it’s right, or because it’s easier for him? Maybe that’s what’s being tested here – and maybe (as has been suggested elsewhere) it’s not that God wants to find that out, it’s that God wants to give Abraham the chance to demonstrate it for his own self-awareness.
Or maybe it’s not that at all, because there isn’t just one Jewish answer.
The comment responses to the writer of the first few linked articles are very telling. Several people take strong issue with her assertion that children should be handled lovingly and with respect. I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen anyone (yet) call them out, or bring up the primary motivation behind the behavior OP is decrying: control.
“Kids are bad,” the naysayers keep commenting. “You gotta keep them under control.” “I expected to receive gifts on cultural gift-giving holidays because I was entitled” (and not, apparently, because repeated behavior becomes expected???), “These entitled little jerks need to have gifts withheld to teach them not to be entitled little jerks” (I’m not even unpacking that one).
But none of these parents will admit it’s about control. The author even seems confused by it – she wonders why a mom would not only conceive of a concept like ‘gift jail’, but would be ‘so dang proud’ of herself for ‘being unkind’. It’s blisteringly clear that she isn’t proud of unkindness, she’s proud of CONTROL. “Look at me,” she’s saying, “My kids know not to fuck with me. I’m in charge. They better live in fear of my whims, because I run this house.” She wants other, more exhausted mothers to be envious of her iron-clad dominance.
Kids are easy targets for this kind of behavior because they’re helpless. Because they’re helpless, they’re also needy – they depend on their parents to fulfill literally ALL of their needs every minute. The demands of this kind of relationship can be harsh, which leads some parents to conclude that they are being manipulated, that their children are ‘entitled’, or that they are ‘losing control’ because they are being asked for more than they can comfortably give. The cold reality is that these parents were not prepared to be fully responsible for another human being. Now they are using manipulation, punishment, and outright lies and surveillance to try to coerce their children into demanding as little as possible.
Also, wrapping fake gifts and throwing them into the fireplace if a child misbehaves? This is a thing??? WTF.
There are major problems about establishing your relationship with your children as one of dominance and submission. One of them is that it becomes hard to relinquish your hard-won control when your children are no longer children. Parents continue to coerce, manipulate, and threaten their offspring who have already become adults because they see their independence as a threat to the parent’s perceived supremacy. This behavior prevents those children from developing age-appropriate independence, from learning how to set healthy boundaries for themselves in relationships, and from being confident enough in their own capabilities to actually make the transition into being a fully independent adult. Control is addicting – a controlling parent’s ego gets used to regular doses of godlike power over others, and is reluctant to let it go. This can be an especially difficult trap for a budding adult to escape because, due to economic conditions, much of the Millennial generation and younger are being forced to live with their parents for an extended time. Even though they are no longer minors, they are still subject to their parents control over essential needs such as food and housing. This means they are still subject to the same threats and intimidation that were used against them as children – parents can take their belongings (even though this is now legally theft), they can punish them physically (even though this is legally assault), and they have nearly unlimited access to harass, manipulate, and isolate their children from outsiders who may recognize the behavior as abusive. Their adult children have little recourse because, while the parent can legally be forced to return stolen property or serve time for assault, they cannot be forced to continue to support their adult children. The threat of loss of support leaves them just as helpless.
And putting their babies very close to their dogs. Too close.
Their babies are being babies - screaming at things, grabbing, touching anything near them.
Including the dog.
And then they are putting photos and videos of these interactions on social media and getting hundreds of likes because of how cute it is.
It’s not cute. It’s dangerous.
Young children to a certain age don’t understand boundaries or body language in people, let alone dogs.
Dog attacks in young children continue to occur because these kinds of interactions are promoted as cute and “clickbait”.
If you have a kid and young children, educate yourself on signs of stress in dogs. Constantly supervise children. Don’t let small children interact too closely with dogs. Educate children on respectful ways to interact with dogs.
Don’t feed this massive pile of misinformation that’s currently trending on social media.
You are a supervillain who has just captured your rival’s child. Rather than being afraid, they’re begging you to let them stay.
Frankly, you’d known those idiots had had a kid for years now. You’d pretended not to, because while you’d committed a lot of atrocities in your life, you weren’t willing to face the moral quandary of whether you would knowingly kill a child just to spite its parents.
They probably thought they were being clever though, what with the blaming you for an injury you knew damn well you’d never given keeping one of them out of commission for a few months, then references to what they would ‘leave behind’ or ‘could not follow’ when in the latest death trap. One of them had accidentally pulled a pacifier out of their utility belt once, and tried to pass it off as being prepared for any young children they came across while rescuing.
Idiots.
Still, you had standards. Standards that fell somewhere past war crimes and before common decency, but they were standards.
WARNING:The screenshots and content in this document contain grooming, sexual exploitation of a minor, and sexual coercion of a minor. Please read at your own discretion.
I am absolutely seething about what Disney just did to Bobby Driscoll again 54 years after he was buried a John Doe (his corpse was found by two children playing an abandoned tenement building–his death date is actually unknown and the date given is the day he was instead found) in an unmarked mass grave in Hart Island’s potters field (not identified for a year until his mother pressured Roy O. Disney to make the NYPD care enough to match his fingerprints) where he still is surrounded by prisoners and unidentified vagrants (literally referred to as the “poor, unable and unwanted” on a sign)…
And 69 years after they fired him by letting him read it in a gossip column. Walt had his secretary call security on him and he was thrown out of the building crying at 16 years old (near his birthday–he was 14-15 during Peter Pan’s production). The film was #1 at the box office and in release for two weeks when he was fired. There’s also a rumor that Howard Hughes was also pressuring the firing, as he absolutely loathed child actors in general, and was in charge of RKO.
Bobby was the voice and rotoscoped character model for the titular Peter Pan. He was also in Song of the South, Melody Time, So Dear to My Heart and Treasure Island. His live-action movies literally saved the Disney company from total bankruptcy in the ‘40s. He was the very first actor ever signed to the company. He was only one of twelve child actors to ever receive a Juvenile Oscar (with such company as Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Shirley Temple, Margaret O'Brien and Hayley Mills) for his performances in 1948/9’s The Window and So Dear to My Heart. And for the record, Walt didn’t treat Adriana Caselotti (Snow White) much better, to the point where he denied her the ability to ever get work with her voice ever again. It’s just that Bobby is possibly the most horrific ending of a child actor ever in Disney’s history (there are many).
Disney just made Peter Pan the villain in the new Chip ‘n Dale abortion that gives the animated character Bobby’s actual backstory (this is not an evil Peter Pan take based on the book and not in any way comparable to Once Upon a Time!) of being an actor fired for hitting puberty and having acne. That’s not Peter’s backstory; that’s Bobby’s. And it’s too specific to be a coincidence. They drew a character, who was drawn unmistakably with the actor’s real features and acting performance, as a middle-aged, fat man, despite the fact that he died at 31 and Peter’s voice basically was his post-pubescent adult voice. They made him a hideous monster aged far past an age he ever reached.
The film also ends with the character incarcerated, which happens to be yet another thing from the man’s real life. By his own words, he was raped in prison. His spiral on drugs sent him to Chino, which didn’t happen until he was bullied mercilessly in public school after being pulled from the actor kids’ school (he also had stage parents who beat him and locked him in a closet to the point that Disney had earlier stepped in to send him to live with costar Luana Patten’s family as a child–there are also allegations he was molested while working at Disney) when Disney basically ended any chance of steady work. He was a straight-A student prior.
I’ve been telling this story every chance I’ve gotten for nearly two decades. Few today know who he is, because Disney does everything to keep the story hidden and him forgotten. Bobby is not a Disney Legend, despite fans lobbying for decades. The Peter Pan DVD/Blu-ray avoids mentioning him as much as they can. Another one of his films is de facto banned.
That Disney just pulled this with a disgusting, sick joke that laughs at his backstory and misfortune, then turns him into an irredeemable villain in a plot that essentially turns themselves into the victims of copyright theft (they’re responsible for lobbying to get copyright law extended indefinitely). So, in other words, Disney has framed themselves as the victim of a heartlessly-fired child actor who died tragically instead of the villain and framed themselves as the victim yet again.
If there’s any silver lining, it’s that Twitter and social media just learned about him for the first time because of outrage over Disney spitting on this dead man’s unmarked grave yet again. I knew this story decades ago (I had a Peter Pan obsession). Undoubtedly, nobody working on this stupid film was with the company 70 years ago and most were likely not even alive when he died, but somebody there had the bright idea to put the biographical data of a person Disney has spent decades trying to make everyone forget as a villain origin story.
“I have found that memories are not very useful. I was carried on a silver platter and then dumped into the garbage can.” -Bobby Driscoll
Sharing this again because I didn’t realize the depth of how much the film pulled from his life, having not watched it myself. The fact that they seem to have even used the acne thing specifically and apparently used some of Driscoll’s own words against him (“getting thrown into the trash”)…this keeps getting worse and worse and part of me needs to watch it to see how bad it gets but…ugh. This is just sickening.
The thing about posting B*b L*mbs photographs of Evan (or Jensen Ackles for that matter) is they are all tagged with his name and website. So even if you rationalise it to yourself by saying “well the images look inocent”*** you are still advertising the man and spreading his name as a photographer without raising awareness of his true nature. You are legitimising him. Stop it.
***and if that is the rationale you use think on this - there is no such thing as an “innocent” image of a child taken by a paedophile. A child was still being groomed and exploited. And pervs can get kicks out of images that may look innocent to your eye.
I still see Evan fans circulating and sharing Bob Lambs images of Evan from when he was a kid. So I’m going to share these articles which tells them exactly who and what Lamb is (and yes he is still active and working with children) these news reports are pretty well hidden from Google search results. Funny that.
A few things to note here. Bob Lamb has an arrest history relating to child s*xual activity going all the way back to 1980. He served no prison time for his 1986 conviction for criminal s*xual contact with a child. .
Despite being a registered s*x offender and serving time for child s*x convictions in 1987 he was allowed to work one on one, unsupervised with children until 2006.
He plea bargained on his 2006 charges, pleading guilty to the least serious charge in exchage for getting 21 other far more serious charges dropped. I have no words. .
Prosecutor “Lamb masqueraded as a photographer only to get close to young boys” and then you let him plea bargain for a lesser sentence? Scum.
why “spanking is harmful” studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:
@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as “spanking”, are psychologically harmful. they’ve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of parents self-admitted abusers who think “I hit my child and I’m okay with that” and/or “I was hit as a child and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me” are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.
unfortunately, I’m here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.
in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but I’m gonna leave it) read.
the upshot of Fiske and Rai’s work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.
but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts aren’t lacking moral compasses - they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominancewhich they feel they are owed by both tradition and moral right.
when abusive parents say that they are “hitting children for their own good”, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the child’s future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a “good” child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.
this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the child’s well-being. for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.
history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of “corrective” physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves - that was never a question in people’s minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be “kept in their place” below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and god’s law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someone’s idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.
and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful - because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parents’ decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their “right” to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they can’t hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.
and that’s why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says children’s rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.
I really wish we could get liberals to actually think about and ruminate on the difficulty faced when one adheres to the one truthful religion but the physical institutions of that religion are corrupt.
Then maybe we could get some empathy and maybe some *help* when clerical pedophilia crises happen instead of dunking and demonizing and condescending pity barely separated from gleeful victim blaming.
The lesser issue here is that, to the extent that these liberals have a concept in their internal vocabularies that’s anything like “the one truthful religion,” that concept doesn’t really have room for “the physical institutions of that religion” – at least, not in the way you mean it. At this point, most creeds and ideologies aren’t bound to particular irreplaceable concrete organizations like the Church. And so, if you want any sympathy for the problem you’re facing, you’re actually going to have to put in the work of explaining why it is that just ditching the Church isn’t the obvious tactically-correct and morally-mandatory answer.
I don’t really think this line of argument makes sense. I’m not Muslim, but I still feel bad for the effect that Islamists have on other Muslims, both directly and in terms of usually-undeserved backlash. I’m not a Maoist, but I’d still prefer a non-corrupt, non-terrible CCP who were honestly trying their best to the crap they have now.
Obviously there’s an extent to which I sometimes prefer my enemies to be incompetent to them competently succeeding at making things worse, but that doesn’t apply to ordinary immorality within their organizations that’s orthogonal to their goals. It’s just as bad when Republicans rape people as when Democrats do it. Nor does it mean that I can’t understand how frustrating that incompetence must be - often by comparing to my own frustration with my own side on the issue, who frankly are generally quite incompetent as well.
…
I think that in the specific case of clerical sex abuse, the issue is that large sections of the Left have this dumb notion that it occurred because Catholics are uniquely evil, and thus doesn’t need to be grappled with; while glossing over the similar abuse in all other organisations that deal with kids. There’s no hand-wringinging on the left about how the project of mass education can possibly continue given the extent of child abuse by teachers, and frankly there should be.
Conversely, I think conservatives have failed to properly engage with the fact that this type of abuse was and is at least partly the result of the sort of hierarchical, close-knit structures of respect they tend to embrace (even if the Left isn’t immune to idolizing, for example, teachers.) Nor with the fact that sex-negativity has proved a poor framework for dealing with it in practice. You fundamentally can’t fix your approach while insisting your approach is perfect and unchanging (which it isn’t).
Miss Sherry’s house has an “open kitchen policy.” That’s what she told him when he showed up on her doorstep eleven hours ago, a trash bag full of clothes slung over his shoulder and a nameless caseworker at his side.
It’s bullshit, mostly likely. It always is. The rundown of rules they give in front of CPS is always vastly different from the reality of the days, weeks, or months that follow. Mrs. Maxwell told Jaime he would have his own room, then shoved two more twin mattresses in the second the caseworker left. The Welfords told him they’d treat him like one of their own, then locked him in his bedroom every night. Mr. Anderson promised he would never lay a hand on him in anger, then…
Well, it’s not worth thinking about now. He’s in a new house, which means new obstacles to navigate, new rules to learn, new traps to avoid. Dwelling on the past will only make him lose his focus on the present, which he is quickly brought back to by a loud rumble in his stomach. The third one in as many minutes.
Jaime is so fucking hungry. He knew—he knew—he should have eaten more at dinner, but his stomach was wound into knots like it always is on the first night in a new place, and he was afraid that he would make himself sick if he forced it down. Now, of course, his body has no such reservations as his stomach tries to claw itself inside out.
Oh shit! Peach, I swear to God I am actually crying. For real, tears in my eyes, omg.
This might honestly be one of my favorite chapters ever. I just… I have a thing for stories with kids, I especially have a thing for kids who came from a bad history, and a bad place, finding safety for once. I knew Miss Sherry was a nice lady, the mentions to her in the previous drabbles made me sure if it, but I don’t think I expected that much from the beginning. And like, we know Jaime’s life will go to shit eventually and that kills me, but I also know the time he has there was truly good for him. He made friends, he was safe, he got into college… I just love that kid so much and I really wish life had been kinder to him. That’s what this piece gave me, really… Just a moment of kindness.
