The America Jesus recently pointed me towards one of Piper’s editorials at The Christian Post, in which Piper responds to the question, “Why was it right for God to slaughter women and children in the Old Testament?” His response is pure and unadulterated Divine Command Ethics: What God does is good, period. It’s gorgeous in its simplicity and horrifying in its content:

It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die. God is taking life every day. He will take 50,000 lives today. Life is in God’s hand. God decides when your last heartbeat will be, and whether it ends through cancer or a bullet wound. God governs. So God is God! He rules and governs everything. And everything he does is just and right and good. God owes us nothing.

However, it gets complicated when humans are the ones doing the killing. Piper wobbles a bit here:

So I would vindicate Joshua by saying that in that setting, with that relationship between God and his people, it was right for Joshua to do what God told him to do, which was to annihilate the people.

I’d love to see a debate between a modern Islamic terrorist and someone like Piper. I suspect that when it got down to fundamental issues, the only difference between them would be a difference in opinion about what God wants at this moment.

There are many troubling portions of the Bible, but the one that occurs to me first is the first story of Phineas (AKA Phinehas and some other variant spellings) found in Numbers 25:1-13. Philip Jenkins uses this as a his prime example in Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses.

While Israel dwelt in Shittim the people began to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate, and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to Ba’al of Pe’or. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel; and the LORD said to Moses, “Take all the chiefs of the people, and hang them in the sun before the LORD, that the fierce anger of the LORD may turn away from Israel.” And Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Every one of you slay his men who have yoked themselves to Ba’al of Pe’or.”

And behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Mid’ianite woman to his family, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel, while they were weeping at the door of the tent of meeting.

When Phin’ehas the son of Elea’zar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation, and took a spear in his hand and went after the man of Israel into the inner room, and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman, through her body. Thus the plague was stayed from the people of Israel.

Nevertheless those that died by the plague were twenty-four thousand.

And the LORD said to Moses, “Phin’ehas the son of Elea’zar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the people of Israel, in that he was jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I did not consume the people of Israel in my jealousy. Therefore say, `Behold, I give to him my covenant of peace; and it shall be to him, and to his descendants after him, the covenant of a perpetual priesthood, because he was jealous for his God, and made atonement for the people of Israel.’”

So Phineas kills a man and his wife for the sin of miscegenation. This was obviously written during one of the xenophobic periods of Jewish history.

There are some ridiculous elements to it. The supposed “crime” was marrying a Midianite, and the text makes a big deal out of the fact that this was brazenly done in front of Moses. But Moses himself likely had a Midianite wife, from the period after he fled Egypt. Moses’ Midianite father-in-law, Jethro, seems to be a fairly important character in Exodus.

Also notice that God stays his hand and grants a covenant of peace, “only” killing 24,000 people. This is what people mean when they complain about the God of the Old Testament. Also note that Phineas’ zealotry earns him and his descendants the plum position in the priesthood.

To me, this passage represents the troubling undercurrent of ethnic purity that runs through some of the Hebrew Testament. All of these sections, found particularly in books like Ezra and Nehemiah, are ignored by most mainstream Christians. Thankfully. But there are a few groups, like the Christian Identity group the Phineas Priesthood, who use this passage as a justification for their racism.

The film centers on the story of David, a straight-A student from Colorado who was sent to Escuela Caribe in May of 2006 after coming out to his parents as gay. Like many others, David was taken in the night without warning by a “transport service” and was never told where he was going or when he would be brought back home. While at Escuela Caribe, David had no way of communicating with any of his friends or family back home until the filmmakers arrived and he decided to ask them if they would smuggle out a letter that he had secretly written to his best friend. Once word got back to David’s community about what had happened to him, many people sprung to action and formed a plan to get him released. Getting David out of this school, however, turned out to be a much more difficult task than anyone had thought, and the trials they went through to get David released revealed just how far Escuela Caribe would go to prevent a student from leaving.

Here’s the trailer:

Via Joe.My.God. If you’re interested in the larger issue, visit the NHYM Alumni page:

We are a group of former students who have reconnected through the Internet and wish to publicize our experiences with New Horizons Youth Ministries. We range in age from our teens to our 40s, and attended “The Program” between 1970 to 2005. New Horizons purports to help adolescents through “Christian milieu therapy” but in fact does more harm than good. Most of our complaints center on Escuela Caribe, the boot camp located in the Dominican Republic, where we witnessed and experienced physical and emotional abuse and had our communications to and from our families censored to keep us from divulging the truth. We are now free to do so, and hope to dissuade more parents from subjecting their children to the trauma we lived.

Donny Pauling used to grace our comments and forums. I see that he’s still pushing himself as a “former porn producer.” I guess that’s not unlikely, but I have to admit that I’m skeptical. We meet so many “former witches,” “former atheists,” and “former satanists,” that I can’t help suspecting that Donny is just as full of it as all the rest.

I also don’t know why someone would go to a former porn producer for sex advice. That’s like getting cooking tips from someone who used to make plastic food. Of course, it’s no worse than going to the Bible, which was written in a time when the authors still thought that the child’s traits were set by what the mother was looking at during conception (Genesis 30:37-39).

If you have a passion to reach the unsaved with the gospel, you are going to confront Goliath. This is the giant the Bible calls “the spirit of fear” that will come against you and taunt you the moment you decide to reach out to the lost. When it’s a one-to-one encounter or you are preparing to preach open air to a crowd, you will hear his tormenting voice telling you that what you are about to do will result in you being torn limb from limb and fed to the birds. [...]

This sort of fear certainly has “torment,” and the only way to overcome it is to do what David did. He slung Goliath a straight-forward mind-impressing message that he wasn’t going to be deterred, and then he cut of his head. That silenced his big and loud mouth.

I think that the slingstone is the perfect analogy for Comfort’s methods of evangelism. It’s quick, straight-forward, easy to understand and intuitive in its operation. It’s also completely unencumbered by any depth, complexity, strategy or nuance.

If Ray Comfort were a weapon, he’d be a slingstone. If he were a piece of writing, he’d be a Hallmark card. If he were a vehicle, he’d be a unicycle. His goal seems to be to make Christian theology – a profound system of thought that has benefited from the greatest minds of the west for almost 2000 years – and make it fit on a bumper sticker.

Pat Robertson and co-host Kristi Watts discuss the atheists, who don’t believe in anything. Watts goes on on a tangent, talking about how Wiccans are “all about the environment,” and that “trees are their God.” [wtf?] She then asks why atheists aren’t saying that we should cut down every tree.

“Just a thought,” she says. I’m afraid that I don’t see any evidence of thinking there, so I’m going to have to disagree.

Anyway, the ever reliable Jason Pitzl-Waters responds:

Atheists aren’t gunning to chop down all the trees us Pagan tree-huggers hug because they predominantly believe in environmental and climate science, and know that cutting down “every tree” would destroy our ecosystem, and life on earth itself (sadly, ski resort Jesus statues don’t absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen).

But maybe Watts has a point. Maybe it’s time to rethink my career path …

(Maybe this is funnier to me, because my wife was an agnostic and a lumberjill when I met her.)

There have been a lot of reaction to this. Some of the better ones I’ve found:

Rev. Wil Gaffney picks apart some of the claims made by Messer.

13. The notion that there is such a thing as a “king chromosome” is a fiction, as is the claim that it is kohenic, that is priestly; the Israelite and Judean monarchs — there were queens as well — were not priests.
14. The man’s articulation of what “God wants,” is to say the least unsubstantiated outside that particular setting.
15. The man never says how he knows that none of Long’s ancestors or relatives has ever seen a Torah scroll.
16. While there are some traditional reflections on the human body — including DNA and chromosomes — in the mystical Kabbalistic tradition, the speaker is crafting a verbal montage without reference to the classical texts or their theologies.

Anthea Butler at Religion Dispatches has been watching Long for awhile:

I wish I could say I was surprised by Long’s latest antics, but I’m not. Actually, I am surprised he stayed away from the church this long. After declaring in December that he was taking a hiatus to work on the problems in his marriage, Long has returned with a new lacefront and a defiant attitude. Having a fake rabbi declare him “King” of a fading, dying mega-church is a joke, but what is not are the deluded New Birth Members cheering him on.

Clearly they have drunk the “Kool Aid” and I don’t use that term lightly. I’ve believed since my trip to New Birth back in 2010, when Long promised to fight his civil case, that New Birth was a cult-like organization. Long’s hold over his congregation reminds me of Jim Jones. That may sound harsh, but Jim Jones slept with his members too, before leading the People’s Temple into the jungles of Guyana.

Messer is sometimes called a Messianic Rabbi, but he’s part of the “Hebrew Roots” movement, which other Messianic Rabbi do not accept. Apparently, this is all just part of Messer’s shtick. From Bartholomew’s Notes:

This is not the first time Messer and his scroll have come to the rescue of a beleaguered evangelist; in 2007 Tampa Bay Online reported from Randy White’s Without Walls International Church, following White’s split from church co-founder Paula White:

[Randy] White preached for a few minutes before turning over the pulpit to Ralph Messer, a Messianic rabbi from Denver who teaches about the Hebrew roots of the Christian faith.
Messer preached about the Torah and Jewish entrepreneurship and spoke again at the 11 a.m. service, where he led the congregation in a prayer that ended emotionally for White.

The Torah that Messer presented is apparently linked to Rabbi Menachem Youlus. According to the Grey Lady, Youlus has recently confessed to fraud:

For years Rabbi Menachem Youlus, a self-described “Jewish Indiana Jones,” received plaudits from those captivated by his stories of traveling to Eastern Europe and beyond to search for historic Torahs that were lost or hidden during the Holocaust.

But on Thursday, Rabbi Youlus stood inside the federal courthouse in Manhattan and confessed that he had made up those tales of daring.

“Between 2004 and 2010, I falsely represented that I had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls — in particular ways, in particular locations — in Europe and Israel,” he told Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court. “I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct.”

Here’s a swarm of quad-rotor robots hovering in formation. They’re a creation of the GRASP labs at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kind of cool. Before you get too impressed, check out the blooper reel at io9 and see all the ways the little four-rotor guys can screw up.

Sure, they’re cute, but what can the little guys do? Here’s an exhibit titled “Flight Assembled Architecture,” created at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France. Several quad-copters are used to pick up polystyrene foam blocks and drop them into place, eventually creating a 6m tower. This is the work of Swiss architect Gramazio & Kohler and Italian robot designer Raffaello D’Andrea.

There’s more about this sort of Flying Machine Enabled Construction at the website of the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control.

These little rotor robots are not the only kind of flying bot out there. Markus Fischer and his team at Festo, a German tech company, have created “SmartBird,” a robot that flies in the same manner as a bird. Here he is displaying their creation at the TED Talks:

Finally, the good folks at Neural Robotics, Inc have produced this RC gunship. For all I know, Neural Robotics is a respected company with a sterling reputation. However, it looks like two good ‘ol boys got together and said, “Hey, let’s build us a big RC chopper and strap a shotgun to it!”

Evangelicals rapping = bad thing

Evangelicals with puppets = bad thing

Now for the test: Rapping evangelical puppets = ?

Via Scott Bailey