Kagi for Kids

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> The story of Abraham is a way to break that spell

That's an extremely generous interpretation. You say the story is about breaking the cycle of pernicious child sacrifice. But there's nothing in the story that supports that view, you just said it because it's the most palatable interpretation of a straightforward story: Obey God, and he may give you mercy (not having to kill your kid). And you conveniently ignore Moses killing all the first-borns.

> Human sacrifice and ritual cannibalistic wars of genocide is the natural condition of humans as a species

There is no "ritual" wars without religion. Religion is what is natural to humanity, as it develops in every culture without fail. Whether you worship Jesus or the Sun, the belief in an afterlife if you follow the rules the last generation handled to you is what leads to terrible deeds, because you can justify anything.

> The story puts an effective limit on the level of worship

No, it doesn't. Many innocent people are sacrificed or ordered to be killed throughout the verses. Jephthah sacrifices his daughter. Saul is asked to kill women and children.

> Seeing as the Bible is a collection of stories that where told for thousands of years before being written down

If by told for a thousand years before being written down, you mean edited, distorted, and mistranslated to the convenience of whoever was in power at the time, yes.

He's considered a moral and good character purely because he was fully willing to sacrifice his child. Even if God did stop it at the last second, we're supposed to think that the morally correct thing to do was to listen to God and murder his child.

I don't know that I agree with your take, I don't think it's meant to be interpreted as a limit to sacrifice. If that's what you got out of it, that's good, I don't think you should sacrifice humans, but that wasn't the vibe I got from the story at all; the vibe I got was that "you should always listen to God if you want to be moral, and God will make sure that the right thing happens."

We are on such a different level of understanding, that there isn't any point in us two talking to each other – about anything. Feel free to take that as a compliment.

Okay, let's say it's just a stupid story about a stupid idiot who didn't even know how to SSH into Arch Linux, and just walked around hallucinating all the time. What made his story so special that it was told and remembered for thousands of years by real people with real lives to worry about?

> I don't think you should sacrifice humans

And why not? In a different time and a different place that would have been the normal, decent and rational thing to do, and if you didn't then people would look very strangely at you.

> What made his story so special that it was told and remembered for thousands of years by real people with real lives to worry about?

I don't know. Maybe a lot of people agree with the message of "always listen to God and things will work out". That doesn't mean it's good morality, or a good way to live your life. While there's certainly selection bias in good stories surviving the test of time, I don't think it's 100% given that an old story is inherently good.

If you found meaning in the story, that's great. I just don't know that meaning was the authors' intent. That might not matter to you, that's fine, but I simply did not get the message of "Abraham + Isaac is actually a limitation on sacrifice".

> And why not? In a different time and a different place that would have been the normal, decent and rational thing to do, and if you didn't then people would look very strangely at you.

I can't know what it's like to have lived thousands of years ago, so I can only answer from someone in the late 20th and early 21st century. The reason I think you shouldn't sacrifice humans now is because I value human life, and that I think it would be wrong to deprive that person of life to appease a God that I do not think exists. There are times where ending a life might be justified, like physician assisted suicide, or self defense, and probably a few other cases, but none of those reasons are to appease a god.

I don't pretend that I have any kind of objective morality on this, I'm not even sure if I believe in objective morality as a concept,

It's been a long time since I read The Myth of the Framework, but I think the concept of "talking past each other" is wrong. On the other hand I often feel this kind of fatigue and don't want to get involved in debates. It probably isn't really about incompatible "level of understanding" (or "frameworks" as in the title), but something else.

The whole purpose of sacrifice is that it should give a reward from God or the gods. Good harvest, good luck in war, good health for your herds, etc. The part where the angel is blessing Abraham after the whole ordeal and swears that he will be rewarded, I interpret as a reaffirmation that Abraham will reap the full rewards even though he didn't sacrifice his child. Ancient worshippers didn't only expect a reward for sacrifices, they demanded it and considered it a bargain with their deities that the deities had an obligation to uphold.

So you can imagine a story teller thousands of years ago telling the other people around the bonfire "And even though he didn't make the sacrifice, he still got more than the full reward".

> The reason I think you shouldn't sacrifice humans now is because I value human life, and that I think it would be wrong to deprive that person of life to appease a God that I do not think exists.

And what proof do you have? We know that the tribe two rivers away sacrifices all men they capture from their neighbouring enemy tribe, and they receive great rewards from their god, who blesses them with better hunting (less competition), better luck in war (lesser enemy forces), and more or healthier children (better nourishment). So it is proven that human sacrifice gives you blessings of the gods. If you want to break with custom, maybe our tribe should banish you and get a new leader?

What I want to illustrate above is that it probably took an immense effort for a leader or for anybody, who thousands of years decided to not do human sacrifice, and managed to convince his tribe against all common sense. This in an environment where it had been custom since the beginning of time, and where tribes naturally expanded in population and territory until game started to become scarce and tensions arose. That's why I think the story of Abraham (or whoever it was originally) is so dramatic and has been remembered throughout the ages. It brought a whole new perspective to sacrifice that probably sounded completely insane to the average person at the time. "Why would a god not want his sacrifice? And why would he reward somebody who didn't give him his sacrifice?".

The materialists who read my comment will probably start connecting the retreat of human sacrifice with the shift from hunting gathering to pastoralism, which is a connection I would also like to make.

Edit: I also think it's super interesting that you bring up the authors intent. In my perspective on these old myths, the original intent is almost meaningless, since the stories have been told thousands of times before they were ever written down, meaning the story must have some core that touches the human soul in a universal way. Or probably that this situation happened so many times with different people that there is no "original" story.

> We are on such a different level of understanding, that there isn't any point in us two talking to each other

That would be a very convenient conclusion, but ultimately not true. Willfully misinterpreting a story so that it sounds morally palatable for a modern world is not a different level of understanding, it's propaganda, and it's extremely common.

And when I'm not doing my day job, I am reading, discussing, and interpreting stories. Drawing subtext involves evidence from the text itself. You are making up subtext. There's a difference, and it's transparent.

I only engaged because you give lots of grace to Christianity and disrespect to everything else, which is annoying to read, but also not even based in real digestion of the work.

I nominate you as the winner of this discussion, and any future discussions. Meaning you don't have to reply to any of my comments, since you already automatically won by walk-over.

I think the story would have been more powerful if Abraham himself had decided to not do the sacrifice, and deciding that no matter what God is offering it's not worth it, sort of like the Huck Finn "All right, then, I'll go to hell". That would be an interesting case of doing what you know is right, no matter who is telling you to do something wrong.

As it stands, it's a decidedly kind of weird story where we're supposed to root for Abraham, despite the fact that he was willing to sacrifice another human being just because someone told him to. Yes, that someone was "God", but that doesn't change my point.

I have to admit that I didn't completely understand where you were going with the second part. I'm not sure what you were asking in regards to "what proof I have"? Proof that I don't think a God exists? Proof that I value human life? Proof that I think it's wrong to kill someone just because you hear a voice that tells you to? Even if that voice actually were God?

I mean, I don't really know how to prove that. That's just my belief, I guess you could say I'm lying about that, but I don't know what to tell you there.

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.

> He's considered a moral and good character purely because he was fully willing to sacrifice his child. We're supposed to think that the morally correct thing to do was to listen to God and murder his child.

The whole point of the story is that Abraham is even willing to sacrifice the son he loves because god wills it. It's a story about having faith that there is a good reason for what god requests of you, even if you don't always know what it is. Abraham is virtuous because he doesn't question at all.

I'm not sure anymore if the story skips over the heartache this undoubtedly causes him.

Of course more cynical people immediately ask why god needs Abraham to sacrifice his son to no apparent benefit other than to prove his faith in the first place.

> And you conveniently ignore Moses killing all the first-borns.

I don't think it's really Moses killing all the first-borns. It's God. While he's complicit to some extent, he doesn't really have a choice in the matter.

While he could theoretically ask for mercy, God isn't exactly known for his compassion at that point in the story. He only really mellows out a bit when he has his own child.

Not to mention that Moses's got pretty good motivation. How many people stuck in a concentration camp would happily murder all first-borns in Germany given the chance?

> That would be a very convenient conclusion, but ultimately not true.

> Willfully misinterpreting

I don't think it works this way. If we've established that we're trying to interpret something, you cannot just claim that your interpretation is the right one, and someone else's is wrong.

> I have to admit that I didn't completely understand where you were going with the second part. I'm not sure what you were asking in regards to "what proof I have"?

That was me channeling the tribesmen, that any Abraham would have to respond to, especially if he wanted to continue being their leader or have an influence on decision. They would offer plenty of proof that human sacrifice was beneficial, and that this is evidence that gods exist and that they are keeping up their end of the bargain. How would you answer to them and actually manage to make them consider your new idea?

> I think the story would have been more powerful if Abraham himself had decided to not do the sacrifice, and deciding that no matter what God is offering it's not worth it, sort of like the Huck Finn "All right, then, I'll go to hell". That would be an interesting case of doing what you know is right, no matter who is telling you to do something wrong.

I would say it is evident that the story already is plenty powerful, considering how long it has survived through the ages. And what you are saying can also be read through the lines as what happened. An overwhelming force was influencing Abraham to sacrifice his son. The force of custom was and still is incredibly powerful over people and their decisions, a disembodied force, which probably was experienced by prehistoric man as a speaking entity. Then a moment of enlightenment, a break from old conventions and the realization that great rewards can be had without having to make great sacrifices. But by following other conventions, obeying a set of rules in life instead of seeing deities as trading partners giving blessings in exchange for sacrifices.

If we want to go a step further, it is also a slight break from egocentrism. Something most children go through, but that maybe prehistoric man never grew out of. What I mean by egocentrism is that the premise of sacrifice for reward is the dumb idea that "If I loose something (by sacrificing it), then that means somebody gained it". Since there's no physical being around who gained, well it is the spirits who gained it. Instead of realizing that whatever was sacrificed was simply spoilt. But not a total break of course, as that ram in the bushes was still sacrificed.

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.)

I don't agree that that can be read between the lines with that, at least in the publications that we have access to in 2025. The story pretty clearly seems to be about rewarding undying dedication to God, and at least how it's written, Abraham decidedly doesn't decide to do the right thing.

While I would understand the motivations for a concentration camp victim murdering all the firstborns, I still think it would be wrong. I would empathize, but fundamentally I don't believe in punishing children for the sins of their fathers.

Additionally, if it's God killing all the firstborns, then it's still a bit odd. He's omniscient, shouldn't he be above petty things like revenge?

I mentioned on a different sub thread, I think the story would be more powerful if Abraham himself decided not to kill Isaac, like if he had realized that no matter what God is offering, it’s not worth doing something completely evil. Like the Huck Finn “all right then I’ll go to hell”

> shouldn't he be above petty things like revenge?

Something about creating man in his image? I think I’ve had that discussion before. To make anything he does reasonable, his omnicience and omnipotence need to have limits.

It would be for atheists, but then it would be left out of the bible ;)