In Oklahoma they are passing a law to mandate a Bible be in every classroom.
I don't have as much of an issue with this as I do with hanging the (Protestant Evangelical) ten commandments on the wall. The Bible, like many other religious texts is an important book...
Just one little question:
Which Bible?
Ya'll say "The Bible" like you have a Pope and there is only one. That's not true. So... which one?
If you don't know then maybe you are not qualified to make such mandates.
Look to the ant, lazybones; consider her ways, and be wise:
She has no king, no boss, or ruler, but she knows to store her provisions in summer and plan for the harvest.
Queens do not "rule" the other ants. They are just the ant with the job of laying eggs.
It's really interesting to me that people in the Bronze age seemed to know this? Or at least recognized the autonomy of individual ants. And they also used the feminine pronouns for ant workers ... which is also correct.
Before you say they didn't know that ants had queens... they did! There is a whole lovely story about King Solomon talking to a queen ant. The queen ant humbles the human King who has gotten too big of a head. It's a nice story.
@futurebird@slothrop
the use of the word "queen" for an egg-laying ant (or other hymenopteran) seems to encourage many misconceptions, particularly the idea that the "queen" has some special power of command, so it's interesting they seemed to know ant "queens" don't "rule" in the human sense. But they must have needed some understanding of ants to protect food stores.
@LevZadov@futurebird@slothrop
the terms gyne and reproductive are already in use. "womb" would be problematical because it implies live birth, and most (all?) ants are egg layers. Anyone know of a an ant that gives live birth?
@futurebird@slothrop My first thought was to wonder how they knew that worker ants were female without a microscope—but workers do lay eggs occasionally, right?
Workers do lay eggs. One could notice if you caught some worker ants of certain species and kept them separated from their colony. Without the queen they turn to laying eggs (which are unfertilized so they can only produce males) in a last ditch effort to participate in the nuptial flights.
But it might also just be a fluke, or a tendency to call all small creatures female? I don't know enough about language to say how remarkable it is to use female pronouns.
This is interesting! (I can't say I realized that worker ants are female either :dragneyes: )
I do wonder (and maybe you know) if the choice of feminine pronoun for the ant here has more to do with the translator dealing with ancient Hebrew's grammatical gender. Perhaps the biblical Hebrew word for "ant" is just feminine?
(Not trying to reply guy or anything I am just a language nerd enjoying the thread and you seem both fairly knowledgeable and interested in details like this 💙)
@futurebird@slothrop
I didn’t even realize until you wrote this that my unquestioned understanding has always been that the queen does rule. That assumption was based on… nothing? What a human queen means?
@futurebird I have heard the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics be called "the rubber bible" (because the CRC publishing group was originally the Chemical Rubber Company).
But I am not convinced that such creative responses actually do much to stop the authoritarian supremacists responsible for such outrages.
@futurebird That's one of the conundrums that puzzles me. If the Bible is the literal "word of God" as I understand some believe, then how can the words be different in different versions? I guess this is why we have sectarian wars, over those words. I'm sure it won't be too long before SCOTUS determines which version is the correct (joking/not joking).
Isn't that the bible of The Church of England... and isn't that the church we Americans were so butt-hurt about having to be a member of that they all went over an ocean to escape it???
@futurebird@SteveClough@VirginiaHolloway
If i'm not mistaken the argument wasn't over what it says in the bible, that's the word of God, so duh. The argument was over what it says in the bible, what it really says, i.e. the interpretation.
But the bible says so many contradictory things, so it's not surprising some people get upset every once in a while.
You can have fun with "The Brick Bible" in classrooms... with the LEGOs and all, it'd definitely get picked up and looked at. Bonus is the pics and stories could lead to some awkward questions at home about what's actually IN the bible mommy and daddy keep on the shelf or table (hee hee).
@futurebird the Bible and the Ten Commandments must be taught, not only present.
However, this order for the Bible is a policy, not a law. That came from a memo by the superintendent of schools.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court is entirely unlike the US Supreme Court as it pushes back against the state's GOP movement to establish religion, specifically Evangelicalism, in schools.
Both the Bible and the Ten Commandments requirements will probably go to the court.
If I were a teacher there I would teach about nothing but the Sermon on the Mount.
OK, we're starting a 3-week unit on "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven."
Then we'll have 4 weeks on "Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you."
And then we'll have 2 weeks on "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them," which is about infallibility, because if you've ever watched how hard birds work you know that Jesus didn't know fuck-all about birds, so what else was he ignorant about hmm?
Let's see, then 2 weeks on "Do not judge, or you too will be judged ..."
@futurebird
I'd be bringing the Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. I want those kids to see all the academic comments and know people argue about meaning and study context.
The cannon of MC Hawking makes this point (A Brief History of Rhyme, Chapter 15) ;
"They need to read a book that ain't so damn old
Let reason take hold
Though truth to be told
They're probably already too far gone
Withdrawn, the conclusion foregone
But maybe there's still hope for the young
If they reject the dung being slung from the tongues
Of the ignorant fools who call themselves preachers
And listen instead to their science teachers"
@futurebird 🧵 As a former student of Theology and Religious studies, I have a simple explication for which many Americans will hate me: THE bible doesn't exist. We only have different corpuses of text collections and translations.
Why?
(People who believe that God personally dictated even one of these collections of texts, please stop reading!)
I try to keep it simple: Just imagine: In earlier times, people passed on traditions orally. There is a tribe that is enthusiastic about the great
@futurebird 🧵 ant queen by the river and tells stories about it around the campfire. For the children it is embellished like a fairy tale, on feast days an epic is recited. Mythical structures are created, including legends. The story of the ant queen is wandering. The tribe from the mountains doesn't know what a river is, and they adjust the landscape. The tribe that wanted to steal the ants only focused on ant eggs. And there is the tribe that makes war, speaks ill of the ant tribe and changes
@futurebird 🧵 the history.
Later, people begin to write down important things. They find ant stories everywhere, are fascinated how many, and write them down. They themselves have never met the tribe, never seen ants. Every writer influences their choice, their way of writing.
A lot of time later, people fascinated by ants (but knowing not much) find some of these papyri. Many are nearly destroyed, so they try to reconstruct the texts. Sometimes they take pieces of several writers together.
@futurebird "which bible?" all the most popular ones? So there should be copies of Quran, Vedas, King James', Torah, Adi Granth, Tao Te Ching, Book of Mormons, etc, in every classroom
@futurebird ... and once the theocrats get in power, they'll spin their wheels on the bullshit differences between them like a bad Marvel vs DC argument.
@futurebird whelp, fwiw, i think all branches of christianity and judaism all have a bible that contains the ten commandments. it’s the rare part of the bible that literally everyone agrees on