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You can't quote that without also quoting:

   Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. -- Exodus 34:7

Exoristos 5 days ago

Except that the writer in Ezekiel is proposing a new deal (in the voice of God) for his intended audience: basically, if at this point in the negotiations you forsake behavior A, various criminality and oppression; I will promise B, not to hold your relatives responsible, and C, to rescue those you've oppressed. (Also possibly D and E -- it's a long passage.)

Thank you for sharing your explanation. One point I was trying to make was that just as the concept of children not being responsible for their parent's choices is mentioned in the Bible, so is the concept of children being affected by their parent's choices.

Whether or not I should take a random person on the internet's (OP's) word that a Bible verse should be interpreted as aspirational or your word that a concept does not apply to the group being spoken to is separate from the fact that both concepts are mentioned. To me it makes sense to acknowledge the existence of both if using the Bible as a supporting reference.

Exoristos 5 days ago

Your post was quite relevant, as the Ezekiel writer is referring to and contrasting with that well-known passage of Mosaic law you quoted. As for your doubts about the discussion here, that's what makes study rewarding -- and the first and secondary sources invite you to start a study of your own.

halJordan 4 days ago

You can't present these two passages as if they're the same voice. It's two different authors so the point that there exists multiple points in the Bible is a non-sequitur. It is very clear that the Ezekiel quote is aspirational because we do know a) what the levant was like then & b) what Jewish law already said and c) what Ezekiel is saying. The fact that you personally don't know invalidates nothing, and that fact that you tried to present b) as if it's a 1:1 cancellation is just insane when Ezekiel already knows and is responding to those words.

password4321 4 days ago

Again I repeat that I did not share anything about voice, invalidations, my personal knowledge/actions (which you've deemed insanity), or cancellation... I am only feebly attempting to ensure that references to this topic from the Bible are considered alongside references in the Bible to a similar topic from another perspective.

I appreciate your filling in additional justification for the OP's initial intro. Thanks for sharing your understanding of the passages though there may be a slim chance your understanding of me is a bit lacking while you've chosen to disregard the HN guidelines.

Of course one can quote the statement that one agrees with and not the statement one doesn't agree with, unless the intent is to review the work that contains them, which it wasn't.

Quoting one statement from a source in support of one's perspective can be interpreted as an attempt to demonstrate that the source aligns with that perspective.

"can" != "necessarily does", but you said "can't", which is what I refuted. And I think your assertion here is even more baseless, frankly ... there's zero indication that they offered the quote to buff the bible, which was not previously the subject of discussion. And they didn't even quote it in support of their perspective, they said it was "aspirational" but then said "To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family".

I also pushed back at the bible thumpers who demanded contradictions in the bible from me when the whole context was you explicitly pointing one out.

I have far better things to do than discuss the absurdities of texts written by ignorant nomads and Roman propagandists thousands of years ago (and spun by agents of King James) so I won't respond further ... over and out.

password4321 4 days ago

If your point in responding was to refute one word being absolute when you accept the concept is a possibility, we're both going to have a bad time.

incr_me 5 days ago

Why not?

One aspect of what I'm trying to share is that it is a bit of a stretch to quote one Bible verse expecting others to accept a one sentence summary of the context as sufficient explanation to apply the verse to a topic.

nkrisc 5 days ago

Probably to show you can pick any choose any bible verse to make whatever point you want. There’s a verse for A and NOT A.

wizzwizz4 5 days ago

There's a verse for "humans only have one rule: don't eat that apple" (Genesis 3:3), but the narrative in which this verse appears makes it obvious that this is no longer the case by the end of the chapter. Much of the Bible is presented as a history, and the rules presented are superseded, amended, qualified or augmented by subsequent rules throughout – although not usually so soon as this.

This poses a problem for cherrypicking, but exactly the same problem is present when cherrypicking from any legal tradition: that doesn't mean that the law is meaningless, only that cherrypicking is not an appropriate way to read it.

Kaliboy 5 days ago

That's weird. I don't have this with the Bible. But maybe I haven't read those passages. Do you have some examples?

https://thoughtcatalog.com/jim-goad/2014/05/30-pairs-of-bibl...

Assuming you are asking in good faith, I'm still going to Google that for you and paste the first link:

How is it possible to not be familiar with this common criticism? e.g., Leviticus prohibits wearing clothes woven of two different types of fabric and calls for killing adulterers, anyone who curses their parents, etc. etc. which millions of cherry pickers ignore while constantly referring to the bit about laying with a man as with a woman.

Kaliboy 5 days ago

I'm more than happy to respond to moral issues you may have with the Bible, if you're interested in trying to understand it from a neutral viewpoint.

However I wasn't expecting this. I expected examples of contradictions.

God knows Christians these days are walking contradictions, so I understand your frustration and reaction, but I meant in the text.

kulahan 5 days ago

I think it's extremely possible to be familiar with the criticism without ever having seen specific examples. I certainly haven't. I guess I assumed it was something to do with people misunderstanding the difference between new and old testament, or something to that effect.

Your comment also does not seem to present any examples of this. You start talking about it, but then you move on to complaining about cherry-pickers instead of showing some other part of the old testament which happens to encourage wearing clothes woven of two different types or not killing adulterers or something.

But they weren't touting the bible or offering it as an authority, just saying that one particular statement was "aspirational" but has practical problems ("To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family").

Kaliboy 5 days ago

This is literally true now that we understand epigenetics a bit more.

scarier 5 days ago

Do you have any references on this? My understanding is that it’s in kind of a similar boat with intergenerational trauma that quantum mechanics is with certain schools of philosophy, and that the actual science of epigenetics supports a much more limited scope (responding to e.g famine and other current stressors in utero), so anything that could fall into the intergenerational realm would need to be passed down through the normal evolutionary process of populations experiencing selective pressure.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fearful-memories-...

Kaliboy 1 day ago

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...

[flagged]

My favorite (dys|u)topian setting; universal child removal to robo-nurseries, gets closer to implementable every day.

Etheryte 5 days ago

They more or less did that during the bombing of London, children were evacuated to foster families in the countryside en masse. Luckily they came to terms with the fact that this was an insanely traumatic experience pretty quickly and reverted. It's literally less traumatic for a child to be in an active war zone than to be separated from their parents.

trelane 5 days ago

> It's literally less traumatic for a child to be in an active war zone than to be separated from their parents.

Unless they happen to go to war themselves, vanquishing an evil queen with the help of a lion and becoming kings and queens, and reigning for a long while themselves.

Those kids seem to mostly turn out alright. Small sample size though.

wizzwizz4 5 days ago

I'm not so sure you're interpreting the data correctly: 1 in 4 such children become "silly, conceited" adults, forgetting all the lessons they learned on their adventure; and 3 in 4 develop vivid visions that result in them getting killed by a train.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-27/child-abuse-royal-com...

defrost 5 days ago

And far far worse outcomes for those children orphaned:

jhbadger 5 days ago

One of them (Susan) gets really into nylons and lipstick and is basically damned to hell for it, though.

wizzwizz4 4 days ago

I think the part where she abandoned people, including one prisoner, to a murderous gang of con artists / burgeoning cultists is more relevant than precisely what she abandoned them for. I'm reasonably sure that my interpretation is not how the author (C. S. Lewis) interpreted this part of the story, though.

Also, she wasn't damned by the end of the last Narnia book (rather, she's expected to be damned, but it is not yet certain).

CamouflagedKiwi 5 days ago

Unless the child is killed in said active war zone, which was the maximally traumatic outcome they were trying to avoid. Some evacuation was reverted, but there were also later waves; I don't think it was clear that it was overall the wrong thing given the very possible outcomes of heavier bombing or even invasion.

nandomrumber 5 days ago

Well obviously dead child suffer no trauma.

em-bee 5 days ago

it seems that at least according to the german wikipedia page about the topic in germany they came to the opposite observation. children who were sent away apparently suffered less than those that stayed in the war zones.

kortilla 5 days ago

Does this apply to babies separated at birth though?

moralestapia 5 days ago

The trauma shifts forward in time, like debt.

marginalia_nu 5 days ago

Amusing how many read excerpts of The Republic and come away thinking it's a utopian project, and not a thought experiment to investigate the nature of justice.

lazyasciiart 5 days ago

And as many adoptive parents know, that doesn’t go so easily.