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Compiled by Adam Christian
Updated Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007, at 2:26 PM ET

(Continued from page 4)

For MarkEHaag this spiritual conflict has contemporary political dimensions:

David Plotz asserts that Jeremiah is a traitor for his continual harping on Judah's imminent destruction at the hands of Babylon.

That seems a little one-sided. Jeremiah is prophesying a punishment for the Chosen People. [...] Their apostasy and incorrigibility are especially grievous, as they have enjoyed blessings bestowed on no other people. [...] In the dialectic of suffering and remorse and self-regard that governs the G*d/Israel relationship, it is precisely the divinity's extraordinary malice toward His Chosen People that marks them out as the recipients of special grace.

Plotz, of course, isn't really talking about Israel. He's talking about America. And his understanding of what it means to be "patriotic" is peculiarly American: one must do everything in one's power to make one's country and one's fellow citizens feel good about themselves, to encourage them to think of themselves as better than their opponents, to drive them on to with the game of geo-political pre-eminence. Suffice it to say, in other times and in other places, true patriotism was understood not as a simple willingness to help one's country feel good about itself as it is, as it currently subsides in the present earthly moment, but to try to improve it morally and eschatologically, to raise up one's land and one's folk, through sublime horror if need be, to a higher level, to make of it something more awe-worthy, grand and eternal, above any petty human sort of merely political competition. That is, something that might truly merit a raging G*d's prickly, somewhat self-absorbed attentions . . . .

On a lighter note, miateredhead ties the conversation back to last week's discussion of spanking, imagining a God who spares the rod:

OK, Sodom and Gomorrah, you are in time-out!

Worshipping that calf again! I told you...give it to me! Now! You may not worship it again for a whole week, and I mean it!

Adam, Daddy understands how tempting that apple was, especially with that mean old serpent egging you on. You won't do that again, will you honey?

OK, I'm going to count to 10, and everybody who's going with Noah had BETTER be on that ark!

There's a lot of good reading and good discussion to be found in Blogging the Bible Fray. Check it out. GA … 10:00pm PST

Friday, Jan. 26, 2007

If the songs of Madonna and Britney Spears affirm the virtues of a good spanking from time to time, the idea of corporal punishment has become decidedly less vogue in the arena of childrearing. The trend towards pacifism found its ultimate expression this past week in a California bill to outlaw spanking by parents altogether. Widely dismissed as an excessive manifestation of the liberal nanny state, the proposed law receives a rare defense from Emily Bazelon.

Many cast a skeptical eye on the supposed link between child behavior and discipline in the first place. "There are so many things going on societally" points out chadosaurus, among them "parents … being lazy, short sighted, concerned more with being best friends than parents, selfish" that it's impossible to cite spanking as "either the problem or the solution." Isonomist- chalks up the escalating rate of juvenile misbehavior and violence to the disintegration of the two-parent household since the 1960s. Taking the interrogation of such a link further, Vepxistqaosani3 laments the general lack of respect shown superiors:

If the argument that spanking is ineffective be true, then it follows that American children should be better behaved today than in the past.

But friends and relatives who teach in the public schools assure me that this is not the case; that children today are far more disrespectful and unruly than ever. Who among us over forty can remember even the most notorious juvenile delinquent mouthing off profanely and obscenely to a teacher? But that is not even unusual today.

unempirical attacks the proposed spanking law as overly broad, and therefore prone to abuse by overzealous prosecutors. wolfmann questions the basic enforceability of yet more statutes aimed at regulating behavior within the home. Inquisitor14 blasts Bazelon's article as "the worst kind of irresponsible indefensible social theory … especially as the author admits that there is not a preponderance of evidence on either side here."

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Moira Redmond is a freelance writer and a former Slatester. You can e-mail her at .
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