"Women Fighters In Reasonable Armor: An Idea Whose Time Has Come"

If you subscribe to, or are a regular fan of, io9 then you've probably already seen this faboo post about artist renderings of kick butt women warriors wearing armor that *gasp* may actually save their lives! Not that you can't kick butt while wearing heels and metal underwear, but you're definitely more likely to twist an ankle and get gutted in the process.

I'm just sayin'.

Personally, I'd like to see this live-action. Not to say that Xena didn't take a few names in her day, but she also should have been sporting a lot booboos with that getup (except when Lucy Lawless was pregnant and they finally put her in full body armor). Doesn't anyone else wanna see a bunch of female samuri with the scary masks? C'mon...you know you wanna :D

Biblical Marriage: Lot & Mrs. Lot Sing the Blues

This is soooooo late! And with that in mind, I'm dashing off this post with one editorial read-through, but there are links that need to be added, etc., that I will get to later. I cannot let this languish any longer! Enjoy ;)

EDIT 9/19/11 - So I've no idea what I was thinking when I first wrote this. The truth is I'm overly wordy almost all the time, and really, really need to edit when I write. With that in mind, I've rewritten this so that it's more accessible and uses less tinpra-jargon.

Biblical Marriage vs. Marriages in the Bible: Lot and Mrs. Lot

If you missed my previous posting, I am writing a (hopefully) brief series of essays in response to a YouTube video that supposedly lays out the dirty truth behind what a Biblical marriage really is. In the course of the video approximately fifteen examples of “marriages” are brought up, each one completely outrageous and jaw-dropping if you’ve never heard of them. Each one is also actually in the Bible. However, most of them are not examples of a Biblical marriage.

What does “biblical” mean? Well it can mean “Of, relating to, or contained in the Bible” as defined in TheFreeDictionary.com. Basically anything that’s in the book regardless of its nature.

Biblical is also synonomous with being godly, or “Pious; reverencing God, and his character and laws; obedient to the commands of God from love for, and reverence of, his character; conformed to God's law; devout; righteous; as, a godly life.” (BrainyQuote.com) This, I think, is the meaning that most of us have in mind when we talk about something being “biblical”: that it reflects the character and precepts of God as set forth in the Bible.

Just because something is in the Bible (the first definition) doesn’t mean that it is in fact biblical (the second definition). The Bible doesn’t just show you what you’re supposed to do and then give examples of people who did them, the Bible shows us people in their real lives doing real things. These are often real crazy, downright outrageous things. Because real people do real outrageous, crazy things. Just because someone lives their life in the heart of Crazy Town, however, doesn’t mean we make them an example of the new standard for living. Usually we use it as an object lesson of what not to do. Why? Because it’s an indication of a wild deviation from the standard, whatever that standard is. And we know they’re deviating from a standard because when there is no standard, there can be no deviation, and where there’s no possibility for deviation you can never have shocking, outrageous behavior.

And so I am compelled to make the distinction between the marriages in the Bible, as mentioned in the YouTube vid, versus what a biblical marriage actually is.

In my previous two essays I tackled the statements that a biblical marriage is one man, his wife, and their murderous son, or the story of Adam, Eve and their son Cain. The video implies that, after killing his younger brother Abel, Cain then had sex with his mother, Eve. While it is true that Cain must have married some female relation by virtue of population size at the time, it was likely a sister, niece or great-niece and not his mom. While God is very much against the murder, Cain isn't faulted for his choice of wives. While it was incest, it wasn't something condemned by God--not then at least.

The next example was one man and his sister (Abraham and Sarah), and that biblical marriage is one man, his sister, and her servant (Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar). In the first instance, it’s okay that Abraham and Sarah are married half-brother and half-sister (but pretty gross to me) because there are no laws prohibiting that level of incestuous relationship yet. It was, in fact, a fairly common practice. There would be laws regarding incest, and they would cover just about everything you could think of and then some, but they don’t exist yet. In that regard, blaming Abraham and Sarah for being married half-sibs would be like a cop giving you a ticket for parking in a spot where a hydrant will eventually go.

In the second instance, Sarah convinces Abraham to sleep with her servant Hagar so Hagar can get pregnant and “fulfill” the prophecy God had given to Abraham that he would have a son--even though the child was supposed to be born to his wife. The whole thing turns into a hot, baked-in-the-desert-sun, ghetto mess that God eventually fixes. It would continue to cause problems down the line, and still does to this day. But that’s what happens when you try do “help” God. Usually you end up needing him a whole lot more than you did when you started. The lesson here? Don’t help God, listen to him.

In this essay, I’m going to be covering the issue of Lot, his wife and daughters, and the “good” citizens of the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. ( Read more... )