A theologian at HuffPo informs me that theology “is not about God”

November 10, 2013 • 7:11 am

It is with a heavy heart that I sit down at my keyboard this morning, for I must spend the next hour locking horns (see previous post) with a theologian—one suffering so severely from cognitive dissonance that he argues that theology is not about God. Something is wrong on the Internet.

The misguided theologian, David Dunn, is described by HuffPo as an “Eastern Orthodox Christian, independent researcher, lay theologian, blogger, and dad” (his website is here).  And he’s ticked off because I criticized a piece in The Atlantic by Sara Isabella Burton arguing that we all need to study more theology.  And so Dunn sat down and wrote a longish piece for HuffPo called “Theology is not about God: An open letter to Jerry A. Coyne.” It even starts with “Dear Dr. Coyne.”

I really should stop here by saying simply, “Are you nuts? Of course it’s about God.”  But, as General Patton said, all true Americans love the sting of battle, and so I must engage Dunn in a bit more detail, if for no other reason than to show how a smart theologian, who has obviously spent years in his profession, tries to justify his existence by arguing that theology is about something different from what everyone thinks.  Further, Dunn’s piece is larded with humorous deepities.

I’ll pass over Dunn’s ad hominems; he clearly doesn’t like atheists except for ones like Marx and Nietzsche (whose atheism he calls “fantastic”). But he has no use for Dawkins and the New Atheists:

As a general rule, I avoid arguments with kitchen appliances, Christian fundamentalists, and atheists who think Dawkins makes sense. But I feel obliged to make an exception in this case. You pride yourself on being a reasonable person and on giving Christian theology a fair hearing, so I feel a scholarly duty, as one intellectual to another, to critique your recent screed against Sara Isabella Burton. She wrote an article in the Atlantic about why theology is useful for humanities scholars, whether or not they believe in God. You say you have spent the past several years reading Christian theology. Thank you for your efforts. It is important that we try to understand each other, which is why I am writing, because I think you still don’t know what theology actually is.

His argument is that theology is not about God, but about people, and takes me to task for that egregious mistake:

Dr. Coyne, you are correct when you distinguish between biblical scholars and theologians. You also correctly define biblical scholars as people who study ancient religious texts. But you go off course when you add that theologians “try to figure out what God is telling us through those texts.” This description of theology makes me wonder how much you were paying attention to what Burton actually wrote. For her, “[Theology provides] an opportunity to get inside the heads of those whose beliefs and choices shaped so much of our history, and who–in the world outside the ivory tower–still shape plenty of the world today” (emphasis added). In other words, theology is not about trying to figure out the will of God from religious texts. Theology, in a sense, is not really about God at all. It’s about people!

. . . Theological studies is not about trying to figure out what God wants; it’s the study of how human beings respond to what they think God wants. That is why some theologians are atheists. To do what I do, belief in God is kind of irrelevant.

Well, that came as a surprise to me after two years of reading about theology, including theodicy, eschatology, and apologetics. What are those except attempts to analyze why God is doing what he does, what he wants, and how we should conceive of God and behave according to his will or his nature?

In fact, “studying how human beings respond to what they think what God wants” is to a large extent “figuring out the will of God from religious texts.” If it’s not, then what were people like C. S. Lewis, Whitehead, Plantinga, Karen Armstrong, Kierkegaard, Tillich, and so on doing? Theology is certainly more than studying how people act when they believe in God. The latter involves psychology and sociology, and while those may form a part of classical theology, you won’t find a lot of psychology and sociology in Aquinas or Augustine.

Now if you argue that theology is “about people” because it involves arguments about God filtered through the brains of theologians, then yes, it is about how humans respond to the idea of God. But Plantinga is not about sociology; he’s about apologetics: how we know God exists, why it’s rational to believe in him, and why God allows things like suffering. These people don’t write a lot about how the minds of medieval monks were affected by their beliefs.

And really, how many atheist theologians are there? I can’t think of one, except, perhaps, Shelby Spong.

I did in fact look up “theology” in the Oxford English Dictionary and found the following two definitions (the first ones):

 a. The study or science which treats of God, His nature and attributes, and His relations with man and the universe; ‘the science of things divine’ (Hooker); divinity.

b. A particular theological system or theory.

Where are the “responses of people” in there?

Perhaps Dunn spends his time, as does Burton, pondering the history of how people act when they think that there’s a God, but that’s certainly not the bulk of theology—at least not the sort I’ve read. What I think Dunn is up to is avoiding all the exegesis and apologetics because he senses that the arguments for God and the interpretations of his will are weak, confused, and conflicting. It’s much easier, and less controversial, to talk about how religious people have behaved—and martyred themselves—through history.

Dunn’s cognitive dissonance, resolved by arguing that theology isn’t about God, leads him down some strange paths:

Theologians sometimes focus exclusively on a narrow swath of the tradition, in the past, but many of us also work to explain to others how our tradition should shape the way we act in the present. Maybe this seems pointless to you. After all, the New Atheist mantra is that religion is dangerous. Okay! Let’s go with that for a minute. Let’s suppose the final solution to religion is to do away with it, but that does not really solve any immediate problems. Trying to convince Ayman al-Zawahiri (the current head of Al-Qaeda) to become an atheist is like trying to turn water into wine when you don’t believe in miracles. It is a pointless exercise. A Muslim theologian who can teach others about orthodox Islam is a more effective opponent of religious extremism than an irate evangelist for New Atheism.

Does that last sentence strike you as strange? After all, it is the imams and Islamic clerics who incite and justify much of the violence of extremist Muslims.  We don’t see a lot of “Muslim theologians” decrying the censorship of The Satanic Verses or the violence that followed publication of the Danish cartoons. And how stupid is it to claim that we atheists are trying to change the minds of peolpe like al-Zawahiri, Pat Robertson, or Ken Ham? We aren’t going after them, but after the doubters and the people on the fence.

Dunn appears to see theology as a branch of history: the branch that explains how people behaved because they believed in God. Where I come from we call that “psychology”:

We do read historical documents (often in the original languages), study artistic and archaeological evidence, engage ancient and contemporary philosophy, and utilize a variety of other critical theoretical tools, but theology is not really about religion as sets of ideas, artifacts, or cultural-historical phenomena. (That is more the purview of religious studies departments.) Religion, as you rightly say, is something people kill and die for, but you only half understand why that is the case. History, anthropology, psychology, etc. can help explain the psychopathic corruption of religion as an instrument of murder, but it cannot do justice to Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Teressa of Calcutta, or St. Maria of Paris. For the record, I am not trying to make this a competition between religion and atheism or faith and science. My point is that only theology can begin to unravel the mystery of how these human beings could suffer and die for the love of a God they cannot see, and for people they can only believe are God’s handiwork. Ideology will make murderers, but it cannot make martyrs. Only love can do that! Only love can make a person give her life for the condemned, embrace the untouchables, and expose injustice by suffering violence without retaliation.

Only love can make martyrs? Really? Does he truly believe that? Because if he does, he’s ignorant of all the history behind martyrdom. Did the people of Jonestown kill themselves out of love? Did the 9/11 bombers act out of love? One might consider other factors, including ideology, group pressure, indoctrination and, yes, as in the case of the 9/11 “martyrs,” hatred. And, most of all, the belief that if you die for your faith—the right faith—you’re going to join God, Jesus, or Allah in the hereafter. These things are not love, but groupthink, fear, and indoctrination.

Now you might be able to twist the word “love” in such cases so it becomes the same thing as “conformity,” “indoctrination,” or even “hatred,” but that’s Orwellian doublespeak. But theologians are good at that.

And then comes Dunn’s most hilarious deepity:

Christians believe that God is love. So we academic theologians are not really studying God, because you cannot see love.

That is so amusingly puerile that it merits not a response, but a horselaugh. Suffice it to say that millions of believers throughout the world see God as more than the emotion of “love.” If Dunn simply means that God is a loving God, then he’s committed a deepity—one that completely sabotages his argument. This kind of argument wouldn’t pass muster in one of our introductory philosophy classes.

Dunn finishes off by reiterating his thesis, as if repeating it several times makes it true. (Geneticist J. B. S. Haldane’s armamentarium of wrongheaded arguments included what he called Aunt Jobiska’s Theorem: “What I say three times must be true.”) Dunn also adds a bit of snark:

Maybe God is imaginary. Maybe love is too. So what? The imagination matters. It shapes civilizations and the saints (and even the tyrants) they produce. Understanding what people imagine God to be demands an interdisciplinary approach that is only preserved in theological studies.

One day, New Atheists may convert the world to reason and usher in a thousand years of humanistic peace. When that happens, sure, let’s get theology out of colleges and universities. But until then, the academy needs theology precisely for what you fail to understand about it: theology is about people. So if theology does not matter, then your problem is not with an “imaginary” God. It is with human beings – marvelously flawed humans! Perhaps you wish, Dr. Coyne, that we were imaginary too.

I would suggest that if you want to understand why people martyr themselves over an imaginary God, you need to study psychology, especially ideology, indoctrination, and wish-thinking—not just theology. By all means let us teach religious history and the philosophy of religion in the academy. But what we don’t need are entire schools of theology, staffed largely by believers who occupy themselves with justifying God’s ways to man. Schools of theology do not, for instance, teach courses on “why people believe crazy things.” We don’t need schools of theology any more than we need schools of Marxism, homeopathy, or pseudoscience. Those schools are a waste of money and brainpower. Put the biblical scholars in history departments, and add a couple of philosophers of religion to the philosophy department. But deep-six most of the theologians.

In the end, any sensible person who actually reads theology can see that it is based largely on the idea that God exists. Given that belief, it falls to theologians to explain what kind of God it is, how he acts in the world, and how we should behave according to those lights. For it is God’s will, and his perceived nature, that determines how believers behave.  If you don’t believe that, look at how Catholicism has promoted the denigration of women and gays, played hob with people’s sex lives, and tortured them with threats of hell.  And don’t tell me these have nothing to do with God or his nature.

Liberal theologians claim the opposite, but the basis is still a belief in God and an interpretation of what his existence means for us. For this is what theologians are paid to do.

Maybe Dunn isn’t that kind of theologian, but he has no basis for claiming that he represents the whole baying pack.

Vintage boots

November 10, 2013 • 5:23 am

One of the most famous of all “factory” cowboy boots was the “Golden Angus,” made by the now-defunct Acme Boot Company (no, not run by Wile E. Coyote). This design was made in the fifties and sixties, and was described, as in the ad below, as “the most beautiful Western boots ever created.”  They featured a bull head inlaid with leather, including golden-colored horns and cheeks. The design and gold-leather explains the boot’s name:

Golden angus

They weren’t of course the most beautiful boots of all; there were plenty of custom makers back then turning out not only prettier boots, but sturdier ones. The Golden Angus was, after all, mass-produced. Still, they’ve assumed an iconic status among boot collectors, for they were unique among factory boots in their creative design.

And so I was excited to find a pair for virtually nothing on eBay, and in good condition, too.  The “pulls” on the boots (those straps on the top that help you put them on) have printing inside that leads me to think these were made in the very late 50s or early 60s. At any rate, they’re over fifty years old.

More art-loving boot collectors call them “the Guernica boots” for obvious reasons:

P1040777The bull in Picasso’s Guernica (1937):

guernica_all

Note the unusual “toe bug” (the stitching near the toe; each make has his/her own identifying pattern):

P1040778

 

Sunday: Hili dialogue

November 10, 2013 • 3:58 am

“Fitness”, you may recall, is the black tomcat who lives with the boarders upstairs. Fitness hates Hili and chases her at every opportunity. They are kept apart. This photo was taken by Fitness’s owner when Hili had climbed up (for the first time) to the upstairs window in Fitness’s digs.  (“Fitness”, by the way, is the cat’s real name, and in English, for he was found abandoned in the rain outside a health club.)

A: You are spying on Fitness again!

Hili: Don’t tell me that you are not curious what the neighbours have for dinner.

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In Polish:

Ja: Znowu podglądasz Fitnessa.
Hili: Nie powiesz mi, że ciebie nie interesuje co sąsiedzi mają na obiad.

Petition to Amazon about books advocating child abuse

November 9, 2013 • 2:26 pm

As one reader pointed out in a comment on my earlier post, Change.org has a petition to Amazon asking it not to carry books that advocate violence toward children—that is, corporeal punishment.  I see this as an issue of imminent harm, which trumps free speech, and had no compunction about signing the petition. It asks Amazon to review its books and not carry ones that advocate beating children. The language seems reasonable:

Currently there are several books available to buy on Amazon (both .com and .co.uk) that advocate, endorse and advise on parenting methods that involve the physical abuse of children. Examples of titles include To Train Up A Child, by Michael and Debi Pearl; Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Tedd Tripp; and Don’t Make Me Count to Three by Ginger Plowman.

Such books, and others like them, promote behaviour which is abusive of children. All of the above books advocate the use of a rod and other implements on children under one.

Such behaviour is abusive to children, and it is also ‘offensive’, which is contrary to Amazon’s Content Guidelines.

It may well also be illegal, as it seems to go far beyond the ‘reasonable chastisement’ currently sanctioned by law in the UK, (where this petition originated) and in many US States. Not only is beating on a regular basis with a rod likely to leave a mark, which is illegal in the UK, it is also likely to amount to inhuman or degrading treatment, which is a breach of human rights.

We wish Amazon to urgently review their decision to stock any book or other product which advises the physical abuse of children.

There are a lot of readers here, and if you agree with that sentiment then you know where to go.  There are about 16,600 signers, and they need eight thousand more.

You can see a list of notable signers, including experts on child abuse, here.

OMG: Kosher cat food!

November 9, 2013 • 2:24 pm

This is a new one on me. After I just told you that cats are atheists, reader Lorena sent me a picture she took of a can of cat food she bought for her ailing cat (she thought it would stimulate his appetite):

koshercat

So there are Jewish cats as well as atheist cats! I don’t know where in Talmud it mandates kosher food for pets, but I’m sure some reader will inform me why we need such comestibles.

This is real, by the way: check out Evanger’s kosher pet food site.

I wonder if they have gefilte fish flavor. . .or whether Hili (a confirmed atheist) would eat this.

_______

UPDATE: I asked Lorena if her cat actually liked this stuff, and she replied “Thanks for posting my picture!  The cat liked the food but was unimpressed with its kosherness, since he also stole bacon off my plate.”  There is still no evidence, then, of any religiosity in cats.

She included a link to a post on halal cat food (“The lunach of Islam #14,998 (or thereabouts): Halal cat food”) that has some absolutely hilarious stuff in it. Here’s part of an ad from a British firm that makes this food:

Those that have attempted to comply with their faith’s requirement by buying fish based products are doubly concerned on discovering, that even in this supposedly harmless product the coating used on the food itself contains haram meat and even pork.

Muezza Pure, our premium brand of cat food (minimum 39% meat content) is the UK’s first Halal pet food for cats. It gives Muslim cat owners the choice and opportunity of purchasing a 100% Halal pet food for their cats, thus avoiding the need to compromise their beliefs by handling Haram food stuffs in their home.

Muezza, of course, was the name of Mohamed’s mythical cat.

The good Christians of Kentucky deface my posters again

November 9, 2013 • 12:20 pm

I’m speaking at Murray State University in Kentucky on Nov. 21 and 22 (stay tuned for BBQ reports) under the aegis of the Murray State University Student Organization for Reason and Science. The head of that group just told me that the posters for one of my talks are being removed and defaced.  This is exactly what happened when I spoke—about evolution—at the University of Kentucky at Lexington several years ago.  The students sent me a photo of a defaced poster in which somebody—I’m betting a believer—ripped the “is true” part off of my book cover:

Damaged poster, Murray State

This doesn’t really anger me, but I’m sorry that the students have to replace the ones that were taken down.  And I’m always aware that this kind of acadmic vandalism, at least against evolution, is based on fear: fear that  people might hear the anti-Biblical truth about science. And that’s exactly why I prefer to speak in places like Murray, Kentucky. I am talking about evolution, but the talk touted above is on accommodatinism—a far more incendiary topic. You never feel the oppressive pervasiveness of religion in America more strongly than in the South.

The students, bless their hearts, have asked me if I’d like some campus security there in case there’s trouble.  I don’t really need that (though when I spoke in Augusta Georgia they provided a guard packing heat), but I told them I’d let the campus cops figure out if it was really necessary.

___

p.s. “Freed Curd” Auditorium sounds like it was named after a compatibilist yogurt.

More religion as child abuse: Parents get stiff jail time for beating their child to death using Christian guidelines

November 9, 2013 • 9:18 am

One hopeful sign that religious exemptions for child abuse are waning in the U.S. is the increasing frequency of convictions and jail time for parents who mistreat their children on grounds of faith. That includes not only withholding medical care, but, in this story, Biblically justified child-rearing (i.e., severe beatings).

According to The Daily News (and other sources like the Examiner), two parents have been sentenced to stiff jail time for religiously-inspired sadism:

A Washington couple accused of starving, beating and forcing their adopted daughter outside as punishment were sentenced Tuesday to decades in prison for her death.

Larry and Carri Williams were convicted Sept. 9 of manslaughter in the death of a teenage girl they adopted from Ethiopia. Carri Williams was also found guilty of homicide by abuse.

Hana Williams was found dead May 12, 2011, in the backyard of the family home in Sedro-Woolley, about 60 miles north of Seattle. The autopsy said she died of hypothermia, with malnutrition and a stomach condition as contributing factors.

Carri Williams was sentenced Tuesday to just under 37 years, the top of the standard sentencing range, by Judge Susan Cook who said she probably deserved more time in prison, the Skagit Valley Herald reported. Her husband received a sentence of nearly 28 years.

What were these parents doing? Curiously, the Daily News fails to mention the ultimate cause, though the Examiner does:

Hana’s death was consistent with a corporal punishment style advocated by many Christian extremists, and memorialized in the controversial book, To Train Up A Child. According to reports, Hana was beaten and starved as part of a regimen of corporal punishment subscribed to by many Christian homeschoolers and other Christian fundamentalists.

The New York Times reports that the couple’s abusive parenting tactics mimicked instructions from the Christian parenting book. Evidence presented at trial indicated Carri Williams had repeatedly beaten Hana with a plastic tube – a device recommended in the book.

To Train Up A Child advocates using a plumbing tool to beat children with starting at age one. The book also advocates giving children cold water baths, putting children outside in cold weather, and forcing them to miss meals, as well as beating them; all of which exemplifies the abuse investigators said Hana endured.

This is unbelievable, but the Williamses weren’t the only parents who killed their child while using that book. According to the New York Times:

The same kind of plumbing tube was reported to have been used to beat Lydia Schatz, 7, who was adopted at age 4 from Liberia and died in Paradise, Calif., in 2010. Her parents, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, had the Pearl book but ignored its admonition against extended lashing or harm; they whipped Lydia for hours, with pauses for prayer. She died from severe tissue damage, and her older sister had to be hospitalized, officials said.

The Schatzes, who were home-schooling nine children, three of them adopted, are both serving long prison terms after he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and torture and she to voluntary manslaughter and unlawful corporal punishment. The Butte County district attorney, Mike Ramsey, criticized the Pearls’ book as a dangerous influence.

. . . The Pearls’ teachings also came up in the trial of Lynn Paddock of Johnston County, N.C., who was convicted of the first-degree murder of Sean Paddock, 4, in 2006. The Paddocks had adopted six American children, some with emotional problems, and turned to the Internet and found the Pearls’ Web site, Mrs. Paddock said. Sean suffocated after being wrapped tightly in a blanket. His siblings testified that they were beaten daily with the same plumbing tube. Mr. Paddock was not charged.

To Train Up a Child was written by Michael and Debi Pearl, who run the No Greater Joy Ministries. The Times describes them:

Through book and video sales and donations, the Pearls’ No Greater Joy Ministries brings in $1.7 million a year, which they say goes back into the cause. They live in a one-room apartment near the church. In his spare time, Mr. Pearl practices an offbeat hobby: he is a champion knife and tomahawk thrower.

Much of their advice is standard: parents should be loving, spend a lot of time with their children, be clear and consistent, and never strike in anger. But, citing Biblical passages like, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son,” they provide instructions for “switching” defiant children to provide “spiritual cleansing.”

They teach parents to use light taps to train infants not to roll off a blanket. For older children, parents are told to respond to defiance by hitting hard enough to sting with a willow switch, a belt, a wooden spoon or the tube.

Mr. Pearl describes child-rearing as a zero-sum test of wills. If a verbal warning does not work, he said, “you have the seeds of self-destruction.”

The Pearls:

michael-and-debi-pearl-190x208-1

Curiously, their book gets a large number of five-star ratings on Amazon, though the distribution is bimodal. Some of the comments are scathing:

Picture 2

Picture 3
The result of the book.  Hana Williams before:

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Hana Williams, 13, was killed by her adoptive parents after she was left outside in freezing rain in 2011. She died of hypothermia.
From Remembrance of Hanna Williams @ Facebook

and after:

correction-adopted-daughter-death
Members of the Seattle Ethiopian community gather around the grave of Hana Williams in a cemetery in Union Cemetery in Sedro-Woolley, Wash. hours after the sentencing of Larry and Carri Williams. (Photo: Frank Varga/AP)

Carri Williams, off to prison for 38 years:

adopted-daughter-death
Photo: Frank Varga/AP

Now you can argue that the three sets of parents who killed their kids were simply sadists, and would have behaved the same without the Pearls’ book or the religion that inspired it. We don’t know, for we can’t rerun the tape of life without the book.  But advocating such corporal punishments violates all the dictates of civility, and religion certainly gave the patina of divine approval to this kind of punishment.

But there are many other cases in which child abuse, and death, can be laid directly at the doorstep of faith.  I refer specifically to religions whose policy is to withhold medical care from children. There are several of these in the U.S., most notoriously the Christian Science Church (Jehovah’s Witnesses do it, too, refusing blood transfusions for themselves and their children).

As I reported five days ago, the majority of U.S. states (37/50) have religious exemptions for child abuse, so that parents can’t easily be prosecuted for, say, letting their diabetic child die a horrible (and preventible) death without insulin.  48 of the 50 states also have religious exemptions for vaccination, which puts not only the child in danger, but also those around it. These exemptions are sanctioned—indeed, mandated—by the U.S. government, which, ironically, requires such exemptions as a condition for states to get federal child-abuse funding.  Here at the University of Chicago, vaccinations are required for all students, except those who have medical reasons to avoid them (e.g.,compromised immune systems)—or religious reasons.

In fact, it’s largely the Christian Science church that lobbied the government to put these exemptions into law. If you want to read the whole sad story, I highly recommend a book I’ve just finished, God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by Caroline Fraser (1999). It not only gives the long and sordid history of Christian Science (an oxymoron given its dogma), all the way back to its founding by Mary Baker Eddy, but also has a chapter full of heartbreaking stories about how its adherents have allowed their children to die. (The book, by the way, is superbly written and a fascinating read.) Nearly all those parents, when they have been prosecuted (for manslaughter rather than abuse) have gotten off or received probation or minimal fines. In the U.S. justice system, religion is far more exculpatory than is mental illness.

Note two things.  If you say that the conflict between religion and science is either nonexistent or trivial, think of of the many children who have died precisely because of that conflict. Those children would be alive today were it not for religion, for there would be no reason for their parents to withhold medical care.  That parental behavior comes directly from the religious belief that Western medicine is ungodly and that children can be healed through prayer. (Christian Scientists believe, in fact, that disease is an illusion and can be dispelled by correct thinking.)

Second, many of these parents, particularly Christian Scientists, are not fundamentalist Southern Bible-thumpers, but often educated and fairly affluent. I’ve known Christian Scientists, and I bet many of you do, too. They are not Biblical literalists, but they do accept the insane teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. In fact they might even be seen as religious “moderates”—precisely the group that, accommodationists tell us, are relatively harmless.

They are not. And that harm is sanctioned by the majority of U.S. state legislatures, who refuse to rescind religious exemptions for denying medical care and immunizations to children.  Here the moderates are not just condoning child abuse, but enabling it.

I wish I could tell you some of the horrific tales of suffering and death that American children have endured because of their parents’ religious beliefs. They would break your heart. You can find them in God’s Perfect Child or the other book I recommended recently: When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law by Shawn Francis Peters.

Parents can damage themselves all they want with their religious delusions. But they have no right to force those delusions on others, especially their children. Faith healing, largely condoned in the U.S., is a clear case of religion as child abuse, and we’re all part of the system that allows it.

In light of this abuse, Jesus’s statement in Matthew—”Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven”—becomes a horrible double entendre.