Cracked eisegesis: it's not just for biblical interpretation anymore!

8 Romantic Songs You Didn't Know Were About Rape | Cracked.comN.B. I have reformatted and added links to some of the original material. Furthermore, my defense of these songs is limited to Ian Fortey's (possibly facetious) claim that these songs advocate rape and is not intended to imply agreement with the moral views presented by them.  IOW, just because I think a particular song isn't necessarily about rape doesn't mean that I don't find it morally offensive for other reasons, such as extolling lust and/or casual sex.

#8. "Baby It's Cold Outside" - Dean Martin & Doris Day

Offending Lyrics:

Her: but maybe just a half a drink more
Him: (put some records on while I pour)
Her: the neighbors might faint
Him: (baby it's bad out there)
Her: say what's in this drink
Him: (no cabs to be had out there)

A short list of things left unspecified in the song:

1. whether or not she actually stays
2. if she does, whether or not they engage in sexual activity
3. if they do, whether or not it is consensual
4. that he is preventing her from leaving.  It is possible that she's choosing to stay of her own volitiondespite her protestations that she "really must go",
5. that he drugged her drink or even whether it has alcohol in it (although I would agree that it's safe to assume that it does.  Furthermore, he didn't ply the drink on her- she requested "half a drink more".

Cracked eisegesis: Another reason I dislike this song: to me, it sounds more like listening to two different radio stations at once than a conversation.
And in the link to the lyrics, I'm assuming that "namonia" is supposed to be "pneumonia" (in case they haven't fixed it as I requested).

#7."Summer Nights" - Olivia Newton John & John Travolta

Offending Lyrics:

Girls: Tell me more, tell me more, was it love at first sight?

Guys: Tell me more, tell me more, did she put up a fight?

Cracked eisegesis: Forley chooses the definition of the word "fight" ("physical altercation") that best fits his premise and ignores other, equally plausible meanings.(such as "intense verbal dispute" or "strong resistance").  IOW, Kenickie (the character that sings "did she put up a fight?") instead may be asking "Was she 'easy' or did it take a lot of convincing to get her to go along?".
Just asking: if the two of them married in real life, would that have made her Olivia Newton John Travolta?

#3."My Sharona" - The Knack

Offending Lyrics:

Never gonna stop, give it up

Such a dirty mind, always get it up

For the touch of the younger kind

Cracked eisegesis: First, "young" is subjective, so "of the younger kind" and "above the age of consent aren't mutually exclusive.  Second, he never clarifies what he's "never gonna stop" or how far he's willing to go to achieve it.  Unless this includes force and as long as he waits until she's over the age of consent, then there's no rape.  Third, no matter how much the singer may want to have sex with her, various lines in the song indicate that they haven't engaged in sexual activity, such as  "Is it just a matter of time Sharona?" and his use of the future tense  in the question "when you gonna give it up...?".  No sexual activity = no rape.

#2."Young Girl" - Gary Puckett

Offending Lyrics:

Young girl, get out of my mind

My love for you is way out of line

Better run, girl,

You're much too young, girl

Cracked eisegesis: As in "My Sharona" above, it's clear that the singer is attracted to someone who is likely a minor.  However, it is just as equally clear that they haven't engaged in any sexual activity and, in this case, he's actively resisting such a temptation.  As long as he does so successfully (on which point the song is ambiguous), there's no rape.

In each of the above cases, the fault lies in adding more to the text than is actually written.  For example, in "Baby, It's Cold Outside" merely asks "what's in this drink?".  The cracked eisegesist reads this and assumes that this means not only must he have added something to the drink, but it must be some type of date-rape drug, even though the text itself does not state that he had.

From cracked eisegesis to

skepticism masquerading as scholarship

One way that some skeptics apply similar means in biblical interpretation is their treatment  of Numbers 31 as condoning rape.  Some read that the Isrealites took "women who had not known man by lying with him" as plunder (vs. 35 ESV) and jump to the conclusion that this somehow must have included rape.  Now, while such an action could lead to rape, it doesn't necessarily.  This, however, overlooks two very important facts: first, they took sheep, cattle, and donkeys as plunder as well, but I doubt anyone can persuasively argue that they used such animals for such a purpose as the Israelites are accused of using the women; second, while the plundering of women could involve rape, it does not necessarily do so.  There are other purposes to which the Israelites could have employed the women, such as for servants.

More fun deconstructing children's literature

SAET » Tom Wright Reads Humpty Dumpty » The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Clearly the writer is telling an Israel story, and here alludes to the Temple.  This echoes other lines in early 2^nd Nursery Literature, such as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard (the "storehouse" of the Temple) and the bone (resurrection life) which she sought for her dog ("Gentiles"). "But when she got there, the cupboard was bare and the poor little doggie had none."  The temple had nothing to offer the Gentiles, and they thus remained in their state of Adamic sin and decay.

Somehow, Wright (and everyone who responded to the post) missed the significance of the name "Humpty Dumpty", an error I sought to correct in my response (awaiting moderation; I've added here the "during the clearing of the temple":that I meant to original comment and changed the word "invasion" in the original to "intrusion".)

"Clearly the writer is telling an Israel story, and here alludes to the Temple."
I’m surprised that no one has of yet deconstructed the name "Humpty Dumpty" itself. Remove the nonsensical last syllable from both words and you get "Hump" and "Dump".
The former, especially with the mention of the "wall" as noted by Wright, is a clear reference to the Temple Mount. But note that instead of the Temple {"wall") being on the Mount {"Hump"), the order is reversed in the rhyme so that the "Hump" is on the "wall". IOW, everything has been turned upside down and is in chaos (It may also be a subtle allusion to Jesus’ "city on a hill" in Matthew 5:14, but once again, with the order upside-down). This is further strengthened by the "Hump" being combined with the "Dump", as the name of Jerusalem’s dump is the well-known... Gehenna (or "Hell"), indicating an intrusion of the unholy into the place of the sacred that echoes Jesus’ quote of Jeremiah 7:11*: "My house shall be called a house of prayer: but ye make it a den of robbers" during the clearing of the temple.
Need Mother Goose paint a clearer picture than this of what is going on here?

*I’m tempted to make a Slurpee joke here, but will attempt to resist it.

In a similar vein (the link to the following was provided in the "SAET » Tom Wright Reads Humpty Dumpty » The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology" post).

Initial Explorations: Bultmann Reads Mother Goose

Internal evidence rejects the view that wehave here an original composition by Mary (Mother) Goose of Boston(1686-1743).[1] The phrasing of I-A is definitely late eighteenthcentury, since the Goose Period would have rendered it "diddley-diddley" (and thus "fiddley" in I-B). Furthermore, the sequence "cat-cow-dog-dish" represents an obvious redaction and is a compilation ofat least four different accounts.[2] Thus, the author of the piece isunknown,[3] and its date set between 1780 and 1820.[4] The Sitz imLeben of the Depression of 1815 may be reflected in III.2.

 See also "Of Bears (and others) of 'very little brain'"

Of bears (and others) of "very little brain"

Reconstructing the Pooh Community - Justin Taylor

But few know of [Richard Bauckham's] years spent in the Winnie-the-Pooh books, reconstructing the community behind the texts [by using methods similar to those used to reconstruct the "Johannine community"]. In this unpublished paper he summarizes the "major methodological breakthrough which virtually all Pooh scholarship now takes for granted." Here is a snippet:

I couldn't do justice to the humor of what follows, you'll just have to read it yourself.  Instead, I'll just skip to my response

So what he's saying is that both Winnie the Pooh and the Gospel of John must have been the works of redactors working with multiple sources?  Because we all know there's no way that the Gospel of John could have been the work of a single author.

For a parody of the "documentary hypothesis" (a.k.a., JEDP), there's New Directions in Pooh Studies: Überlieferungs- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien zum Pu-Buch, for which I've provided the following excerpt:

There is little need, at the present stage of scholarship, to attempt a justiÞcation of the principle that the dogma of unitary authorship for works of literature must be totally abandoned. In all conÞdence we may say that a priori we may expect the Pooh corpus (viz. Winnie-the-Pooh, hereafter abbreviated W, containing traditions of higher antiquity than the Deutero-Pooh book, The House at Pooh Corner, hereafter abbreviated H) to be of composite origin; even if there were such a person as A.A. Milne, traditionally the 'author', we may be sure that he did not write the Pooh books. His name does not occur once within the narratives themselves, and we can hardly be expected to take a title-page, manifestly a later addition, seriously.

 See also "More fun deconstructing children's literature"

Bart Erhman's odd Job

Ehrman begins his overview of Job with the claim that "the book [of Job] as it has come down to us today is the product of at least two different authors" and these "two sources... have been spliced together to make the final product" ([God's Problem], p. 162; 163 all references, unless otherwise noted, are from this source). One may wonder just how he managed to deduce this. Perhaps he unearthed copies of the original, separate stories? Don't be silly! Rather, like another practitioner of this craft, Bernard D. Muller [1] (who's work I've commented on on TheologyWeb, although I'm planning on running a more thorough rebuttal later in this blog) and in the finest tradition of "skepticism masquerading as scholarship", he attempts to "to flag out the 'smoking guns'"- even when the only trace of smoke exists in the imagination of the skeptic. But that is merely assertion, worthless unless I can show the reasons for his claim of dual authorship stand on less than solid ground.  As far as I can tell, here is the entire list of his claims (pp. 162-164, 167):

1. "[In] the prose narrative[,] Job [displays] patient endurance under duress[, but in] the poetic dialogues... Job is not patient but defiant" (= "in the prose [Job] is a patient sufferer; in the poetry he is thoroughly defiant and anything but patient");
2. "[In] the prose narrative[,] Job['s] patien[ce] is rewarded by God[, while in] the poetic dialogues... God does not reward the one he has made to suffer but overpowers him and grinds him into submission" (= Job " is commended in the prose but rebuked in the poetry");
3. "The writing styles are different between these two genres";
4. "[T]he names for the divine being are different in the prose (where the name Yahweh is used) and the poetry (where the divinity is named El, Eloah, and Shaddai)";
5. "[T]he prose folktale indicates that God deals with his people according to their merit, whereas the entire point of the poetry is that he does not do that- and is not bound to do so";
6. "[I]n the prose narrative, suffering comes as a test of faith; in the poetry, suffering remains a mystery that cannot be fathomed or explained"; and,
7. "It is obvious that a bit of the folktale was lost in the process of combining it with the poetic dialogues, for when it resumes, God indicates that he is angry with the three friends for what they have said, in contrast to what Job has said. This cannot very well be a reference to what the friends and Job said in the poetic dialogues, because there it is the friends who defend God and Job who accuses him. And so a portion of the folktale must have been cut off when the poetic dialogues were added. What the friends said that offended God cannot be known".

Item 1: Good (five stages of) grief!  Even if Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' "idea of 'stages' oversimplifies a complex experience" Job provides near textbook examples of bargaining ("maybe if I say nice things about God, we can get this over quickly"?) in the prose and then anger ("Well, if God's not going to cure me, I'm going to stop saying good things about Him", which wouldn't be too surprising when the bargaining didn't work) in the poetry. In short, Ehrman fails to notice that some time has passed between Job's mood shift.
Item 2: And what happens between the rebuke and the commendation? Job repents, which may have led to the latter. Also, the rebuke addresses only Job's response while the commendation addresses that of his friends as well ("Eliphaz the Temanite..., [thou] and thy two friends... have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath" Job 42:7). Therefore, this may be God's way of saying that while Job isn't entirely correct (thus the rebuke), he is closer to being right than his friends were (thus the commendation).
Item 3: I'm sure a single writer would never have thought of using different writing styles for contrast. This is one of those objections that are so blindingly simple to refute one has to wonder why it was raised in the first place.
Item 4: Again, contrast, this time between a stately God attending His court and a boisterous God that speaks from a whirlwind.
Item 5: This is simply false, as God's granting permission to Satan to do what he wants to Job, the stealing of the oxen, donkeys, and camels, the deaths of his children, God's granting permission to Satan a second time, and the start of Job's afflictions all occur in the alleged prose folktale. One would be hard pressed to claim these as examples of "God deal[ing] with his people according to their merit".
Item 6: While God's response to Job may seem incomprehensible to us, it would appear that Job understood it. Therefore, I would dispute Ehrman's claim that "in the poetry, suffering remains a mystery that cannot be fathomed or explained" as being only partially correct. That is, it may have been true during Job's affliction, but not afterward. Another mistake I believe Ehrman is making here is trying to universalize what was not meant to be universalized. The lesson I think we should take from Job is that even if we don't know the exact cause of a particular instance of suffering (although, as I've written before, we can know why suffering in general occurs), one should think twice before questioning God's wisdom. (Another lesson might be that it's easy to say that God punishes only the guilty when one isn't suffering).
Item 7: I think what the friends said that could have offended God can be known and, oddly enough, Ehrman supplies the answer when he writes: "there are obvious problems with [the suffering comes from God as punishment for sin] point of view, especially if it is generalized into some kind of universal principle" (p. 54).  Evidently, when Ehrman summarizes their arguments as follows: "Job is guilty, he should repent, and if he does so, God will relent and return him to his favor. If he refuses, he is simply showing his recalcitrance and willfulness before the God who punishes those who deserve it" (p. 175), he forgot that earlier he had "stress[ed] that the prophets themselves never state this as a universal principle, as a way of explaining every instance of suffering" (p. 53) as this is exactly what the three friends are trying to do (whether the friends got this idea from the prophets or somewhere else).

[1] This should not be read as implying that Ehrman endorses, or has even read, Muller's work, but rather that the two employ similar methodology.