What Are We To Make Of Diabolically Evil Babies? "This American Life"

  

The first of the following Bad Baby episodes is extraordinary. 

Try as you may to imagine a diabolically evil child, 
this "case study" will strip away every glib thought of crime and punishment.

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 “A man might have a son who is stubborn and refuses to obey. This son does not obey his father or mother. They punish the son, but he still refuses to listen to them.  His father and mother must then take him to the leaders of the town at the town meeting place.  They must say to the leaders of the town: ‘Our son is stubborn and refuses to obey. He does not do anything we tell him to do. He eats and he drinks too much.’ Then the men in the town must kill the son with stones. By doing this you will remove this evil from your group. Everyone in Israel will hear about this and be afraid."  

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 

Alan: I believe there is no passage in the Quran as bloodthirsty as Deuteronomy 21: 18-21. Whereas the Quran enjoins the slaughter of infidels, Deuteronomy not only authorizes, but commands the slaughter of one's own children. Furthermore, the obligatory slaughter of one's own children is invoked for behavior that is normal in the developmental psychology of adolescents. According to God's Word in Deuteronomy, I - and everyone I know - would have been killed after denunciation by their own parents.

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"Worst Bible Passages"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/09/worst-bible-passages.html

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"Is The Bible More Violent Than The Quran?"
NPR
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/03/is-bible-more-violent-than-quran-npr.html

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521: Bad Baby

March 28, 2014

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/521/bad-baby

They're small. And they're cuddly. But sometimes it feels as though our babies were replaced with demon replicas — controlling, demanding, or just downright awful. This week, stories of infants and children who dominate the adults around them with their baditude, or whom adults have painted with the "bad" brush from early on. We also ask the question: at what age does badness begin?

Audio File (available 7:00 p.m. March 29)