#christian shepherd

[oceanic316]

A very short analysis of all* the dads and daddy issues on lost

*Considering every character that was a main character

Daniel

Charles widmore- complete sociopath in many ways, only met Daniel when he was an adult to manipulate him into going to the island on which he would be killed by his mother which Charles witnessed

Boone

Split up with his mother at some point, was clearly left with a nanny frequently enough to kill her, definitely has unresolved issues with his dead stepfather as he fell in love with the stepsister

Miles,

Very obvious dad issues from being raised without him present. Did get to meet him but he was a bit of a dick tbh. I guess he did love him but too little too late

Michael

Little known about his dad but only his mum was looking after Walt off island. His role as a dad could be interpreted as daddy issues

Ana Lucia

Deffo has mommy issues but the lack of clear father figure points to possible daddy issues as does her time with Christian

Charlotte

Goes to shithole island to try to discover her father who was never there. Clearly has daddy issues regardless of her fathers (unknown) quality.

Frank

Has issues but there’s every chance they are NOT daddy issues. Good for him

Shannon

He’s dead and his widow is a terrible stepmother. Daddy issues up to here-may have contributed to her sleeping with her brother

Desmond

He had to raise his siblings so this points again to an absent (at the very least emotionally) father. Daddy issues

Eko

Had to raise his brother suggesting a largely absent father who wasn’t around much

Kate

Blew up her real father due to his general terribleness, her stepfather was in the army so probably has issues over him not being around all that much even though he seems like an alright guy

Jack

Jacks daddy issues regarding Christian are basically a main plot point of the show and even made it into the finale. Points to Christian for feeding into a lot of the characters daddy issues

Sawyer

Dear Mr Sawyer… probably the nastiest daddy issues, doesn’t really get much worse than murder suicide with your kid under the bed. All of sawyers bad bits are due to his daddy issues. Also has daddy issue ties to Christian and Anthony

Locke

Attempted murder was a pretty bad look from Anthony as was the kidney theft. Anthony traveled across the world giving kids daddy issues left right and centre, despite only Locke being shown as his biological kid

Ben

Skeletor was not a great dad and is a key reason captain bunny killer is so messed up. Also bens habit of adopting children (Ethan, Alex) is likely linked to his own crappy upbringing

Sayid

His dad the war hero gave him some toxic masculinity problems, sayid not killing a chicken is our only main clue but it was pretty dark

Libby

Like everything involving Libby’s past, her parents are a big mystery. She does have dead husband issues?

Sun

Mr Paik for sure messed Sun up. His treatment of Jin and his general murdery tendency affected sun not only as a child but also screwed up her marriage

Jin

Jins dad is the nicest guy on the list, but jin had intense daddy issues due to his shame and being raised by a single father.

Claire

Christian really putting it out of the park here! Being the result of an affair involving an American doctor cannot have been fun and his absence in her life probably didn’t help with her wanting to give Aaron up. Also may have contributed to her not trusting Charlie that much

Hurley

David Reyes is an asshole, but he’s a pretty run of the mill, leave my family and don’t come back til there’s money, but he made the most effort to fix things. Hugo has big daddy issues tho

Juliet

Pretty standard daddy issues but her parents divorce clearly stayed with her and led her into some pretty unhealthy relationships later on in life

Charlie

Charlie’s dad seems like quite a nice guy if I’m honest but his older brother messed him up enough I’m happy to say Charlie has something very close emotionally to daddy issues

Richard

Too much of an enigma for a strong analysis but imma go out on a limb and say yes

Bernard

I don’t think so?

Rose

She seems pretty well adjusted so I think no

Vincent

Everyone on the island has been his dad at some point- probably missed Walt his original dad a lot

[thewordfortheday]

THE WORD FOR 21/8

The LORD is my Shepherd, I shall not want. Psalm 23:1

Like sheep we need the tender care of our Shepherd.

For He alone

- meets our needs (I shall not be in want)

- gives us rest (makes me lie down in green pastures)

- guide us in the right path (leads me in the path of righteousness)

- protects us from evil (I fear no evil, for You are with me)

- gives us comfort (Your rod and staff comfort me)

- vindicates us (spreads a table before me in front of my foes)

- blesses us richly (my cup overflows)

- gives us abundant life (goodness and mercy will follow me)

- and eternal life (I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever)

The Lord Jesus, our Good Shepherd, has our journey perfectly planned. As long as we're following His voice, and He is our Shepherd we will never be in want!

[lorddoodle]

(self) sacrificial lamb

[walkswithmyfather]

Amen! 🙏🕊️🙌

[tired-lamb]

my uncle and I had a conversation yesterday. he cares deeply for his family— myself included. he’s a christian man, as most of my family is. we’re a small community in the depths of south asia, which is why elders consider it of great importance to pass down virtues onto youngers, lest they go astray in a country where we are a minority. he was advising me on relationships, on attraction, and such. I knew where this was going to go. I knew that he knew today’s world was more open-minded.

“You should be attracted, ideally, to the opposite gender—“ ”But what I’m not?”

I knew he was going to say that. I’m surprised I said what I said, too, since I usually avoid this topic with my family like a prey avoids predator. he was silent, for a moment, and I took myself by surprise again by adding,

“Would I still be your niece?”

a question that had been hanging on my tongue ever since I’ve delved into a world where queerness and my faith coexist. whether they coexist at odds, or on the same end, or maybe somewhere in between, was something I was always, always scared to know. sometimes I chose for myself. sometimes I followed others. rarely have I ever believed they exist at odds. my uncle went silent again. he stared at me, and for a moment I wished I hadn’t asked.

“Of course.”

I didn’t expect it. he looked me dead in the eye and said with utmost surety that I would still be his niece. I would still be his relative and apart of his family. I would still be something to him. I didn’t react too emotionally incase he got suspicious— but I know for sure that that response meant a whole lot to me. it still does. it still will. I wouldn’t be writing this if it hadn’t. he was the last person I expected to say that. he was the last person I expected to still accept me if I were queer. he then later casually mentioned that relationships aren’t exactly about gender— it’s more about the attraction. I questioned him, too, saying “it’s not about the gender?” not that I believed it ever was, but just incase I had heard him wrong. he then looked at me, with a “rahm. Come on.” deadpan kind of look, and said,

“It’s never been about the gender.”

as if it were some common knowledge. as if he didn’t just erase any worries and qualms I had about no longer being apart of the family if I were of a certain kind, of a certain community that is usually at odds with my faith.

I share this because this interaction meant a lot to me. I share this because I want to look back on it whenever I have my doubts. to look at this and read and say if even my uncle of all people, who usually comes off as an uptight, no nonsense christian man, can say this, then what am I worrying for?

I like to think God, himself, would react this way.

[alwaysrememberjesus]

Follow The Shepherd

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Gaspar de Crayer (Flemish, 1584-1669) The Adoration of the Shepherds, ca.1650 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

[ae-cha08]

Pause for a moment and think about that statement. I lack nothing. Let the truth of that statement fill your heart with peace and gratitude.

My shepherd provides everything I need. 💙

[soaringeaglesingingjoy]

‭‭Psalm‬ ‭23:1‬ ‭AMPC‬‬

[1] THE Lord is my Shepherd [to feed, guide, and shield me], I shall not lack.

https://bible.com/bible/8/psa.23.1.AMPC

[honeybeeshepherd]

We don’t talk enough about how the reason that the whole “Jews as Christ Killer” trope exists is because the Romans were actually the ones who Killed Christ, but that gets kind of awkward if you’re trying to, say, convert Romans, especially powerful Romans. And it gets especially awkward if you make your official state religion the one based off a guy you killed to keep the peace in one of your colonies.

[dailychristianblog]

[jessicalprice]

adventures in christian opinions about judaism

(reposted from Twitter)

So a while back I started writing a thing on the trio of parables that ends with the prodigal son (which I still need to finish) and like MAN OH MAN do Christian commentators insist that Jews hate shepherds.

Like, I can't even count the number of commentaries that insist that shepherds were "despised figures" for first-century Jews and the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin were designed to insult the Pharisees by comparing them first to a shepherd and then to a woman.

So, as is my wont whenever Christian commentators make a claim about what was normal for first-century Judaism, I decided to try to hunt down their source on this.

As I've said many times, when it comes to Christian parable interpreters' claims about what attitudes/beliefs/etc. were normal for first-century Jews, get used to the phrase "no sources are cited."

I mean, first off, as a 21st-century Jew, the insistence that 1st-century Jews hated shepherds rings odd, given that <checks notes> Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rachel, all of Jacob's kids (the founders of the tribes), David, etc. were all sheep-tenders. The image of God as a shepherd is pretty consistent throughout the Tanakh. That image reappears in the Qumran texts, which as far as I know, are one of the few Jewish sources we have from 1st-century Judaea.

The term "despised" gets used a lot, so I decided to dig into that one.

When I was able to find citations, I traced them back to an 1882 commentary by a guy named Frederic Farrar.

Farrar cites Heinrich Meyer as a source for this, but when I looked up THAT citation, it's Meyer saying that shepherds were a "lowly but patriarchally consecrated class" -- in other words, poor, but with a distinguished history and status.

So that's why everyone's tossing the term "despised" around--because Farrar just made it up. But what about primary sources? I went back on the hunt.

Surprisingly, in a number of reference works, like glossaries and Jeffers's "Greco-Roman World of the New Testament," I found similar assertions about the common attitude toward shepherds, for which they cited...

<drum roll>

Aristotle. You know, the Greek guy who lived 300 years before Jesus? Definitely a reliable source for Jewish attitudes of the time.

Some people cited Philo's On Agriculture. Okay, Philo was at least Jewish and lived when Jesus would have, although he was a wealthy Hellenized Jew living in Alexandria rather than a Pharisee living in the Galilee. But okay, at least it's the right culture and time period. (The reference in Philo turns out to be talking about the section of Genesis in which Joseph's brothers come visit him in Egypt. It talks about how they were proud to be shepherds, and criticizes (gentile) kings who look down on shepherds.)

Then we've got Mishnah Kiddushin, in which a bunch of rabbis are having a debate about which professions make you trustworthy vs untrustworthy, and one rabbi lists everyone from camel-drivers to herders to barbers to shopkeepers as untrustworthy. Another rabbi comes back and is like, nah, all those people are fine upstanding folks; it's doctors and butchers you've gotta watch out for. So they're citing one cranky dude with a LONG list of people he doesn't like, who immediately gets shot down, as evidence of the normative attitude for Jews about a century earlier.

Oh, and we've got a citation of Midrash Tehillim which says that God-as-shepherd doesn't have any of the failings of humans-as-shepherds, which... sure. Also, it was codified in the 1300s?

The most compelling citation is from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 25b), in which the rabbis discuss who's qualified to be a legal witness. They exclude shepherds, because shepherds graze their animals on other people's land, which some of the rabbis see as a type of theft.

The Talmud is a record of debates, but this passage definitely makes it sound like this is a majority opinion. (It should be noted that the passage disqualifies all KINDS of people, from those who lend with interest to those who fly pigeons, as having conflicts of interest.)

But the important thing here is that the Talmud includes records of debates from as late as the 4th or 5th centuries CE (300-400 years after Jesus's time), and the passage makes a point of noting that the disqualification of shepherds as witnesses is a later development.

So in other words, the idea that the Pharisees hated shepherds and would have been insulted by Jesus telling a story in which the protagonist was a shepherd is based either on Greek attitudes that are 300 years too early or Jewish ones that are 300-400 years too late.

But people will twist themselves into citation knots (or just not bother citing a source at all) to insist that this was a common attitude so they can position the Pharisees as hating those charming humble shepherds and their fuzzy little lambs.

As to WHY this idea seems to be so important to them, well, you cannot read about Luke 15 without encountering the word "outcast" roughly 90 times per page.

The framing is Jesus was friend to The Outcasts while the Pharisees despised The Outcasts and the Lost Sheep, Coin, and Sons are all parables about accepting The Outcast.

Never mind that neither the sheep, the coin, nor either of the sons got kicked out of their communities. The sheep wandered off, as sheep are wont to do, the coin was lost by its owner, and the younger son decided to leave to go on a spending spree while the older son declined to attend the welcome back party for him after his dad managed to hire a band and caterers but never thought to let his own son know what was going on and he had to find out from a hired hand.

Moreover, the term "outcasts" gets used as a synonym for "tax collectors and sinners." Tax collectors were usually pretty well-off because they ran a protection racket for the Romans. Outcasts? I mean, I guess? But hardly in the "marginalized and powerless" sense.

As far as "sinners," the NT doesn't usually bother telling us what, exactly, they did to "sin," but on the rare occasions when it does offer that context, it's almost always wealthy people.

But why talk about that when they can present the objection the Pharisees had to Jesus's dining with "tax collectors and sinners" as the Pharisees despising lowly outcasts, and insist that the Pharisees hated the idea of such people repenting and returning, and so Jesus was tweaking their noses by comparing them to shepherds and women.

As if, you know, teshuvah wasn't something the Pharisees were ALL ABOUT. If you want to actually understand, consider that the iconic tax collector in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector shows no inclination to STOP being a tax collector.

The objection wasn't you're having a friendly dinner with poor lowly outcasts for whom we have contempt. It was you're having a friendly dinner with people who are extorting their neighbors on behalf of the invaders who kill us for looking at them funny and have expressed no intention to stop doing that.

Now, there's a good discussion to be had about whether shunning Trump lawyers and Marjorie Taylor-Greene donors or inviting them to dinner and trying to win them over with compassion is more effective, more ethical, more compassionate (to whom?), etc.

But presumably we can see why people of intelligence and goodwill might disagree on which of those approaches is the right thing to do, and why such people might might object to the strategy they don't agree with.

But what really gets me is that Christians have the utter fucking NERVE to paint the Pharisees as inhumanly awful for not wanting to have dinner with tax collectors while viewing Corinthians as Holy Writ:

I mean, Paul's all YOU MUST SHUN ALCOHOLICS AND PEOPLE WHO ARE GREEDY and Christians are like yes, that makes sense, but if the Pharisees are like, no, I don't want to have dinner with that guy who narced on my cousin and got him crucified, Christians are like, they're monsters.

Cool, cool.

Anyway, this has been your weekly edition of Christians Need To Stop Just Making Shit Up About Jews And Then Citing Each Other Like It's Fact.

And there were a lot of "I've never heard anyone say Jews of Jesus's time hated shepherds..." responses: Maybe you haven't, but that doesn't make it uncommon.

Sources in which I've found it:

Craig Blomberg (Denver Seminary, Society of Biblical Literature, Tyndale House, NIV translation committee)

Jared Wilson (professor at multiple Baptist seminaries)

Stephen Wright (Spurgeon College (British evangelical college))

Arland Hultgren (Luther Seminary (ELCA))

Kenneth Bailey (Presbyterian/Episcopalian)

Joachim Jeremias (Lutheran, cited EVERYWHERE)

Bernard Brandon Scott (Disciples of Christ, the Jesus Seminar)

Klyne Snodgrass (Evangelical Covenant Church)

Barbara Reid (Catholic Biblical Association)

That particular trope spans denominations, decades, etc. It's not a fringe viewpoint.

[thewordfortheday]

The LORD is my Shepherd; therefore, I shall not be in want. Psalm 23:1

I shall lack nothing, because I have the best possible shepherd taking care of me. He makes me lie down in green pastures. (Psalm 23:1-2) Our Shepherd leads and feeds us. Our Shepherd guards and guides us. Our Shepherd is good and gracious to us forever. Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, is the Good Shepherd who laid down His life for the sheep and then rose again victorious over all our foes. With our Good Shepherd beside us, we have no evil to fear and every good to look forward to! Hallelujah!

[apenitentialprayer]

I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well.

Samwise Gamgee (J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"An early objection I had with Christianity at school was being told I was part of a flock. Shepherds don't just look after sheep because they like them. They either want to fleece them, fuck them or eat them."

-- Christopher Hitchens

[thecruellestmonth]

I actually enjoy Bruce Wayne as a character a lot, and while I love expounding at length about his flaws and failures, I also like it when he's portrayed as a likeable person.

This might come as a surprise because I'm such a hater about him constantly. But I only act that way because too many people hold up a picture of him being nice to a random child and then say, "Does THIS look like an abuser to you? 🥺"

Which makes me want to bite something—because, you thoughtless ass, that's not how abuse works.