How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

For example, the law about not allowing a donkey to sleep in a bathtub was put into effect in 1924. The story is that a rancher had a donkey that frequently slept in an abandoned bathtub on the rancher’s property. One day, a local dam broke, and the water from the reservoir washed the bathtub and the donkey into a basin. Local authorities were called to help rescue the donkey, but it was not easy to do. It required a lot of effort and manpower to finally rescue the animal. To prevent such a thing from ever happening again, they passed a law that prohibited donkeys from sleeping in bathtubs. At that time, for those involved, it made sense to have that law. It was likely never prosecuted, but it was put in place for a reason at a certain time for a certain purpose, a purpose most of us cannot relate to today, since few of us own a donkey. The