“Both prophets are faced with the same problem — the presence of child sacrifice understood as obedience to a sacred decree — and both want the same solution — that child sacrifice should stop, and that God should no longer be associated with such things. Yet they have recourse to entirely different strategies of interpretation to get the same result: one holds to a proto-Marcionite “wrong god” solution, the other holds to a proto-fundamentalist “same God, serious mental gymnastics” solution. Yet what is interesting is that, had you been an ordinary, traditional observant Israelite or Judaean of the period, you would have assumed that God wanted child sacrifice, and that both Ezekiel and Jeremiah, each in their own sweet way, were the ancient equivalents of the leader writers of the Guardian newspaper. In other words: dangerously secularizing proto-atheists who are not God-fearing people at all. Good, straightforward God-fearing people will have known right away that religion is a serious business, and it involves sacrificing children. “If you don’t go along with sacrificing children, then you can’t really be serious about respecting God.” So, let’s remember that over time it turned out that the word of God was being spoken by these prophets, the very ones who would have appeared to be insufficiently religious to their contemporaries. In other words, in the Bible, it is the dangerous secularizers who win out in the end.”