A young girl, Sara, has died in the crush of people on a small boat attempting to reach Britain. This is emblematic of the problems facing many attempted migrants to our country.
So let’s talk about an almost certainly fictional story from the Old Tasty mint instead.
https://mega.nz/file/47t1ySJY#f1kAsOfH0ebXRlbWXelbmlL1NTXPeZFx8cIv_PHX_e0
Platitude of the Day 
This really was plumbing the depths.
A man is mourning the death of his daughter in a terrible accidental death on one of the awful boats smuggling people in desperate straits to the UK. This reminds Banner of a completely unrelated story in a very old book about the comings and goings in an ancient civilisation at war with itself where a son who had already killed his half-brother was now trying to kill his own father, but was killed himself by another enemy he had made. Who knows whether it’s a true story or not. And it’s nothing like the story of the dead daughter except that both fathers felt terrible grief for their own very different actions.
You would do anything for your children and the death of one feels like part of yourself dying. What you don’t want to hear is some religious ars***le trying to compare your loss to some semi-fictional event in a distant time and place just because it is part of his religion. This really was very distasteful.
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I tweeted: On @BBCr4today #ThoughtForTheDay, @TrinCollCam dean and theologian Michael Banner pivoted from the tragic Channel death of a young migrant girl to King David’s parental grief. Sadly there wasn’t time to mention a more relevant Bible tale, Yahweh’s watery genocide in Noah’s day.
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Agreed; this was very distasteful. I seem to recall that Banner has form for this sort of thing. He could just have said “As a father of a seven-year-old daughter myself, I can understand that Ahmed is going through unspeakable agony, and that there can be no consolation for such a tragic loss”, and left it at that. Instead we got a gratuitous comparison with David, a character who is almost certainly fictional; certainly all the detailed stories about him in the ‘Hebrew Scriptures’ are made up. It is as if Banner had made a comparison between Ahmed and, say, Denethor, the father of Boromir from Lord of the Rings. Wholly inappropriate.
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“David, a character who is almost certainly fictional”
If you’re not already aware of the Tel Dan stele, then you may find this interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Dan_stele#%22House_of_David%22
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Thanks, Peter, I did know of it. It seems to be the best available evidence for the existence of a ‘House of David’, although this interpretation is contested.
The article also touches on the remarkable lack of evidence for the ‘Israelites’ as a coherent grouping before the 8th century BCE. This is another indication that most of the ‘Hebrew Scriptures’ were written a lot later than some people like to make out.
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Even if David isn’t fictional, one minor verse from an unverified and tiresome story about a long ago Middle Eastern patriarchal ruler is an inappropriate comparison to a death in the Channel in 2024.
I sent a complaint to BBC Today as this sort of comparison is what all compassionate people would avoid, but is typical of those evangelically minded who must insist on telling you about their own particular imaginary friend and how it supposedly has told them to live.
For those affected by the loss of a child I can recommend the charity The Compassionate Friends who would never recommend what Banner did today.
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