In ancient times lots of gods had the wrong values. You didn’t worship god(s) because they were good, you worshipped them because they would aid you if you performed the proper rituals and punish you if you didn’t. Read the Illiad if you want to see ancient gods acting like total pricks. And not just to modern readers, Plato also thought the Illiad’s gods were nasty, and worried about the effect these depictions would have on public morality. Yahweh is no different save for his quirk of demanding the Hebrews worship him alone, and not give recognition to the neighbors gods. He’s not a nice god. No ancient tribe would have expected their God to be nice.
As a non-believer, I have to say I’ve never understood how Jews and Christians reconcile the primitive early Yahweh with the later perfect being of mercy and compassion. Perhaps it’s in the book Maastricht mentions.
Sorry about the weird double post. I hit “submit message” when I meant to hit “Go advanced”
Well, the ancient Israelites worshiped God because they entered into a contract with him. They would obey his laws and worship him, and in exchange, he would protect them, help them defeat their enemies, and give them prosperity.
You’d just enslave them? I can understand that…it probably is more profitable. But if you slaughter everyone, that does encourage the next city you attack to surrender rather than fight back. Sort of like the saying that the English would, from time to time, hang an Admiral to inspire the rest.
You forgot to mention permission to rape all the virgins! Moses fought long and hard for that. In the first version of the covenant, only blonde virgins were permitted to be raped upon conquest of a city.
Captain amazing:
I’m not even sure what we are discussing here. Are you saying that you don’t think it is morally wrong to conquer cities and kill everybody in them?
Why are these people being attacked at all? If we look at the excellent example of the amelekites that Fabulous Creature mentioned, the killings are ordered by God because of something Amelik did a long time ago. And thus all men, women, infants and nursing children are killed. The poor children who might not even know what this Amelik did, are ruthlessly killed. You don’t think this is evil?
Your irony and facetiae meters appear to be non-functional. Please go to the Windows Update site to download the most recent versions and then reboot your computer. Your enjoyment of Internet message boards will be vastly increased.
What is your aim here? Because it seems a bit disingenuous and largely leading to me.
A hundred years ago, medical practice was barbaric compared to today’s methods. Should we stop practicing medicine?
Why is it so difficult to accept that despite the terribly ugly incidents recorded in various biblical testaments, some people continue to choose to believe in the inherent goodness of a benevolent and moral god? Even the Catholic Church has appologized for past persecutions commited out of a zealous belief in their interpretation of god’s will.
Are you seriously thinking you’re going to trip up people’s faith in god and get them to see the error of their ways by trudging out these examples of cruelty and inconsistency in an ancient and largely unsupported text?
Sorry. As I said, I am not that familiar with the bible. Besides god commanding that snakes eat dust, and that rape victims marrying the rapists, this didnt seem much more absurd to me. Still I didn’t really believe it, but I didnt want to call you a liar, thus my questioning.
Yes, this thread is not really going as I had hoped. To a large degree because of my own misunderstanding of the bible passage with the levite.
I did my best to define my aim in the Original Post.
I am not saying that I cannot accept people believing in a benevolent god. This is a question for people who believe in the OT. As for your remark about the text being unsupported I will once again repeat:
My aim is to ask that, assuming this is the case, wouldnt the most morally defensible course of action be to rebel against this god?
I’m not mr. jp, but it seems to me the problem is that lots of people today take said ancient and lagely unsupported text as being the fount of wisdom and morality, the infallible truth, and in fact want to apply mosaic law to the modern world. Check out the Dominionists for an extreme example, but you don’t have to go to that scary extreme. Whenever you bring up, say, gay rights, someone will say “It’s against God!”
No one needs to bring up the nasty behavior of the Gods of the Illiad, because no one believes that book to be true, and no one is seriously stumping for a ressurection of Pagan Greek religion.
Not at all. Morality, being a human construct, one would be prudent to follow the rules set out by such a vengeful and capricious god in the hopes of being rewarded in this life and the next.
Well, we seem to only focus on the Judeo-Christian view of the History of God. Plenty of other competing religions out there who take a very dim view of these texts we’ve been discussing. So a radical but relatively small population like the Dominionists look even more inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah, it would be good in terms of being rewarded.
But do you really want to ignore your own code of morals for some earthly and/or heavenly reward?
Let us say for instance that you are an atheist, and you had the opportunity to steal a lot of money from some charitable organisation without risk of getting caught, would you do it?
Or you are an atheist subordinate to Saddam Hussein back when he was in power. And you had the opportunity to carry out the genocide of the kurds, and if you did this he would reward you bountifully. Would you do that?
As I view it, doing these things would be “prudent”, in the same sense that it would be prudent to follow Gods rules. But I would never do them, because of my moral values.
What is the “human moral code” in comparisson with the will of the gods?
You seem to be thinking of morals as an absolute while history shows that this is clearly not correct. Morals are flexible and subject to social influence.
I don’t want to come across as a moral relativist. Clearly there is behaviour that approaches a moral absolute (“common good”). But moral structures have not stopped evolving any more than society or humans have.
The people who wrote Deuteronomy obviously didn’t think it was morally wrong. Why are you so surprised that your set of moral values is different from theirs? And for what it’s worth, most people’s set of moral values nowadays is different than theirs, even most Jews and Christians. So, when they read that text, they find a way to excuse it…they say “Oh, that was obviously a special case”, or “You shouldn’t take it literally” or “Things were different back then.”.
Ha I sleigh me…