Leaving aside the considerations raised by the three different Hebrew words that are all rendered rather inaccurately by the emotive word “harden” in various English translations of the OT, we are still left with the fact that Pharaoh, as the events are reported in Exodus, was pretty much in control of his own decisions, “hardening” his own heart after the initial disasters and plagues, needing no help from God. One need only think of modern rulers like Mao and Stalin to get an impression of the kind of bloke he was. So the first thing to consider is that the first instance of any act of God on P’s heart doesn’t come until after P has repeatedly rejected God’s request to let his people go.
Alongside this fundamental fact, it’s important to realise that from God’s point of view (and after all we have to do our best to imaginatively “get inside his head”), had P yielded after the intitial disasters, it wouldn’t have been from repentance but because he was afraid. It was in this context that God strengthened his heart. That the wicked desire was already in P is indisputable. God’s strengthening gave him the courage to carry it out. This is indeed a mystery - but at least we have identified the mystery we should be laying at God’s door, not making accusations that really don’t stand.
Significantly, during the fiery hail that followed, P recognised he was wrong and promised to release the Israelites. How very human of him to change his tune when the hail had stopped! I think we can all associate with him in this. But the key thing is that it was Pharoah who was calling the tune - his own tune. Hardly is he a puppet in the manipulative hands of God!
He had made up his own mind to carry on along his way of broken promises and sinful rebellion.
It is important to understand that desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. For it is only as deserved or undeserved that a punishment can be just or unjust. When we discipline our children, for example, we do it essentially because they have transgressed - overstepped the mark – not because we wish to “correct” them, or indeed to deter them, their siblings, or anyone else for that matter, from transgressing again. (Most certainly, we don’t do it out of vengeance, which is frankly often a straw man in discussions of punishment.)
Deterrence may indeed be the result of the punishment, but if so it will be a happy side effect of the act of punishment, which is only ultimately justifiable on the grounds that it was merited.
It is crucial to see the human rights - as properly understood - aspect of this position. To be punished because we deserve it is to be treated as a truly human person. The idea that the only legitimate motives for punishment is the desire to deter others, or indeed to mend the wrongdoer, appears merciful but actually deprives the person of his or her human rights.
When we stop considering what criminals deserve and consider only what will deter others, or cure them, we remove them from the sphere of justice altogether. Instead of a person with rights, we are treating the wrongdoer as an object or a case.
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Near as I can tell, the point is so that justice is done and to demonstrate God’s power and love for Israel.
Tell me how to discern “just” violence from unjust violence. Justice is an abstract, not an absolute. Had the UN sent Peacekeepers to Rwanda to stop the slaughter by force there would undoubtedly have been some Hutus killed. The relatives of said Hutus would almost certainly consider this unjust. At virtually every execution of a convicted murderer there is someone weeping at over the condemmed and who probably considers the execution “unjust”.
An individual could decide they have no authority to determine what would be a “just act of violence” and refuse to do violence period.
The pacifist is 100% willing to “pay” for their ethic with their lives. The ultimate price is something they are willing to pay. Their lives are their own to pay with. They’re not asking anyone to die for them, in fact they’re asking people NOT to die(or kill) for them.
There is a range of options available to the pacifist to resist evil. That range simply does not include harming other humans. Be it because they believe justice is best left in the hands of a divine force or for some other reason, it matters not.
The problem for pacifism is that, by refusing to intervene when a third party are vulnerable to, say, murder, there is always the question of whether they are not also “100% willing to pay for their ethic with other people’s lives”.
Why does “intervene when a third party is vulnerable” mean “kill/use violence against the aggressor”? The group in the OP, the “Christian Peacemaker” group is absolutely intervening in a situation where people are being murdered every day. By helping rebuild Iraq and working towards stabilizing the country they are helping eliminate the situations where mass murder is a nearly daily occurrance. They are placing their own lives on the line, obviously, to help rebuild Iraq. How is this not inervening on behalf of a vulnerable third party?
They are living their ethic by putting their lives on the line to stabilize a country where third parties are being oppressed and murdered. The only thing they’re NOT doing is using violent intervention. Every other kind of intervention, humanitarian, financial, up to and including becoming the targets of violence themselves, is being employed by the group. Why shouldn’t they get credit for intervening on behalf of vulnerable third parties?
Primarily, just violence is defensive. It protects people who are being threatened. This doesn’t mean that pre-emptive violence can never be unjust, but that the threat has to be imminent and clear.
Also just violence allows the object of violence an opportunity to return to the staus quo ante violence. A robber offers his victim a way out, but only at the expense of their valuables. A peacekeeper offers the aggressor a chance to stop being aggressive without cost.
Finally just violence should operate within some sort of legal constraints. The police are required to justify any use of force within very strict guidelines. Even our military is supposed to obey certain ethical guidelines.
Obviously these are in fact grey and abstract ideas. Applying them in the real world requires hard choices, acceptance of imperfections, weighing of options, etc. etc. I think the attraction of pacifism is that it takes all these choices off the table and provides a simple answer to a complex problem.
Yes relatives of SS guards and Hutu Genocidaires may have thought their loved ones were fine people. So what? They clearly weren’t.
If I’m a killer whats to stop me from shooting the person shielding my intended victim first and then shooting my victim. This pacisfist tactic has accomplished nothing.
I have no idea what Dr. King would have done. If violence would have worked better than non-violence, blacks would have rallied around violent leaders. (For all Malcom X’s rhetoric, he didn’t actually commit any violent acts.) In the political world actions and tactics count, not philosophy. King happened to have a philosophy that led to the most effective tactic in the situation. Peaceful protest is often an effective tactic, and is often to be preferred to violence.
My point in bringing up Rwanda was that it was a situation where only a show of force would have halted the genocide. There might not have even been any need to resort to actual shooting. But peacekeepers would have had to be willing to use force to stop the massacres. Had the Hutu thought the hypothetical peacekeepers were only willing to stand between them and the Tutsi, they would have hacked their way through. Had they thought the peacekeepers were prepared to respond violently, they would have backed down without a shot being fired.
Says you, and me incidentally, but what gives us the authority to visit our idea of justice upon them? It would seem this makes us no better than they were. The SS guards thought those going through death camps were less than human and thus justly exterminable. The Hutus had led lives of oppression under a Tsuti elite for decades and many were after a “just” revenge or purging of what they saw as a corrupt elite.
I agree with this entirely, but I don’t see the relevance to my question.
This makes absolutely no sense to me. I’m not a parent, and I don’t know a lot about raising kids, but the idea that you don’t punish kids out of a desire to correct their behavior is absolutely insane. If punishment is meted out with no intention of correcting or preventing misbehavior, then what purpose does the punishment serve? If you spank your kid for hitting his sister, there’s no expectation at all that he won’t hit his sister again in the future? What you’re describing is nothing more than sadism looking for a valid outlet.
But it’s not a question of if it’s justified, it’s a question of what good it does. What’s the point of punishing a criminal if no thought is given to preventing him from comitting another crime?
Bullshit. Utter, indefensible bullshit. Punishment without consideration of reform is not justice, it’s an excuse to inflict suffering without consequence.
Kinda, sorta, maybe. I think part of the problem is that the people who wrote the Old Testament have a different idea about the purpose of punishment than you do. One of the purposes of punishment in the bible (both judicial and divine) is, like you mentioned, to teach the person or nation not to do the thing again.
But there can be another purpose to punishment in the bible. In the bible, (and I’m trying to figure out how to say this right), when a person or a group of people do something wrong, it offends the universe, so to speak…it’s a kind of a stain on the world, and there are some injustices so great, some things so horrible, that there’s no way to fix the evil of the actions other than blood and death on the heads of the guilty.
Now, you might not believe this, and this might not fit into your value system, but it did fit into the value system of the people writing the bible and its earlier interpreters, and when you look at the plagues of Egypt, you need to keep that in mind. The plagues came because Pharoah enslaved the Hebrews and killed their children, and in doing so, brought down a curse onto his head and the head of his country.
Before disciplining or punishing children - and smacking them is pretty rare for many parents, I think, but the same principles apply - the first, and most important, question to ask is “What did you do?”, not “Why did you do x?”
In this way much of the purpose, or efficacy, of punishment is achieved in advance of the act itself, as the child is caused to formulate in their own words what they did. Often it is at this stage that they will cry, ashamed of what they have done and of the opproprium they perceive their parents feel for them.
This may sometimes be sufficient punishment in itself, as the child demonstrates (and one’s own child with whom one has a long, close and good relationship can scarcely hoodwink its parents) that it understands what it has done and that it merits the punishment which it will receive - grounding, no TV, etc - or which, indeed, may be remitted by its parents as a result of its contrition, based on a clear understanding of the fact that what it did was wrong and that it deserved to be punished for it.
“Correction”, “cure” or “deterrence” will hopefully be by-products of this process of doing justice (a justice combined with mercy), but they are very much second things, while the doing of justice is a first thing. Only in this way, I believe, will the correction and deterring desired have a chance of being brought to fruition.
You can compare freedom and equality. Place freedom first, and equality may follow. But not vice-versa. Because freedom is a first thing, and equality a second.