God: Just kidding, killing is AOK with me. And here's a list of people to whack!

Great Debates
61

Thanks for the note re: Heller. I love that kind of stuff.

RE: Translations. Hmm. JPS and similar translations are online, and my absolute favorite is the Stone Edition Chumash, but that is expensive shit. (So wonderful, though!* Wow*. The commentary at the bottom about the history and entomology takes up half the page, and the Hebrew and English scripture take up the other half.)

This site offers up some commentary.

If you know the names of the Hebrew books, it is helpful to type those in if you are Googling instead of the English ones. They are:

Genesis (Bereishis)
Exodus (Shemos)
Leviticus (Vayikra)
Numbers (Bamidbar)
Deuteronomy (Devarim)

You can always look at the parsha/torah portion of the week to get some more insight and musings. I read it every week just because I like to learn and it is just like the study of literature or law or philosophy or any other field of thought.

Weekly Torah Portion at myjewishlearning.com is great and Ki Tetze is what we’re talking about right now. I see a couple of articles on rape and war.

You may enjoy Come and Hear, but it serves to be problematic if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

Hope it helped, though. (:

62

It is assumed from Deut 20 and rabbinical commentary that you should stop a man who is raping a woman by killing him. If a man rapes a married woman, you kill him. Not that you agree with it, but I think it is pretty much saying, “Don’t rape!”

A woman’s position in Jewish law is very complicated, but it is more simplistic than just viewing women as property.

63

Actually, I really didn’t have a fault at all. I just read the discussion about whether there was any passages commanding rape and when looking them up I found this passage which I now really as absolutely zip to do with the conversation up to that point.

Now, I have come up with a fault though that I think is fair. :wink:

I’ve got one more. While you defended your kill everybody stance by saying it was 3000 bc your earlier statement that I was replying to was

and that’s present tense suggesting you consider that acceptable not that it would have been acceptable 3000 years ago. It sure sounded like you consider it an reasonable response to an enemy nation. I’m willing to accept that this isn’t what you meant but it is what you wrote and you didn’t include your 3000 years ago thing in regards to this issue.

64

Well, hold your horses your extrapolating a lot out of what I said.

My basic point is that the sources of many of the major World religions come from a time when soceities were very much different than they were today. These leads people, especially those that heavily base their actions on these sources, to do things which are out of kilter with modern-day social ideals.

Now someone else brought a particular example, but you claimed that such an example was extremely unrepresentative, I pointed out that this is not as much of the case as you potrayed it to be.

Yes, broadly speaking the majority of Israelis are secular and resent the influence that religious authorities have on their lives. Of course you are wrong, the Chief Rabbis are elected by an electroal assembly consisting of 80 Rabbis and 70 representatives of the public.

I’ve indicated by general distaste of ‘Israel threads’ in the past, this is not an attempt to turn this thread in to one. Comments about the rights and wrongs of Israeli and Palestinian soceities in general are extremely tangential to the point I am trying to make.

Firstly xenophobia is a fairly universal human trait, no argument there. Secondly this xenophobia by all accounts was fairly prevalent in the bronze age fertile crescent (and beyond), the ancient Israelities were not worse or better than their neighbours in that respect. Thirdly the Jewish religion following the diaspora almost universally existed as a minority religion, within the socities which they lived in they were generally more accepting of outsiders, being regarded as outsiders themselves, though at the same time were fairly insular. Again this is a tangent, like I said I have no wish to apply modern day standards for good or for bad to times when they did not exist.

When did I describe an unbroken chain of xenophobia? I just said that the influence can be traced back from the use of passages to justify this behaviour.

Being ‘more ethnocentric’ is not a value judgement. Christianity and Islam in the general sense only, are more focused on differences in beliefs far more evangelical than Judaism. Christianity and Islam use much the same sources as Judaism and are equally guilty of the criticisms I levelled at organised religion.

65

Those are some interesting links that I’ll peruse through.

The JPS translation from your first link is pretty much the same as King James interestingly enough.

Still, if there are earlier passages or other texts that specify that rape is bad then I have no problem with this text laying out a remedy.

Hey, agree with capital punishment or not, I agree that it makes a strong statement about how wrong the punishable action is.

BTW, did you mean less simplistic in that last line?

66

Yeah, nothing says ‘mellow’ to me like having your “son” killed on purpose.

67

Put into perspective, really, more so than defend. (Though you also have to think about resources and nomadic tribes becoming stationary…still..context.)

I was just pointing out practical warfare. :o

You opined without any cite that Judaism was somehow inherently xenophobic and has been the case for four thousand + years.

hahahaha, when the Chief fucking Rabbi of Israel can be Masorti, we’ll talk about democracy. The Rabbinate also has several seats that are permanent, and Israelis do not get a vote. So I am right and you are wrong. (Can I say “neener neener”?)

If you are going to trace it back, it suggests a chain. Now if you mean to say, “Some assholes use this to justify their hatred”, well, *that *has been going on since the invention of the written word.

Also, the sky is blue.

If they are equally guilty, how are they less ethnocentric? And excuse me, but labeling anything ethnocentric does seem to be a value judgment.

Using demographics, you could argue that over time, Christianity and Islam were/are more ethnocentric, given their respective power.

Yes, I don’t know if they use the 1917 version or the newer one. I really do prefer Art Scroll and those commentaries, but JPS’s footnotes also tell you more about the words used.

…yes.

68

The Israelites who authored the Torah were incredibly ethnocentric. Adonai chose them instead of any other culture for no particular reason. They had a mandate to obliterate the Canaanites and take over their land for no reason. The whole book of Joshua is an orgy of ethnic cleansing, and others have pointed out eg the disgusting story where Saul is dumped on for being too lenient to the Amalekites.

The rabbis mitigated these stories by inventing bad things the enemies of Israel had done to make them deserve it, which is a sign of progress IMO – “we killed them all because they did bad things” is still awful, but it’s better than “we killed them all because FUCK YES, IN YOUR FACE!!!”. But the cultures that produced the Torah were radically ethnocentric – as was every other culture at the time.

What Torah does do is affirm that it is required to love the foreigner in your midst – but it’s talking about assimilated aliens living as Israelites and participating in Israelite religious practice, not ones practicing their own religion. Those ones get speared through the stomach. It is a progressive text for its time and can be a stonkingly beautiful work of literature, which is why I still choose to engage with it, but it is legitimately horrible in many places.

69

No you opined something about what I thought.

Is the Orthodox religious monopoly in Israel fair? No. Are they elected by a popular vote of the Israeli public? No. But they are elected. perhaps to use 'democratic 'is unfair and at the very least a stretch as despite the insertion of 70 representatives of the Israel public it’s not really an exercise in people power. But 1) I stated what I meant 2) you don’t become Cheif Rabbi of Israel by being regarded as an extereme fringe element by the religious establishment which is my point that the xenophobice element is not entirely on the extreme fringes as you suggested.

let’s taker an unrelated example. Some Evangelical Christians adopt Old Testetament practices justifying them from scripture, often these practices have been disregarded almost completely. Does that suggest an unbroken chain?

It’s a comment on general trends in beliefs. I don’t see how it’s that controversial to state that a religion which broadly speaking defines it’s members by their birth (yes it is possible to convert and there’s many different views, but when making any kind of generalization about any religion that consists of a number of different denominations, the brush will necessarily be a broad one) is more ethnocentric than two (again broadly speaking) highly evangelical ones.

And like I suggested, it’s not a compeition. I’m not saying Judasim is worse or better than Islam or Christianity. I mentioned Judasim, because you posted something I thought was quite misleading.

70

.

And that’s all we needed to hear; thanks.

I was just wondering if I could be French even though I was born in America? Fucking Francophiles!

If you want to label Judaism as ethnocentric, I don’t see it as being any different any other religion who obviously wants to uphold their way of life, no? The only difference is that Jews are a nation. But you may as well call Muslim Arabs ethnocentric while you’re at it.

Still, you’re conflating issues of xenophobia with ethnocentricism. Two separate things.

What exactly was misleading? The fact that you have to take shit into context? That Judaism isn’t a xenophobic religion? Or are you going to continue to being an armchair Googlist and try to find something that suggests that Israelis or Jews are xenophobic religious fucktards? :confused:

71

Nope. They believed no such thing at that time. They were henotheistic and tribalistic. They believed in a wrathful, jealous god who had to be pacified with animal sacrifices, but had made a special deal with them that he would help them kill other people and take their land in exchange for their obeisance and steady supply of dead animals.

Which is exactly the point of the OP. This is not a loving God or a universal God, and certainly not a moral God.

Cite? The source for this is only the self-serving propaganda of the Bible itself. Even according the Bible, the imagined offense of the Amelekites against Israel had happened centuries before. How would this justify killing children and babies anyway?

The Germans did worse to the Jews, did they not? And that was only a few decades ago. Using the logic of the Bible, the Jews should be justified in slaughtering German babies now.

Moreover, the alleged grievance - that the Amelekites had attacked the Israelites during the Exodus - is a demonstrable fictional invention. we know this because there was no Exodus. There was no battle with Moses and Joshua because there was no Moses or Joshua. Those are mythical characters. This passage in I Samuel appeals to a fictional event to try to justify a holocaust.

Irrelevant. Hitler was kind to dogs. That doesn’t excuse atrocities.

72

Of what relevance is the New Testament to how God is characterized in the Hebrew Bible?

What’s so great about Jesus?

73

Dio, why talk to you if you are going to fling ‘the Bible is fiction’ in an argument while also trying to talk as though the Bible were not fiction? I could say to ANY of your points, NO, THAT NEVER HAPPENED! to refute them.

74

That’s very childish. i’m sorry but so far you’ve yet to say much qualitively instead you’ve gone in to knee-jerk name calling and insinuations. I’ve yet to establish in my mind what exactly it is you disagree with.

Yes you can, you can also be irrelevant and be French AND be born in America

Well of course a religion that is evangelical and one which is passed via birth are qualitively different. That seems fairly trivial. Judasim is not unique this respect, for example Hinduism has very simlair ideas on conversion and proselytizing. Like I said this is not a competition and I don’t see the connection, less than a fifth of Muslims are Arabs.

I’m not conflating the two. I pointed out a link, it’s far easier for religious xenphobia to exist in a ethnocentric religion than in universalist religion. Of course an ethnocentric religion on the other hand is going to be less agressive in it’s expansionism.

No that you potrayed Rabbi Dior’s religious xenophobia as extremely uncommon and existing on the absolute periphery of Judasim in Israel.

75

Well, let’s start with Zechriah 14:2:
For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

The following passages all contain incidents of God telling Israelite men to capture women as sex slaves (and not always in battle. The first passage tells the Israelite men to simply go out and kidnap women from Shiloh as they go out to an annual festival for no other reason than that the Benjamites don’t feel they have enough wives to go around.

Judges 21: 10-24
Numbers 31:17-18
Deuteronomy 20:10-14
Deuteronomy 21:10-14
Judge 5:30 (“…a woman or two to each man.”)

Then there’s this little gem where God tells David he will give David’s wives (plural) to David’s neighbor and have the neighbor rape them in front of him (II Samuel 12:11-14)

"Thus says the LORD: 'Behold, I will raise up adversity against you from your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun.

You clearly haven’t studied the Bible very much. I have. Let me educate you.

Rape was essentially a property crime. It was only wrong if it was somebody else’s wife or unmarried daughter. It was no crime to rape your own wife, or to rape women taken as hostages (as amply demonstrated above).

Moreover, if a man raped a virgin, she had to marry him (Deut. 22:28). This was because she was considered to be damaged property. It was a “you break it, you buy it” policy.

Not only that, but if a woman was raped within the confines of a city, she had to be beaten to death with rocks. (Deut. 22:23-24).

First of all, no they didn’t because the Israelites were never in Sinai. They were never in Egypt. There was no Exodus, second of all, even if this were believed to be true by the author of that passage, it still referred to an alleged event that had happened centuries earlier and says that God ordered the Israelites to kill babies for something their remote ancestors had done hundreds of years before. It’s a patently stupid and inane justification, and you can’t save it. Why not just admit that the Bible often reflects a backwards and barbaric worldview? It was no worse than any other worldview of the time, but no better either.

76

Looks like you’re trying to call him a lair. You are not allowed to call other posters liars in this forum even if you believe you’ve created a really clever workaround for doing so. Don’t do this again.

Let’s leave modern day Israel out of this, please. That’s a separate debate that has been done in many other threads and will be again.

77

I guess you were wrong, huh? I just cited a bunch of them.

This is a distinction without a difference, and as I’ve demonstrated, not all of these women were taken as spoils of war (as if that’s not an atrocity in itself), but were sometimes just kidnapped from other tribes during peacetime, and in at least one passage simply allowed to be raped on the battlefield.

78

Sounds like he’s studied it pretty well to me. Better than you have.

Dawkins was raised in a religious school, so he studied the Bible.

79

Yes I agree that this is not the best place, like I said I am not trying to turn it in to yet another ‘Israel thread’.

However I don’t believe I was the one to bring up the topic…

80

Fair enough, I see it also came up in CitizenPained’s post. I’m not finding fault with anyone, I am just saying it is time to drop that part of the discussion.