God, presumably.
So manslaughter is OK! 
just wanted to say that my real motivation for posting the OP was:
my opinion is that killing is killing regardless of whether a group of people feel they are justified to do that - the percieved justification doesn’t change the definition of ‘kill’ into something else.
I am of course hypothesising a literall interpretation of the bible, but then if there is a god that created everything, then is that so strange to expect to take a book with such supposed relevance literally?
sorry to spam but.
no i cannot accept the existence of god giving the order
The conclusion does not follow from the assumption. The existence of a creator-god does not imply the truth of any other doctrine of any faith, and certainly not the truth of any scripture.
And, even the assumption that the Bible is divinely inspired does not compel a literal interpretation.
Except you’re not taking it literally if you translate the commandment as “Don’t kill” rather than “Don’t murder”. You’ve made a translation mistake.
And while I respect your opinion that killing is killing regardless of whether a group of people feel they are justified to do that, you have to realize that yours is a minority opinion, and that almost every society draws distinctions between justified killing (killing in war, killing in defense of yourself or someone else, killing in defense of property, capital punishment, sometimes, revenge killings, sometimes, the killing of a child by his father, sometimes, the killing of a slave by his master, sometimes), unjustified but accidental killings (manslaughter, death by misadventure), and unjustified purposeful killings (murder).
Pretty much every society makes those kinds of distinctions and treats people differently based on which of those things they’ve done. Usually, they don’t punish, or even regard as heroes, the people in the first category, they only punish the people in the second lightly, and they punish the people in the third severely.
Almost all law codes draw a distinction like that, so there’s no wonder that the bible does, with no punishment going to the first group, the existence of “cities of refuge” for the second, and punishment for the third.
i suppose it is a matter of opinion whether my assumption is incorrect,
i mean the scripture exists in the universe which is supposedly created/controlled by god, thats my thinking.
its good to hear your thoughts on this too though, thanks
yes point taken about the translation. accepted that ‘murder’ is defined differently to ‘killing’ so it does make a difference in the context.
i guess my understanding of the distinction between between killing and murder was muddled. my personal feeling about this distinction is another topic.
:smack:
but also with my assumtion that the scripture should have a literal meaning because god created everything, then why was "לא תרצח (Dont murder) translated to “thou shalt not kill” incorrectly?
I realise you will say my assumption of expecting a literal translation is wrong but it still bugs me in the same way.
Blame King James I (IV of Scotland).
I think the problem is not how, in a modern context, we decide how to reconcile the Bible with the necessity (or otherwise) of killing people today, but rather, how we resolve the fact that the Bible itself contains lots of killing, apparently ordained by the same authority that dictated the ten commandments - and only a few chapters after the commandments.
Doesn’t that go against the notion of free will? If they were inherently evil, then God made them that way. Why did he make them that way?
And really, the babies were evil? Seriously? The babies deserved it? No, I can’t accept that the babies deserved it.
God even told the Israelites to kill the animals, by the way. Were the animals inherently evil too?
Having never met an Amalekite, an Amalekite baby or an Amelekite animal, I can’t really tell you. They’re metaphors, after all - their sole purpose of existance is to be killed.
Note, however, what the story implies - that genocide requires an executive order direct from the Big Guy himself. When was the last time God gave a direct order? 2500 years ago? 3000 years? The Bible shows us a lot of things that only God is allowed to do, which means, by inference, that man is *not *allowed to do them. That’s the whole point of “one rule for me, one rule for you”: by showing that God is greater than the laws He gave humanity, it stresses the point that no man is, less he confuse himself with God.
It makes no sense to say that “God is greater than his laws.” That means his laws are arbitrary and have no inherent moral value in themselves. It also means that the Bible is lying when it says that people have the same knowledge of good and evil as God.
Right. “Murder” is a human construct, particularized to any given culture and it’s morals. So when god says, “Don’t murder,” he’s really just saying, “You can kill, as long as you cover your ass with your choice of modesty.”
Exactly. It’s pretty easy to rationalize killing people as “not murder,” especially on a state level. Of course, when other people do it to you, it’s always murder. The Ft. Hood attack was an assault on a military installation and military personnel. Murder or warfare?
So you contend that all killing is murder?
But the Ten Commandmens are a legal code, not a moral code. They don’t say what’s right and what’s wrong - they say what you are and are not allowed to do. They’re arbitrary in the sense that any legal system is arbitrary.
I contend that it’s easy to rationalize a lot of killing as not really being “murder” if it suits us.
The question here is that is depends on what humans call it. If’s purely semantics. So: “You’re not allowed to do X. It’s up to the lower courts to decide if what you’re doing is in fact ‘X.’”
So you agree that some killing is not murder?