The idea, Cap Amazing, in my view, is that one who lives his life as Jesus have will have a well-settled soul ready for paradise, knowing that she has done her best in this world. One that doesn’t will lead a tulmutuous life filled with temporary pleasures, but with long-term anxiety and ultimately, discontent. That is the ideal, although it has not followed through in reality.
MEBuckner, Ben, et al: there are scientists who say that evolution occurs in many systems, other than biological. So are we saying here that the people who believe in Yahweh, as well as Yahweh himself, have not evolved in anyway from your perceived in the OT, down to to this very day? I thought I can integrate the two views here, but I apologize if I did misrepresent.
Okay, focus on the OT. Apparently Yahweh saw fit to relocate the descendants of Abraham to the western part of the Fertile Crescent. But He knew that the current inhabitants will not budge easily, and are quite hostile to foreign nomads. Alas, there had to be war. Perhaps the cruelties inflicted in the struggle to obtain the land now called Israel was meant as a deterrent from other nations, and for the Israelites themselves, knowing that they can be so hardcore when fighting a war, they would be loath to initiate one lest they expose that sde of themselves.
What distinguished the Israelites from just about any other belief system in the world at that time is the admonishment that no idols are to be worshipped, and the demand that all magic-type activity be in the domain of Yahweh, his angels and his chosen prophets. Practicing magic and diviniation was a form of worship (Magis were Persian priests). He saw fit to prohibit magic and idol worship because He probably felt that it would make the people think that they would be above God, or they don’t need Him in their lives, which He knows is false. As a reminder that they are to worsip Him alone, He saw to it that when the Israel people conquer a town, that all idols are to be crushed into powder.
I began thinking about this myself and I thought: maybe Yahweh and his angels are not alone in the universe as the only holy beings. The other gods probably did exist, probably in different forms than was depicted, and there was a power struggle between Him and the other gods, with parallels with what happened on Earth, and He came out on top.
Well, I obviously did, because this statement seems like a non-sequitir to me. Then again, I did preface my comments earlier by saying that your view is alien to me. Care to re-phrase your most recent question?
cmkeller’s most recent post is very dissatisfying, but I won’t get in to that now. Opus1 indirectly started this thread, and I wouldn’t want to steal his thunder. Plus, he’ll do a better job.
Not that it’s good by your standards or mine, which you seem to take it as, but rather good in the universal scheme of things.
I don’t think that x action that you preform is good by my moral standards, you are evil.
**
He doesn’t, but it sure does help to convert the masses. When Jim Jones saves my soul, I’ll listen to arguments about him being God.
No, none that I know of at the moment.
**
I do not find everything that God does in the OT to be of a good moral sense, but then, really, who am I to judge? You ignore the fact that He created the universe. That everything is His and is subject to His feelings of morality which are based on His intellect which just so happens to far surpass ours.
**
Well then since it would be his creation, then well, it’s his to play with as he will. But, thankfully, we weren’t created by a supernatural entity with pedophilic tendencies. We were created by an (no I’m not gonna say loving and caring cause you’ll just scoff at that statement) entity with a sense of right and wrong, a sense of good and evil. Just because He delivers out a harsh punishment to those who disobey Him, how is that morally wrong?
**
It’s not might makes right, it’s “this is his house he can do whatever he wants with it”.
The universe is God’s creation. We are His creations. Everything that we can fathom and everything that we can’t is His because He made it. God can do whatever he wants because He is the Creator. We operate under His rules, not the rules which our tiny little brains can come up with.
If you were to create a virtual world on a computer and you were to include a physics engine which was perfect, and you were able to create true A.I. would you be limited in what you could do to the A.I. characters by what they concieve of as morality?
**
You asked if I believed he was portrayed as an evil character, to which I responded yes. Non-existent and things which do exist can be portrayed in literature and various other forms of art. You can make a judgment on how something is portrayed withought having to believe it existed because you are judging the portrayal which is in existence, not the thing being portrayed.
Yes, there have been great changes in people’s attitudes between the Bronze Age and now (well, in many people’s attitudes anyway–that doesn’t really seem to apply to the Taliban, for example). This could even be loosely described as “moral evolution”. My point is, the degree of change in (or evolution of) the Western conception of God has been so great that it raises, in my mind, serious doubts about the objective, external existence of God at all. How do you know that the old-fashioned, “cruel” God of the Old Testament or the hellfire-preaching Jesus of the New Testament is the “false God” and the new, nice, 21st Century version is the “true God”? Isn’t it more likely that both of them (or “all of them”, I should say) are “false Gods”, in the sense that none of them have ever existed outside of people’s heads?
If I had in fact created sentient beings (as part of a computer simulation or under any other circumstances) I would feel a very strong ethical obligation towards them. One thing I would not do is lay down for them a system of ethics, including such precepts as “Don’t kill each other” (or “Don’t erase each other’s programs”) and “Don’t steal from each other” (“Don’t appropriate each other’s virtual resources”), and then turn right around and violate those very ethics by a) arbitrarily exterminating millions of AI’s by direct action and b) encouraging or commanding the AI’s to exterminate each other. As far as I can tell, the deity described in the Bible is frequently utterly cruel, often with very little in the way of a good reason. I’ve heard the “God knows more than you could possibly know” argument, but to my unaided human reason, these things seem wrong, and my unaided human reason is all I’ve got to go on.
By the way, I don’t really see a whole lot of difference between “might makes right” and “this is his house he can do whatever he wants with it”.
As I said earlier, I think I am being unbelievably (and irrationally) patient in agreeing to converse with defenders of genocide. I still haven’t received an answer about whether anyone here would even consider defending any other instance of genocide, which leads me to think that this is a particularly uncomfortable question which has hit too close to home with some people.
I really don’t have any good arguments left. Instead, I have an appeal.
I am only 20 years old. I wasn’t even alive during Vietnam. Desert Storm is a vague memory from my prepubescence. I have a seizure disorder, which means that I will probably never serve in the military, even if WWIII breaks out tomorrow.
So, I’m appealling to all you veterans here, especially those who have either killed or seen people killed in combat, to post here with your most horrific descriptions of war. I want people like cmkeller to see what war really means. It’s easy to talk in dispassionate terms about how crying 2 year olds need to be killed lest people get intrigued by the evil their parents had committed. It’s much more difficult to defend such a position when you have to face up to what war really means.
In the meantime, I’m linking to some pictures from Vietnam. While looking at these, keep in mind that this is pretty much what the Israelites did to the Amalekites, Canaanites, Jebusites, Perezites, Hittites, Hivites, Amorites, people of Laish, etc.
I in no way mean to criticize those who have fought bravely for our (or any) country. We all know that war is hell. But when cmkeller argues that a perfectly moral, all-good being ordered the Israelites to do this to whole towns, I have trouble even keeping my composure enough to respond, much less come up with an intelligent rebuttal.
If any veterans feel that posting their memories of war would be too difficult or too personal, I’d appreciate an answer to this question instead, which is really what I’m getting at anyway:
Based upon what you’ve seen on the battlefield, do you believe that an all-good, all-powerful ruler would ever order a nation to go to war against another nation, and specifically tell them to execute all people (including civilians) “without mercy” to boot?
I have no idea what sort of responses I’m going to get to this. Maybe none at all. Maybe it’ll backfire in my face. But I’m hoping that those who have seen the horrors of war will agree that it is an option of last resort, to be avoided at all costs. It is not something that an all-powerful God with a multitude of choices at his disposal would order time and time again against numerous unsuspecting civilians. And complete extermination is not a fate that any society, no matter how evil, deserves.
Here are some pictures from Vietnam. Keep in mind when looking at each one that this is pretty much what God ordered the Israelites to do to their neighbors, if you believe the Bible:
(Perhaps if I have some extra time I’ll find some images of the killing fields in Cambodia, or the Holocaust, which are more accurate analogies to what God ordered the Israelites to do than even the worst civilian massacres of the Vietnam War.)
Opus1, I don’t think you’re going to get any takers on the “defend extra-biblical genocides” question. Which raises an interesting point: It seems to me that here we have a bunch of atheists more or less taking the position that there are ethical absolutes (“Genocide is wrong”), while the theists are espousing radical moral relativism (“Whether or not genocide is wrong depends on the circumstances”).
Also, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say to Libertarian’s post of 05-24-2001 03:18 P.M. above, and I guess I would just ask this question: Do you think it’s ever valid to oppose any social injustice, and if so why? I mean, say the government confiscated all private property, took away everyone’s guns, and sent all Christians, gun-owners, and “rich people” to re-education camps where they were tortured mercilessly before being killed–wouldn’t the proper response by more or less to shrug our shoulders and say “Oh well, c’est la vie–they’re all in a better place now (or will be, once the secret police get finished with them)”?
Okay, I’ve got some time to continue. quixotic78, I’m sorry to have let you down. Hopefully, this next post will help; it’s really the same post, part 2, but darn it, this many long messages take time to compose a proper response to.
Opus1:
Okay, I looked up the think about King Azariah. The answer is, he got stricken with leprosy for having usurped the priests’ role in the Temple by offering incense; the story is in 2 Chronicles 26. He’s known as “Uzziah” there; alternate name, same guy.
Or that the people G-d ordered slaughtered were themselves evil, and that G-d’s ordering of slaughter was an act of justice. Cruel to those who are evil, but saving those who are not from their influence.
I and other Orthodox Jews believe it because it’s not a story that a single individual claimed to have heard G-d’s voice, but that an entire nation heard G-d’s voice at Sinai, and they handed down thattale to their descendants, not as something they heard happened, not as something that someone else claimed happened, but as something that they themselves experienced. All later prophets, whose hearing of G-d’s voice were more private, derive their authority from that event.
That en masse communication is unique amongst the claims of all major religions. Christianity depends on trusting the words of JC. Islam, the words of Mohammed. Buddhism, the words of Siddhartha (sp?). Judaism places its trust not in the word of a single individual, but of an entire nation of them, corroborating one another’s stories.
MEBuckner:
Actually, it was more like four centuries.
quixotic78:
Encouraged rape? How so?
As for “murder,” it’s clear that you include execution as punishment when using this term. I think it’s important that a distinction be made there.
Opus1:
No, I wouldn’t. It is impossible for a human being to judge an entire nation in that way, a point I made in my earlier post.
Now, of course, you believe that the crimes for which the genocides commanded in the OT were committed are post-facto justifications of human acts. As I said earlier, if you’re going to believe the what the OT says about the genocide itself, then also believe that G-d had ordered it, and that the nation in question was so fundamentally corrupt that amongst them all there weren’t even ten righteous people. Judge the whole thing in context, or don’t judge it at all. To cherry-pick the parts you think are believable presents an inaccurate and warped view of the beliefs of those who believe in the whole thing (like myself and other Orthodox Jews).
Presumably you’re referring to Abraham here. Might I remind you that he stopped him before he actually did it?
Jephthe’s oath was not proper, and had been condemned by the sages. Yes, he “allows” wrong things to happen, otherwise, there would be no free will.
Nadab and Abihu. And entering the sanctuary at an unauthorized time was an act of extreme disrespect toward G-d. (In addition, Jewish tradition says they were drunk at the time, which compunds the disrespect.)
Libertarian:
Darned right, which is why I’m not going to address that detail so specifically. However, I should point out that although homosexuality is listed amongst the sins of the Canaanites, Emorites, etc., never had it been singled out. The only time that any of those sins was singled out to justify the wiping out of those nations was in Deuteronomy 12:31 - “You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.” I think this sin has fewer defenders in twenty-first century Western culture than homosexuality does.
But what about the children?
Now, to address the point of those innocents dying and suffering. Most of what I know on the Torah’s view on that matter comes from an excellent book (if one is interested in Jewish theology) called "The Informed Soul, by Rabbi David Gottlieb.
The basic idea is that in Jewish belief, there is no suffering that befalls a person that is unnecessary. The issue of children is usually addressed in one of two ways. Way # 1 is reincarnation. While Jews do not believe that reincarnation is a standard part of existence, like Hindus and Buddhists do, nonetheless, it has always been (from what I understand) part of Jewish belief that it occurs on occasion. Sometimes a soul that has been sinful will get sent back down to suffer a specific form of punishment that is fitting to it. Way # 2 is that it serves a greater purpose (such as, for example, the maintenece of free will through the cloaking of divine justice), and that, for serving that purpose, there is ultimate reward in the afterlife.
Sheesh. When I try to condense it here, it sounds trite. I may have to re-post this in a better way later, but the essay from which I’m drawing this sounds a whole lot more convincing. Forgive me for that, at least for the time being.
I think it’s possible to judge the morality of a character in an entirely fictional book, while still believing it’s an entirely fictional story. Imagine you’re reading a novel, and the author clearly intends for his protagonist to be a sympathetic or “good” character, but you personally find the protagonist to be morally repugnant, even within the context of his story.
Actually, I find Fundamentalist Christian beliefs about God to be even harder to sustain than Orthodox Jewish ones. Even if you can convince yourself that it was ethically proper to kill all the Canaanite or Amalekite children (or all the children of the world*, in the Flood story), on the grounds that they’d have all turned out to be very wicked if they had been allowed to grow up (this is sort of like the old bull-session question about would you go back in time and kill Hitler as a child if you had the power to do so), I can’t see torturing anybody for ever and ever and ever without end.
*[sub]Jesus drowns the little children,
All the children of the world,
Red and yellow, black and white…[/sub]
The Old Testament has two beliefs that are somewhat hard for moderns (in America) to swallow.
The first is that the sins of the parents are visited on the children. “Innocent babies” they may be to the modern mind, but to the ancient Biblical minds, they were babies who were about to be raised by evil parents. Are the children of Goerring or Eichmann “innocent”? Well, if left to be raised by those evil people, they would come out evil, too. They’re only “innocent” if you can get them out of the evil environment before they’ve been tainted by their parents. That’s not very palatable to Americans, who want to hold each individual accountable for him/herself, but that’s the Old Testament view.
The second is that a society is responsible for its leaders, and for their actions. This is actually an amazingly democratic perspective coming out of the Bible – and it holds that Hitler could not have perpetrated mass evil on his own, he needed the support of his people. Thus, when a Biblical king does wrong (like Pharoah, for instance), the punishment is often visited upon his people.
Those are not easy concepts for modern Americans to accept, but they certainly are concepts that the Biblical writer(s) accepted. God is not cruel, but just, by those standards.
It is also worth noting that in the two earliest mass destruction stories (Flood and Sodom), it is made abundantly clear that the only righteous people in the society DO escape. And those people are not what you’d call “saintly”, both Noah and Lot are very weak human beings with ample failures/sins. It is therefore an acceptable implication that when later Biblical texts talk about destroying “all” of a group, any who were righteous among that group would have been spared (or removed from the group before the destruction came.)
I don’t understand why it’s necessary for G-d to kill anyone. “Cuz they were evil!” Ok, yes, I can accept that. But he’s G-d, couldn’t he have thought of a more creative way to go about it?
Before I can continue with my question though, I need to know something. In Judaism, what is the after-life like? What happens to the truly evil people? Is G-d’s most horrible punishment of evil men and women to take them out of this world? Is that the worse than can happen?
Those of you defending God’s murderous actions, I have some really strange scenarios, which could turn out to be a stupid question, who knows. But I thought I’d ask…
Suppose that scientists developed a Divine-o-scope, which would actually allow people to SEE God in Heaven. And suppose we used this Divine-o-scope, and we peep in on God. And there He is, in his Celestial Room, making a sacrifice of a little baby to his altar of Satan. Would you try to justify His actions, saying something like, “Well, He knew we were watching, so He’s testing us?” Would you try to justify it by saying, “Well, He made the Rules, He can break them at will?” Or would you say, “God–what the hell are you doing? You can’t sacrifice a baby, and you certainly can’t offer it to Satan!” I think what Opus1, MEBuckner, and myself are essentially asking about the murder/genocide question is: What the hell?
What if we could eavesdrop on God as well, and we heard Him praying to Allah? Would this take any of you aback? Would anyone “pro-defending-God’s-murders” do a double-take, or would you just accept it? Would you accept God’s breaking of the rules in this case, because “He made the Universe, after all”?
Suppose you’re married, and God appears on your doorstep one day and says, “Bugger off, I’m going to screw the shit out of your husband” (substitute wife if that’s more appropriate). Would you willingly oblige, saying, “Well, go right ahead! After all, you made him, so what rights do I have”? I think even the most devout of you would say, “Now wait a minute here, God–he’s my husband, and I don’t want him to commit adultery!”
My point with these really outlandish scenarioes is that many of you seem to accept that God kills people, despite it seeming “hypocritical,” because it’s been ingrained in you. If you were suddenly WHOMPED with God trying to break a different one of His commandments, I think you’d be singing a different tune, at least initially. After the initial outrage wears off, I’m sure you could justify anything. But I’d also propose that the initial outrage is a more real emotion.
cmkeller, no, I don’t think any hypothetical children of Goebbels, or even Hitler, are inherently evil. I read an article in the newspaper about two best friends–one the only survivor in his family of the Holocaust, the other the son of a concentration camp executioner. Using your logic, I suppose it’s only a matter of time before the Nazi’s son offs his so-called “friend.” I think American History X is an especially poignant reminder that you can overcome what you’ve grown up with.
This may have been asked of you before, I don’t recall. Would you object if God decided tomorrow to obliterate anyone with even the slightest bit of German blood in them, because they may become intrigued with their German heritage, and “re-create” the Holocaust?
There are better ways of changing people’s outlook that simply killing everyone. In that old question MEBuckner mentioned about if you’d kill Hitler as a child, the best (IMO) response is, “No, but I’d confront him about his views of Judaism, and try to change his mind.” Certainly a better option, at least, than putting a bullet in his head. Oh, and then going around and killing all of his friends and relatives, because they might try to “re-create” Hitler’s views.
Murderous actions? Gosh, Quix. I don’t think it’s a stupid question, necessarily, but it certainly is a loaded one. You answer mine first about whether a man, assuming there is no God, is more important than a pig, and then I’ll answer yours. (Although I might unload it first. ;))
Well, it seems we simulposted on that one. (I was surprised to see that you had posted so late at night like I did, and then I realized you were on the west coast.)
But your attempts to make me realize the extent of the carnage of such wars do not address any of what I was saying…not unless you also have pictures of, say, victims of human sacrifice to Moloch, or other atrocities committed by the nations in question. (Okay, I suppose there are plenty of source where I can find pictures of the incest/homosexuality/bestiality stuff, but aside from that…) Heck, in some cases, it’s not even detailed, such as in the case of the flood, where it merely states that these people were evil all day long.
You and I are clearly posting at cross-purposes. I’m posting about G-d as defined in the OT, within the context of the entire OT. You’re posting about punishments meted out by G-d in the OT, which you accept as truth, but refuse to believe what the OT says about the people who were being punished, so clearly G-d comes across as unnecessarily cruel. Your definition of “OT G-d” is based on half the document rather than on the full one. I mean, it’s comparable to someone who reads a newspaper article (and has no other source of information about the case) that says, “Tim McVeigh, who killed 168 people, is being executed by the US government,” and saying to yourself, “Well, I can’t believe that anyone would kill 168 people. So that US government must be some bastard, killing this not-so-bad guy.” If you don’t believe the article’s source, disbelieve consistently. If you want to evaluate what the source says, treat all parts of it with equal credibility.
MEBuckner:
Yes it is, but it’s not an accurate judgment if you’re just judging his described acts without considering the described motivation. Tell me, if you read Moby Dick, would it be accurate evaluate Ahab’s morality based on his pursuit of Moby, ignore the fact that he lost his leg to the whale?
pepperlandgirl:
Of course he could, and did! Let’s see…the builders of the Tower of Babel had their languages mixed up and were scattered around the Earth. The Egyptians got some pretty original, non-fatal (until the last one, and even then, only for the firstborns, not a complete wipe-out) plagues. The Philistines were stricken with hemmorhoids! Original enough for you?
As I’ve posted in the past, there’s a very high threshold of evil that a society must reach before G-d considers it too dangerous to the moral future of the world to be allowed to survive.
Well, there is reward and punishment in the afterlife. An exact description of that is not exactly possible, but garden-variety evil-doers get punished for a maximum of twelve months, while those who specifically rebel against G-d get punished perpetually.
quixotic78:
No, it would very much be appropriate to ask why he’s doing something so totally out of what we’d been told about his character. I point you back to the story of Sodom, Gomorrah, etc. that I referenced earlier, Genesis 18. Prior to destroying it, G-d notified Abraham that he was about to do that. Abraham questioned him as to whether this was just…perhaps that society produced 50 righteous people? No? How about 45? 40?..Down to 10. When G-d responded that that society does not even contain ten righteous people, Abraham stopped arguing, conceding that what G-d was doing to Sodom et al had to be considered just.
We are allowed, even expected to question apparent inconsistencies. However, we are expected to do so with an open mind regarding the answer we receive, not with an attitude of “nothing could possibly justify this.”
He does have a consistent manner in which he acts. However, if we assume that we know all the facts rather than actually questioning whether there’s some information we’re missing (or, in some of the earlier posts in this thread, that we have but refuse to believe), we’ll never achieve any attitude toward him other than disgust.
Didn’t say that one. Please get your attributions right.
Would I question, in the manner desribed of Abraham above about Sodom? Yes. After all, as far as I can tell, there were plenty of good Germans. The Third Reich only lasted 12 years, all evidence of German behavior since then has been repentant of it. Would I unconditionally object without asking for greater elaboration? No. G-d deserves to have his justifications heard before I jump to judgment on whether his commandment is right.
Whoa, there. Weren’t you just arguing that anything an all-powerful creator did would be morally right? Now you seem to have switched it to a belief that right and wrong exist independent of the wishes of said creator, and a pedophilic creator’s actions would be less moral–that even if a creator has the right to abuse us sexually, it would not be as “moral” as a creator that did not. You contrast the current God under discussion with the pedophilic God and imply that a pedophilic God would not have a sense of right and wrong, a sense of good and evil (or that a God can have a sense of right and wrong that is in any way different from “what I want/don’t want”, which is not consistent with your previous argument either). However, if whatever the Creator wants is “universally good”, then the pedophilic God has a sense of right and wrong too: in that world, pedophilia is universally good, and denying God His pedophilia is universally bad. Nor is being “loving and caring” moral unless God is loving and caring, by your rationale; cruelty and hatred would be more moral than love if the Creator was cruel and hateful.
Based on your current argument, though, you do not really appear to believe that just because a creator has created all, everything they might do to their creation is equally “good”. If you do still believe that anything a creator may do to his creation is “good in the universal sense”, then I think you must believe that a pedophilic’s Creator’s actions are precisely as moral as any other Creator’s actions; that the theoretical Pedophilic God would be just as “good” as your God. You would have to beleive that God’s actions are good simply because He does them; that there is no innate moral superiority to choosing to love and care for your creations rather than rape and abuse them.
To reiterate Chaim’s point, G-d isn’t doing this because He likes it…it’s not like “It’s five o’clock, and that’s smiting time!” If you’re going to believe the bible, G-d doesn’t go around killing people or destroying cities, unless that’s the only alternative. The topic is addressed in one case where G-d doesn’t destroy a city…in the book of Jonah. To sum the story up, for those who don’t know:
G-d says to Jonah, “Go to Nineveh and tell them I’m going to destroy the city because they’re wicked”. Jonah doesn’t want to, so he goes in the opposite direction. After an incident with a storm and a fish (which is the part of the story everybody remembers), G-d convinces him He means business, and Jonah listens and goes to Nineveh to preach its destruction. The king listens, and says "Everybody repent and mourn, and maybe G-d will spare us. He does, and Jonah is upset, saying, “I knew this was going to happen! That’s why I didn’t want to go. You should have smitten them!” Then he goes outside the city to wait and watch, and G-d makes a plant grow to give him shade. The next day, though, the plant dies, the sun beats down on Jonah’s head, and he’s upset at the plant’s death. So, G-d says to him, “Look, if you can care about the life of that plant, which you had nothing to do with creating, shouldn’t I care about the lives of the people of Nineveh, who did what they did because they were ignorant, not to mention the lives of their cattle?”
cmkeller is right: we are talking right past each other. I think it would be helpful if I were to spell out my argument, so here it is:
God is all good
The Bible describes God doing many things which are not good
Therefore, the Bible portrays God inaccurately, and is not the word of God.
Cmkeller’s argument (I think) goes a bit like this:
The Bible is the word of God.
God is all good
God does many things in the Bible which seem bad.
But, because God is all good, all of the atrocities in the Bible must actually have some sort of justification for them.
Needless to say, when my conclusion contradicts his premise, little progress is possible.
We can see what absurd lengths he’s gone to to defend his position. When I mentioned David’s census, Chaim was sure that God was angry about something, because God doesn’t get angry for no reason. When nothing in the Bible supported this claim, he turned to “Jewish tradition,” i.e., the Talmud, a book written centuries after the events in the Bible took place. He did the same thing for the people of Laish: they must have worshipped idols. Sorry, that’s not in there either. Maybe the rabbis living a millennium later had something to say about it though.
Cmkeller is one of those “any-excuse-will-do” Biblicists. Every atrocity committed by God has to have some sort of legitimate explanation. If I can’t find one, I’ll just assume one exists and offer it as fact. Because it couldn’t possibly be that the Bible contains errors of any sort. The authors of Joshua and Judges couldn’t possibly have made up stories about divine commands after the slaughters, as an attempt to justify their genocidal behavior.
No one believes the Moabite stone when it says that Chemosh told Mesha to attack Israel. No one believes that Marduk lead Cyrus to victory over the Babylonians. No one today believes that the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1920 was divine retribution for our sins. But millions of people believe Yahweh told the Israelites to slaughter their neighbors, and that the occassional plagues and natural disasters which struck Israel were really from Yahweh. Go figure.
So, I’m going to ask my genocide question again, but this time much more specifically.
Imagine there is a religion called “Whateverism.” You’ve grown up in a non-Whatever household. You know a little bit about the religion, but not much. One day you decide to sit down and read the holy book of Whateverism, the Book. In this book, God, who’ve you’ve always been told is “good,” is portrayed doing all sorts of things which we would normally consider bad. He slaughters millions of people. He orders the death penalty for minor offenses. He favors one group of people over another, and then orders his favored group to mercilessly slaughter surrounding tribes. To top it off, this book contains numerous fairy tales about magic trees, talking animals, floating axheads, and people walking through a furnace unharmed.
Would you sit down with a Whatever and listen patiently as he explains how all of these things are actually perfectly justifiable? Would you take him seriously when he tells you that certain tribes committed idolatry and other abominations, when the only evidence he has is another Whatever holy book, the Commentary, written hundreds of years after all these genocides occurred?
Or would you decide that the Whatever religion is seriously fucked up, and that their divine book is a disgusting misrepresentation of God’s interaction with humanity?
If this is all a little too abstract for you, I’ll ask cmkeller whether he’s ever debated a Nazi apologist, listening attentively and reacting calmly while the Nazi explained all the horrible things that the Jews did, which is why it was right to kill millions of them. To make the analogy complete, we’ll pretend that this Nazi also claims that God ordered the Holocaust. As evidence, he uses speeches from Nazi leaders in which they state that God supports them.
Would anyone here give this idiot the time of day, much less hours of time forming cogent arguments against his nonsense? But somehow, when it’s a 3,000 year old book which says that God supports genocide instead of a 60 year old Nazi speech, the entire picture changes.
I don’t know why I even bother. Fundies and Orthodox Jews have bought into the Bible hook, line, and sinker. Nothing anyone says will ever change their minds. Confronted with errors, contradictions, and cruelties galore, they simply pull solutions and justifications out of thin air, all to save their precious little worldview. There’s really something very pathetic about someone who would spend his time inventing justifications for merciless genocide rather than admit that his belief system is false, especially when his own people have experienced the horrors of genocide themselves, and, of all people, should know that it is never justified.
Why does G-d need to kill anybody though? Why can’t He wait until they die “naturally”. If they are evil enough, they’ll probably be murdered anyway. Once they are dead, then they can be punished. It seems reasonable to think that G-d is not in any hurry, as He has all of eternity to deal with His Creation. Why go to all the trouble to kill entire populations that could possibly include innocent people?
Yes, but I though the oral tradition the Talmud came from was supposed to be contemporaneous the the OT.
I personally think that believing that any large group of people, including children and infants, could be so completely evil that exterminating them wholesale is a moral act is a strain on my credulity far beyond what it would take for me to even believe in God. I can more easily accept the possibility of the existence of a deity of some sort than I can believe that any entire society would be wholly evil without any good; it is simply not borne out in any way by my experience with humanity.
However.
You are right to say you will never convince Chaim otherwise. You likely will not. You cannot prove that the helpless babes who had their heads bashed out on rocks were not tiny seething cauldrons of evilness. I agree it goes against our experience with infants to think that they would be so, but we cannot prove it was not.
I actually find it rather redeeming that Chaim is at least giving reasons for God’s actions, rather than the “He made us, so killing small children is perfectly moral if He feels like it!” argument. Assuming that every man, woman and child was utterly evil in a way to put Hitler to shame, perhaps their extermination is justified. But I agree with you also, Opus, that this sort of thinking sets off all sorts of warning bells for me. In addition to what I consider the complete unlikeliness that everyone could be so evil (and my personal belief that considering homosexuality as evil is completely wrong-headed at best), if one can justify genocide once, you can do so again. However, I do not see much likelihood that the orthodox Jews will start wholesale murder of races on the premise that they are utterly evil, so I am not too concerned about this. The current practice of orthodox Jews is reasonable and doesn’t often seem to have large numbers of people claiming God told them to murder babies. At least Jews would ask for reasons to do so, rather than the cheery “Ok, God!” that some theists seem to imply would be their response to any request from God, no matter how vile.
Yes, I’d think Whateverism is approximately as sensible as most current literalist religions (depending on how good their apologists are). And I’d give a Whateverist the same respect that I’d give any other person who believes utterly in what I consider ancient myths. I have no real opinion as to whether a Whateverist’s book is an accurate depiction of God, seeing as I never met the guy. Hey, could be. ::shrug:: The literalist God seems much less likely to me that some of the more liberal Gods, but I think they’re all pretty damn unlikely. I will bring up arguments againt any particular belief if I consider it inconsistent with evidence or its own internal logic, but eventually you run into the mighty wall of faith (at least if the theist has any sense). Currently I know of no society that is wholly evil, and while I may extrapolate back and say that they’re probably weren’t any back then (or for that matter, sticks turning into snakes and dead people walking around), a believer will simply say “well, there is no proof that there wasn’t”. And that’s that.
Unless someone’s faith-based beliefs are likely to harm others, convincing them otherwise is not much of a priority, IMHO. And if you do wish to convince them otherwise, bashing them or their beliefs is almost certainly not going to get you the results you desire. I like Chaim and consider his explanations useful for understanding the orthodox Jewish viewpoint, and for that matter his explanations and rationales are ususally about forty times better than the literist Christian’s (though his religion has had about 4000 more years to come up with explanations for a book only about half as big as the Christians must use, not to mention they have a theology that is heavily emotive and a little light in the logic, IMHO). So I humbly suggest, Opus, that you ease up a bit, and perhaps use less heavily-laden terms when you attempt to explain to Chaim why the justification for genocide seems, to you, completely wack.
