I've gotten a chance to read the Christian CADRE response to the challenge I threw down on Monday. I must say, it's even less impressive than Steven made it out to be when he brought it to my attention. The author, BK, makes a big to-do about no Christians today wanting to apply the Biblical laws today. This isn't quite factually accurate; there's a minority Dominionist/Theonomist theology that believes much of the Biblical law should be applied today. That, however, is beside the point. The fact that most Christians would be horrified by the thought of enacting Biblical laws today only helps my case. They know it would be morally odious to do so, so why do they think the situation was different in Old Testament times?
On two counts, killing homosexuals and killing people of other religions, the main post contains no attempt at an explanation as far as I can see. There's complaints about context and how Jesus' message was love, but no explanation of how the moral standard mysteriously changed at some point in history. It seems sufficient to note that my challenge was ignored here, but there is also a quote from Dan Barker that is appropriate to the situation: "You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say 'God is love,' they will claim that you are taking things out of context!"
In the case of the extermination of the Amalekites, the main justification seems to be that they did lots of evil things. How this justifies killing their children is unclear; most people recognize that it would have been wrong for the Allies to exterminate Axis civilians after WWII. I also wonder what the definition of an evil society is. This argument could just as easily be inverted to say that because the Israelites were going to try to exterminate everyone in their "promised land" (Deuteronomy 20:16-18).
4 comments:
You're God.
You're all-powerful.
You're all-good.
You have a "chosen people" (for whatever reason) that you have a special plan for (fuck the rest of 'em).
Those "special ones" are having your plan challenged by a bunch of heathens (nevermind how this can occur, since you are in control).
You can:
1) Freeze time, pick up the "heathen people" and literally move them, and all their stuff, to a place far away, where they can no longer "impede" your people. Also, choose to either make it more difficult for them to be "heathen" or make it easier...whatever.
2) Order your "special ones" to exterminate the "heathen", even their "infant and suckling, camel and donkey" (1 Sam 15:3).
You choose 1, and you might exist
If you choose 2, you don't exist.
;)
don't know if you're interested, or if you already saw it, but glenn miller wrote an item addressing this topic (not responding to you specifically):
http://christian-thinktank.com/rbutcher1.html
- iaabwc
After I posted on Christian Cadre a post showing how Muslims used Judeo-Christian morality to justify killing whole tribes of men and boys (they cite Deuteromomy to do so), the site administrators at Christian Cadre decided they had had enough of not being able to say why Hitler's morality was different to Judeo-Christian morality and deleted my post.
Did Glebb Miller really write an article explaining how it was moral to kill homosexuals until Jesus came?
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