Is genocide ok if God tells you to do it?

[Kilgore Trout]

Is genocide ok if God tells you to do it?

I wouldn't advise not doing something god tells you to do.

 

[Autodidact]

haha - as wrong as Euripides.

Parables? Fiction? What are we supposed to learn from them?

 

[painted wolf]

According to the Bible, these actions are not just tolerable, they're praiseworthy. They are what God expects and commands us. To fail to do so was sinful and merits damnation by God. That's what the Bible teaches.

Don't you mean according to what you are reading into the Bible?
That is what you want the Bible to teach.

wa:do

 

[Autodidact]

Don't you mean according to what you are reading into the Bible?
That is what you want the Bible to teach.

wa:do

Well, according to the Bible, God repeatedly and at length commands the Israelites to commit genocide, praises them for doing so, and gets angry at them when they fail to include the babies as well. How do you interpret it?

 

[Autodidact]

Assuming a hypothetical in this situation just doesn't work.

I say this because if we know that the ancient Hebrews never committed genocide, and we're not even sure that God exists, it doesn't make sense to abuse ancient Hebrew myths to explore something that is obviously against both Jewish and Christian teachings.

That's why it's a strawman.

So the Bible isn't a source of Jewish and Christian teaching? Jewish and Christian teaching doesn't need to be consistent with scripture? What makes a teaching e.g. Christian, if it's not derived from Christian scripture?

 

[Autodidact]

Ah, but they are. Most ethical disputes devolve into "Yeah, who says?" So authority is not tangential, it is central.

God, ex hypothesis, commands humans not to kill.

No, He doesn't. He commands us not to murder, that is, not to commit unauthorized or prohibited killing.

That means that we are not to take it upon ourselves to take the life of another human being. That does not mean God can't arrange for the death of someone. Our lives are not our own, after all, they are a (temporary) gift from God. He can give and he can take away, blessed be his name. And in his arrangement for someone's death, he can use a human instrument.

So for you, if God commands genocide, it's moral to commit it?

That's why I say the issue isn't so much whether murder is immoral. I grant it. But that law, even as it appears in the law of God, governs OUR behavior, not God's.

And if God commands us to do something otherwise immoral, it becomes moral, right?

Now, I understand why there might be a bias against making authority a central issue in ethics. Ours is a generation steeped in narcissism. We feel we can do what we want when we want so long as we don't hurt anyone else (and we get to decide what "hurt" means). We believe in rights, not social responsibility. We believe in free expression, not civility. We believe in doing what feels good now rather than self restraint and delayed gratification. We believe in the autonomy of the individual and we have a natural aversion to authority. And all these trends muddle our view of ethics. In particular, we separate ethics from authority and thus believe that we can, on our own, without reference to any authority whatsoever, determine the parameters of our own behavior. That's a recipe for social dissolution, not an ordered, civil, loving society.

And we believe in not slaughtering innocent babies, but then, we're a bunch of irresponsible narcissists, so we would.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Parables? Fiction? What are we supposed to learn from them?

In short, they are tools by which we can fulfill the command of the Delphic oracle "Know thyself."

So few of us have made that journey and lived to tell about it.

 

[Autodidact]

In short, they are tools by which we can fulfill the command of the Delphic oracle "Know thyself."

So few of us have made that journey and lived to tell about it.

A good way to learn about myself is to read the mythology of one of the world's ancient cultures? Sounds like a particularly lousy way, myself. And why this one in particular?

 

[Autodidact]

Evil and good is defined by God. What we think is right or wrong is not law, but What God says to do is just, afterall he is GOD.

So you agree that you should kill babies if God tells you to?

 

[painted wolf]

Well, according to the Bible, God repeatedly and at length commands the Israelites to commit genocide, praises them for doing so, and gets angry at them when they fail to include the babies as well. How do you interpret it?

As I've said before... bellicose chest thumping and propaganda. Nothing out of the ordinary for the time period or region.
Why are you so obsessed with it?

wa:do

 

[Autodidact]

Well, can you show how this is currently a part of Christian teaching (or even ancient Christian teaching)?


Associating this with Christians today is no less childish and intellectually irresponsible as if I were to associate you with Stalin, the atheist who killed more than 35 million people. Stalin's brutality should cause one to think twice about the legitimacy of a moralizing atheist.

EDIT: And in case you've forgotten, the Crusades happened almost a thousand years ago, whereas Stalin killed his millions in the modern era.

"Here is another example of the way Robertson would mix church and state, rather than keep them separate. Let's say that a Christian thinks God is directing him or her to blow up an abortion clinic or kill a doctor who performs abortions, and this Christian does in fact commit such a crime. In a September of 1984 edition of The 700 Club, Robertson suggested that special church tribunals could be called upon to discern if a believer had in fact received an authentic word from God which compelled him to break a civil law. According to Robertson, if this church tribunal did determine the believer had in fact received an authentic message from God -- how they could reach this conclusion without issuing God a suboena wasn't made clear -- then, Robertson said, the church tribunal would have the civil authority to provide the believer with immunity from prosecution."
-- Gerard Thomas Straub, speech before the San Fernando Valley Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, September 11, 1995, quoted from Harry Schwartzbart, "Pat Robertson Proposes Immunity From Prosecution For Criminals Who Commit Crimes On Instructions From God"


Pat Robertson: The wars of extermination have given a lot of people trouble unless they understand fully what was going on. The people in the land of Palestine were very wicked. They were given over to idolatry. They sacrificed their children. They had all kinds of abominable sex practices. They were having sex apparently with animals. They were having sex men with men and women with women. They were committing adultery and fornication. They were serving idols. As I say, they were offering their children up, and they were forsaking God.
God told the Israelites to kill them all: men, women and children; to destroy them. And that seems like a terrible thing to do. Is it or isn't it? Well, let us assume that there were two thousand of them or ten thousand of them living in the land, or whatever number, I don't have the exact number, but pick a number. And God said, "Kill them all." Well, that would seem hard, wouldn't it? But that would be 10,000 people who probably would go to hell. But if they stayed and reproduced, in thirty, forty or fifty or sixty or a hundred more years there could conceivably be ... ten thousand would grow to a hundred, a hundred thousand conceivably could grow to a million, and there would be a million people who would have to spend an eternity in Hell! And it is far more merciful to take away a few than to see in the future a hundred years down the road, and say, "Well, I'll have to take away a million people, that will be forever apart from God because the abomination is there." It's like a contagion. God saw that there was no cure for it. It wasn't going to change, and all they would do is cause trouble for the Israelites and pull the Israelites away from God and prevent the truth of God from reaching the earth. And so God in love -- and that was a loving thing -- took away a small number that he might not have to take away a large number.

 

[Autodidact]

The stupidity of this statement really is profane.

Are you trying to assert that according to the OT, God does not order multiple genocides?

 

[Autodidact]

Compare this cursory reading with the demographics of ancient cities and the definition of genocide.

Failing to do so before jumping to conclusions is intellectually dishonest and irresponsible.

You mean, if you wipe out an entire small nation of people, it's not genocide, only mass murder? Is that what you're arguing?

 

[Autodidact]

Read this, if you can.

http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/philosophy/82099-why-angellous-not-christian.html

I'm confused. Are you a Christian, or not a Christian?

 

[Autodidact]

My tolerance has its limits.

I have little respect for intellectual dishonesty and even less when they combine it with disrespect for my religious convictions - be they a "fellow Christian" or not. I've taken it from both sides recently.

If you want to interpret the Bible as condoning genocide, define your terms. Genocide is a modern phenomenon because only in recent times have our killing abilities become effective enough to do so. Demographic relationships must be established as well to imagine the ancient world properly, answering the question: were there sufficient people groups in the ancient cities, even as the author imagined it, to classify this as a mythical or imagined genocide?

So far no one has considered anything historical, or even substantively hypothetical.

On top of this, it is basic historical knowledge that such a genocide never occured.

Combine this intellectual dishonesty and ignorance with the strawman - no Jew or Christian would say that it is ok for people to commit genocide in the name of God - and we have the perfect storm of mental vomit.

Uh, O.K. fine. The Bible commands mass murder and infanticide, praises those who follow God's commandments in committing them, and expresses God's anger at those who refuse. Therefore, is it moral to commit mass murder and infanticide if God commands you to?

 

[Autodidact]

Not to mention that singling any group out from this time period is stupid.
Every culture practiced the same mentality of warfare and civilians were not spared by anyone, regardless of religion or culture.

It took the Geneva Conventions to enshrine civilian protection during war...

To attack any modern people by the actions of their thousands of years ago ancestors is stupid and a waste of time.

wa:do

Well, but no one's suggesting we base our conduct, let alone the governance of our nation, on the Epic of Gilgamesh.

 

[Autodidact]

Yes, you never know how ignorant the reader is.

Now you're trying to allege that the crusaders did not rape, murder and pillage their way across Europe, killing thousands of innocent non-Christians and Christians on their way?

 

[Autodidact]

Now, thinking carefully, how many people can you prove that Joshua killed, and what exactly is the makeup of their group?

There are two ways to approach this - historically and mythologically - and they overlap. That is, historical facts - inasmuchas we can determine them from historical sources like archaeology and epigraphy - helps us to determine the qualities of the myth.

It doesn't matter whether there ever was a Joshua. What matters is that there is a religion that believes there was, that he repeatedly committed genocide, and that was consonant with God's will--the God they worship. Further, that by doing so, Joshua was a righteous, Godly man.

 

[Clover]

Autodidact, I love your quote, Thomas Jefferson is in my top 5 favorite quoters.

Question: When was the last genocide? I only remember two in a relatively close time to our's, Hitler's Genocide on Jews, and I forgot the guy's name, I think it was Saddam who had a genocide on Shiites, or Sunni's.

 

[Autodidact]

Why were there no genocides?

Two major reasons:

1) Killing was not as effective. It was impossible in the ancient world to kill on the level that is commonly associated with today's genocides.

2) Just as importantly, a genocide in the ancient world goes completely against everything that we know about ancient warfare. The cities were less inhabited, and a conquering force needed some of their men, women, children, and other resources from the conquered people (contrary to what the book of Joshua says in your selected verse).

The overwhelming archaeological and epigraphical evidence and the interpretations by social historians indicates that conquered peoples and conquerers shared common cultures - they influenced eachother - rather than sought to wipe eachother off the face of the earth (= modern genocide).

Total destruction is a new concept, as well as the ability to do it.

angellous: The Bible is full of falsehood from start to finish. Obviously, I don't believe any of it, I'm an atheist. I also don't believe the Q'uran. I do believe that 3000 Americans are dead because of what other people believe about it. What people believe matters--it affects their behavior. Millions of Jews (Muslims and Christians) died because of what medieval Christians believed about the Bible. It matters.