moral question

[guilo]

Which was? As an aside, since we're all so interested in mitigating factors, if there were mitigating factors like the Jews actually being evil like Hitler said, would that have made the Holocaust okay?

How do you know you aren't wrong in your morality? The Israelites thought they were doing the right thing, do you really think they were saying to themselves 'oh man, this is wrong' while they were killing the babies?

'We' don't already know it. 'We' are a bunch of humans with all sorts of different moralities.

So if they were pagan idolators, they would deserve death?

The perceived lack of mitigating factors is due to not reading the text at face value. The babies are killed because they're considered unclean, like everyone else. Even the possessions of the Canaanites are (generally) unplundered, which wouldn't be the case if the motive was rapine. The entire populace is killed in a sacrifice to God. Ethnicity is a mitigating factor. Holy war is a mitigating factor. They didn't wake up one day and think to themselves, I'm going to kill all those people for no reason. If you're going to condemn them, you have to argue that their reasons weren't good enough for genocide to be justified. This is what a lot of these debates about Biblical genocide come down to.

Unless, of course, you think that genocide is wrong in all cases. But then why this insistence on mitigating factors? Stop talking about pagan idolatry and just say that genocide is always wrong. And then I can ask 'Why is genocide wrong?'.

The reason the lack of mitigating factors are used in my argument, is that it eases the reasoning around it. Otherwise it is just a permutation of the Capital Punishment debate. If nothing wrong were done, then no punishment is in order, so no one can possibly use justified punishment as an argument. I, personally, think that killing anybody is wrong, but I also know there are far more arguments for killing people as a judgment than for killing babies that have nothing 'judgable' against them.

I agree that we have different moralities, but the Bible doesn't. According to Genesis 3:22, everybody knows right and wrong and it supports the idea of 'Absolute Morality', which is the same for everything in the universe. The Jews did many other atrocities that were punished by God later on, so I wouldn't put it beyond them to commit the mentioned one.

I can't think of one instance where genocide can be considered right. I live in Rwanda half of the time and have talked often with people whose families were the victims of genocide. There is no doubt in my mind that it is an atrocity against the human race. How you see that ethnicity counts as a mitigating factor astounds me. According to the Bible, God made man in all his ethnic diversity and loved all of him equally. That is why he sent his only son as read in John 3:16. Although he chose the Israelites as the people to bring about salvation through Jesus Christ, the Ten Commandments which say, 'Thou shalt not kill', applies to all people, not just members of the Israelite community. There are cases where Israelites were judged for their bad treatment of their slaves, which weren't Israelites. So yes, genocide is mass-killing and no matter which ethnicity it wipes out, it remains unlawful and immoral.

Why would God hold out his hand and make promises some of the time to other ethnicities (Ruth, Naomi, Ishmael, King Cyrus of Persia) and at other times decide they are not good for anything but annihilation, extermination and fornication?

 

[Nooj]

5.) Contextual analysis such as those done by theologians take a lot of respect from me, because it clarifies issues such as cultural norms and historical accounts. It does not condone the command of a God to slaughter babies. If you do not agree that God commanded the slaughter, you are inescapably committing to saying that the Bible gives an inaccurate account of what actually happened. This brings the whole Bible's integrity into question and casts doubt on many if not all of its other statements.

So what if they do? There are many Christians who are not wedded to Biblical inerrancy. Why should anyone care if they don't believe that their Bible is historically or scientifically accurate? Good on them. I don't see the point in trying to force them to believe in Biblical inerrancy, and accuse them of not being proper Christians if they don't toe some doctrinal line that atheists think is rubbish anyway. And I think it's mean-spirited to try to crush their faith between the rock of 'accept it or you're not a Christian' and 'if you accept it, your God is evil'.

Trying to deconvert Christians is such a pointless task, I don't know why anyone tries to do it. It really makes no difference to me what Christians believe, so long as they don't try to push it on me. I say let them believe what they want to believe.

 

[Danmac]

It remains a logical fallacy regardless of how much you like it.

Did you start another thread yet?
One wonders what the hold up is...

And which text are you quoting from?

 

[McBell]

And which text are you quoting from?

Are you or are you not going to start a new thread for your off topic tangent?

It really is a simple question.

 

[Nooj]

I can't think of one instance where genocide can be considered right.

If a group was made up entirely of evil people (to a man, woman and child) who wanted to kill you and where the only option was kill or be killed? This isn't farfetched. You'll find that some Christians argue precisely this.

I'm not devoted to the Bible. I only used it because there are links between it and what interests me. Clearly the Bible doesn't believe that killing babies is wrong, and it gives reasons to support killing babies. These reasons may have seemed convincing two and half thousand years ago, but not any longer to many people. It seems to me that the content of those reasons seems to have changed (we don't think killing due to ethnicity or religion is valid anymore), but not the overall idea that killing babies is okay if X. Hence the discussion about what intentions and mitigating factors make killing babies okay in one instance yet not okay in another. I want to know what the basis for morality is for atheists and theists.

Is there a reason why genocide or killing babies is immoral? Why is killing due to ethnicity or religion wrong? Why was the Holocaust wrong? Why was the Rwandan genocide wrong?

How you see that ethnicity counts as a mitigating factor astounds me.

The Israelites saw it as a mitigating factor.

 

[guilo]

If a group was made up entirely of evil people (to a man, woman and child) who wanted to kill you and where the only option was kill or be killed? This isn't farfetched. You'll find that some Christians argue precisely this.

I'm not devoted to the Bible. I only used it because there are links between it and what interests me. Clearly the Bible doesn't believe that killing babies is wrong, and it gives reasons to support killing babies. These reasons may have seemed convincing two and half thousand years ago, but not any longer to many people. It seems to me that the content of those reasons seems to have changed (we don't think killing due to ethnicity or religion is valid anymore), but not the overall idea that killing babies is okay if X. Hence the discussion about what intentions and mitigating factors make killing babies okay in one instance yet not okay in another. I want to know what the basis for morality is for atheists and theists.

Is there a reason why genocide or killing babies is immoral? Why is killing due to ethnicity or religion wrong? Why was the Holocaust wrong? Why was the Rwandan genocide wrong?

The Israelites saw it as a mitigating factor.

I don't mind Christians who are prepared to acknowledge that the Bible is not really that accurate and needs some patching and sewing by a few good theologians to extract the essence of it. My beef is with the fundamentalist Christian who quotes directly from scripture and says, 'The earth was made in six days', 'Being gay is wrong', 'The flood wiped out everything', 'The earth was irrigated from underneath before the flood', 'Evolution is a bare-faced lie'. So, see this argument as a kind of shepherding argument where the atheists at least try to bundle all the Christians into a more rational camp, such as the one one of the Jews were in earlier in the thread (I think Tarheeler and co.). I don't mind Christians trying doing apologetics, because then they at least subvert to reason in some way and atheists and theists alike can agree on a regular basis.

According to the literal Bible, God remains the same yesterday, today and forever after. Thus if it is wrong now, it was wrong then, regardless of what the Israelites of the time thought. God's morality didn't change.

Atheists/Agnostics don't or shouldn't believe in absolute truth, so the method they use for declaring killing babies and genocide is wrong is by reasoning in a fashion similar to the following:
1) I am a person, just like billions of others around me.
2) I wouldn't like people to start killing me and my family, especially if I was an innocent baby with my whole life in front of me and I could have done anything to warrant a statement of 'I had it coming to me'.
3) Since everyone else are also people just like me, they also subscribe to point 2)
4)Therefore, we should avoid killing anyone, especially babies who don't have it coming to them.

The Rwandan genocide has a horrific account of babies' heads being dashed against wall, their limbs cut from their bodies before they are killed, babies and young girls being raped in front of their mothers: this because the ethnic minority were viewed as 'inyenzi' - meaning 'cockroaches'. The genocide of the Amelekites and Canaanites were done in similar fashion and a reasonable Christian should argue that the Jews justified their actions by saying it was under command of God. If that was true and God did command it, God's moral highground collapses and Christian doctrine along with it. Just accept that the Bible is fallible, it is subject to reasoning and should not be taken word for word. I, for one, am happy with that for a start.

 

[chinu]

Killing babies: right or wrong?

No, but if saving babies is right.