If you’ve read the Old Testament, a grueling task that I actually accomplished, you’ll know about the many genocides ordered by Yahweh. Many were the tribes slain by the Israelits on God’s command, including, besides the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. Theologians have spent a lot of time trying to justify why God wiped out innocent children (and even animals), and of course they’ve succeeded. Today we’ll occupy ourselves with the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites, described in Deuteronomy 7:1-2 and 20:16-18.
As God said in Deuteronomy 20:16, “But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive. . ” That could imply that not only were all the Canaanites (including women and children) slaughtered en masse, but so were their animals. Or at least so some theologians have argued, forcing them to then justify why God would commit genocide of animals. But theologians are up to the task!
First, here are a few explanations for the mass slaughter of humans:
Reader John sent me this video made by the disgraced (just out of prison for tax evasion and other crimes) but still active young-earth creationist Kent Hovind. While the 35-minute video includes Hovind’s usual blather about evolution and creationism, the reader wanted us to see Hovind’s justification for the Canaanite genocide. His/her email:
“Dr.” Kent Hovind has recently been released from prison and is back online, answering emails from the public in a daily Youtube broadcast.
In his November 5th 2015 video, he put his own spin–the most monstrous I’ve yet encountered–on the fictional Yahweh’s proclivity for genocide: apparently, mass murder of the Canaanites by Yahweh’s servant Joshua was a necessary public health response to the population’s bestiality-induced infectious disease burden! According to Hovind, the extermination of the Canaanites, innocent children included, can be considered entirely analogous to a physician prescribing an antibiotic to eradicate bacterial infection!
Imagine if you or Richard Dawkins or Peter Singer said such a thing!
The relevant excerpt of the video–amongst a half-hour of inane blather–begins at 6:30 minutes in:
The following is my [John’s] transcript (verbatim by intention, or, at least, as close to verbatim as I can manage):
“As far as God telling ’em to wipe out the Midianites, well, there were nations that were so full of diseases and things like that … that God said, “Yes, they need to all be wiped out, especially, like, the Canaanites in that land”. God told Joshua, “When you go into the land, utterly annihilate them! Kill ’em all!” Well, one of the things the Canaanites did was sex with animals, and had all kinds of diseases … and … and … just endemic in the civilization, and God said, “Wipe ’em all out!” No different than a doctor saying, “Take this pill that’s gonna kill every bacteria [sic], even the little baby ones that haven’t done anything wrong. Yeah, we’re gonna kill ’em all, ’cause if you leave onebehind or one resistant one behind, the disease can come back with a vengeance!”
Well, Hovind isn’t the only one to justify the murder of all the Canaanites, including their children AND the animals that they had sex with. William Lane Craig famously justified the human genocide; you can see some of his disgusting apologetics here. An excerpt:
So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.
. . . By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
Talk about making a virtue of necessity! The children had to die because God said so, because they’d grow up to worship pagan idols and so had to be extirpated, and because it wasn’t so bad after all because the children would reap their reward in Heaven. (Why, I wonder, would these children even go to Heaven, since that’s not an Old-Testament concept?) It is a fact universally acknowledged that there is no act of cruelty that cannot be justified by theologians as an aspect of God’s beneficence. Craig’s apologetics are monstrous.
But why destroy the Canaanites’ animals, too: the passive and probably unwilling victims of bestiality? Well, Clay Jones, Associate Professor of Christian Apologetics at Biola University, has explained that away on his website:
The Lord ordered that those who have sex with animals should be put to death along with the animal (Lev. 20:15). Atheist Richard Dawkins objects that it adds “injury to insult” that “the unfortunate beast is to be killed too.” ([Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton, 2006),248.]) But, what Dawkins and others don’t grasp is that only the depraved would want to have animals around who were used to having sex with humans.
Jones goes on to describe a story by Robert Yerkes about a female gorilla who tried to press her genitals against his feet, and intimates that she had either had sex with a human or, if she hadn’t but might have in principle (although there were no gorillas in the Mideast), she’d be even more sexually demanding. That would be not only “embarrassing,” but even dangerous! And that’s why the Canaanites’ animals had to die—they were rape victims who became sluttish. It was honor killing! Jones:
Now the objection could be made that some of the animals may not have been subject to such abuse, but that’s not something that an Israelite would be able to know. Thus they all had to die.
Major takeaway: sometimes beings innocent of committing sin can be harmed and corrupted by others who misuse their free will, as seems to be the case with animals involved in bestiality. It is a tragedy that these animals had to be killed but that’s one of the big lessons about sin: Sinful beings can hurt the innocent sometimes permanently.
Can you imagine a grown person being paid to utter such idiocy? But such is theology: the post hoc rationalization of things you want to believe. The argument that God killed the Canaanites’ animals because the poor beasts were sexually abused is simply an example of theologians making stuff up. After all, we don’t even know (if the Bible were true) that the animals were even killed. And the argument is no sillier than Edward Feser’s claim that dogs and cats won’t be admitted to Heaven.
The proper response to such arguments is not respect, but mockery.
Huitzilopotchli on a bike.
Quite literally.
Dark screen, deep movie trailer voice:
“Nothing that breathes remains alive”
Pan out, further out, and find you were in the pupil of Hitchens. With scotch in hand, Hitchens contends, “This is why I will not stop until this sewage is appreciated for what it is.”
Anaerobic bacteria would say that statement is not completely true. Unless non-breathing bacteria are immortal like some animals and plants seem to be on our world. (Ones “blessed” no doubt for some reason they have to dream up for their peers and little brains in need of molding…
Wow! All that nonsense to justify an event that probably didn’t actually happen.
Maybe it did happen and this is how they reconciled it as a psychological tool.
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
This being Jewish, not Christian, or is it now Christian too? How does that fit into everyone dead staying dead till a thousand years after the second coming then a measly thousand year reign then the 2nd Resurrection, bar and grill.
Where the new body getting, then a read off of names of the living and the formally dead as to who gets what. They tend to ignore their own religion. Rather annoying when Atheists like myself want to speak to them about that and they like the other version in popular culture etc. (Dying and waiting in line for St.Peter to look up their name now.) I wonder how many of their theologians bother with that? Not that I care. But that fantasy can get skewered too if need be. The best version is the one on the TV series “Supernatural”!
Their stupidity is hilarious!
Promoting genocide as given by their deity is no different from the those jihadis who get their jollies from wholesale murder.
I wonder if this guy Dr. Hovind, went to Dr. Carson for his brain surgery?
…God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel.
BS, the same story repeats 20 times throughout the OT. Either God is a lousy teacher; His “chosen” people were too damn stupid to learn; or someone embellished the legends to grab power and control. In a way, it was brilliant, because they still retain a lot of power today.
A third possibility. Too many of them didn’t want to kill anyone, much less children and valuable animals.
I wonder how many dogs Dr. Jones has strangled for trying to hump his leg, on the theory that the dogs must have had sex with humans?
While I disagree with Hitchens’ polemic claim that religion poisons *everything*, I do think that it certainly has poisoned Jones ability to think rationally.
Every now & again this link needs to be publicized:
A detailed list of God’s Killings:
http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2010/04/drunk-with-blood-gods-killings-in-bible.html
Cool list, and those are just the ones in the bible.
This does not even scratch the surface of those he killed through negligence and reckless abandonment. And if you count The Curse, he has killed literally everyone who has ever died of natural causes, all in a fit of rage over A&E eating the forbidden thing.
That “forbidden” thing is self knowledge of Good and Evil. Before that the faceless father thunder god did. The other was the Tree of Immortality which A and E were shooed out before they became “like a god” by doing so. WE can still do it one day. Rather simply criteria for godhood, don’t you think?
As a young adult I thought it was strange that there was a Tree of Life that granted immortality. We were told, after all, that we needed Jesus to give us immortality. Yet here, almost on page one, is a much simpler way… just eat that fruit.
Really made the whole several thousand year bloody history of the tribe of Israel culminating in some guy getting nailed to a cross seem kind of redundant.
As a young adult I thought it was strange that there was a Tree of Life that granted immortality. We were told, after all, that we needed Jesus to give us immortality. Yet here, almost on page one, is a much simpler way… just eat that fruit.
Which was why two angels with flaming swords came and drove them out before they hit godhood. Can’t have that…
In medieval Europe the Church had legal control over the lives of the people in many matters. Sex crimes was one. When a person was convicted of bestiality, it was a legal requirement for the animal to be slaughtered. The animal was not allowed to be subsequently eaten.
Priests had books that listed every sex crime imaginable, and the appropriate punishment. Women generally received harsher sentences than men. Many of the “crimes” would obviously not be recognized as such today. Forbidden were sex outside marriage, sex on Sunday, sex on saint’s days, any sexual position except missionary, oral sex, anal sex, same-sex relationships, sex during Lent, sex on Wednesday, sex on Friday, sex on Christmas Day, sex during menstruation, and more. You weren’t allowed to enjoy it too much either, especially if you were a woman – sex is for procreation!
I think you’re over-projecting Victoriana self-promoting legends onto reality. And in reality, the Victorians were well aware that they were being hypocritical bullshitters. (there were a few genuine pathological cases too – Gladstone, for example and his “fallen women”) with some estimates putting 1 in 4 of the female population as being at least part-time prostitutes. The probably author of “Walter’s” “Secret Life” (a sewage engineer, allegedly) clearly indicates that the range of sexual practices known to the professional and purchasing sides of the transaction was much wider then the legend. As for the mediaevals, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane .
Or read Chaucer. Or any number of mediaeval comic tales. Or Villon…
Oh yes, how could I forget Chaucer? Miller’s tale, wasn’t it?
Yes, and there’s also The Wife of Bath’s Prologue!
And – I forgot – one of the very greatest poets of the British Isles (and of Europe), a contemporary of Chaucer, and as good as, if not greater than Chaucer: Dafydd ap Gwilym, who wrote in Welsh, and is one of the funniest – and most beautiful – poets around. Find if you can, Trouble at an Inn(‘Deuthum i ddinas dethol’ in Welsh). There’s also an address to his prick, which has got him into trouble (there’s been an affair with someone else’s wife):
I consider you the vilest of rolling-pins,
Horn of the scrotum, do not rise up or wave about…
You are a trouserful of wantonness,
Your neck is leather, image of a goose’s neckbone;
Nature of complete falsity, pod of lewdness,
Door-nail which causes a lawsuit and trouble.
Consider that there is a writ and an indictment,
Lower your head…
Brilliant! A***!
And of course there is Chaucer’s ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, a vengeful riposte to ‘The Miller’s Tale’ (in which the cuckolded old husband was a reeve, or carpenter), and one that leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
And outside Britain, there was, among many other works, Boccaccio’s Decameron, which contains a number of bawdy tales.
You note some medieval literary works that are bawdy and erotic to support the criticism that Heather’s point projects onto the past, but I’m not sure that they show that she’s doing that, just as I’m not sure that a street devoted to prostitution somehow counters the point that there weren’t oppressive sexual laws. Take “The Wife Bath’s Prologue”. It subverts and critiques a long antifeminist tradition. As for the bawdier tales like “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Reeve’s Tale”, sure, they are openly erotic, but who were they for? I expect that they were written for men. Does their existence mean that medievals were more open about erotic things? I actually don’t know, but I expect that Heather’s point about the law is generally true. As well, I expect that there have always been prudes and libertines.
I did enjoy your list of tales, however. Boccaccio’s story about Alibech–the one with the line about “putting the devil back in hell”–is hilarious! And there are some pretty ribald poems by troubadours. Check out Guillaume’s poem about “con”!)
Please excuse the pedantry but ‘reeve’ is not a synonym for carpenter as you seem to imply. A reeve was a feudal official and it just happens to be the case that the reeve in Chaucer’s party of pilgrims was originally a carpenter. The cuckold in the Miller’s tale was a carpenter but not a reeve. It is nevertheless true that by making the cuckold share the same trade as the reeve, Chaucer provided a device to determine who should tell the next tale as the offended reeve jumps in to get his own back with a tale at the expense of millers.
Oh, don’t excuse yourself! You are absolutely right. I was rushing. And pedantry is often a very good thing.
Its not germane to Heather’s point since it was written before there was a church (around 60 BC), but that poem you quoted reminded me of Catullus 16. That one’s definitely worth a look for anyone who thinks the ancients weren’t bawdy.
Its a twofer: obscene AND an early defense of free speech and the right to ‘be offensive’.
“a trouserful of wantonness” – like it! If wantonness were to become a countable noun, then this is the obvious plural.
Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” the basis for the title “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margret Atwood.
Influenced by it too.
I didn’t mention the Victorians at all, so I’m not sure where that criticism comes from. I was only talking about the laws the RC Church tried to enforce. If there weren’t people doing all this stuff they tried to stop, it wouldn’t have been in their books of sex crimes in the first place FFS. This is about how the Church tried to control people’s lives, not about their attitudes.
I think that I agree with your comment, Heather. I didn’t agree with the projection criticism. However, it is interesting that sometimes people do project ideas anachronistically on to history.
(As well, in my comment, “I’m not sure that a street devoted to prostitution somehow counters the point that there weren’t oppressive sexual laws”, I meant “were”, not “weren’t”.)
People do sometimes project onto history. As an historian, I’m not one of them. I got a bit more annoyed than I should have, probably because it’s happened several times on this site. I’ve got no idea who did it, because even though it looks that way, I don’t take it personally.
The prostitution area in London was over the river in Southwark in medieval times because it was easier to escape the notice of the Church there. One bishop (whose name currently escapes me) built a palace there, ostensibly to allow easier policing, but actually to give him better access to the prostitutes.
One of the punishments for a prostitute was to be paraded through the streets in a striped dress where the neckline went under her breasts. It was a popular punishment.
As for the Victorians, there were literally thousands of brothels in London at the time. The population at the time was about 1.5 million mid-century.
I didn’t think that you were projecting. A comment above seemed to suggest that you were. In comments below, Tim says that he didn’t mean to undermine your points but, rather, to contribute to the discussion with interestingly complicating points. His comments on the “Winchester Geese” (in a post below) go with your example of the bishop whose name escaped you. Perhaps, you are referring to the same bishop. Anyhow, your point makes it clear that the laws were oppressive but that some authorities were (surprise, surprise) hypocrites who indulged in what they publicly condemned.
You note a popular punishment (from the Renaissance?) for a prostitute. How common were such punishments? If there was a kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind permissiveness, what prompted crackdowns, and how common and ruthless were they?
Your last comment about population and brothels points to a difficulty, I think. When numbers get so large, it gets more difficult to assess common attitudes. Basically, with so many people around, it’s not hard to find evidence of one attitude and then of its opposite.
If you don’t mind answering, what are you a historian of?
My comment about projection wasn’t directed at you (or Tim). You clearly weren’t doing that, and I’m sorry if it sounded like I was referring to you.
I don’t know how often the punishment occurred, just that it did on a fairly regular basis in Southwark in the 15th century.
I don’t know that much about the Victorians. All the suppression on the surface, and being seen to do the right thing, seems to have hidden all sorts of things. I see the US a bit the same, especially when I see stuff like the reaction to Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. Here people would just laugh.
It’s probably a bit of a cheek calling myself an historian as I don’t formally teach or research it. My degree was in history and I mainly studied medieval England and Europe. It’s what I wanted to make my career, but physical injuries meant I couldn’t take up my post-grad place.
I worked outside the field. About ten years ago ongoing physical issues stopped me working altogether. Now I blog when I can. I’ve been doing that for just over a year and only two of my posts have been historical, and I mainly did them because there was a religion tie-in.
It wasn’t just prostitution – there were bear-baiting, bull-baiting, fairs, lots of taverns (like Chaucer’s Tabard)and unlicensed acting and eventually theatres like the Rose (connected with Marlowe) and the Globe (connected with Shakespeare). It wasn’t so much that Southwark was beyond the control of the Church, as that it was outside the jurisdiction of the City of London and so beyond the control of the City elders, who were not churchmen; the citizens of this ‘commune’ had the right to elect a mayor. The City was very jealous of its rights and authority, and was able to stand up to kings, and also, I think, to the Church. Within the City, things (whether ‘moral’ or not) had to be licensed and ‘legal’: Southwark, just across the river and on the road to Canterbury, was splendidly placed to become London’s entertainment and red-light district.
And, forgive me, Heather, but I don’t think that Henry of Blois built his place in Southwark in order to have access to prostitutes. Southwark was part of the Bishopric of Winchester, and the Bishop was required to attend the court of the king and also Parliament on occasion, so that it was convenient to have somewhere close to London for these occasions – travelling up from Winchester was a fairly major operation in those days. I have checked, and I think it was not so much a matter of licensing prostitution in the area, as I suggested earlier, as that the Bishopric owned a lot of land in the area and so the brothels paid rent to the Bishopric.
I wasn’t thinking of Henry of Blois – I wouldn’t have forgotten his name. But I am wrong in calling it a palace because I’m pretty sure it was a bishop of London who built it as an alternative residence.
The Bishop of London’s place of residence was Fulham Palace. I don’t think, to be honest, any of the bishops of London would have had an alternative residence in Southwark’s red-light district… From the 18th century, the bishop had chambers also in the City, in Aldersgate Street, so I suppose he might have whipped across to Southwark from there, but anyway that was fare later.
How about the stocks? Weren’t they hives of sexual attacks men and women?
With 8 billion on the way we can have a cessation of reproductive sex—please!?
No idea actually. It’s not something I’ve ever heard of, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen of course.
Just to let you know that i cackled so much at the mental image of “slutty animals” that tea came out of my nose.
🙂
Reminds me of this scene in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.
Me too, except it was Dr. Pepper.
Re: “The proper response to such arguments is not respect, but mockery.”
I like Pinker’s summary of violence in the Bible. It’s at the start of “Better Angels”, and it seems to be written, at least partly, in the spirit of mockery. One of his many zingers: “No sooner do men and women begin to multiply than God decides they are sinful and that the suitable punishment is genocide.”
More seriously, I think of Bertrand Russell’s comments on righteousness in his essay “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” He briefly explores righteousness in relation to religion and concludes that “the essence of the conception of righteousness … is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice”.
I wonder if we’re seeing more of this from the fundies as an example of ISIS envy?
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.
This is an open-ended statement that justifies almost anything so long as you can convince your co-conspirators that God really did command that. Combine this anything-goes-because-God-said attitude with the attitude that “other ways of knowing” are reliable, and you essentially have… the history of religion.
Divine command theory sounds like a tacit admission by the religious that what they really believe in is not objective morality, but absolute authority. “Objective morality” is just easier to sell, I guess.
I think they manage to merge the two together: a morality is “objective” iff it will always be enforced. It’s a variation of “it ain’t wrong if you don’t get caught.”
You are incorrect. To make your statement correct, you need to remove the “almost.”
Just remember that with that divine command goes absolution of whatever you do in order to keep you from Hell. (A good psychological way of easing emotional burdens.) As was round out that when people let the giver of orders say it “wasn’t their fault” they gladly flipped the switch that they thought were giving greater and greater charges of electricity. Even when the person stopped shouting for it to stop and the idea is that they died.)
Ah yes… They were only following orders. That apparently worked for bronze age goat herders as well as for soldiers during WW II.
It’s mind boggling to know that these stupid people actually exist! One of them, Kent, is supposed to speak at — of all things — a public school in Ohio tomorrow!
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/11/08/creationist-kent-hovind-will-be-speaking-at-a-public-school-in-ohio-this-tuesday/
Thnx for heads up on Hovind’s school appearance, another source to add to my #TIP http://www.tortucan.wordpress.com coverage of Hovind. Make no mistake about it, Hovind has a large following in the Kulturkampf creationist subculture (which includes state legislators and school board members, as at Dover case a decade ago) so keeping track of his activities is not an exercise in mere scholarship.
They aren’t stupid, they are dangerous. Remember that. Just as former president GWB was dangerous, not stupid.
By this insane perversion of logic, the proper response to the propensity of priests to rape children placed in their care would be to indiscriminately slaughter all Christians of all denominations.
And, really? All-powerful YHWH who used Jedi mind tricks to pervert Pharaoh so as to excuse the Plagues…this superbeing couldn’t think of any more effective means to end bestiality and cure or contain the relevant diseases than to have his chosen people make the fields run red with blood? Do these assholes think that we should be following this model for the African AIDS crisis?
For that matter, what sorts of biohazard containment practices did they use? STDs are typically easily transmissible through contact of an open wound with contaminated blood. The genocide described would have been a great way to have caused even higher rates of infection amongst the Israelites than amongst those they killed.
You want to have play-pretend zombie cannibalism fantasy parties, that’s one thing. But when you start endorsing the worst (fictional, to be sure!) crimes ever written down…that makes you every bit as much a pariah as any Neo-Nazi who thinks Hitler had the right idea and it’s a shame he wasn’t able to finish the job.
Every single theologian quoted above is evil and a menace to civilization. They should be closely watched for any sign that they might decide to act upon their genocidal fantasies. They’re the domestic DAESH. They can remain free so long as they behave, including free to spew this toxic insanity of theirs…but only until they step out of line.
b&
I expect the answer is, “Yes”. They are just that nice.
Surely, the logic suggests that you should kill the children, and not the priests as well, or all Christians. Hasn’t that been a defence put up by some priests? – that little twelve-year-old had such a tempting twinkle in his eye that it was irresistible, and so it was not the poor priest who was at fault but that tempter of a little boy? One recalls Humbert H. Humbert’s throwing of the blame on Lo-lee-ta.
You’re not thinking like Moses.
The logic suggest that you should kill all the adults, and turn all the (virgin!) children into sex toys of your own.
…and, no. I’m not being facetious or exaggerating or anything like that. That really is what Numbers 31 is all about.
b&
“Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation.”
Does this include aborted fetuses, too (I don’t see why it wouldn’t)? In that case, I assume Craig must be strongly pro-abortion, then, right? Free ticket to heaven for the “child,” since it has no risk of straying from God in adulthood. And even if it’s a sin for the mother to have the abortion, all she has to do is repent, accept Christ, and she gets to go to heaven too. It’s win-win!
For that matter, any mass-murderer of young children would have to be considered a moral hero, right?
Let’s put Ben Carson in charge of our stockpile of nuclear weapons! At least he would sleep well at night after using them…
Any presidential candidate who claims to be a person of faith–especially if that faith involves a personal relationship with God and a belief in objective morality–should be asked, in as blunt a manner as possible, if he or she subscribes to divine command theory, e.g.: “If God commanded you to drop a nuclear bomb on a U.S. city, would you do it?”
Yes! This is a key logical flaw with most evangelical versions of Christianity. Catholics might have a way out because they hold (or used to hold) that babies are born with original sin and are born at risk of Hell, but Protestants, and Evangelicals especially, embrace a theory of redemption that all but demands the slaughter of children whenever and wherever possible.
How does that let the Catholic gods off the hook? Any god who would infinitely torture an aborted fetus or a murdered infant for any reason, especially one so NIGYSOB as that they hadn’t yet accepted Jesus, is the worst sort of imaginable monster — worse even than their Satan or their caricatures of amoral secularists.
The problem isn’t who does or doesn’t go to Hell. The problem is with the very existence of such a place at all. If mere mortals can figure out that cruel and unusual punishment is inexcusable, even for the worst of the worst, what excuse does an infinitely knowledgeable and powerful and compassionate god have for inflicting infinitely cruel and infinitely unusual punishment on anybody?
b&
It doesn’t let their god off the hook, it makes their god more monstrous. And of course any belief in Hell is monstrous.
Nevertheless, the logic of Protestant belief, however monstrous, more or less forces you to be pro-child slaughter. The logic of Catholic doctrine, also monstrous, lets the Catholic believer off the hook of the logic that they should be slaughtering children. That is all.
They’re only off the hook until Baptism, which usually occurs within a few weeks or months of birth. Then, kids cannot mortally sin until at least the age of reason. So from a few weeks old until the age of 7, we’re right back to having to figure out why everyone shouldn’t be slaughtered to ensure salvation.
No wonder they are so bonkers for embryos… those fall in the narrow range when you can’t “safely” kill them.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”
Voltaire
“Major takeaway: sometimes beings innocent of committing sin can be harmed and corrupted by others who misuse their free will, as seems to be the case with animals involved in bestiality. It is a tragedy that these animals had to be killed but that’s one of the big lessons about sin: Sinful beings can hurt the innocent sometimes permanently.”
Hope he doesn’t catch on to the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of HUMAN abuse victims living in this country…
Since God was perfectly capable of committing genocide on his own, by assigning the job to the Jews, He, in his infinite wisdom, has created outsourcing.
Good point!
And lo, He did export his making of divine miracles to the lowest bidder. And it came to pass that the miracles had many defects. There came upon this land many babies that were, well, kind of red and wrinkly.
Well, maybe he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe he had a bit of guilt about the whole creation of man thing and wished to hell he’d never done it. But, was following through out of a sense that some other god would be watching to see if he was being consistent. Maybe he was afraid his mother would find out. How the hell can we know?
“The Lord helps those
who help themselves.”
sub
The glib acceptance of Biblical genocide is implicit in the “logic” of their belief in a just & loving God, in which case anything unjust or hateful done by or on the command of that god must not be what it appears to be, resulting in the dervish spinning that is both amusing and scary to read. Unfortunately, Hovind’s attitude is hardly restricted to his wacky end of the Young Earth Creationist bible apologetic spectrum, as I note p. 721 of “Cuz the Bible Tells Me So” TIP chapter regarding Old Earth Creationist Hugh Ross and the immensely influential bible apologist Norman Geisler http://www.twowordculture.com/tip/files/2004/Troubles-in-Paradise-part-6-2004-draft-Cuz-the-Bible-Tells-Me-So.pdf
Well, you seem to find the strategy of creationists failing because they fail to attack evolution directly enough for success. But it seems to me you are being too generous wrt their motives. These people of the Discovery Institute and such are milking their followers to make a living. They are not at all sure of ultimate success, but probably don’t care all that much. They want a paycheck and work at maintaining some visibility among their followers so the donations continue. Some of them are more serious than others, of course, but I have to believe they are in it for the money. Call me a cynic.
I don’t know about the others, but William Lane Craig is not defending the slaughter of the Canaanites merely by saying it had a higher purpose. Yes, that’s sort of ‘part 2’ of his quote, but ‘part 1’ is a completely different argument: that the slaughter was moral in and of itself, regardless of the consequences, for the simple reason that God willed it and anything God wills is by definition moral.
That’s what makes DCT so scary. They think murder, rape, etc. are perfectly okay (Craig even goes so far as to say morally obligatory) in instances where God commands you to murder and rape.
A “loving god” for the good guys and “a vengeful god” for the long list of those who aren’t considered by them to be good.
Jeez…… If he is a doctor I’m and astronaut!
Craig says “The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.” – One wonders how God communicated that command – the same way he communicates with men today?
Exactly. In addition to other problems, Craig’s rationalization can only be applied in a closed situation in which all the variables are set out and accepted in advance. In the Bible the Israeli soldiers can be 100% certain of what God wants because the Bible informs us that they were listening to God. In other words, they’re story characters and WE are the readers who have been told things. We’re not supposed to recognize that hey, the soldiers wouldn’t have known what we know. They’re not reading the Bible for clues. They’re following religious leaders or having hallucinations or looking into their ‘hearts’ or whatever.
It’s like those experiments where small children are shown an object being hidden while somebody is out of the room and asked “where will so-and-so look for the cookie?” Up to a certain age toddlers simply assume that there’s a kind of hive-mind at work and what they know is what other people know. If they saw the cookie being taken from a cabinet and placed in a box, then that is where it will be looked for.
Then as subjects get older theory of mind kicks in and the child thinks “ah, but that other person was not in the room and doesn’t know what I know — they will look in the original place, the wrong place.” This is a natural aspect of human development, one which shows up later in the autistic. And apparently it’s not supposed to show up at all among the Biblical literalists.
How do the Israelis KNOW God overrode the command against murder? But … but … God told them. It says so, right here. They weren’t trusting themselves; they were trusting God. Duh.
Honestly, it’s like WLCraig is 3 years old, and talking to other 3 year olds.
” it’s like WLCraig is 3 years old, and talking to other 3 year olds”
Yes indeed. I suspect this is the case for very many religious nut bags. Benny Carson might be among the many. I’ve noticed that sometimes his vocabulary dips in sophistication as if he’s addressing an elementary school class.
Undoubtedly, that is why Hitler’s verbal attacks on the Jews so often compare them to vermin. So much easier to think about genocide that way.
Yes. Iirc another popular analogy was cutting a cancer out of a healthy body, in order to save it. Dehumanizing your enemy in order to demonize them is a strange and dangerous way of trying to appeal to common sense and compassion.
Yup. I think in Rwanda the slaughters were also preceded by verbal attacks comparing people to cockroaches. Dehumanizing and a sort of “anti-anthropomorphization” are pretty common trends before or in justification of murder.
And – disgustingly – the term ‘cockroaches’ was recently used by a so-called commentator in one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers here in the UK to describe immigrants fleeing war and oppression in their countries of origin and trying to get into Europe .
This is the sort of thing that simply can NOT be rationalized by allegorical interpretations.
Sure, accept evolution by claiming Genesis 1 is an allegory, but there’s a bigger problem here.
The affable and folksy new Catholic auxilary bishop of Los Angeles, Robert Barron, states these are not real genocides, but allegories of removing evil from the human heart. If so, it’s a dreadful allegory. You might be able to use various fabulous creatures like vampires or werewolves in such a way, but people of other races??
Bishop Barron is also an admirer of Bob Dylan, Anne Rice, and even atheist author Christopher Hitchens, and has a definite homey charm, but his allegorical take on this remains quite weaselly.
My family loves Fr. Barron. If Barron was an admirer of Hitchens, I doubt the admiration would flow the other way. When Stephen Fry was interviewed about what he’d ask God, Fr. Barron had some contempt for him straight out of the Mother Teresa playboy of suffering to get closer to Jesus. His apologetics are mostly of the “I don’t believe in that God either” variety.
I think you mean “playbook” not “playboy”.
The only Christians I know of that Christopher Hitchens admired were William F. Buckley (not sure why) and two that he believed to be really secular humanists using Christian language, Martin Luther King Jr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (IMO Hitchens is heavily mistaken about the last two, re their beliefs.)
Darn. I had all sorts of theories about the antics of Mother Teresa playboys.
Yes, playbook, which Android again just attempted to change to playboy. Chalk this up as the thread that will send that next freak who Googles “Mother Teresa playboy” straight to whyevolutionistrue.
Doubtless based on your browsing history…
(And no, my browsing history has no possible connection with all the emails I get offering cheap viagra and Russian nymphomaniacs, honest officer… )
cr
I prefer not to talk about the past. Let’s talk about where we’re going in the future.
<Ducks out and signs up for the Republican Presidential race.>
The allegory card pretty much always fails. Allegory for what!?
One of the most infamous examples is one that’s presented straight-up as an allegory. In Luke 19, Jesus tells a story about a kingdom whose king takes a leave of absence; when the king returns, the king orders that all those who won’t accept him as their king be mercilessly slaughtered at his feet.
Now, if that were presented as an allegory about the evils of tyranny, we could pretty much all get behind such a message.
But it’s not.
Instead, Jesus puts it beyond doubt that the king in the story represents Jesus himself, and that it’s an allegory for what Jesus himself is going to do at Armageddon when he returns.
So, sure. Luke 19:27, “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me,” is the punch line of an allegory…but the message of the allegory is that Jesus himself is demanding his followers to kill all non-Christians.
Which is typically how allegories work.
So, when, in Numbers 31, YHWH orders Moses and his Merry Men to murder all the Midianite adults and turn all their boys into slave laborers and rape all their pre-pubescent children for the rest of their lives…first, it’s presented as history, not allegory. But, even if one is to insist that it’s an allegory…it’s an allegory for why it’s right and good to murder and rape and pillage, and the best prizes are the hymens of all the little girls.
You’d be hard pressed to come up with an example of anything from literature more evil or horrific than the Bible, and it’s the alleged heroes who’re the worst of the worst.
b&
Not that this improves matters any(!!!), but I think the target in Luke 19 is probably specifically Jews. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of emphasis on belief here, more on being faithful stewards and managers.
Reasons for slaughter. Sounds quite rational for the insane to me.
Hovin et al must miss the good old days..
And let’s not forget about the Trilobites. Done in by the hand of God.
Archeological digs seem to have proven that Canaanites continued to live in Canaan after the Jews arrived. If the Jews killed off whole villages, that’s bad enough. But, I think they
exaggerated greatly about killing off the whole population.
When has there ever been a time when Jews lived in exclusion from all non-Jews except in ghettoes (and that not of their choice)? Even Jerusalem and other parts of Israel and Judea were populated with non-Jews as well as Jews. During and after the diaspora Jews were dispersed to many countries. Not all Jews chose to “return home”. And, there were significantly large populations of Jews living in countries God didn’t give to the Jews. Alexandria being one such. Apparently, God didn’t insist on genocide in those cases.
And many of the Jews who chose to stay converted to Islam and are modern day Palestinians. Yet they retain and incorporate many Jewish rituals in their worship.
The man seems to have gone a little further over the edge.
He’s the one with the dinosaur playground isn’t he. No doubt some hapless security guard is going to find a very disturbing sight in his torch beam some night.
All of the commands of genocide are predicated on God’s command.
How do they know it was God, and not just some guy who wanted to rape and pillage?
And how does Hovind and the rest determine if a person today is talking to God, when they call for horrific atrocities, both large and small?
The only possible rational answer to such assertions is to tell God to do it himself.
If he’s so powerful it shouldn’t be a problem for him.
Can’t tell God to do it himself. That would be disobedience. God hates that. Prove your faith by blindly following Gods orders.
“How do they know it was God, and not just some guy who wanted to rape and pillage?”
Exactly, i.e. GWB… God told me to invade Iraq! (paraphrased)
These theologians have a very serious case of the g*d delusion. It is indeed as funny as it is terrifying. Humans can rationalize anything especially when backed by ideology. I remember some ex-Nazi concentration camp guards/soldiers being interviewed on one of the World at War episodes who basically said that humans get used to anything, no matter how horrific, and they still seemed pretty unapologetic about their involvement. Chilling.
I recommend watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s two extraordinary and harrowing documentary films about the massacres in Indonesia in the sixties, instigated by the government with the splendid moral support of the UK and the US: ‘The Act of Killing’ and ‘The Look of Silence’. You can meet a number of men – and their loving wives – who explain in tones of relish and pride how they went about their mass-killings.
I recommend watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s two brilliant and harrowing documentaries about the massacres in Indonesia in the sixties, which were instigated by the Indonesian government, with the moral support, or connivance, if you prefer, of the UK and the USA. There you will meet a number of men – and their loving wives – who recount with pride and relish how they went about the mass-killings.
I recall reading somewhere that in Bali (that mythical heaven on earth where the arts flourish and over which the New-Agers drool) a larger percentage of the population died in these massacres than the percentage of the Cambodian population who were killed by Pol Pot and his pals.
Sorry about that. The first one didn’t appear, and I thought it hadn’t got through because I’d forgotten to type in my names, etc.
I saw the first one.
Sickening.
And one of my other comments failed to go through as well, even though I filled everything in.
Thanks for the Oppenheimer recommendation. I’ll look into that…though it does seem to be very disturbing.
You’d think his loving god would just simply wipe out the bacteria infecting his precious creations instead.
God’s aim is notoriously bad.
Can he prove this statement? Without that proof, there is no justification for the actions.
I think you mispelt the word — it’s “prooove.”
Throughout all this absurd farrago, we need to remember that there is no evidence that any of it ever happened. It is all made up. The Israelites were never exiled to Egypt, but were most likely descendants of the original Hittite inhabitants. There is no evidence that the Biblical genocides were ever actually committed (thankfully). It would be nice to think that some day people might grow up and take some notice of what history and archaeology can tell us; but I’m not holding my breath.
trying to justify the crimes of characters in an ancient fable clearly drives people insane.
I was going to comment that there’s nothing to justify since, as it’s from the Bible, it’s almost certainly fictitious.
That doesn’t let Hovind et al off the hook though, since they probably think it did happen.
And comparing their victims to bacteria – I’m not sure even Hitler got around to that. That’s not something you come across very often – guys more extreme in their views than Hitler. ISIS would love them.
I would, however, support the extermination of Hovind, Craig and Jones as an essential public health measure.
[That was sarcasm. Probably.]
cr
P.S. ‘baby bacteria that haven’t done anything wrong’ ?
Hovind’s grasp of biology is… tenuous.
Much like his grasp of reality.
cr
“support the extermination of Hovind, Craig and Jones as an essential public health measure”
Don’t lose any sleep over it.
Fictional or not, the comments say something important (and not very complimentary) about the speakers.
Huck Finn is fictional too, but if someone reads it and says “damn that Huck, he should’ve done the right thing and returned Jim to his master” that says something quite nasty about them. The same goes here, too – doesn’t matter if its fictional. Supporting the immoral side in a fictional story is character-revealing in the same way that choosing the immoral side in an actual event would be. Maybe we give some latitude for bravado (not everyone who says outrageous things about a fictional plot would carry through with their assertions in real life), but otherwise, yeah it being fiction really doesn’t make much of a difference to how reprehensible these attitudes are.
The moral obscenities that otherwise normal people can espouse, when infected with religion, can be almost disorientating to encounter.
I’ve been listening to the podcast “Unbelievable” lately which typically pits atheist against theist in debate/discussion (it’s quite good, generally).
There was an episode in which an atheist was debating an Intelligent Design proponent (and the ID person was a biologist as I remember!). At one point the atheist said, ok, given you are also a Christian, doesn’t the design of horrible pathogens and disease etc say something sinister about the designer?
The IDist said that although ID doesn’t get into such moral/theological issues, “as a Christian” Christian theology gives him the tools to answer such problems. As it happens, diseases etc are attributed to the story of The Fall, where God, in his foreknowledge of The Fall, had “prepared” that fallen world.
My jaw just dropped. He actually imagined he just answered the problem by saying “yeah, God deliberately created rabies, black plague, malaria, cholera etc for us to punish us” as if THAT were a satisfactory answer to the problem of God being sinister for having done so in the first place!
Just imagine the mind that would create rabies or other terrible diseases, with full intent of how they would wreak their havoc on human beings.
This was like excusing Hitler for having “prepared” the ovens before-hand knowing the Jews wouldn’t do as he wished. What kind of twisted person, divine or otherwise, would take such diabolical actions in the first place?
I seem to remember it was Philip Kitcher’s truly excellent book “Abusing Science” (about creationists) in which he put it very well (paraphrasing); When we think of a Designer overlooking this creation, it is hard to place a benign expression to his face.
There is a common consensus that all that is needed to address so-called “hard questions” is an answer — any answer will do, no matter how incoherent or even confounding. All that matters is that you answer the question, and that’s the end of the matter.
So, “Why doesn’t Jesus ever call 9-1-1, even whilst he’s watching his official representatives commit serial child rape?” can be satisfactorily answered with, “Because it’s important to Jesus that the priests have the freedom to do anything they want, and it’s up to him to decide what, if anything, to do about the priests after they’re dead and gone.”
Any sane person would instantly recognize the Jesus so portrayed as the Mafia don ensuring that his heavies get all the perks they want; but, for a Christian, the mere fact that the question has been answered makes everything just hunky-dory.
Insanity. Sheer, naked, terrifying insanity.
b&
Or blatantly contradictory to the answer they gave to the last question.
I think some if the Jebusites must have escaped and moved to the rural south 😀
Jebus…amirite? No…Amorite.
If Divine genocide is comparable to prescribing antibiotics, why couldn’t have omnipotent Yahweh, on I don’t know, introduced them to antibiotics?
Well, perhaps all those laws were on the books at one time or another, but I doubt that they were enforced with any great zeal, except perhaps periodically, when it was felt a moral crackdown was needed.
From before the time of Shakespeare, the prostitutes in the borough of Southwark were known as “Winchester Geese” because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester himself to work within the Liberty of the Clink. So much for morals and church teachings.
The above is a reply to Rick at 9. I don’t know why it ended up here – probably my fault.
Your point about the “Winchester Geese” is interesting, but I’m not sure that it undermines Heather’s criticism. It seems to me that oppressive laws, hypocrisy, and sexual license (as in freedom and a permit) commonly go together. (Incidentally, doesn’t “The Canterbury Tales” begin at a tavern in Southwark? Or maybe the pilgrims are supposed to return there?)
Sometimes people do project ideas anachronistically onto history, but I don’t think that Heather does in her comment. I think that there were oppressive and invasive laws and that they were used. I don’t think that red-light districts or ribald literature suggest that there weren’t oppressive laws or that they weren’t used. Rather, I think that the durability of such areas and such literature suggests that it’s very, very difficult for oppressive forces to stamp out or totally to control sexual behaviour and desire.
I was not seeking to undermine what Heather was saying. I was merely pointing out that things were interestingly complicated.
My apologies for the accusation. I thought that your points were supporting the idea that Heather’s comment was too revisionist. I agree that what you point out is interestingly complicated. Indeed, your posts have me thinking about such complications. For example, Dante describes sodomites on 2 different occasions in his great poem. The first is in hell, the second in purgatory. Readers are sometimes surprised by the idea that there are saved sodomites. Perhaps, that surprise really reflects later attitudes to homosexuality imposed on Dante’s poem, and, perhaps, some quarters of medieval society were more relaxed about queerness. It must be the case that Roman culture was more relaxed about it. So, on the one hand, the Inquisition, but, on the other, Gropecunt Lane and the Bulicame (a river frequented by prostitutes, according to Dante’s poem). So, I agree with your points to some degree, and I did enjoy your list of literary ribaldry and the quoted poem.
And among those sodomites in Hell was Brunetto Latini, for whom Dante had the greatest respect: ‘Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?’ asks Dante in surprise. But one wants to be wary: ‘sodomy’ in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (in England, at least) was not so strictly defined a sin, or, rather, it covered a number of sins of a sexual nature, though Brunetto implies that in the Inferno, at least, it refers to homosexuality (and it seems that there is at least one love poem written by Brunetto to a young man). Since Dante thought so well of him, one wonders why he did not put him in ‘Purrgatorio’ – but it gives the lie to those who assert that Dante’s purpose in writing ‘The Divine Comedy’ was to have revenge on his political enemies.
Anyway, here’s a description – from Amazon – of Michael Rocke’s book ‘Forbidden Friendships’: ‘The men of Renaissance Florence were so renowned for sodomy that “Florenzer” in German meant “sodomite”. Indeed, in the late fifteenth century, as many as one in two Florentine men had come to the attention of the authorities for sodomy by the time they were thirty. In the seventy years from 1432 to 1502, some 17,000 men–in a city of only 40,000–were investigated for sodomy; 3,000 were convicted and thousands more confessed to gain amnesty.’
But there was some leeway in real life: in Marlowe’s ‘Edward III’, Edward’s infatuation with Gaveston destroys him because he lets it interfere with his governance. At one point in the play, Mortimer Senior recommends letting the king have his favourite until ‘riper years shall wean him from such toys’, since Alexander loved Ephsion, Hercules loved Hilas, Patroclus loved Achilles, Cicero loved Octavius and Socrates loved Alcibiades… The example of the Classical world was always there…
O, lord, I’ve written PURRgatorio… I blame the influence of this website.
I noticed that. You can’t commit even the slightest transgression on this site (or maybe, on this site, that isn’t really a transgression) without being found out.
cr
Dante’s encounter with Brunetto is a good example of the difficulty of generalizing about historical attitudes toward sex. Brunetto is punished by the fire and brimstone, as seems to be expected for a sodomite, yet Dante is affectionate towards his old teacher, as you point out. In the next canto, there’s another seeming surprise when Dante says that he would have embraced the sodomitical Florentines if not for the fire. Perhaps, Dante shows an attitude that is more nuanced than is sometimes assumed about back then. It’s hard to say whether his attitude was typical or unusual. Hmm.
Your note on Rocke’s book is interesting. The stats suggest that the law was pretty involved yet that the law doesn’t seem to have curbed behaviour too much. (Or maybe Florentines slanderously accused one another of sodomy a lot.)
I’ve never read Marlowe’s play, though I’ve heard about it. (I think that you meant “Edward II”, not “III”.) I’m not sure that it is evidence of leeway in real life, unless you mean that it reflects real-life leeway. (I don’t doubt that there was leeway, especially for kings.)
Yes, ‘Edward II’!
Well, there was a fair bit of leeway, as long as you did not, like Christopher Marlowe, go around declaring your atheism unwisely and dropping bons mots like ‘All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools’. Richard Barnfield got into a bit of trouble with his homo-erotic poetry but declared he was merely imitating the ancients. The playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher were, from what John Aubrey says, seem to have been a gay couple, married though not in name. Then there are of course Shakespeare’s homo-erotic sonnets. And there were the fulminations of the Puritans about the pretty boys on stage who became the ‘ingles’ of wealthy patrons (as happened in Japan, where I live). And the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, as well as James I himself, were clearly gay. But homosexuality was not understood in the way it came to be understood later or as it has come to be understood now. ‘Sodomy’ was a sort of catch-all term for a disorderly sexual life. If one was discreet, it didn’t matter in the way it came to matter in 19th-century and 20th-century Anglo-Saxondom. I do not think that things were so different before the English Renaissance, either.
Bifil that in that season on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweship, and pilgrims were they all,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
I thought so! Thanks for posting that, in the original no less. (How many words did you have type more than once because of autocorrect?) I vaguely remember a lecturer stressing that the pilgrimage begins in a pub and pointing out that it was the kind of pub that Falstaff would frequent!
I hate ‘auto-correct’! You have to go back all the time and have a tussle with the computer over who is going to win, and with Chaucer it’s every second word. Is it possible to turn auto-correct off?
Should be possible in your browser. And if it displeases you, use a different browser.
As far as my computer is concerned, I am Root User. I am God. I can type ‘apt-get uninstall [package-that-just-pissed-me-off]’ and it shall be done, and the electrons shall be recycled, yea verily as it was done to the Midianites.
So don’t take no shit from your browser. 😉
cr
It’s a Mac. I shall do some googling….
I regard that as a point in favour of the church. A sign that (some sections of) it were pragmatic and recognised the realities if life and society.
Or maybe it just indicates that my morals are all bass-ackwards. 😉
cr
Well, of course, a lot of churchmen WERE pragmatic. Certainly, the Bishop of Winchester was: I seem to recall that a fee had to be paid before a licence was granted…
So the church was profiting from immoral earnings.
Better and better…
cr
Anyone who believes this should make it their life’s mission to kill as many children as possible. Sure, the believer will go to Hell for all of those murders, but it’ll be worth it for all the children they will have saved from Hell. After all, most children who are allowed to grow up won’t make it to Heaven… narrow is the way and all of that.
Indeed.
And, that Christians aren’t mass baby murderers demonstrates that they all fall into one of two categories.
Mostly, fortunately, they don’t actually really truly believe the bullshit. They almost all eventually come down on the side of “belief in belief” when push comes to shove.
The rest, those who actually do believe? Are selfish cowards deserving only of utmost contempt. Here they have the opportunity to commit the ultimate sacrifice — of their very own eternity — in order to ensure the greatest possible benefit to vast numbers of others.
We all recognize the heroes who sacrifice their lives for other people, but what is such sacrifice in the face of eternal damnation? And to sacrifice simply for a few score years on Earth is trivial compared to the infinite stretches of heavenly bliss thus guaranteed to the aborted and the victims of infanticide.
Christianity is an evil, horrific death cult; its only saving grace is that nearly nobody actually believes any of that shit.
b&
Of course, Jesus’s bad weekend pales in comparison to such an unselfish sacrifice. Anyone willing to risk eternal torture to guarantee the salvation of so many should be rewarded with Heaven. And anyone willing to let people risk eternal torture to ensure Heaven for themselves should be punished with Hell. Quite the enigma we have here.
It is difficult to imagine anyone not shrouded in the cloak of religion even getting away with making such statements, much less getting paid for it. If any non-religious person started talking about justifiable genocide, they would be hounded out of any public platform they had.
sub
“The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.”
This sounds disturbingly similar to the rationalizations I have read for the “Final Solution” by the similarly self-proclaimed “chosen race” of Aryans.
heh. christian apologists can’t deny that killing innocent people and animals is wrong (and more importantly, was always wrong). but there it is, in chapter after chapter, and in verse after verse, in their holiest of documents, genocide commanded by their loving deity. what to do? ah, but the answer’s obvious!
those people and animals, they weren’t innocent. (and the kiddies? well … they weren’t gonna stay that way.)
problem solved.
I’ve always wondered why many of these religionists were so opposed to abortion because it seems to me that they should strongly support it as sort of giving these to-be children a free pass and quick route directly to Heaven. If, as many of these people believe, there is an “age of accountability”–a nebulous concept that changes depending on who you are talking to that basically supports Determinism, but only up to a certain age before freewill kicks in– wouldn’t you want to prevent as many of these kids from growing up as possible since they might screw up and switch religions or (god forbid) become evil atheists? I certainly hope this never happens, but I’m almost surprised that some lunatic Christian hasn’t come along and attempted to murder young kids to “protect” them from a possibly future hell. If they really wanted to “save” people, it seems to me the greatest way of doing so, is by doing nothing at all for many believe that ignorance “doesn’t count”. Well, then why would you want to inform anyone about the religion at all? If you are really concerned about their afterlife, the goal should be keeping everyone in the dark, not proselyting.
But in the end there is no ‘age of accountability’ in the strict sense in the Christian religion since:
‘In order to emphasize how mysterious and unapproachable is Divine election, the Council of Trent calls predestination “hidden mystery”. That predestination is indeed a sublime mystery appears not only from the fact that the depths of the eternal counsel cannot be fathomed, it is even externally visible in the inequality of the Divine choice. The unequal standard by which baptismal grace is distributed among infants and efficacious graces among adults is hidden from our view by an impenetrable veil. Could we gain a glimpse at the reasons of this inequality, we should at once hold the key to the solution of the mystery itself. Why is it that this child is baptized, but not the child of the neighbour? Why is it that Peter the Apostle rose again after his fall and persevered till his death, while Judas Iscariot, his fellow-Apostle, hanged himself and thus frustrated his salvation? Though correct, the answer that Judas went to perdition of his own free will, while Peter faithfully co-operated with the grace of conversion offered him, does not clear up the enigma. For the question recurs: Why did not God give to Judas the same efficacious, infallibly successful grace of conversion as to St. Peter, whose blasphemous denial of the Lord was a sin no less grievous than that of the traitor Judas? To all these and similar questions the only reasonable reply is the word of St. Augustine: “Inscrutabilia sunt judicia Dei” (the judgments of God are inscrutable).’
The above is a bit of Catholic theology found on the internet. Calvinist theology in particular is even more up front. The Anglicans waffle and wobble. But in the end, and despite the casuistry about free will, determinism rules.
The get out of jail free card when it comes to Catholic theology is Divine Mystery. Never has there been an institution so good at dressing up non sequiturs and contradictions in fluffy and ambiguous language. Pile on some well-indoctrinated guilt from the time children are born and they have themselves a cadre of unquestioning believers. (Pay no attention to the sophisticated justifications or allegory if you’re happy literally accepting weeping statues, flying saints, and a 6,000 year old Earth.) Of course, this is a large part of the formula that has allowed them to maintain their power for nearly two millennia. God willing (haha), that edifice is finally starting to crumble in the modern communication age.
In my view, Judas should be regarded as the greatest of all the saints by rational (well, ok, more rational) Christians. He does the most horrible act imaginable, at least according to the story, and yet it is needed, also according to the story.
Cf. also MASH “Quo Vadis Captain Chandler”.
Yeah, I always though Judas was unfairly maligned, since it was necessary for the story (and even foreseen by Big J) that Judas would sell him out. He really didn’t have a choice.
cr
“He really didn’t have a choice”
Jesus knew he was living in a deterministic world. He had no choice about the whole Crucifixion scene. His dad had no choice about forsaking him. I agree we need to give Judas a break.
So you see how the present concern with punishment in discussions of determinism, often to the virtual exclusion of anything else, derives from such theological discussions as are described in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.
I didn’t know the Catholics composed their own Encyclopedia, but I cringe to contemplate it’s implications.
Would that be Wickedpaedia.
Jorges Borges wrote a short story with this premise, called Three Versions of Judas
In the third version, Judas himself is the Messiah because he has made the most perfect sacrifice.
But what is surely interesting about this extract from the Catholic Encyclopaedia is that it is not mere fluffy and ambiguous gobbledygook. What is going on, within those religious and theological trappings, is precisely the kind of discussion about determinism and the nature of ‘free will’ that we see every so often on this web-site. And what is being said is not foolish – the point about the question recurring (that is to say, no settled conclusion as to the nature of free will is possible, since it is always possible to bring in a new factor that militates against the possibility of free will), leads to the strong suggestion that everything is predestined by God, or, in modern terms, determined. It may be possible to bring up a new factor that suggests that free will exists, but that again can be trumped by bringing up yet another new factor that suggests determinism, and so ad infinitum… The only way to stop this infinite regress is by appeal to the inscrutability of God. Nevertheless, what is being said here points strongly to God’s determining everything – partly, no doubt because if he is omnipotent, he has to determine everything, but also because when you try to argue out the matter, the argument seems strongly to favour determinism (or, in this case, predestination).
I think it is actually worse than that – god can override his own gift if it suits him. Free will is supposedly this most wonderful of gifts and yet, in order for the drama to take place as wanted (innocent man pays the price for the guilty, etc.) there must be a betrayal! I suppose that *Judas* doesn’t have to necessarily be the one, but *someone* does. How does that work, anyway? (It is easier if you assume, as some of the gnostic gospels did, that Judas was told that he would be the betrayer and to play his role like the others.)
Calvinism makes things clearer. There are the elect (whom God has elected since the beginning of time) and the reprobate (whom God has determined from the beginning of time are reprobate and will therefore be damned); God will nevertheless give certain of the reprobate intimations of the possibility of being saved, so that they may despair the more on realising that they will not be saved, and, despair being a mortal sin, deserve their damnation the more. That is what happens in Faustus’s last great soliloquy in Marlowe’s ‘Dr Faustus’: God shows him where Christ’s blood ‘streams in the firmament’, so that Faustus may in the end despair the more, as he does. Marlowe had studied the most advanced (i.e. Calvinist) theology at Cambridge and knew what he was talking about. Catholicism fudges things, but in the end, as I think is clear from that entry in the Catholic Encyclopaedia, predestination rules. There is no free will.
I have a theory.
Suppose that the Romans had suppressed a Jewish revolt so effectively that all copies of the Old Testament were destroyed, leaving only the New Testament. And suppose that we now found a copy of the OT, hidden in a cave somewhere in the arid middle east.
My theory is that modern Christians would reject it as a corruption or a forgery. There’s no way anyone would defend it unless they had no choice.
They never get the illogicality of their arguments ,Yahweh because he is Yahweh doesn’t need to order anyone to do anything ,just flicks his fingers and its done, doesn’t it strike their Religion addled minds that the only reason Yahweh needs help is because he can’t do it himself , because he doesn’t bloody exist.!
I recently confronted Hovind on his fake Ph.D. You can watch it on YouTube here:
https://youtu.be/7Qce1UTf-FM .
Full episode:
https://youtu.be/-0A_vSoxZBg
…Bernie
Very amusing. Your persistence is commendable, but the exchange gives a sense of futility about the project of engaging the fellow. You will never change his mind about anything. He’s like a hamster spinning his wheel mindlessly.
It’s not really about changing Hovind’s mind, as much as it is showing his followers what kind of guy he is. And Hovind seems to have a significant fan base.
Right. Let’s hope at least some of his fans are receptive to facts. I’m sure many are not. I’t certainly worth a try and you did a good job.
I think his degree’s in tap dancing.
Interesting…but rather than bashing accreditation, you probably would have been better off demonstrating the atrocious quality of his work.
Just a couple lines from the introduction:
In a nutshell, the grammar is appalling and apparently Hovind lives in an alternate Universe where original research is stuff you “can’t prove to anyone” or research from experts, which he bizarrely in the same breath declares are impossible to validate as such. The whole document is cited with less rigor than the average comment thread at WEIT, including one citation of “the last paragraph” in a book. Really? I think I wrote research papers of better quality when I was 12 years old.
RE: “Interesting…but rather than bashing accreditation, you probably would have been better off demonstrating the atrocious quality of his work.”
The program segment was on the topic of “morality” so his dishonesty in claiming a Ph.D. was a relevant subject.
Ah, I see. I didn’t watch the whole segment, just the part about his credentials, so that’s fair game. Hovind’s thesis, and I use that word loosely, is rife with material too. It’s 101 pages, I skimmed through it for about 10-15 minutes and picked up such gems as the “doctrine of evolution,” complaints about Lamarck, and of course the micro-evolution canard. There’s also “Voltair” and Thomas “Payne”. Hovind even gets Voltaire’s lifespan wrong. I only noticed this because I saw it listed as 1694-1798, which made me wonder why I’d never heard that Voltaire lived 104 years. There is also, of course, quote mining all over the place, sometimes having to do with evolution; other times, they are complete non sequiturs about Communism, Marxism and humanism. I’m not sure whether all this is dishonesty or simple refusal to take the time to verify basic facts. This all speaks to your point about the value of accreditation. To paraphrase Stephen Weinberg, doctoral candidates can write good papers and they can write bad papers, but for a bad paper to earn a candidate a doctorate, that takes a diploma mill.