Obama, in prepared remarks, said, "There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being."I can think of a couple . . . dozen. The holy books of the Christians and Jews are full of instances of God commanding the the slaughter of innocents. He even does it himself on occasion. Then again, he also spares whole cities of the guilty on pain of one righteous man. His attitude in these regards is a bit schizo, as befits the power-mad Angry Dad in the Sky.
Likewise, apologists for Islam call it a "religion of peace" and critics find within the Koran all sorts of bloody nonsense, when of course, it contains both, because like all religions it is an insane, primitive set of superstitions that is neither coherent nor consistent. Pagans were generally better on this point, as their gods of limited attributes behaved rather like the dark superheroes of the seventies and eighties, one moment saviors, the next villains in thrall to Acton's iron law--but always and thoroughly human.
Americans being generally fond of encomiums to bland, deracinated, ecumenical, content-free "faith," Obama also stressed that faith should not be used "as a tool to divide us from one another"--this, of course, being precisely the purpose of so many religions, especially the religions of the book, which strive above all else to distinguish believers from infidels, faithful from apostate. The Jews call themselves the Chosen People, for Buddha's sake. Islam erected vast edifices of law and commentary on the question of cohabiting with various forms and types of non-believer.
It would be one thing for the President to encourage us to learn civil coexistence in the face of difference. Hey, worked for the Romans, more or less, or for the Andalusian caliphates. It is another entirely to claim that existence of specific doctrinal traditions obliterates distinction and division.
34 comments:
clearly, he's not a Believer.
Ain't a believer, but baitin' believers of all stripes.
Actually, I'm curious about this. My somewhat counter-intuitive impression is that there is no passage of the Hebrew Bible where God commands the slaughter of innocents. Moses does it in God's name on several occasions, and God says twice that he himself will annihilate/destroy (the Israelites and "all flesh," respectively). But I think it's always human agents who do the killin in the Bible. If anyone is bored at work maybe they can prove me wrong.
NB this challenge does not include passages where God commands people be killed for completely innocuous so-called "sins" like taking a bong toke or two at a party.
If sincere, this pabulum from Obama confirms he's not really a Christian after all. Fortunately, it also confirms he's not a Muslim.
I think I left my copy of the Bible under the TR-55 Manual in the bookcase at the back of my cube, let me go and retrieve it.
My somewhat counter-intuitive impression is that there is no passage of the Hebrew Bible where God commands the slaughter of innocents.
Ezekiel 9:5-6 :
"But to the others He said in my hearing, "Go through the city after him and strike; do not let your eye have pity and do not spare. Utterly slay old men, young men, maidens, little children, and women."
Numbers 31:
And the Lord said unto Moses, "Avenge the children of the Midianites.. They warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses, and they slay all the males. And they took all women as captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods. And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire. ...
Moses said, "Have you saved all the women alive? Now kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that has known a man by lying with him, but all the young girls who have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.
I'm pretty sure there's more where that came from, I'm just Googling here.
Aaron---a couple of examples spring to mind, however ambiguous. There was this thing called the "Flood", in which YHWH himself slaughtered all extant humans aside from Noah and company. Then there was that nasty plague killing all the Egyptian firstborns....
Aaron - God explicitly commands Saul to completely destroy the Amalekites ("men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys") in Samuel 15:2-3. As for examples of him actually doing the job himself, there is the small matter of the Sodomites and that whole Flood business. I'm sure someone with better scriptural knowledge could come up with other examples - these are just off the top of my head.
God reached his hand down from the sky.
He flooded the land, when he set it afire
He said, "Fear me again, know I'm your father,
Remember that no one can breathe underwater."
So bend your knees and bow your heads
Save your babies, here's your future...
Well, as I said, the challenge was to find instances where God commanded the slaughter of innocents, not where he did the job himself, which happens in the Bible on any number of occasions--the Flood ("all flesh"), the Egyptians, and so on. I'm not sure "avenging onesself on the Midianites counts, it was Moses who supplied the really gory interpretation (especially objectionable since his erstwhile wife was a non-virginal Midianite female!).
But we have a winner! Samuel definitely qualifies.
Aaron---more ambiguity, I suppose, but I was responding to this portion of your initial post:
"But I think it's always human agents who do the killing in the Bible."
Bottom line, though, is that there's plenty of Righteous Killing to go around.
"There is no God..."
Hmmm. I guess Obama knows each, all and everybody's Gods and They all agree. Why didn't he just say: "God doesn't condone taking the life of an innocent human being"? Best not to get to personal with "My God." You might piss somebody off.
I guess it is irrelevant what anybody's God does or doesn't condone, cause its gonna happen anyway. God or no God. Permissible impermissible.
I was responding to this portion of your initial post
My goof. I meant "human agents who do the commanding to kill." Of course unless you think Saul really had a hotline to God, even our best example is all shot to hell!
Oh, the lack of theological training! Please people, read some Kierkegaard or at least Jung's "Answer to Job"....
God is a Thermals fan? Awesome!
I'm sick to death of Kierkegaard.
Haha. Kierkegaard was sick to death of you before you were born!
Then again, he also spares whole cities of the guilty on pain of one righteous man.
Well, except that he doesn't even do that. Abraham, being a mensch, negotiates him down to ten righteous men. But the only man in Sodom who qualifies is the guy who offers his own daughters to an angry mob, and who chose to live in Sodom to begin with. So God bails his ass out, and destroys the Sodomites anyway.
Oh, and Joshua 6:17 (KJV, baby!):
"And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are therein, to the LORD: only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent."
Suck on that, Jericho!
"There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being."
Sounds a bit like "I can't recommend so and so too highly."
Now Anonymous has me thinking: What if we're missing an essential comma?
"There is no God, who condones taking the life of an innocent human being." [taps nose meaningfully]
There's a sense in which both parts could be considered correct. And remember, he is a godless leftist... Muslim.
I like your writing and your blog, but a quick comment on one of my pet peeves from the PC police - please don't use "schizo" in the way you did. Schizophrenia is commonly mistaken to involve symptoms of split or multiple personalities, but it doesn't actually.
Speaking as a person with a close family member who is schizophrenic, it would improve the lives of mentally ill people and their families in this country slightly if there was less misinformed slang usage contributing to a misinformed public. Thanks.
Renee - don't worry. WhoIsIOZ? doesn't recognize the validity of any diagnostic psychiatry, and we also throw around retarded, nigger, and fag. In any case, the implication wasn't that Big Daddy has multiple personalities. I leave the mysteries of the triune god to Benny Hinn. Rather, the implication was that Our Father is delusional, paranoiac, and prone to hallucinatory and non-linear bouts of thinkin'. So, s'all good.
Instead of reading Kierkegaard or Jung's shitty Answer to Job, trying reading Walter Kaufmann's The Faith of a Heretic, especially the chapter "Suffering and the Bible."
Aaron, your comments indicate the limits of "somewhat counter-intuitive impressions." (Whatever the fuck that means.) I notice that even when people cited chapter and verse where Yahweh ordered his faithful to commit massacres, you tried to wiggle out of it.
I suppose it could be argued that the people he wanted butchered were not really "innocent," because they were idol-worshippin' heathen and all. I fondly remember a Christian graduate student who tried to tell me that Yahweh ordered these slaughters in order to save the victims from a fate worse than death, namely slavery. He was unaware of other passages in the Torah where Yahweh ordered the children of Israel not to slaughter inhabitants of certain cities, so that they could be enslaved. But then, this same grad student also thought that C. S. Lewis was one of the major theologians of the 20th century.
But then, this same grad student also thought that C. S. Lewis was one of the major theologians of the 20th century.
The saddest part? For much of the Left Behind crowd, this would actually be an improvement. At least Lewis wasn't a premillenial dispensationalist. (Try typing that while drunk.)
Of course unless you think Saul really had a hotline to God, even our best example is all shot to hell!
Well, given that God doesn't exist, there aren't going to be any actual examples of him commanding the slaughter of innocents. However, you asked for examples of "passage[s] of the Hebrew Bible where God commands the slaughter of innocents", which is a rather different matter.
Ach, Ioz and Promiscuous. You uns just don't engage the really SOPHISTOCATETETEDETED theology which is out there which dominates the minds of every snake handling believer in the hinterland. God is just an "essence" you know who loves every believer, be they quiet pious New Englander Congregationalist or flayed human skin wearing priest of Smoking Mirror (I ain't gonna try to spell the Nahuatl name!) 'tis all the same, according to the intellectual theologians.
Tezcatlipōca. You're welcome, Brian. (Unless you wanted it in the original pictographic form, in which case you're out of luck.)
And no love for Cthulu, Hast*r, et al.? Have we learned nothing from C.S. Lovecraft, greatest 20th Century theologian?
Mr. Prom, up yours! (No, really).
That aside, you misunderstood the question. But who cares, really.
My somewhat counter-intuitive impression is that there is no passage of the Hebrew Bible where God commands the slaughter of innocents.
Yeah, I for one can see how that's completely open to interpretation, and in fact has no connection whatsoever to "passages of the Hebrew Bible where God commands the slaughter of innocents."
Meanwhile,
But I think it's always human agents who do the killin in the Bible.
"And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle."
--Exodus 12:29
"And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses."
--2 Kings 19:35
"So the LORD sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even to the time appointed: and there died of the people from Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men."
--2 Samuel 24:15
Sorry, but the Hebrew God was a smiter, all right.
I think we are all indebted to Brian for that outpouring of authentic frontier gibberish. The Holy Spirit must indeed have been upon you, for you to speak in tongues like that.
There aren't that many snake handling Christians around, y'know. There are a lot more vacuous, platitude-spewing Christians like Obama.
mds-
Yes, it is my fault. There was a discrepancy between the original question and my restatement of it, noted above: My goof. I meant "human agents who do the commanding to kill."
The question was meant to be very restricted: In the Bible, does Yahweh give explicit commands for other people to kill or does Yahweh generally leave that up to their imaginations/ biblical exegesis stylins? Only one counter-example has been found so far though I'm sure there are others.
I am not a Yahwist. I was curious about the rhetoric. In any case the divine capacity for mass killin as portrayed in the Bible is obviously not in dispute.
God is about blood sacrifice and burnt offerings. In the face of some odd twist of fate in my youth, I observed that either there was no god, god had a plan for us or god was a twisted, evil sonofabitch. I lean toward choice 1 but at times, choice 3 seems really, really likely. Two words: pediatric oncology.
Actually, Aaron, numerous counter-examples have been given of cases where Yahweh gives the order to kill, and his human agents carry it out. However, this is not 'their biblical exegesis stylins' because in the Biblical period people didn't yet have the Bible. As for their imaginations, of course it's all in their imaginations, but that's how they conceived their god.
One of my favorites, incidentally, is the one where Saul has been ordered (through the prophet Samuel) to kill an entire population, including their livestock. The Amalekhites, maybe? I'm too lazy to look it up just now.
Anyway, Saul saves some of the best, unblemished cattle for sacrifice to Yahweh, and also saves the King of the Amalekhites or whoever. Yahweh sees red, and sends Samuel to fix things. Saul stutters that he only wanted to sacrifice these lovely cattle to the Lord. Samuel yells, "Hear the word of Yahweh! 'I desire obedience, and not sacrifice!'" Then he kills the Amalekhite king on the altar of Yahweh (human sacrifice occurs at numerous points in the Tanakh), and tells Saul that Yahweh has withdrawn his favor from him, and he won't get another chance, because Yahweh is not a man who might change his mind. (Which is funny too, because Yahweh has already changed his mind by de-friending Saul.)
We've made progress, of course. Nowadays we have atheists (like Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens etc.) who think that No-god has a deep insatiable thirst for human blood. Especially Saracen blood.
Well, dingleberry, one example has been given of God giving an explicit command for others to engage in mass murder, which was my actual question. I find that mildly interesting (in contrast to arguing with you about whether counterexamples have been given to an assertion I obviously did not mean to make and immediately clarified).
Meanwhile, in the interests of furthering your education! "The Bible" was not copyrighted and printed in XXX B.C., but rather like most pseudonomous works accreted over many centuries, reaching its current form in about 70 A.D. The vowels weren't added until 900, changing the meaning of a many passages almost completely. Ergo, as a composite document it is full of exegetical commentary from one passage to another.
Toodles!
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