this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Have you ever heard of a lil' book called The Old Testament?
That's a collection of books. And where does God kill people unjustly?
Well, there's the Flood and the Ten Plagues (particularly that tenth one) for starters.
Then there's the various war crimes committed by the Israelites at Jehovah's explicit instructions (e.g. the genocide of the Midianites in Numbers 31).
Not disagreeing with anything you said, I just find it mildly amusing when people call things war crimes when they took place before the Geneva convention. There was no international agreement on what a war crime is at that time, so technically nothing was a war crime back then. They were free to commit all the genocide they wanted.
The flood spared the innocents (Noah's family) and the plagues were done because Pharaoh wouldn't free the slaves, the blood was on Pharaoh's hands.
God just said to avenge Israel. Moses carried out the rest of the orders.
There is no reason to believe that Noah's family were the only innocents in the Flood story. I do not know how one can pin the supposed hedonism of the world on all those young children who would have drowned.
There is also no way to excuse killing the children of thousands of people because of the actions of one man. Blaming that one man for "forcing" supposedly omnipotent being to act in that way is also unjustifiable.
And there is no way to shift blame for genocide by simply saying, "the underlings took it too far." This excuse rings especially hollow when Jehovah asks for a cut of the spoils afterward (Numbers 31:25-31).
In the Sodom and Gomorrah story and the Jericho story, innocent people were saved. How would the great flood be any different? It's illustrative of the extent of the hedonism.
You can't even keep your own stories straight. The Great Flood myth in the Bible is very explicit that all life on earth will be destroyed, except that aboard Noah's Ark. Genesis 7:23 (NIV):
"Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark."
It wasn't a global flood. It was hyperbole. 2 Peter 2:5 says it just covered the world of the ungodly. "World" is generally used locally in the Bible as well as "the earth" meaning a large area of visible land.
We can see that in Genesis 8:9
"But the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him."
When verse 5 said:
"And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen."
I do not care how local you think the myth of Noah's Flood was supposed to be, as that fact is immaterial to the point you continue to miss. That flood still would have killed innocent people, and the story frames this as a morally just action. No amount of quibbling over linguistics will change that.
The amount of excuses needed to ignore the plain implications of a passage is really telling. One could take the Old Testament as it appears: a series of books written and edited (and redacted, and co-opted, and edited again) as the religious and cultural canon in the Iron Age for an otherwise obscure Levantine tribe, with morals from a different time and place unsuited to our modern sensibilities. There are many such books and traditions from all over the world that contain tales just as horrifying as any in the Old Testament, so it would not be without company.
But the apologist wants us to believe that their ancient stories are actually true, and so they have to invent all these insane reasons why clearly immoral actions by their book's main character are totally justified. This is the sort of position that can only come about when someone decides what they believe first and then looks for rationale afterwards.
It didn't kill innocent people, though.
You have yet to satisfactorily establish that. The most you've mustered is claiming that Jehovah would have known his victims were guilty and so was was justified in killing them. This excuse only works if one starts from a position of, "Jehovah is good", and then find justification for his actions afterwards. In every other instance we would judge people by their actions, yet you want to make a special exception for your god where we reverse the calculus and judge his actions by his person instead.
I reject this backwards logic, and still conclude that the god of the Old Testament is a vindictive, bloodthirsty character, much more in line with his Iron Age contemporaries than with any modern conception of a god. This is one of the fundamental flaws of Christianity: that its god cannot be separated from its narrow, barbaric past, and thus cannot be easily squared with what is excepted of a universal deity.
I have a question, suppose that a different god or being did all the things said in the bible attributed to god. Are these deaths and atrocities still moral? Are they good because god did them? Or are they inherent good things to do? What if you were the one who started the flood or unleashed the plagues or anything else like that? Is the act still moral? Is the death of thousands if not moral at that point?
No, because God created man so He has authority to destroy man.
If you create someone, a living thinking person,do you have authority to destroy them? I'd say you do not. Do your parents have the right to destroy you? No, they do not. So why does god have this privilege?
Nice little qualifier you added there. Cause it's generally accepted that the God of Abraham ordained killing at least two million people prior to the birth of Jesus Christ. I get the sense that you're perspective is that if God does it then it must be just and you want to prove anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. If that's the case, you're in the wrong place my friend.
The flood sounds quite like collective punishment.
The innocents were saved from it
Would the foetuses of any of the damned by considered guilty? I presume there must have been a few pregnant women murdered by that malevolent deity in that fairy story of your ilk (if you're not on the wind-up, might I add).
If anyone innocent was killed, they would have went to paradise anyway
So god could kill as many innocents unjustly as he wants, as long as he sends them to paradise after?
If so, it seems, any atrocity god commits could be justified.
Eternity in paradise > a temporary life
So yes as long as god sends people to the good place he can be as horrible as he wants to them before they die. Is there anything god could do that you would consider evil or unjust even if the people affected go to paradise at some point after? Or is not sending innocent bystanders he hurts to paradise the only thing god could do you would consider evil?
Paradise forever and also being healed still outweighs the worst torment that satan can do to you on earth.
They deserved it. Everyone but Noah, which is why he was saved
They did not deserve it, and the Egypt thing is a bald faced lie. They were never enslaved there.
If they were never enslaved there, then wouldn't that mean the plagues never happened? What's your point?
Correct. It's all bullshit fairy tales.
The point is NONE of it happened. Any more than any of the "miracles" and such Christianity plagiarized from predecessor religions happened.
Source?
The entirety of the Canaanite genocide. And since Hebrews were Canaanites themselves, that just makes them mass murderers who steal land through violence.
Oh wait ..