david@ssc-vax.UUCP (01/12/84)
> Tim Maroney's third response: > You are correct, Dave: my quote IS out of context. Here is a > representative quote from Numbers 25: [quote here - Dave] > (Note in this last > sentence that Israel is commanded to perform human sacrifice to appease > their wrathful deity.) There is a difference between useless sacrifice and just punishment. > It doesn't seem to me that the offense of apostacy is deserving of the death > penalty. The people freely went over to the rites of the Moabites. This is > hardly a capital offense. Or do you really think that we should pass a law > imposing the death penalty against those who leave their religion, or those > who preach any religion other than Christianity or Judaism? Tim seems determined to convince us that the Midianites were not as bad as they seemed. I have already pointed out what they were: they sacrificed the children to their god; they seduced Israel to sin against their God; they attempted to weaken and thereby destroy Israel by perverse means. This is a summary, but I explained these in my earlier article. It is not as if the Israelites innocently left to join in the festivities; they were tricked and decieved into committing evil (in a sense, they were being infected by a disease). >Nor is fornication to be considered a crime deserving of execution. This may be argued (but not by me, and not here). But you have to examine the results of this fornication. Balak was trying to destroy Israel; again, refer to original article. Also, refer to the last verse of Numbers 25. > Also, it has not escaped my attention that in Gen. 38:15-19, Judah practices > solicitation of a prostitute quite openly and without the slightest qualm. > His later embarrassment is only over having been tricked by a whore, not in > having used one. In Gen. 49:8-12, Israel himself deems Judah a praiseworthy > man. Is this yet another example of moral monopoly, that is, "It's OK if we > do it, but no one else can"? Tamar pretended to be one of the "kedeshot" (religious prostitutes) and tricked Judah into believing she was a whore. This demonstrates the depth of immorality the Chosen People had fallen to. Earlier, we find that he marries a pagan Canaanite, starting a chain of sinful events. His two sons, Er and Onan, died without leaving children. "The contrast between Joseph and his elder brother would be more sharp when Joseph revealed his behaviour in the hour of temptation. Judah needed to become a new man to be pleasing in the Lord's sight" (Dr. Kyle Yates) > The early Christians were accused of the selfsame offense by their enemies, > as were the Jews in the Middle Ages and in the 1930's. Their enemies were > lying. Similarly, when the enemies of the Midianites said this, they were > almost certainly lying. Huh? How so? I am no logician, but I believe that there is a minor flaw in your reasoning here.... > If you are going to treat blatant propaganda as > fact, we aren't going to get anywhere. The same holds true in reverse. I thought that, for the sake of argument, we had accepted that a) God exists and b) the OT is an accurate transcription. I may as well quit right here if you really believe this; it can be used against any scriptural reference I make, and there is no defense to it. > However, even if these tales were > true (which I do not think is the case, but which I will concede for the > sake of argument), the Midianites could not have killed as many Midianite > children as the armies of Israel did in Num. 31. "For the crime of killing > your babies, we will kill your babies"? Absurd. You're the one defending > slaughter, not me. We don't know how many children they sacrificed. Anyway, this seems like a good time to bring up Tim's refusal to reckon with the prerogative of a righteous Sovereign to judge sin (ref Ex. 20:5). And Tim makes it appear that the Israelites a) only killed babies (false) and b) only because the Midianites killed babies (false). As I explained, this was the lesser of two evils. There was a recent movie that depicted a woman in WWII forced to choose between saving only one of her two children. With Tim's view, the woman can be considered "evil" because she is "ordering the slaughter" of her own baby. This analogy is not perfect, but it represents the kind of decision God had to make. Granted, there is the problem of "omnipotence" here, but that is a separate argument. > Your reasoning about the destruction of the Midianites for the salvation of > Israel is worthy of a true Stalinist or Nazi. This is a stale argument, and used by many of the other responses to my earlier article ("Dave would make a good Nazi"). You are equating the evil Midianites to the suffering Jews, and the Israelites to the Nazis. This argument has a lot of emotional appeal, but this analogy isn't good enough to be used as a model comparing Hitler and God, or me to a Nazi. > The principle of the purge is > the same in all three cases -- slay an unliked people so that a liked people > can prosper. I don't buy it from them, and I'm not buying it from you. Unliked? Only in the sense that a murderer is "unliked". > So what do we have by our examination of Num. 25? All we find is that the > worshippers of another religion were popular, so Yahweh had them all killed. That is not all I have found about the Midianites (weren't we here before?) Tim, your insistence of the innocence of the Midianites is getting a little old. > A few chapters later, with Israel firmly planted in Heshbon, many miles from > Midian, and having had no further dealings with the Midianites, Yahweh > decided that killing a few of them hadn't been enough, and ordered Israel to > march over 100 miles south and wipe them out to the last person. I think you have your history mistaken; in 25, it is the Israelite offenders who were killed. The Midianites were killed in 31. > Their only > crime was that they worshipped a different religion; this was apparently > considered enough to justify genocide. Not again! > One last point in favor of the Midianites. Moses' wife Zipporah was a > Midianite, and there is no suggestion that she is "vile" by the standards of > Yahweh, although the prejudices of some Israelites turn them against Moses > for marrying her. Furthermore, Zipporah's father Jethro, also a Midianite, > gives Moses good advice in Ex. 18:13-27, and is generally painted in a > positive fashion by the book's author. Clearly the people of Midian were > not beyond hope of redemption if these two individuals came from their > number! By the way, I hope Jethro got out of Midian in time, since it says > that all the males were put to death. Moses has been criticized for this act, but Jethro conditioned his advice with "and God commanded thee so"; we may assume that Moses inquired of the Lord here. At any rate, we find just earlier the passage where Jethro was "converted", shall we say. I don't think this argument can be used to justify the Midianites. I might say it is like saying Jethro is like a Nazi soldier who defects. This hardly puts the Nazis in a good light. > All this is to some extent beside the point, which is that no possible crime > justifies actions such as depicted in Num. 25 and 31. Brutal slaughter of > civilians is completely unacceptable to any reasonable moral standard. > Yahweh's ordering it puts him on a par with Hitler, Stalin, Manson, and > Calley. This is a leader that should not be followed under any > circumstances; he has proven himself unfit to hold power by his brutal > abuses. "Brutal slaughter", "Hitler, Stalin, Manson, and Calley", and "brutal abuses" are, again, very emotional appeals, but let me get to the root of Tim's argument: "No crime justifies death". I would conclude that you believe the death penalty should never be used. This has been a hotly debated issue for some time (and maybe doesn't belong in net.religion). I would rather turn this argument over to the lawyers and statisticians who know more about crime rates than I. But I do feel that, for certain crimes, a man should forfeit his life. > Finding out how small was the "crime" of the Midianites only makes > this fact all the plainer. Here we go again with the "innocent" Midianites.... > Thank you, Dave, for [blah, blah, blah - Dave]... Right. -- David Norris -- uw-beaver!ssc-vax!david
spear@ihuxm.UUCP (Steven Spearman) (01/13/84)
Gee, Dave, after reading your defense of the slaughter of an entire people for the sins of a portion thereof, I must agree that you ARE a Nazi.
dap@ihopa.UUCP (afsd) (01/14/84)
Dave, I am interested to hear your explanation of the reasoning behind the rape of the Midianite women and the killing of the children. How is this plainly vengeful slaughter analoguous to a woman who sacrifices one son so that the other may live? Just exactly how does the mass rape contribute to the good of Israel? Another point that you seem to keep making which I can't agree with is that Hell is not like a concentration camp since people "volunteer" for it. Hey, I don't necessarily believe in the Christian God, but I most DEFINITELY am not volunteering for eternal torment. Even if there is such a God, at worst I am making a mistake. If a man were given a choice of two doors, one of which holds certain death, would you claim that he "volunteered" for that death if he opens the wrong one? Would you hold the entity who forced him to make that decision blameless since, in the end, the man had "made his own decision"? The worst the man did was to make a mistake. If the man was given a book which had been written thousands of years ago and had been interpreted in a thousand contradictory ways through the years by people who often gave the appearance of trying to ignore logic in order to give their interpretation validity, would you blame the man if he ignored what it said about the doors? Especially if much of the book was made up of fanciful miracles? If there were other larger groups which didn't hold that the book was true? If the man saw no evidence for the validity of the book and in fact saw what he interpreted to be facts in contradiction to the book? Would you claim that he "volunteered" for his fate if he chose what all his senses told him was the right door? Would you then claim that he had made an "immoral" choice when he opened the wrong door? Dave, if I'm wrong about God, I made a mistake. That's all. I don't feel that I am (and I feel that there are too many contradictions in the Christian view of God to allow his existence), but if I am, why would such a God choose to put me in eternal torment for this mistake? This is very convincing evidence (to me) that such a Christian God doesn't exist. But supposing that God for some reason DID want to segregate undesirables like myself. Why is Hell necessary? Why couldn't he just set me down on some tropical isle with plentiful food and water? Let me anticipate your answers. You might say to seperate out my influence on the residents of heaven. Well, at that point I don't see how I could be especially troublesome against an almighty god and anyway, that end would be achieved when I am safely tucked away on the isle so I don't think that would be your reason. You might say to punish me. For what purpose? Revenge? Almighty God takes revenge on Darrell Plank! Doesn't seem very sensible, besides, why would a loving father take revenge on his errant son? He might try to correct him but if he had an ounce of love in him, he wouldn't in any sense call it revenge. Maybe you will say to deter others. This argument doesn't make much sense either. First of all, I don't BELIEVE in hell so how can it be a deterrent? This seems to be the case for most people. I can't believe that anybody who is actually sure of hell would transgress very far. People seem to be put off by much more tangible things like stocks and lashes than hell. Besides, if he really wants to DETER people from sinning he can use a positive inducement instead of a negative (a few miracles would serve nicely) and keep a lot more people out of hell. The stock answer here is "But God doesn't want to FORCE people to love him". If this is your answer, then you have just supplied another argument why God wouldn't use hell as a deterrent. I can't think of any other reason for hell unless such a God enjoyed watching people in agony but this is not in accordance with the idea of a loving God. So what's the sense behind all the agony in hell? It sounds more like fallible human beings describing the things which they would like to see done to those who have the audacity to disagree with them. Darrell Plank BTL-IH ihnp4!ihopa!dap
djhawley@watrose.UUCP (David John Hawley) (01/15/84)
Dave didn't say that he would have slaughtered the Midianites, or even that humans have the right to make such a decision. He is merely defending God's right to do so. That is an entirely different matter. David