Evolution and Creationism

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 2:29 pm

The Bible does say that massacring cities is a good thing and it also says to stone your children if they disobey you. That's a great final authority.

Post by **Captain Seafort** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 2:33 pm

Cpl Kendall wrote:The Bible does say that massacring cities is a good thing and it also says to stone your children if they disobey you. That's a great final authority.

Jerico was part of the point I was making.

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 2:37 pm

Captain Seafort wrote:
Jerico was part of the point I was making.

Excatly, in fact there's several points in the bible where "god" lends his aid to the Israelites so they can destroy a tribe and take their land. The message is always the same: please me and you will succeed, piss me off and you will be punished. And we see this when they later forsake him and are forced to wander in the desert. Great guy that lord.

Post by **Mikey** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:59 pm

As a modern Jew, I am a devotee of the Old Testament (strictly.) And you are correct - the Bible does mention on a number of occasions G-d helping the Israelites to make war and/or conquest. Many people believe that one of the Ten Commandments is, "Thou shall not kill." This is incorrect - a misinterpretation possibly promulgated by St. Jerome. A better form is, "Thou shall not murder" - thus, the warfare conducted in the Bible is NOT a contradiction in morality.

Secondly, and more objectively, you are discussing the semi-mythological history of a people who co-existed with the Sumerians, the Mesopotamians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Akkadians, the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Egyptians (and the Hyskos, who CRUSHED ancient Egypt,) not to mention the relatively small tribal nations such as the Philistines et. al. Sure, the ancient Israelites practiced a "monolatry" as opposed to a pantheistic paganism - they still had to live in a world in which conquest was the primary means of promoting a national existence.

G-d IS great, almighty, omniscient, and merciful to those who accept his mitzvot and especially to those who treat properly with their fellow-man... but nobody ever said he had to be nice, or was even definable by such human standards.

Post by **Mikey** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 8:02 pm

The Bible does say that massacring cities is a good thing...[/i]

BTW - no, it doesn't. The Bible may have indicated that conquering a city was an unfortunate necessity, but never describes massacre as a "good" thing.

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 8:34 pm

Mikey wrote:
BTW - no, it doesn't. The Bible may have indicated that conquering a city was an unfortunate necessity, but never describes massacre as a "good" thing.

The end result was good for the Israelites wasn't it? They gained a city and more territory. How else are we supposed to see it but as a win-win for them and a plus in general. I don't recall any thing in the passages about the fall of Jericho waxing poetic about how unfortunate it was.

Post by **Mikey** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 9:31 pm

Of course the end result was positive from the point of view of the authors - otherwise there would have been no motivation to act against Jericho. That's the point. Jericho was conquered as a means. No delight was taken by the Israelites in warfare for its own sake. Are you suggesting that the Hebrews conducted war merely for the pleasure of killing?

Post by **Captain Seafort** » Wed Sep 05, 2007 9:39 pm

Jerico wasn't war, it was a slaughter - with the exception Rahab and her family the entire population - men, women and children all, were killed, and the city was destroyed.

Varthikes · Post by **Varthikes** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 8:28 am

You need to look at what those people of Jericho and of Ca'naan were involved in regarding what they worshipped and how they worshipped--sacrificing their children to lifeless statues among other things.

As for the stoning... Consequences of deliberately choosing not to follow instructions. Disobediance is a very serious thing.

Post by **Captain Seafort** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 8:46 am

Varthikes wrote:You need to look at what those people of Jericho and of Ca'naan were involved in regarding what they worshipped and how they worshipped--sacrificing their children to lifeless statues among other things.

And for this they deserved to be murdered to the last man woman and child?

As for the stoning... Consequences of deliberately choosing not to follow instructions. Disobediance is a very serious thing.

Capital punishment for childish disobedience? This doesn't strike you as a tad excessive?

Post by **Mikey** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 2:37 pm

Of course it's excessive by our standards - as was the siege of Jericho, as were many other things mentioned in the Bible. I will repeat - If you are going to read the Bible as history, you must understand the world in which it was set. Corporal punishment, dismemberment, disfiguration, banishment (with the intention of starvation/deprivation), and other such things were common punishments for even minor transgressions in those times - the Bible is simply the only place where those punishments are codified and recorded in such detail. Jericho was the same way - just because the Akkadians, for example, didn't leave as detailed a record, warfare was simply conducted that way at the time.

This is why fundamentalism is substantively flawed, especially with a document as antique as the Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses.) Nobody, ESPECIALLY G-d, expects us to stone our children for disobedience, or to keep slaves, or to leave the corners of our frields unreaped - I don't have a field!

Besides, at least the battle of Jericho was conducted as part of an undisguised campaign to take (or recover, depending on your point of view) a piece of territoy. For every Christian who mentions this as an example of immoral conduct and slaughter for its own sake, may I mention the Crusades, perhaps? Or the pogroms? Or the Spanish Inquisition? Or the Dominicans, and Spangler's Malleus Maleficarum? Or the Ku Klux Klan?...

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 6:55 pm

Varthikes wrote:
As for the stoning... Consequences of deliberately choosing not to follow instructions. Disobediance is a very serious thing.

No it's not, disobeying ones parent's is a normal part of a childs progression into adulthood and requires careful handling not fucking stoning. It's this particular verse that is used to justify all kinds of screwed up physical punishment by parents and results in loads of screwed up kids. If your child disobeys you you put them in a corner and take away their time, you don't beat them to death with a blunt object or the myriad of other inventive punishments that I've seen and heard of being used by fucked up parents.

Post by **Mikey** » Thu Sep 06, 2007 7:58 pm

Of course we're not going to stone a kid to death for disobeying us. I have a three-year-old daughter; I would have killed her at least 13,000 times by now! I hope I'm being paranoid, but I fear that I'm not, when I ask the following question: Why do Christians find it so easy to take disputable, contradictory, or illogical items from the New Testament and pass them off as "allegory" or morality tales, but so difficult to do so with items from the Old Testament? The Old Testament, remember, is the one dictated by the Almighty - not authored by men, as the New Testament was. Firstly, it is natural and normal to NOT be able to fathom the word of G-d, or at least not to be able to take it all literally. Secondly, if you couldn't guess by the names, the Old Testament is vastly OLDER than the New Testament - we live in a far different context than the world of the Old Testament, and I repeat, it is NOT meant to be and CANNOT be interpreted on the basis of fundamentalism!

Varthikes · Post by **Varthikes** » Fri Sep 07, 2007 7:20 am

Captain Seafort wrote:
Varthikes wrote:You need to look at what those people of Jericho and of Ca'naan were involved in regarding what they worshipped and how they worshipped--sacrificing their children to lifeless statues among other things.
And for this they deserved to be murdered to the last man woman and child?

They were in defiance of God. They had the opportunity to turn around as did Rahab and the Gibeonites, who both demonstrated faith in Him.

As for the stoning... Consequences of deliberately choosing not to follow instructions. Disobediance is a very serious thing.

Capital punishment for childish disobedience? This doesn't strike you as a tad excessive?

It wasn't mere childish disobediance. It was outright rebellion and greed and it affected the entire nation of Israel.

Post by **Captain Seafort** » Fri Sep 07, 2007 9:58 am

Varthikes wrote:
Captain Seafort wrote:And for this they deserved to be murdered to the last man woman and child?
They were in defiance of God. They had the opportunity to turn around as did Rahab and the Gibeonites, who both demonstrated faith in Him.

So, mass murder is an acceptable punishment for defending your city against aggressors is it? You could use a similar argument to say that every non-Catholic on the planet (all 5 billion of them) should be executed if they don't convert.

As for the stoning... Consequences of deliberately choosing not to follow instructions. Disobediance is a very serious thing.

Capital punishment for childish disobedience? This doesn't strike you as a tad excessive?
It wasn't mere childish disobediance. It was outright rebellion and greed and it affected the entire nation of Israel.

What rebellion? I was reffering to the Cpl's point about the Bible stating that children should be stoned if they disobeyed their parents.

Evolution and Creationism

How do you believe the universe and life was formed? Creationism or the scientific explanations (including the Big Bang, abiogenesis and evolution)?