Bible - cruelty and violence

[Compassionist]

Please read this list of cruelty in the Bible. Is the Bible true? If it is true then why is God so cruel and violent? Doesn't God's cruelty make God evil and unworthy of praise and worship?

[Compassionist]

I understand what you are saying. However, the Bible differs from your opinion about the Bible. "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness," - 2 Timothy 3:16, The Bible (NIV). Unlike you, Christians take the Bible to be God's Word.

Of course, that's because they read it out of context. Now, if you include 2 Timothy 3:15 in there, and look at the time period in which it was written, the only scripture people would have 'known as a child' would have been the Jewish scriptures, since the "New Testament would not be compiled at that time.

I agree with you. Why don't all Christians agree with you?

[Autodidact]

How can you justify all the slaughtering in the Bible e.g. Amalekites, Canaanites, Medianites, etc? Not to mention killing off all living things except the alleged occupants of Noah's ark. How is such atrocious commands leading to a 'higher standard of behaviour'? Buddha taught far better than the Bible.

I don't have to justify those things, because they never happened.

(a) It makes no sense to study the Bible as literal history, because it isn't; and that is because (b) the Bible isn't the Word of God, but the words of men talking ABOUT God; in fact, (c) the Bible isn't even one document, but a collection of ancient documents that are redacted from oral traditions that predate it by many centuries, which have many different backgrounds and agendas; therefore, (d) it makes no sense to study the Bible as either the record of actual historical events, or as the direct teachings from God about what is wrong or right.

The Bible -- and by that I mean the Hebrew Bible, which is apparently what is being discussed here -- is the LITERATURE of the Jewish people. Not our religious beliefs, not our history, not our ethics. LITERATURE, which includes legend, fable, teaching tale, hero story, ecstatic vision, political polemic, love song, ethical discussion, metaphysical speculation, folklore, and perhaps some garbled seventh-hand history. It is LITERATURE, and it is unwise to make more of it than that. That some do is not the fault of the text, nor of the people who wrote it.

It has always puzzled me that those who do NOT believe that the Bible is The Inerrant Word of God Himself will use arguments against it which assume that it IS. Actual Bible scholars, and liberal theists alike, consider the Bible in the ways that I have described above. We don't worry about the massacre of all the Midianite males, for instance, because that massacre pretty clearly never took place. Read the passages about it; pages are spent establishing the PRIESTLY military leadership of those massacres, and more pages spent on establishing that the PRIESTS got the bulk of the spoils; and only a couple of lines on the battle itself. It's not rocket science to conclude that this was a literary creation written LONG after the fact, as in CENTURIES, which had no other purpose than to promote the authority of the PRIESTLY establishment in the Kingdom period.

Besides, a few decades later, in Judges, the Midianites seem to be around in sufficient numbers to have Israel "in their hands" for seven years. Taking those passages seriously as history is equivalent to future historians making hard-and-fast conclusions about that history of the Old West from Clint Eastwood and John Wayne films.

Certainly none of it ever happened. In fact, very little contained in the Bible did actually happen.

However, the fictional character described in the Bible is still evil.

[Autodidact]

How can you justify all the slaughtering in the Bible e.g. Amalekites, Canaanites, Medianites, etc? Not to mention killing off all living things except the alleged occupants of Noah's ark. How is such atrocious commands leading to a 'higher standard of behaviour'? Buddha taught far better than the Bible.

Easily! The Amalekites, Canaanites and much of the pre-flood world was corrupted with angelic half-breeds. Only Yah could see the future consequences of not destroying them. How would you like to live in a world populated by supermen battling each other for domination with the average humans caught in the crossfire while being forced to worship them as gods? That was the reason for the genocide. It was mercy for future generations. I doubt there would be life on this planet if the flood had not wiped out that evil then.

Are you serious?!

Yes, some of the ancient law was harsh but necessary for those times IMO. Take the slavery laws presented, the Isrealite slaves were far better treated then other neighboring countries. They had rights granted to them as slaves by the law. It was for their protection.

It's not so much the Israelite slaves and the slaves the Israelites captured. For example, adult circumcision, that's a bit rough.

Could you please present your objective historical evidence that the cultures around the Hebrews treated their slaves worse than the Hebrews?

[Autodidact]

Please read this list of cruelty in the Bible. Is the Bible true? If it is true then why is God so cruel and violent? Doesn't God's cruelty make God evil and unworthy of praise and worship?

I don't recall an instance in the Bible of God acting against good people to warrant the claim God is evil.

A good person can be quite violent and quite good if there are a lot of bad people around. John McClane in Die Hard is a good example of this. My point being that we need to analyse each action in that list to determine if God is evil or not in taking those actions.

so for you, killing babies, toddlers and children is moral?

[cnorman18]

Of course, this entire debate is predicated on the assumption that the Bible is something more than the collected ancient literature of the Jewish people. I didn't vote, because I don't agree that the Bible proves anything about "God's cruelty," never mind about whether that claim proves anything about God being "evil."

That some claim that this collection of ancient writings is authoritative -- make that "AUTHORITATIVE" -- on the nature of God, is the "Word of God," matters of morality in the present day, and suchlike, is hardly the fault of the book itself. We Jews don't, by and large, hold such views -- and we WROTE this stuff.

From my own rabbi: "If you see something in the Torah that you know to be wrong, there are two possibilities: Either you do not understand the Torah properly -- or the Torah is wrong." Notice that the third, or fundamentalist, alternative is missing; that of overruling one's own rational thought and moral sense in favor of book-worshipping dogmatism.

I like what you said. First, we have to decide whether the Bible is TRUE. IF it is TRUE then I find such a God to be EVIL. IF it is FALSE then what it says is irrelevant.

So when you guys read Harry Potter you didn't work out Voldemort was evil? Within that work he was evil. Within the work of the bible you can decide as well.

Let's see CNorman turn up at the temple with the pages he doesn't agree with torn out and see if the torah is wrong or he doesn't understand properly.

How many pages has your rabbi torn out with that advice? And doesn't it show the advice to be hollow if the only possible answer is that you don't understand it.

Who said anyone has to tear out pages? It's ancient LITERATURE. We can certainly continue to study it without agreeing with it, or with the things our distant ancestors thought. I've also written elsewhere about how -- shall we say unwise -- it is to assume that one can learn the teachings of the Jewish religion by reading the Hebrew Bible unassisted. In Jewish understanding, those ancient documents are unintelligible without the assistance of the tradition -- that is, the consensus (ever changing, even in the present day) of the best and wisest of our people about what the Bible says and means, and what it DOESN'T say or mean -- and much more.

Evil? I suspect that if we looked at a few carefully cherry picked episodes from your own life, we'd decide that YOU are evil. That's certainly true of me. Even as a literary character, God is a good deal more complicated than your average Warner Brothers cartoon -- and even Wile E. Coyote was neither purely good nor purely evil.

It's alway struck me as strange how some atheists, very much like many fundamentalists, insist on (1) reading the Bible literally, and (2) oversimplifying things to make them nice and neat and easy. Real life isn't like that -- and neither is non-fundamentalist, non-literalist religion.

[cnorman18]

How can you justify all the slaughtering in the Bible e.g. Amalekites, Canaanites, Medianites, etc? Not to mention killing off all living things except the alleged occupants of Noah's ark. How is such atrocious commands leading to a 'higher standard of behaviour'? Buddha taught far better than the Bible.

I don't have to justify those things, because they never happened.

(a) It makes no sense to study the Bible as literal history, because it isn't; and that is because (b) the Bible isn't the Word of God, but the words of men talking ABOUT God; in fact, (c) the Bible isn't even one document, but a collection of ancient documents that are redacted from oral traditions that predate it by many centuries, which have many different backgrounds and agendas; therefore, (d) it makes no sense to study the Bible as either the record of actual historical events, or as the direct teachings from God about what is wrong or right.

The Bible -- and by that I mean the Hebrew Bible, which is apparently what is being discussed here -- is the LITERATURE of the Jewish people. Not our religious beliefs, not our history, not our ethics. LITERATURE, which includes legend, fable, teaching tale, hero story, ecstatic vision, political polemic, love song, ethical discussion, metaphysical speculation, folklore, and perhaps some garbled seventh-hand history. It is LITERATURE, and it is unwise to make more of it than that. That some do is not the fault of the text, nor of the people who wrote it.

It has always puzzled me that those who do NOT believe that the Bible is The Inerrant Word of God Himself will use arguments against it which assume that it IS. Actual Bible scholars, and liberal theists alike, consider the Bible in the ways that I have described above. We don't worry about the massacre of all the Midianite males, for instance, because that massacre pretty clearly never took place. Read the passages about it; pages are spent establishing the PRIESTLY military leadership of those massacres, and more pages spent on establishing that the PRIESTS got the bulk of the spoils; and only a couple of lines on the battle itself. It's not rocket science to conclude that this was a literary creation written LONG after the fact, as in CENTURIES, which had no other purpose than to promote the authority of the PRIESTLY establishment in the Kingdom period.

Besides, a few decades later, in Judges, the Midianites seem to be around in sufficient numbers to have Israel "in their hands" for seven years. Taking those passages seriously as history is equivalent to future historians making hard-and-fast conclusions about that history of the Old West from Clint Eastwood and John Wayne films.

I understand what you are saying. However, the Bible differs from your opinion about the Bible. "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness," - 2 Timothy 3:16, The Bible (NIV). Unlike you, Christians take the Bible to be God's Word.

Uh, that would be YOUR Bible, dude, not mine. There's no book called "2 Timothy" in the Hebrew Bible.

It's perfectly OK with me for you to believe whatever you like; I have great respect for the Christian religion, and I do not say that it is wrong, because I don't know that; but it is not MY religion. I'd appreciate the same courtesy extended to me.

[Goat]

I understand what you are saying. However, the Bible differs from your opinion about the Bible. "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness," - 2 Timothy 3:16, The Bible (NIV). Unlike you, Christians take the Bible to be God's Word.

Of course, that's because they read it out of context. Now, if you include 2 Timothy 3:15 in there, and look at the time period in which it was written, the only scripture people would have 'known as a child' would have been the Jewish scriptures, since the "New Testament would not be compiled at that time.

I agree with you. Why don't all Christians agree with you?

I find that the vast number of people get all their theology from the pulpit, and it appears to me that one of the big differences between the Jewish tradition where I grew up, and the Christian tradition is that Judaism encourages examining everything and asking questions. Christianity , at least the variety in the United States, discourages questions and independent thought (about religion at least).

That causes them to end up with a 'theology of sound bites', where large swaths of their theology is supported by out of context one liners. Original context in what was written, and the cultural context of when the book was written is not considered.

[Compassionist]

Evil? I suspect that if we looked at a few carefully cherry picked episodes from your own life, we'd decide that YOU are evil. That's certainly true of me. Even as a literary character, God is a good deal more complicated than your average Warner Brothers cartoon -- and even Wile E. Coyote was neither purely good nor purely evil.

It's alway struck me as strange how some atheists, very much like many fundamentalists, insist on (1) reading the Bible literally, and (2) oversimplifying things to make them nice and neat and easy. Real life isn't like that -- and neither is non-fundamentalist, non-literalist religion.

Neither you, nor I have committed genocides of billions and caused suffering to billions e.g. making childbirth painful. I am puzzled by something. Without Genesis 3, there is no need for Jesus getting crucified and resurrected. The Fall of Adam and Eve and salvation through Jesus is the foundation of Christianity. How can Genesis 3 be read metaphorically given that it is an alleged account of the incidents which led to all the suffering and death on Earth? I am not oversimplifying the Bible. I am quoting what it says. I didn't say that the Bible is true. I am convinced that much of the Bible is fiction and the Biblical God is imaginery and evil. Just as Voldemort in 'Harry Potter' is imaginery and evil.

[Compassionist]

Uh, that would be YOUR Bible, dude, not mine. There's no book called "2 Timothy" in the Hebrew Bible.

It's perfectly OK with me for you to believe whatever you like; I have great respect for the Christian religion, and I do not say that it is wrong, because I don't know that; but it is not MY religion. I'd appreciate the same courtesy extended to me.

I have been talking about the Christian Bible, not the Jewish Bible. I am perfectly ok with anyone believing anything. I don't respect evil and imaginery deities of any religion. I respect everyone's human rights, one of which is the freedom to have any or no religion. I have been courteous to you and everyone else whether or not we agree about anything.

[Compassionist]

I find that the vast number of people get all their theology from the pulpit, and it appears to me that one of the big differences between the Jewish tradition where I grew up, and the Christian tradition is that Judaism encourages examining everything and asking questions. Christianity , at least the variety in the United States, discourages questions and independent thought (about religion at least).

That causes them to end up with a 'theology of sound bites', where large swaths of their theology is supported by out of context one liners. Original context in what was written, and the cultural context of when the book was written is not considered.

I agree with you. Also, most Christians seem to have never read the whole Bible. They seem to just read cherry picked sections which suit them.