JehovahsWitness wrote:
QUESTION: Should the Sabbath breaker have been executed for picking sticks?
♦ANSWER
Yes, absolutely because he was rightly found guilty of the premeditated breaking of a law that carried the death penalty .
I think you're arguing in a circle here: the law stating he should have been executed is morally justified because that law said he should be executed? To make your case you need to argue how killing a man merely for gathering sticks is morally justified.
If someone doesn't want to respect the law of the land where they live, they are free to leave but living within a nation's territories implies unspoken agreement to comply with the laws of that country or face the consequences.
In that case the Jehovah's Witnesses sent to the concentration camps in Hitler's Germany were getting what they deserved. As you argue, they were to obey the law of the land. They had an unspoken agreement to comply with the Nazi laws or face the consequences.
Got-Cha!
Given how easy the law to refrain from working on a sabbath was, justification should be demanded from the criminal as to why he broke the law, not the other way round.
Gathering sticks can easily be justified. Like I pointed out in the OP, the man murdered by Moses may have been gathering the sticks to build a fire to feed himself and his family or keep them warm. People need food and warmth on all days of the week.
We do not know the surrounding circumstances but we can reasonably suppose he was fully aware of the law.
It's very possible this unfortunate victim of Jehovah was not fully aware of the idiotic law that work on the Sabbath was prohibited. One possibility is that he had dementia or some other cognitive disability and that disability kept him from understanding the law. Another possibility is that he did not know what was meant by "work." The law doesn't spell out what constitutes work.
Common sense dictates he observed that those around him collected twice the needed amount the day before and would have at the very least explained...
LOL--if you want to argue common sense, then how can you see any sense in a law that prohibits people from doing what they need to do?
At any rate, people are imperfect and often "miss the boat" waiting too long to do something. I'm sure you have missed a deadline some time in your life. So why fault this man for making a common human mistake?
It seems fair to say it was therefore a deliberate act of rebellion. You don't just accidently start collecting sticks... like you're just walking along, minding your own businesses and oops you trip and suddenly, through no fault of your own and against your will, start collecting sticks... that's ludicrous. If he was caught breaking the Sabbath, he did so willfully. His motivation was his own but it seems reasonable to believe it was a manifestation of at the very least a meprise for the law and perhaps the nation.
Can you really blame anybody for rebelling against a god so stupid that that god demands no work on Saturday? If the man was rebelling, it cost him his life, and unlike you I can see the tragedy in his being murdered.
In any case, he that breaks the law must pay the price. We don't usually call such people "victims" the word is ... "criminal"
If the man in Numbers 15 was your father, brother, or son, would you be so quick to deem him a criminal and bash his head in with rocks?
