And how do you know special pleading is going on if you haven’t read the special pleading? The fact that you would even suggest “special pleading . . . in the Bible that they are really the same god“ tells me you really don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
And I see no point in talking about it with you.
The Bible, imo, is a work of narrative written by men over many centuries with a lot of editing at various times to make stuff fit. Obviously, someone who believes it is inspired by God will have a different take on it.
Not necessarily. A belief in divine inspiration doesn't have to obviate editing nor deny that fellas wrote it over many centuries.
Interesting - or frustrating - as a discussion about the Bible might be, I think we have wondered far from the OP and the issues raised in that.
Indeed. A bizarre cross-pollinating from one thread to another. I've been wanting to drop the topic for days and really hope no one calls me back here.
And how do you know special pleading is going on if you haven’t read the special pleading? The fact that you would even suggest “special pleading . . . in the Bible that they are really the same god“ tells me you really don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
And I see no point in talking about it with you.
The Bible, imo, is a work of narrative written by men over many centuries with a lot of editing at various times to make stuff fit. Obviously, someone who believes it is inspired by God will have a different take on it.
Inspired by God, screwed up by humans is hardly an unusual take. The Bible as it stands is a product of the Church, and we know the Church is regularly subject to human screw-ups, so it's not surprising if the Bible is too. Why is it that atheists and fundamentalists both seem to think the Bible is meant to be inerrant?
Why is it that atheists and fundamentalists both seem to think the Bible is meant to be inerrant?
This observation is one of the big insights I have gained from this discussion. (It might also explain why fundamentalists can easily turn into atheists).
Two reasons I think: firstly fundamentalists shout louder and are most insistent that that's how it must be done.
Secondly, a literal reading is the most obvious, especially in our western culture. An atheist can look at it literally, reject it and think no more about it. It's only the Christian who can't accept it literally but doesn't want to reject it entirely who is motivated to find an alternative.
It's an entirely acceptable alternative, in my view. And I'm not sure that just Christians read it that way initially.
Well, YMMV, but when I read God saying to go and kill lots of people, the most obvious interpretation is that God said go and kill lots of people. Or that the writer thought he said that. And if God inspired the writer to write that, it's a fairly obvious conclusion to draw that God did indeed so order.
It's an entirely acceptable alternative, in my view. And I'm not sure that just Christians read it that way initially.
Christians, every single one I've ever spoken with, pick and choose what they find to be allegory, instructive, history or NOitreallydidhappenhowcouldyouquestionit? That isn't really the problem, though, nearly everyone does with nearly every religious text.*
The problem is when they present otherwise. And that is part of what saying the OT and the NT are a continuous tone.
*I think everybody with all, but the possibility exists, so...
Saying that the OT and the NT are the same in tone. That they are consistent and cohesive without a lot of work to reconcile them.
Parts are, parts aren't. The Hebrew scriptures themselves aren't all one tone. Neither are the Gospels. Heck, the tone changes even within books, particularly the Psalms.
Saying that the OT and the NT are the same in tone. That they are consistent and cohesive without a lot of work to reconcile them.
What I find compelling, and more so as time goes by and I read the bible more, is the clearly apparent dissonances between different books (which I repeat I believe to be a feature not a bug) and the common thread that makes them coherent - which is not the same thing as saying they present a systematic picture, or comprise a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece must fit.
Well, YMMV, but when I read God saying to go and kill lots of people, the most obvious interpretation is that God said go and kill lots of people. Or that the writer thought he said that. And if God inspired the writer to write that, it's a fairly obvious conclusion to draw that God did indeed so order.
One thing I've said before is that I really think this is a question of focus. The Bible says God is slow to anger and abounding in mercy. It doesn't rule out (righteous) anger, but it emphasises the mercy. The thing that's emphasised about Jericho is Rahab being saved; the thing that strikes me about Sodom and Gomorrah* is Abraham (as he sees it) negotiating God's justice down to something he can cope with, and God sparing Lot and his family.
==
*Oh and by the way Jesus (NT guy) says some of his contemporary hearers are going to be worse off than the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. There's consistency for ya.
Again, this just seems like abusive spouse. Yes he does knock me around a lot but he can be really sweet and romantic.
"M'lud, this is a question of focus. Yes, my client did hold up the bank and emptied his shotgun into two members of staff, but he's a wonderfully father and terribly kind to animals. Why, he paid for a rabbit he ran over to be operated on by a vet out of his own money".
And how do you know special pleading is going on if you haven’t read the special pleading? The fact that you would even suggest “special pleading . . . in the Bible that they are really the same god“ tells me you really don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
And I see no point in talking about it with you.
The Bible, imo, is a work of narrative written by men over many centuries with a lot of editing at various times to make stuff fit. Obviously, someone who believes it is inspired by God will have a different take on it.
Inspired by God, screwed up by humans is hardly an unusual take. The Bible as it stands is a product of the Church, and we know the Church is regularly subject to human screw-ups, so it's not surprising if the Bible is too. Why is it that atheists and fundamentalists both seem to think the Bible is meant to be inerrant?
Dammit, I didn't want to come back but this is fascinating.
I don't think any atheist regards the Bible as incapable of being wrong, which is the handy definition of inerrant. On the contrary, all atheists must believe the Bible is wrong in part or whole or they wouldn't be atheists.
But I suspect most atheists read the Bible as a narrative text, much like any other, and in narrative texts the reader works from an assumption that the author of the narrative wants you to believe in it. Moreover, the reader also wants to believe in it, hence the willing suspension of disbelief that allows us to live vicariously and invest emotionally in narratives that we know are not and which cannot ever be true.
Now, I suspect that isn't the only way of reading a text and it may have only become the common way of reading a text in relatively modern times, but it is the only way I know and I suspect it's the only way most people know, because that is what is demanded by contemporary (IE, the last few hundred years) fiction and non-fiction narrative texts.
But I suspect most atheists read the Bible as a narrative text, much like any other, and in narrative texts the reader works from an assumption that the author of the narrative wants you to believe in it. Moreover, the reader also wants to believe in it, hence the willing suspension of disbelief that allows us to live vicariously and invest emotionally in narratives that we know are not and which cannot ever be true.
Now, I suspect that isn't the only way of reading a text and it may have only become the common way of reading a text in relatively modern times, but it is the only way I know and I suspect it's the only way most people know, because that is what is demanded by contemporary (IE, the last few hundred years) fiction and non-fiction narrative texts.
Depends on what you mean by relatively modern. Certainly none of the stories in the Canterbury Tales are meant to be taken as factual accounts.
Depends on what you mean by relatively modern. Certainly none of the stories in the Canterbury Tales are meant to be taken as factual accounts.
The actual stories are tales told by the pilgrims, but I think we are meant to believe that these are a bunch of pilgrims going to Canterbury.
But in terms of narratives we are meant to believe in, then maybe Robinson Crusoe is a starting point. However, by relatively modern I mean no earlier than 1800.
But I suspect most atheists read the Bible as a narrative text, much like any other, and in narrative texts the reader works from an assumption that the author of the narrative wants you to believe in it. Moreover, the reader also wants to believe in it, hence the willing suspension of disbelief that allows us to live vicariously and invest emotionally in narratives that we know are not and which cannot ever be true.
As an aside, you're using the word 'narrative' to mean 'fiction'. Nonfiction can be narrative too.
Suspension of disbelief is not the same as adoption of belief. Fiction is not pretend reality television for snobs.
No playwright would want the audience to forget that they're watching a play to the extent that they try to intervene in the action. No novelist really wants the audience to forget that they're reading a made-up story. That's because a good many literary effects depend o the interplay between the subject matter depicted and the manner of depiction. When Austen informs us that noone observing Catherine Morland in her infancy would suppose her born to be a heroine she is playing with the fact that we know Catherine Morland is the protagonist of a novel. She is playing, as all novels do, with the fact that novels have conventions, and that a novel that breaks a convention does so hoping that we will recognise that the convention is being broken.
One does not simply hope that the fiction turns out the way one would want real events to turn out. When one reads a novel one doesn't merely hope that the characters receive their moral deserts or that characters one likes end happily. One wants the author to resolve the character in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing, that is appropriate to the presentation of the story so far. I don't want to read Thomas Hardy or Henry James myself, but lots of people do, and even though they're not sociopaths they don't do so because they want things to turn out alright for the good characters in the end. I'd feel cheated by a production of Hamlet where he lived to marry Ophelia at the end.
Again, this just seems like abusive spouse. Yes he does knock me around a lot but he can be really sweet and romantic. [...]
Killing entire cities isn't righteous anger anyway. It's homocidal psychotic evil writ large.
That comparison doesn't hold up at all so far as I can see. In the narratives, the objects of God's judgement are not the objects of his mercy. And the whole point of the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative is that God did not kill an entire city: he spared Lot and his family. We might be shocked by the actual loss of life, but it's not portrayed as wholly indiscriminate; very often, there are exceptions and reasons for those exceptions. That is not psychotic behaviour.
Again, this just seems like abusive spouse. Yes he does knock me around a lot but he can be really sweet and romantic. [...]
Killing entire cities isn't righteous anger anyway. It's homocidal psychotic evil writ large.
That comparison doesn't hold up at all so far as I can see. In the narratives, the objects of God's judgement are not the objects of his mercy. And the whole point of the Sodom and Gomorrah narrative is that God did not kill an entire city: he spared Lot and his family. We might be shocked by the actual loss of life, but it's not portrayed as wholly indiscriminate; very often, there are exceptions and reasons for those exceptions. That is not psychotic behaviour.
Yes. Terrified children cowering as fire and brimstone rains down while they die in agony as their bodies boil. But the bastards deserved it didn't they? Righteous anger of God.
Fuck this shit. Stop pretending it isn't fucking repulsive. It paints a monstrous God; no ifs, no buts. I ask one thing only of this God. Annilation. I sure as hell don't want to spend eternity pretending I can love him.
Do you think the writers of the texts, and their original recipients, shared your view that the God they were writing about was monstrous? Was it their intention to portray him as such? If so, why do you think they bothered? Were they less discerning than you? Trying to out-think Roko's Basilisk for self-preservation? Or what?
(My go-to passage in these circumstances is, rather counter-intuitively, Gandalf talking to Frodo in Moria about whether Bilbo should have killed Gollum or not.)
Sorry, just to expand on that a little: if one must use that word, then in terms of the narrative, the answer is clearly "yes". Which brings me back to my question above about how the authors were intending to portray God. Why might they be seeking to portray him as a murderous psychopath? Would that be a reasonable assumption? If not, what alternative explanations might there be?
Sorry, just to expand on that a little: if one must use that word, then in terms of the narrative, the answer is clearly "yes". Which brings me back to my question above about how the authors were intending to portray God. Why might they be seeking to portray him as a murderous psychopath? Would that be a reasonable assumption? If not, what alternative explanations might there be?
At the moment, I think they were tribal people whose culture didn't value people outside their own tribe, so showing that God would come down on others like a ton of bricks raised no qualms. I am well aware that humans are quite capable of genocide and not surprised that they would paint their God (their God, not those people over there's God) in their own image.
If your 'tribal' analysis is correct (which it may be), what's really striking about the OT is the way that even as it reflects that prejudice, it is constantly challenging it by having people from outside the tribe accepted and blessed by God. Constantly.
Did you know the very first person in the Bible to whom God reveals himself as YHWH, and goes on to bless, is an abused, rejected, foreign wife?
I think the only way you can reasonably read the Bible, and the OT in particular, as setting out to reveal the true nature of God as a bloodthirsty genocidal maniac is if you approach it with that assumption in mind.
If you do, of course you can reinterpret the text in that light, much in the same way as people have shown how Winnie the Pooh was written by multiple authors over several centuries, but I really don't think it's self-evident from the text.
As the narrative has it, Rahab was saved first and foremost - along with her entire family - because she acknowledged the God of Israel as the one true God, not because she betrayed her people. If you want to take your line of arbitrariness, you might as well criticise God for 'arbitrarily' sparing her household as well as herself as criticise him for 'arbitrarily' killing everybody else.
As I say, the idea of racial/tribal superiority might be there, but it is also being constantly challenged, right from Genesis (and all the way through to Revelation). How can you reconcile those challenges with your interpretive framework? Why are these challenges less significant than the backdrop against which they occur?
And yes, this backdrop includes things like (almost) an entire city population being wiped out, but that brings us back to what "deserve" might mean.
I think the only way you can reasonably read the Bible, and the OT in particular, as setting out to reveal the true nature of God as a bloodthirsty genocidal maniac is if you approach it with that assumption in mind.
I knew someone would say this sooner or later but you'll just have to trust me when I say that it's simply not true. It's what screams out at me from the text, always has done, from the very first time I read it, and long before I heard anyone else raising the same point. It's just there. God orders genocide. That is not good. It's evil, almost in the purest form possible.
I cannot get my head around responding to "kill everyone, men, women and children, even the animals" any other way than "what? Are you fucking insane? What sort of murderous bastard are you?"
If I may. In my fundamentalist cultic theodicy we completely justified that God, as literal as we could make Him. We loved Him. Because He loved us. He wasn't a psychopath. He was pragmatic. He would do anything to save everyone. Who can be saved. More than 99.99% post-mortem. Which justified Him being... 'pragmatic'. And He would do anything to weave and witness His golden thread of purity throughout history, which was plain to see...
Which is all post-Enlightenment fundamentalism I realise.
The, in the main, C6-5th BCE portrayers of God portrayed Him like their messiah Cyrus, the mythic Nebuchadnezzar surely, on steroids?
My spine STILL tingles at 'For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.'. The God who bargained with Abraham under the Terebinth Oak (Quercus coccifera) Trees of Mamre is pathologically righteously... cool.
He's just an evolving best case God for the time isn't He?
No. We're not talking about either the Holocaust or Stalin's purges, we're talking about the OT.
I want to know why you think God's actions in the OT count as genocide. Spell it out for me.
Deuteronomy 20:16-18 has God commanding genocide. Are you drawing a distinction between commanding genocide and carrying it out? Because the same argument exonerates Hitler.
Deuteronomy 20:16-18 has God commanding genocide. Are you drawing a distinction between commanding genocide and carrying it out? Because the same argument exonerates Hitler.
No, I'm drawing a distinction, firstly, with respect to who is commanding it.
Setting aside the emotional aspects of this issue, in absolute terms it seems to me that a creator has the prerogative to end the life of their creatures in a way that a fellow-creature does not (which again, I think is a cornerstone of Gandalf's argument to Frodo with respect to Gollum, albeit in reverse).
And I would say that rights aside, killing entire populations is an evil act. So God would then be exercising his right to be evil. Otherwise how do you know God wasn't using the Nazis to exercise his 'right' to kill Jews?
But elsewhere you say God is good and loving so that doesn't work.
Setting aside the emotional aspects of this issue, in absolute terms it seems to me that a creator has the prerogative to end the life of their creatures in a way that a fellow-creature does not (which again, I think is a cornerstone of Gandalf's argument to Frodo with respect to Gollum, albeit in reverse).
Is that why we don't charge parents with child neglect and infanticide?
Deuteronomy 20:16-18 has God commanding genocide. Are you drawing a distinction between commanding genocide and carrying it out? Because the same argument exonerates Hitler.
No, I'm drawing a distinction, firstly, with respect to who is commanding it.
Divine command theory is bollocks. It robs words and ideas of all meaning.
EDIT: it seems to me that we're looking for ways out of the logical contradiction formed by the ideas that God is good, God commanded a thing, and the thing is evil. My take is to break the middle idea (so God didn't command the thing). Eutychus seems to be trying to redefine the latter. Karl, I think, is pointing out that the latter two imply the former is false, quite rightly in my view.
Indeed. And it's perfectly consistent with a God who says one morning "I've decided the young family next door need to die. Get a carving knife and stab them all to death for me."
It's the IS justification - God wants us to kill these people.
No, but I notice that you haven't addressed several objections that I've raised, in particular the objection that against this interpretation of "nationalist manifesto for genocide" we have recurring stories from Genesis to Revelation reminding us of God's avowed intent to bless all nations (did you find who it was with whom God was first referred to as YHWH yet? If you're correct, why on earth would the writers do that?).
I think idea of "rights" is right up there with "deserve" and is important in this context.
If we're talking in human terms, law, politics, and so on, then yes I believe in the concept of rights, protecting them, and defending them, and will go down the line to do so in my sphere of activity.
If, however, we're talking in theological terms, I don't think we as humans have any rights or "deserve" any particular treatment from our creator.
There is more than one way of trying to get to grips with the "genocidal" declarations of the OT, but if one takes the biblical statements that God ordered the destruction of entire populations at face value, then it does not seem unreasonable to me to also take at face value the rationale that this is an enactment of his judgement - not a purely arbitrary gesture because they are "not us", which is what I think is usually understood by genocide. And note that at every turn, from Noah onwards, there are people who escape that judgement.
No, but I notice that you haven't addressed several objections that I've raised, in particular the objection that against this interpretation of "nationalist manifesto for genocide" we have recurring stories from Genesis to Revelation reminding us of God's avowed intent to bless all nations (did you find who it was with whom God was first referred to as YHWH yet? If you're correct, why on earth would the writers do that?).
I think idea of "rights" is right up there with "deserve" and is important in this context.
If we're talking in human terms, law, politics, and so on, then yes I believe in the concept of rights, protecting them, and defending them, and will go down the line to do so in my sphere of activity.
If, however, we're talking in theological terms, I don't think we as humans have any rights or "deserve" any particular treatment from our creator.
There is more than one way of trying to get to grips with the "genocidal" declarations of the OT, but if one takes the biblical statements that God ordered the destruction of entire populations at face value, then it does not seem unreasonable to me to also take at face value the rationale that this is an enactment of his judgement - not a purely arbitrary gesture because they are "not us", which is what I think is usually understood by genocide. And note that at every turn, from Noah onwards, there are people who escape that judgement.
And that requires you to imagine that entire populations, men, women, children, babes in arms, can somehow be deserving of a judgement of brutal killing at swordpoint. Or drowning in terror. Or fried alive.
I can imagine no such thing. I cannot imagine how anyone can, frankly.
As an aside, you're using the word 'narrative' to mean 'fiction'. Nonfiction can be narrative too.
Suspension of disbelief is not the same as adoption of belief. Fiction is not pretend reality television for snobs.
No playwright would want the audience to forget that they're watching a play to the extent that they try to intervene in the action. No novelist really wants the audience to forget that they're reading a made-up story. That's because a good many literary effects depend o the interplay between the subject matter depicted and the manner of depiction. When Austen informs us that noone observing Catherine Morland in her infancy would suppose her born to be a heroine she is playing with the fact that we know Catherine Morland is the protagonist of a novel. She is playing, as all novels do, with the fact that novels have conventions, and that a novel that breaks a convention does so hoping that we will recognise that the convention is being broken.
One does not simply hope that the fiction turns out the way one would want real events to turn out. When one reads a novel one doesn't merely hope that the characters receive their moral deserts or that characters one likes end happily. One wants the author to resolve the character in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing, that is appropriate to the presentation of the story so far. I don't want to read Thomas Hardy or Henry James myself, but lots of people do, and even though they're not sociopaths they don't do so because they want things to turn out alright for the good characters in the end. I'd feel cheated by a production of Hamlet where he lived to marry Ophelia at the end.
No, I was thinking of narrative non-fiction as well. I've invested plenty of emotion in Jonathan Raban's travel writing and in the excellent Alone, by Admiral Richard Byrd.
Austen in Northanger Abbey is deliberately sending up the conventions of the Romantic novel.
Haven't read Henry James, but when I read Hardy's Return of the Native I was angry that the only two characters who 'had a pulse' were killed-off at the end with the clear message that they were dead because they had transgressed against the stifling morality of the times. So yes, I do invest in the characters and want things to turn out all right for them. I think the majority of modern readers do. And having just read Eric Ambler's classic Cause for Alarm I am thoroughly glad it all worked out for the three main characters.
Yes, you're right that the author plays games with the reader, but they do want the reader to invest in the characters and share their emotions.
The bit in 1 Samuel where God commands Saul to kill all the Amalekites is the bit of the Bible that I just can't do anything with. That's not God.
As far as the Flood and destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah go, I think one has to buy the premise of the story that a) if there were anyone there who didn't deserve to die God would have either spared the city or put them on the Ark; b) they weren't ordinarily selfish but absolutely deserved death.
Now in the real world, not mythological, there would be at the very least children who wouldn't deserve it.
Approach one: this is mythology. They don't have children; they're fictional characters.
Approach two: midrash it. Maybe God had made them all barren as a warning a generation back. Maybe they killed all their children or sold them into slavery which is what prompted God to think they needed to be destroyed.
None of that is the plain meaning of the text. But one aspect of the plain meaning of the text is that it leaves a lot unsaid.
The power of the text is not that it provides answers. It's that it provokes questions. It's morally wrong to sacrifice your son to your God. But existentialism and all modern thought influenced by it, which is most of it, springs from asking the question, what follows if one supposes that on just one occasion it was the right thing to do.
And that requires you to imagine that entire populations, men, women, children, babes in arms, can somehow be deserving of a judgement of brutal killing at swordpoint. Or drowning in terror. Or fried alive.
I can imagine no such thing. I cannot imagine how anyone can, frankly.
I'm not sure that I can do any better than @Dafyd here (in fact, I'm sure I can't).
Ezekiel (OT) tells us that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. That's a value judgement. The slaughter narratives are there, but I don't think there's anywhere where we see God revelling in them, or indeed Israel doing so. There might be rejoicing at the defeat of enemies, but I don't come away with an impression of glorification of the actual slaughter or its methods.
I may find it emotionally difficult to reconcile 'taking no pleasure in the death of the wicked' with the bare narratives of mass slaughter, but as Dafyd says there are a number of ways of reading those.
Even on the bare narrative, I can intellectually posit that God would not engage in such without good reason. Or that the narrative is there to show us that failure to acknowledge God is ultimately a disastrous thing. (Again, if we prohibit God from exercising just judgement, I personally have difficulty seeing on what grounds we allow ourselves to define it, uphold it, or mete it out).
Most of all I am persuaded that this apparent vindictiveness of God is by no means the whole story because of the constant counter-thread I keep alluding to. It would have been much easier to portray God as vindictive by excising that.
Comments
The Bible, imo, is a work of narrative written by men over many centuries with a lot of editing at various times to make stuff fit. Obviously, someone who believes it is inspired by God will have a different take on it.
Interesting - or frustrating - as a discussion about the Bible might be, I think we have wondered far from the OP and the issues raised in that.
Indeed. A bizarre cross-pollinating from one thread to another. I've been wanting to drop the topic for days and really hope no one calls me back here.
Inspired by God, screwed up by humans is hardly an unusual take. The Bible as it stands is a product of the Church, and we know the Church is regularly subject to human screw-ups, so it's not surprising if the Bible is too. Why is it that atheists and fundamentalists both seem to think the Bible is meant to be inerrant?
Secondly, a literal reading is the most obvious, especially in our western culture. An atheist can look at it literally, reject it and think no more about it. It's only the Christian who can't accept it literally but doesn't want to reject it entirely who is motivated to find an alternative.
Well, YMMV, but when I read God saying to go and kill lots of people, the most obvious interpretation is that God said go and kill lots of people. Or that the writer thought he said that. And if God inspired the writer to write that, it's a fairly obvious conclusion to draw that God did indeed so order.
The problem is when they present otherwise. And that is part of what saying the OT and the NT are a continuous tone.
*I think everybody with all, but the possibility exists, so...
Parts are, parts aren't. The Hebrew scriptures themselves aren't all one tone. Neither are the Gospels. Heck, the tone changes even within books, particularly the Psalms.
What I find compelling, and more so as time goes by and I read the bible more, is the clearly apparent dissonances between different books (which I repeat I believe to be a feature not a bug) and the common thread that makes them coherent - which is not the same thing as saying they present a systematic picture, or comprise a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece must fit.
One thing I've said before is that I really think this is a question of focus. The Bible says God is slow to anger and abounding in mercy. It doesn't rule out (righteous) anger, but it emphasises the mercy. The thing that's emphasised about Jericho is Rahab being saved; the thing that strikes me about Sodom and Gomorrah* is Abraham (as he sees it) negotiating God's justice down to something he can cope with, and God sparing Lot and his family.
==
*Oh and by the way Jesus (NT guy) says some of his contemporary hearers are going to be worse off than the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. There's consistency for ya.
"M'lud, this is a question of focus. Yes, my client did hold up the bank and emptied his shotgun into two members of staff, but he's a wonderfully father and terribly kind to animals. Why, he paid for a rabbit he ran over to be operated on by a vet out of his own money".
Killing entire cities isn't righteous anger anyway. It's homocidal psychotic evil writ large.
Dammit, I didn't want to come back but this is fascinating.
I don't think any atheist regards the Bible as incapable of being wrong, which is the handy definition of inerrant. On the contrary, all atheists must believe the Bible is wrong in part or whole or they wouldn't be atheists.
But I suspect most atheists read the Bible as a narrative text, much like any other, and in narrative texts the reader works from an assumption that the author of the narrative wants you to believe in it. Moreover, the reader also wants to believe in it, hence the willing suspension of disbelief that allows us to live vicariously and invest emotionally in narratives that we know are not and which cannot ever be true.
Now, I suspect that isn't the only way of reading a text and it may have only become the common way of reading a text in relatively modern times, but it is the only way I know and I suspect it's the only way most people know, because that is what is demanded by contemporary (IE, the last few hundred years) fiction and non-fiction narrative texts.
Depends on what you mean by relatively modern. Certainly none of the stories in the Canterbury Tales are meant to be taken as factual accounts.
The actual stories are tales told by the pilgrims, but I think we are meant to believe that these are a bunch of pilgrims going to Canterbury.
But in terms of narratives we are meant to believe in, then maybe Robinson Crusoe is a starting point. However, by relatively modern I mean no earlier than 1800.
Suspension of disbelief is not the same as adoption of belief. Fiction is not pretend reality television for snobs.
No playwright would want the audience to forget that they're watching a play to the extent that they try to intervene in the action. No novelist really wants the audience to forget that they're reading a made-up story. That's because a good many literary effects depend o the interplay between the subject matter depicted and the manner of depiction. When Austen informs us that noone observing Catherine Morland in her infancy would suppose her born to be a heroine she is playing with the fact that we know Catherine Morland is the protagonist of a novel. She is playing, as all novels do, with the fact that novels have conventions, and that a novel that breaks a convention does so hoping that we will recognise that the convention is being broken.
One does not simply hope that the fiction turns out the way one would want real events to turn out. When one reads a novel one doesn't merely hope that the characters receive their moral deserts or that characters one likes end happily. One wants the author to resolve the character in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing, that is appropriate to the presentation of the story so far. I don't want to read Thomas Hardy or Henry James myself, but lots of people do, and even though they're not sociopaths they don't do so because they want things to turn out alright for the good characters in the end. I'd feel cheated by a production of Hamlet where he lived to marry Ophelia at the end.
*Cough* Jericho *Cough*
Yes. Terrified children cowering as fire and brimstone rains down while they die in agony as their bodies boil. But the bastards deserved it didn't they? Righteous anger of God.
Fuck this shit. Stop pretending it isn't fucking repulsive. It paints a monstrous God; no ifs, no buts. I ask one thing only of this God. Annilation. I sure as hell don't want to spend eternity pretending I can love him.
[x-post]
Everyone else deserved to be put to the sword?
Sorry. All Saints. I need to decide whether I want Jesus to be raised.
(My go-to passage in these circumstances is, rather counter-intuitively, Gandalf talking to Frodo in Moria about whether Bilbo should have killed Gollum or not.)
Sorry, just to expand on that a little: if one must use that word, then in terms of the narrative, the answer is clearly "yes". Which brings me back to my question above about how the authors were intending to portray God. Why might they be seeking to portray him as a murderous psychopath? Would that be a reasonable assumption? If not, what alternative explanations might there be?
At the moment, I think they were tribal people whose culture didn't value people outside their own tribe, so showing that God would come down on others like a ton of bricks raised no qualms. I am well aware that humans are quite capable of genocide and not surprised that they would paint their God (their God, not those people over there's God) in their own image.
If your 'tribal' analysis is correct (which it may be), what's really striking about the OT is the way that even as it reflects that prejudice, it is constantly challenging it by having people from outside the tribe accepted and blessed by God. Constantly.
Did you know the very first person in the Bible to whom God reveals himself as YHWH, and goes on to bless, is an abused, rejected, foreign wife?
I refer back to my courtroom example. You can't overlook these terrible things by just focusing on the nice bits.
If you do, of course you can reinterpret the text in that light, much in the same way as people have shown how Winnie the Pooh was written by multiple authors over several centuries, but I really don't think it's self-evident from the text.
As the narrative has it, Rahab was saved first and foremost - along with her entire family - because she acknowledged the God of Israel as the one true God, not because she betrayed her people. If you want to take your line of arbitrariness, you might as well criticise God for 'arbitrarily' sparing her household as well as herself as criticise him for 'arbitrarily' killing everybody else.
As I say, the idea of racial/tribal superiority might be there, but it is also being constantly challenged, right from Genesis (and all the way through to Revelation). How can you reconcile those challenges with your interpretive framework? Why are these challenges less significant than the backdrop against which they occur?
And yes, this backdrop includes things like (almost) an entire city population being wiped out, but that brings us back to what "deserve" might mean.
I knew someone would say this sooner or later but you'll just have to trust me when I say that it's simply not true. It's what screams out at me from the text, always has done, from the very first time I read it, and long before I heard anyone else raising the same point. It's just there. God orders genocide. That is not good. It's evil, almost in the purest form possible.
I cannot get my head around responding to "kill everyone, men, women and children, even the animals" any other way than "what? Are you fucking insane? What sort of murderous bastard are you?"
Why what? Do we have to explain to people why the Holocaust or Stalin's purges were a Bad Thing?
I want to know why you think God's actions in the OT count as genocide. Spell it out for me.
Which is all post-Enlightenment fundamentalism I realise.
The, in the main, C6-5th BCE portrayers of God portrayed Him like their messiah Cyrus, the mythic Nebuchadnezzar surely, on steroids?
My spine STILL tingles at 'For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.'. The God who bargained with Abraham under the Terebinth Oak (Quercus coccifera) Trees of Mamre is pathologically righteously... cool.
He's just an evolving best case God for the time isn't He?
Deuteronomy 20:16-18 has God commanding genocide. Are you drawing a distinction between commanding genocide and carrying it out? Because the same argument exonerates Hitler.
Setting aside the emotional aspects of this issue, in absolute terms it seems to me that a creator has the prerogative to end the life of their creatures in a way that a fellow-creature does not (which again, I think is a cornerstone of Gandalf's argument to Frodo with respect to Gollum, albeit in reverse).
But elsewhere you say God is good and loving so that doesn't work.
Do you imagine I haven't heard all this before?
Is that why we don't charge parents with child neglect and infanticide?
I think your argument is vile nonsense.
Divine command theory is bollocks. It robs words and ideas of all meaning.
EDIT: it seems to me that we're looking for ways out of the logical contradiction formed by the ideas that God is good, God commanded a thing, and the thing is evil. My take is to break the middle idea (so God didn't command the thing). Eutychus seems to be trying to redefine the latter. Karl, I think, is pointing out that the latter two imply the former is false, quite rightly in my view.
It's the IS justification - God wants us to kill these people.
I think idea of "rights" is right up there with "deserve" and is important in this context.
If we're talking in human terms, law, politics, and so on, then yes I believe in the concept of rights, protecting them, and defending them, and will go down the line to do so in my sphere of activity.
If, however, we're talking in theological terms, I don't think we as humans have any rights or "deserve" any particular treatment from our creator.
There is more than one way of trying to get to grips with the "genocidal" declarations of the OT, but if one takes the biblical statements that God ordered the destruction of entire populations at face value, then it does not seem unreasonable to me to also take at face value the rationale that this is an enactment of his judgement - not a purely arbitrary gesture because they are "not us", which is what I think is usually understood by genocide. And note that at every turn, from Noah onwards, there are people who escape that judgement.
And that requires you to imagine that entire populations, men, women, children, babes in arms, can somehow be deserving of a judgement of brutal killing at swordpoint. Or drowning in terror. Or fried alive.
I can imagine no such thing. I cannot imagine how anyone can, frankly.
No, I was thinking of narrative non-fiction as well. I've invested plenty of emotion in Jonathan Raban's travel writing and in the excellent Alone, by Admiral Richard Byrd.
Austen in Northanger Abbey is deliberately sending up the conventions of the Romantic novel.
Haven't read Henry James, but when I read Hardy's Return of the Native I was angry that the only two characters who 'had a pulse' were killed-off at the end with the clear message that they were dead because they had transgressed against the stifling morality of the times. So yes, I do invest in the characters and want things to turn out all right for them. I think the majority of modern readers do. And having just read Eric Ambler's classic Cause for Alarm I am thoroughly glad it all worked out for the three main characters.
Yes, you're right that the author plays games with the reader, but they do want the reader to invest in the characters and share their emotions.
As far as the Flood and destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah go, I think one has to buy the premise of the story that a) if there were anyone there who didn't deserve to die God would have either spared the city or put them on the Ark; b) they weren't ordinarily selfish but absolutely deserved death.
Now in the real world, not mythological, there would be at the very least children who wouldn't deserve it.
Approach one: this is mythology. They don't have children; they're fictional characters.
Approach two: midrash it. Maybe God had made them all barren as a warning a generation back. Maybe they killed all their children or sold them into slavery which is what prompted God to think they needed to be destroyed.
None of that is the plain meaning of the text. But one aspect of the plain meaning of the text is that it leaves a lot unsaid.
The power of the text is not that it provides answers. It's that it provokes questions. It's morally wrong to sacrifice your son to your God. But existentialism and all modern thought influenced by it, which is most of it, springs from asking the question, what follows if one supposes that on just one occasion it was the right thing to do.
I'm not sure that I can do any better than @Dafyd here (in fact, I'm sure I can't).
Ezekiel (OT) tells us that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. That's a value judgement. The slaughter narratives are there, but I don't think there's anywhere where we see God revelling in them, or indeed Israel doing so. There might be rejoicing at the defeat of enemies, but I don't come away with an impression of glorification of the actual slaughter or its methods.
I may find it emotionally difficult to reconcile 'taking no pleasure in the death of the wicked' with the bare narratives of mass slaughter, but as Dafyd says there are a number of ways of reading those.
Even on the bare narrative, I can intellectually posit that God would not engage in such without good reason. Or that the narrative is there to show us that failure to acknowledge God is ultimately a disastrous thing. (Again, if we prohibit God from exercising just judgement, I personally have difficulty seeing on what grounds we allow ourselves to define it, uphold it, or mete it out).
Most of all I am persuaded that this apparent vindictiveness of God is by no means the whole story because of the constant counter-thread I keep alluding to. It would have been much easier to portray God as vindictive by excising that.