Did God really command violence?

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What’s morally bankrupt about saying they deserved it, if in fact they deserved it? At no point did you refute the charges against them, nor even argue that the crimes they stand accused of are not worthy of death.
 
mythbuster1 said:
I’m saying they deserved it because they were evil
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And the Apostle Peter agrees with you:
‘For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell f and committed them to pits of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven other persons, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction and made them an example to those who were to be ungodly;’ - 2 Peter 2:4-6
 
Damian243 said:
Seems like we align moral rules along the lines of maximizing physical and psychological pleasure as equitably as possible and minimizing pain.
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But that’s a naïve, unfair, and meaningless moral framework; with no reference to a Creator or a loving God, it inevitably breaks down into a tyranny of the majority.
 
But a moral system centred around the individual’s pain or pleasure experience is not only subjective, but also leads to outcomes based on selfishness rather than altruism. A moral system based on a loving God allows us to stand up for individuals in pain or disadvantage and advocate for them to be included in the common good.
 
Anesti33 said:
But that’s a naïve, unfair, and meaningless moral framework; with no reference to a Creator or a loving God, it inevitably breaks down into a tyranny of the majority.
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No more than having a God in your morality system means it’s a “might makes right” system.
Anesti33 said:
But a moral system centred around the individual’s pain or pleasure experience is not only subjective, but also leads to outcomes based on selfishness rather than altruism. A moral system based on a loving God allows us to stand up for individuals in pain or disadvantage and advocate for them to be included in the common good.
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A moral system built around God is equally subjective, since you choose the God you worship. That’s subjective.

I’ll disagree with Damian on one point which is I think presenting morality as about ‘pleasure’ gives the wrong impression that it’s about hedonistic pleasure. I think ‘well-being’ presents the idea much more clearly. When acts improve the well-being of living creatures, particularly sentient ones, we usually label that as good. When it harms their well-being we usually label that as bad or evil, and where the well-being of two individuals comes into conflict is where we find actual moral quandaries and decisions.
 
My mother used to take me to dentist and I didn’t like it because it hurt me. I suffered. Did she do good or evil thing by taking me to dentist?
 
It’s worth noting the Bible didn’t fall from the sky; it was written by men. This isn’t to deny that it’s the word of God, just to point out that the Jewish scholars exiled in Babylon would have their own biases as to what was ethical and what was worth including. It’s likely these men would have taken for granted that a racial group could be evil down to an individual level, or that cruel measures would be necessary for a people to survive.

Modern critics often judge the bible by modern standards, instead of taking into account the realities of the ancient world.
 
You seem to be derisively objecting to the idea of progressive revelation by pointing out all of the moral deficiencies of the Mosaic Law. There are a lot of assumptions to that objection, especially the assumption that immediately revealing a perfect moral law would have brought about a greater good. You’re assuming that yes, it would have. But then why not prevent the fall in the first place?

You’re just restating the problem of evil and ignoring the free will defense. We can walk that back all the way to the beginning of creation. A reasonable answer is to say that the Mosaic Law was a greater good because the Jews actually attempted to obey it, and considered it feasible, whereas they would have completely disregarded a stricter moral law.

As for your analogy of God teaching children something evil only to tell them later not to do that thing, your analogy is overlooking two things. 1. The Mosaic Law was not the perfect moral law revealed immediately by God and 2. it was mediated by angels to teach the Jews that they were sinful, and to place some limits on their sin that they would actually obey, especially to withdraw them from idolatry.
 
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hmm you have actually answered my previous strawman question, but now refusing to answer this one which I don’t think is strawman. It’s a valid moral dilemma question.
 
Personally, I do not think that God ever ordered any massacres. but maybe there are some elements worth considering.

The idea of killing children is disgusting, but I think that, even if the children would have been spared, they would have had no hope to survive without men’s help and protection. Once the men had been killed, women and children would have been doomed to die of hardship or to be killed because of raids by some other tribes.

So, directly or indirectly, killing the men would have killed also the children.

We are talking about violent and warmongering peoples.

In 1 Sam 15 , Samuel orders the jews not to spare cattle; however, the jews kill everybody, but they disobey this oder and spare cattle (because the cattle was very useful to them, of course). This clearly proves that the jews did what they did (i.e. the massacre of men, women and children) because the WANTED to do that, and not because they wnated to obey a divine order.

Samuel’s words do not seem to be a real order but a prophecy, such as: you will attack, you will win, you will kill everybody. The order to kill the cattle is the litmus test, which shows that the real intentions of the jews were not to obey God, but to appropriate their goods.
 
You should consider that God does not need man’s help to kill people; God can make people die without any murders (e.g. heart attack, stroke, etc.)
I have never read in the Gospel Jesus saying " love your enemy, but kill them when God orders you to do so". Have you?
 
The Old testament was written on the basis of secular oral traditions; oral traditions can be easily corrupted. I do not consider the Old Testament reliable from an historical point of view; it contains many errors, both scientific and historical. The Old Testament is to be read as a parable giving us moral and spiritual teachings. I do not think that God has ever said to a prophet that some children had to be killed; those verses are the result of a corrupted oral tradition. The Old testament is to be read and intepreted in the light of the New Testament,

I would suggest you to read a document form the Pontificail Biblical Commission " Inspiration and Truth in Sacred Scripture".
Unfortunately, on the official vatican site, this document is not published in english, but only in Italian, French, Spanish and German. If you can read one of these languages, you can find the document here:
French: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/c...222_ispirazione-verita-sacra-scrittura_fr.pdf
Italian: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/c...22_ispirazione-verita-sacra-scrittura_it.html
Spanish: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/c...22_ispirazione-verita-sacra-scrittura_sp.html
German: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/c...22_ispirazione-verita-sacra-scrittura_ge.html
 
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That is quite odd. Never in my 12 years of Catholic Bible studies have I been informed that the OT is corrupted and the difficult passages should be ignored because they are not true. You have a unique perspective on the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture. Yours is more like Islam’s than the Catholic Church’s.
 
The Sacred Scripture is inerrant about spiritual and moral teachings; it is certanly not inherrant from a scientific or historical point of view. Are you saying that you believe that the Bible does not contain any scientific or historical errors?
 
At this point, let’s be honest. God really did command the killings of men, women, children, infants, and all their pets & livestock.

1 Samuel 15:1-3
 
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