Genocide in the Bible: does this trouble anyone else?

[MNathaniel]

The gist I’m getting from some of the responses here is that genocide is okay if God orders it. That’s… wow. I’m trying to wrap my head around it.

How does all this square up with the lack of evidence regarding the conquest?

I’m chiming in only to remind you that CAF isn’t the place to expect to hear authentic Catholic teaching taught. There’s no way to screen for what random people can say on the internet.

While it’s certainly up to you if you want to engage in the discussion, I’d just like to personally reiterate that Trent Horn makes a very clear case for why a Catholic is not obligated to believe that God ordered genocide. His book (which touches on lots of challenging Bible topics) is called: ‘Hard Sayings’.

Apart from that, piece of Grandma-style wisdom that I like: we are all responsible for the advice we choose to take. Any question posted on any topic on this site will bring a wide variety of responses out of the woodwork. It’s up to us which responses we listen to, engage with, believe. In particular I suppose I’m keen to remind you that just because someone might claim Catholics ‘must’ believe X… that doesn’t make it true. So try to avoid rejecting Catholicism itself on the basis of ideas CAF-ers try to tie to it.

This post intended with respect for all.

 

[StudentMI]

Very well said, MNathaniel. Thanks for posting that.

I’m learning to accept it as it is. Perhaps I’m not meant to know this side of the grave. Trusting in God seems the easier course.

 

[HarryStotle]

So a suicide bomber who believes that God has ordered him to kill is committing a moral act?

The difference is between a false belief and a true belief. A suicide bomber who merely believes God ordered him is not acting on the will of God.

Hypothetically, suppose God really did order it? It wasn’t imagined but actually God ordering it. Would you say it would be wrong to obey God then? Did Abraham sin when he was going to carry out the sacrifice of Isaac? Did God sin in ordering him to do it?

Can human beings sit in judgement on God’s will if it truly is his will?

Every human being will die as part of God’s will for man. That appears to be a complete genocide of the whole human race. Is God wrong for making it the reality of human existence? Do we have the wherewithal to judge that reality and say God is wrong for allowing or ordering it?

I think it is easy to lose sight of the fact we are speaking of God here and using our limited judgement to assess his will by our capacities.

Perhaps the conundrum is intentional in that it challenges us to distinguish between our thoughts about God from who God is, and therefore we mistake how we view things with how God does.

I do agree that there is a danger because some will claim decisions or actions as the will of God when they aren’t, but Scripture is the Word of God so we have to temper our tendency to impose our limitations and our judgements on Scripture and on God in those instances.

Yes, it is uncomfortable to think that God would order mass death, but perhaps that means we ought to be aware that our thinking isn’t God’s. He also became a human being and suffered death for us. That, too, is uncomfortable and incomprehensible because it means we do not grasp or control God, nor can we begin to explain why he would do so.

I am quite content to admit such passages are disconcerting, but I am not the one who must justify or explain them. God will have to and I expect that he will. I also don’t expect that our attempts to explain them will even come close.

 

[HarryStotle]

God is perfectly moral,

Therefore, He cannot order something immoral.

So, if God ordered genocide then genocide must be moral.

Doesn’t follow because the terms are ambiguous. Moral is defined in terms of human moral agents. Moral or immoral as far as humans are concerned are defined in terms of what is permissible or not for human beings. But is God so restrained in his actions?

Defining terms without allowing for supervening factors would be like claiming that if intentional killing of a human being is immoral then any time a human being is intentionally killed it is necessarily always immoral. That would simply rule out possible cases that are justified by other additional factors such as self-defense.

So genocide in general might be immoral, but in the instances in Scripture the intervention and ordering of it by God may have justified it because of supervening factors in those cases.

For example, God’s omniscience and omnipotence may have brought to bear in those cases factors that we cannot even imagine regarding the long term repercussions, the states of being of the victims, the ultimate plan of God for humanity, the ways God may have intervened in individual cases of innocence that were not documented and a host of other possibilities that we have no way of knowing given the remoteness of time and the lack of documentation. We have very scant knowledge of what actually happened and even less access to what God would know or his moral superintendence that we are in no real position to judge what took place and why.

We do know what “being moral” means as far as human actions are concerned given our limitations in space and time but we don’t as far as God is concerned because he does not have our limitations.

So to argue that we are letting God off as a case of special moral pleading only works if God has the same moral conditions guiding his actions as we do. But he doesn’t.

Quick example. Would shooting someone with a gun be wrong if human beings were impervious to pain and once shot they would heal in a matter of seconds to their former condition? Seems to remove all the messy consequences that would make shooting someone wrong, no?

If God is omnipotent and could restore life immediately to a higher degree, anesthetize any pain, etc., would his ordering that person to be killed be morally wrong for him?

Note that we have none of those abilities so when we take the initiative to kill someone we fully expect their anticipated death and pain. It is that knowledge and those limitations that make killing wrong.

Is God, when he acts, held to the same moral constraints as we are? I don’t see how.

 

[Gorgias]

Writings from the Egyptians who ruled Canaan for like 400 years

And did these address the moral character of the peoples whom the Egyptians subjugated?

archaeological remains that suggested human sacrifice, etc.

And, doesn’t the evidence – archeological and historical – demonstrate that human sacrifice was part of the cultures of the ancient Levant?

 

[HarryStotle]

I know I know, God commanded those children to be slaughtered, so it’s acceptable and TRUE. It says so right there in the bible. And there’s a hammered metal dome too. I gotta see that. God’s word made it so.

The problem is that you are using loaded terms based upon what you imagine when you read them.

The “hammered metal dome” is clearly figurative language that we necessarily comprehend with our own cultural and experiential baggage. We imagine something we do not comprehend so it sounds completely foreign.

The words were not merely written for us but for peoples and cultures through the ages, and more specifically for those who were around when the narrative was originated. It meant something to them and for good reason.

I think it is a mistake to read into the text our impressions alone. For us such texts reflect a kind of primitive militarism that should never have been permitted in the first place because we ardently believe humans should live harmless civil lives in sanitized prismatic abodes wiling the time away sipping tepid beverages and talking about the weather or sports and such. We are shocked and dismayed that God could have permitted such barbarism, let alone led human beings into it.

That might say more about us than it does about them, though, in terms of living full and hardy lives.

So “children to be slaughtered” is odious to us, yet we slaughter more children in a day in the womb than these people did in the course of entire lengthy wars. But we sip our beverages comfortably secure in the knowledge that today we are more civilized and we would never permit such horrific deeds.

Uh huh.

Perhaps we have sanitized the killing of children such that we are not offended when we do it, but utterly so when the barbaric primitives did? Transference of guilt?

Do we truly grasp morality?

 

[HarryStotle]

The gist I’m getting from some of the responses here is that genocide is okay if God orders it. That’s… wow. I’m trying to wrap my head around it.

We need to wrap our heads around all of life with all of its madness, mayhem and horror, why it carries on and why God permits it.

I suspect the narratives have a bigger meaning to convey than “genocide is okay.” More like: Why is there evil, what is it precisely, and how does it proliferate so quickly?

And: Who and what is God?

 

[Neithan]

The gist I’m getting from some of the responses here is that genocide is okay if God orders it.

Seems like that and that’s incredibly disturbing. The “we can’t apply modern morality to ancient times” etc. doesn’t work and Catholics should know that because the whole point of morality is that it’s not a changing ethic; it is based on the essential natures of humanity, and God.

I think Dr. Matthew Ramage has done some admirable work on this topic, based on Pope Benedict XVI’s commentary in Verbum Domini. Dark Passages of the Bible | Catholic Answers

 

[HarryStotle]

StudentMI:

The gist I’m getting from some of the responses here is that genocide is okay if God orders it.

Seems like that and that’s incredibly disturbing. The “we can’t apply modern morality to ancient times” etc. …

It would be nice if we could apply modern morality to modern times with some level of consistency instead of holding ancients responsible for standards we hardly uphold.

Imagine barbarian hordes at the fence of your yard with frequency. I am not clear that they would have found commentaries and such persuasive to stop them from raping and pillaging, but hey worth a try.

 

[ralfyman]

From

Did God Command Genocide?

 

[StudentMI]

Just a side note: does anyone else miss the facial cue thumbnails from Bishop Barron’s videos? It used to be if it was a serious topic or something sad the thumbnail had the Bishop with a stone face. If it was happy or joyous or whatever the thumbnail had the Bishop smiling. It always kind of made me laugh.

 

[IanAG]

Thanks Ralfy, at last someone who doesn’t believe God to be a genocidal tyrant, and who better than Bishop Barron!

The key here as I said before is interpreting the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus Christ, nothing more, nothing less.

 

[Neithan]

Imagine barbarian hordes at the fence of your yard with frequency.

Different circumstances, that (God forbid) could hypothetically happen again, but moral right and wrong remain the same. Nothing justifies slaughtering babies for the sins of others.

 

[Neithan]

God gives and takes life. But commanding human beings to slaughter human babies is not morally consistent, and if God did that, he would be morally capricious, and we would have no way of knowing what is truly good or evil. That’s one of the points of difference in our understanding of God compared with (many) Muslims. Pope Benedict XVI controversially discussed this in his famous Regensburg Lecture.

 

[Neithan]

The distinction is not what God can do and what we as creatures can do; it’s what God can do and what he commands us to do. If what is good is what God commands, and not what He Is, then we have a classic Euthyphro dillemma. If slaughtering babies for the sins of their parents is good because God commands it, then slaughtering babies for the sins of their parents is not evil. Nothing is, if God commanding it can make it good. In which case morality is capricious.

 

[Marcus_Aurelius1]

And those babies being killed is good news, considering God visited them in Sheol when He was crucified.

 

[StudentMI]

But that brings up a problem. Say an abortion provider says God told him to do what he was doing. The obvious response is that that can’t be true as it violates the moral law. But the abortion provider can say but God violated the law moral law before in Old Testament times.

 

[goout]

goout:

I know I know, God commanded those children to be slaughtered, so it’s acceptable and TRUE. It says so right there in the bible. And there’s a hammered metal dome too. I gotta see that. God’s word made it so.

The problem is that you are using loaded terms based upon what you imagine when you read them.

The “hammered metal dome” is clearly figurative language that we necessarily comprehend with our own cultural and experiential baggage. We imagine something we do not comprehend so it sounds completely foreign.

The words were not merely written for us but for peoples and cultures through the ages, and more specifically for those who were around when the narrative was originated. It meant something to them and for good reason.

I think it is a mistake to read into the text our impressions alone. For us such texts reflect a kind of primitive militarism that should never have been permitted in the first place because we ardently believe humans should live harmless civil lives in sanitized prismatic abodes wiling the time away sipping tepid beverages and talking about the weather or sports and such. We are shocked and dismayed that God could have permitted such barbarism, let alone led human beings into it.

That might say more about us than it does about them, though, in terms of living full and hardy lives.

So “children to be slaughtered” is odious to us, yet we slaughter more children in a day in the womb than these people did in the course of entire lengthy wars. But we sip our beverages comfortably secure in the knowledge that today we are more civilized and we would never permit such horrific deeds.

Uh huh.

Perhaps we have sanitized the killing of children such that we are not offended when we do it, but utterly so when the barbaric primitives did? Transference of guilt?

Do we truly grasp morality?

I agree the hammered metal dome is figurative language. You must realize I am using the passage to prove a point right?

In a fundamentalist reading of scripture, the hammered metal dome is literally the command of God. According to Scripture, God spoke and it was. At the same time even fundamentalists are forced to acknowledge the non-literalist view of this passage.
Yet some are unwilling to accord other passages that are even more troubling the same generosity of reading. If it’s acceptable to take a spiritual reading of one passage, one ought to be open to that application in other passages, especially one that details genocide.

Just my opinion, but it betrays a willingness to excuse and sanctify violence.

And anyone who receives this image of the Catholic Church ought to run from it screaming, in good conscience. Because that image of God is distorted. Indeed, some atheists who have been scandalized in this way have a more godly sense of morality than some Christians.

And that flight from the Church due to distorted Christianity is what is happening in the millions. At some point the sin of scandal is worth considering.

 

[HarryStotle]

The Euthyphro dilemma has been resolved in the sense that the nature of God determines reality including moral reality. There is no moral law above God to which God is beholden or must submit or he is to be judged immoral. It doesn’t work that way unless God is a being among other beings and he is not. He is Being Itself and determines what is moral by his nature. That is the divine authority.

Apparently you haven’t resolved the dilemma in a way that removes that possibility so your judgements regarding the Old Testament hard passages are tempered by that overriding concern.

There is no possibility that the Euthyphro dilemma can be applied to God so the concern isn’t a real one.

Divine Command theory is likewise a non-starter because God’s commands are not subject to moral scrutiny. The nature of God defines morality it isn’t subservient to morality.

It is a lack of understanding of God’s nature that makes people think these are issues.

 

[HarryStotle]

That people are scandalized by God is more a feature of narcissism and egocentricity including the proliferation of hedonistic behaviour than it is about this issue.

People don’t want anyone telling them what to think or do so finding a possible fault in God provides a convenient excuse for getting out of his jurisdiction. The underlying problem is they don’t understand ths nature of God to begin with. In fact they don’t understand the nature of morality either.