"Genocide" and The Bible Part 2

Title:
"Genocide" and The Bible Part 2

Description:
Is genocide condoned in the OT? The argument that I THINK someone might make about this might look like the following: 1. The biblical God CANNOT commit any unjust act (Authority: theological tradition) 2. God ordered the killing of children (Authority: biblical text) 3. The killing of children can never be a 'just' act, regardless of competing ethical demands in a given situation. (Authority: someones personal moral intuition) 4. God, therefore , ordered an 'unjust act'. (authority: substitution of terms) 5. The ordering of an 'unjust act' is itself an 'unjust act' (authority: not sure--this is somewhat controversial in ethical theory, but I will grant it here for the purposes of illustration) 6. The biblical God, therefore, committed an unjust act. (authority: substitution of terms) 7. Therefore, the biblical God CAN commit an unjust act. (authority: from the actual to the possible) And at this point we would have a clear logical contradiction between statement #1 and #7, and presumably could conclude that that God could not exist (since our concept of this God contained a 'hard contradiction'). But notice the problem--the whole thing stands or falls on the accuracy of the personal moral intuition in Step 3. It there is no reason to believe it applies WITHOUT EXCEPTION, then our attempt at constructing a hard contradiction this way fails. Credits and Sources: Glen Miller: http://www.christian-thinktank.com/ James Patrick Holding: http://www.tektonics.org/

Author:
mdean1215

Tags:
truth, genocide, murder, israelites, christian, god, bible, atheism, agnosticism, apologetics, skepticism, morality, fundamentalist, religion, literalism, homicide, ethnic, cleansing, intolerance, crime, humanity, child, deconversion, story, holysinecure, ProfMTH,