It was a rather depressing trip to the Creation Ministries of the Ozarks yesterday. It’s a cheesy little place which slavishly follows the dogma of Answers in Genesis — the first people I talked to there parroted the Ham Party Line. It was all presuppositionalism, worldviews, “we’re just interpreting the same facts that you do, only through a biblical lens,” all that relativistic bullshit that they use as an excuse to avoid facing the fact that they deny almost all the evidence. I did get the one guy to admit that their method is to accept the Bible as truth and then glean through the scientific evidence to find the bits that fit their predispositions, but even that minor triumph was hollow: he thought it was a virtue of creationism!
They generally seemed like very nice people, who were pleased to have this crowd packing their little place. They offered us cookies and juice. I think we made their month.
I was dismayed at one bit of conversation with Dr Rod Butterworth, head of the place. He was trying to explain how the bloody god of the Old Testament really wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.
“You don’t understand: all those people he had to kill, were horrible people. They deserved to be killed!”
To which I replied, “But that’s exactly the excuse Hitler used to murder the Jews!”
“No…” He seemed slightly nonplussed.
One of Mattir’s spawn was there, and she explained to him that it was true, that Jews were accused of blood libel, and the Nazis claimed they used Jesus’ blood in evil rituals.
“Oh, well, there probably were Jews who did that, who hated Christianity, and those Jews would have deserved it.”
You could have knocked me flat with a feather.
I pointed out that his god, according to his myth, exterminated the entire population of the planet, except for 8 people. Was he really arguing that all of those people, even the babies, were all so wretchedly evil that they deserved death?
He replied that yes, they did, because they refused to worship god, and god as their creator had every right to do with them as he will.
I chose not to mention that his “museum” was full of people who refuse to worship his tyrannical god, and considered those acts immoral, no matter whether they were done by a creator.
Maybe they weren’t such nice people after all. I didn’t want to give him an excuse to commit justifiable homicide.
…wow.
The lengths they’ll go to to let their mass murdering god off the hook. I wish it was surprising anymore.
Fair point: polite manners and hospitality do not make you “nice people” if you favor and excuse genocide. Clueless saps.
The only excuse their god has for all of its claimed atrocities and threats of eternal punishment is that, mercifully, it doesn’t exist.
Uh, what’s the evidence that these people were “wicked”? Same as the “evideence” for the flood?
So all you have to do is claim that people are wicked and that you’re doing God’s work in genocide? What about it, WLC?
Glen Davidson
Jeez at least some of the Christians I know would’ve said Hitler was lying but god doesn’t make mistakes instead of rationalizing hitler.
Troy Newman of Operation Rescue said Dr. Tiller was guilty of Blood Guilt (really no different than Blood Libel) and therefore had to be beheaded (he quotes a biblical reference for that). Then his follower, Scott Roeder goes and shoots the doctor in the head. These fundies really hate being compared to their fellow Christian creationist, anti-abortion Nazis don’t they?
From the twitter pics I saw, from the outside the place looks like a glorified petrol station.
So, then, “I am a jealous god” does have a certain whack to it. If you bother with that sort of wackiness.
http://www.mbcpathway.com/2011/07/creation-ministries-of-the-ozarks-tackles-evolution/
Well you see, they were evil, persecuting us. So secularists and theistic evolutionists deserved to die.
How does that fail to logically follow from WLC (with the other IDiots) and these particular apologists for genocide? The logic for causing any level of evil exists in their religions.
Glen Davidson
Oh what the fuck. That’s just… in-fucking-credible.
But, *high fives* to Mattir spawn.
The link PZ posted doesn’t work: “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.” Is there a small puff of smoke in Missouri? We can but hope.
The sad thing is that in a thousand years from now, they’ll still be using the same excuse to get their god off the hook.
Clicked the link:
“Bandwidth Limit Exceeded”
That just about says it all.
Just think, these xians are the same folks who complain that skeptics have no cause to be ethical, upstanding people, and that if the xians didn’t believe in some god-concept, nothing would stop them from a psychotic breakdown. This ‘museum’ visit makes it sound like they’re already gone.
Not only does God forgive his believers, but God’s believers forgive him.
But I forgive God also. He had no choice in those acts. Since he does not exist, all of his acts are stories invented by humans, and we know how bad some of them can be.
The guilt belongs with those humans who invented the stories, and with those humans who believe those stories and think God is great BECAUSE of those acts, and more so with those believers who use those stories to justify their own bad acts.
“We’re interpreting the same Bible you do, only through a moral lens.”
“You don’t understand: all those people he had to kill, were horrible people.”
Give ’em an inch of a ‘reason’ to judge and hate, and they’ll take a mile. One will get you ten that guy isn’t fond of gays or librulz or atheists or environmentalists or…well, they gotta hate SOMEBODY, don’t they?
I want to know if any sex was had on the exhibits like you discouraged, PZ.
Beautiful.
You should’ve tried yanking at his wig or peeling the rubber mask off his face: clearly Dr. Rod Butterworth is William Lane Craig in disguise (or vice-versa)!
And now at least one of them will claim a debate with Prof. P.Z. Myers on his vita…
Its the Marc Antony ploy:
God kills millions, but it must be good, for God is an honorable…er, god.
God kills babies, but it must be good, for God is an honorable…god.
God kills the innocent, but it must be good, for God is an honorable god.
And so on. The formula is this:
God x, but it must be good, for God is an honorable god
where x has the value of any horrific thing that, if done by a human, would be heinous; for example one can substitute x for the repeated rape and the enslavement of countless little girls, or as in this case, genocide.
Ecce homo.
Yes. That is exactly what they are taught from childhood. I remember the picture in our Sunday school book of people drowning as the Great Flood began, crying desperately for help as Noah and his family shut the doors to the ark. It was a very disturbing picture that made me feel bad, but I was quickly assured that those drowning people all DESERVED to die because they had made fun of Noah who was a true servant of God.
Religion fucks people up.
That is just a common lie of creationists. They don’t interpret the facts, they throw out, distort, and ignore 99% of them. At least.
The vast majority don’t even know how much biological data there is. They carefully maintain the bag over their heads.
Just remember, we’re the ones with no basis for morality and we are mired in moral relativism.
Frankly, if that’s moral absolutism, then it can fuck right off.
“deserved to die”? Isn’t there a line in their book that says if you are wronged to turn the other cheek or something? I think some of those morons better check up on the meaning of the parable of the good Samaritan.
RamblinDude: Yeah, same thing happened to me. I very specifically remember a picture of several men, women and children (all white, for some reason, even though this is one generation before the divergence of the races according to the creos) desperately clinging to a rock, trying to help each other up, exactly like evil people wouldn’t do. I specifically thought that: “if they are such terrible people, why are they wasting time helping each other instead of shoving each other off to get on that rock?” The answer is that very few humans indeed have ever been as evil as the Bible teachers like to pretend in order to justify this. There was also, of all things, a tiger trying to get on the rock. I felt immensely sad for the tiger. Even if those people were all evil, the tiger wasn’t.
From the quote in #8,
So, persecution is a form of…persecution.
Rod Butterworth, founding member of the Tautology club.
I said it before, I will say it again: Religion is Stockholm syndrome on a galactic level.
According to the propaganda, the Biblical god needs no excuse to kill people. He goes on killing sprees just because he can. Some kids mock Elisha’s baldness and Yahweh whistles up a couple of bears to do some smiting. Get Ol’ Yahweh the least bit cranky and it’s a very good year for the undertaker.
I think that the only happy Christians are those that either 1) have no idea what Christianity entails, or 2) have a dangerous streak of sadism.
Through a “Biblical Lens”, eh? Well there are good lenses and bed lenses aren’t there? There are lenses like the ones in my glasses that correct my myopia. That’s a good, useful lens. The proverbial “Biblical lens” would no doubt be green in one part, purple in another, orange in yet another, all wibbly-wobbly in the middle and blurry all over.
Excellent point about how despite their good manners and smiles they still had a wretched viewpoint. This is what tone obsessed accomodationists just don’t get. The idea that how you say things is more important than what you say is absolute drivel. I would rather a swearing, ill mannered sceptic than a courteous, polite bigot. So should anyone with a lick of sense.
Which is the opposite of any search for untainted evidence.
I’m the judge, and I’m just interpreting the evidence of your guilt or innocence through my understanding that you totally suck.
Oh yeah, you’d like that sort of interpretation of the facts to be used on you.
Glen Davidson
This is one example supporting my decision to dump Christianity like a bad habit. The stupid, it burns.
The Bible was a bunch of books cobbled together, copy edited (to fit prejudices) and then made out to be God’s word by folks who wouldn’t know the voice of God if it came up and blasted them out of their complacency.
I’d sooner trust most of the people here, because they can be trusted. Hell, I’d sooner trust the morals of an atheist, because his ethos is based on reason and real world experience.
To quote Bugs, “What a maroon.”
Benjamin, #27
Surely we haven’t inflicted ourselves on the Milky Way yet.
Probably not. Most fundies are christofascist Dominionist theocrats with a carefully maintained ability to hate just about everyone.
To them, Scott Roeder is a hero and in their minds, they are short a few million dead gays, atheists, scientists, Moslems, and uppity women. Xians learned millennia ago that while it can be hard to convert Pagans, it is always easy to kill them.
Hitchens: Xianity lost its best argument when they stopped burning people at the stake.
What keeps them in check is real simple. The police, law, courts, prisons, and the US armed forces.
Yeah, I so want these people and their death cult in control of our nuclear arsenal.
DaughterSpawn is what happens when homeschooled 15 year old girls spend a year wearing a sweatjacket with Sharpie decorations consisting of a huge Gnu A on the back, a squid on the front, and autographs by (among others) Richard Carrier and PZ Myers. We accept the tsk-ing of our Squidly Overlord™, roll our eyes at his oddities of opinion, and continue our antisocial ways of corrupting the Christian homeschoolers among whom we live.
The other amazing thing reported by Spawn yesterday was SonSpawn’s getting some serious pervy-unsafe-guy vibes off of one of the museum staff, who asked him to come out to his car to get a “book that would change his life.” Apparently SonSpawn checked to make sure he would remain in visual range and hollering distance of the rest of the Skepticon folks.
I spent yesterday observing the electricians and utility guys replacing the 60 year old breaker panel and 3-strand overhead power lines at our house. No Skepticon for me, alas, but at least we’ve completed the prerequisites to re-roofing our house.
Just remember, folks, there are 2+ billion Christians and 1+ billion Muslims. Sleep tight!
Oh, but at least you can disprove the Abrahamic religions with a few years’ careful study. Much less easy to divest yourself of the Dharmic ones, especially Buddhism.
These are the Nazi’s of the 40’s.
If they believe that their ‘god” could kill others, it is just a step away from they, themselves, being able to kill others in the name of their “god”.
This is how it starts.
It starts with people being seen as “other” and then “evil” and then it becomes easier to justify their killing.
Whenever I get into an argument with a fundie with a group present, I typically ask them whether they would kill someone just because they believe that god told them them to.
The number of times I get yes, followed by at least one horrified look from the other people present at their answer entirely justifies the continued use of this strategy.
Considering the way the police act in the United States that’s nowhere near as reassuring as I think you intended it to be.
“Nice” is not the same thing as “good.” I’m sure they’re very pleasant to their neighbors who drop by, and always have a smile and a greeting when they see you at the supermarket, and when they’re behind closed doors with their own families, they think children should be trained first and loved later.
The whole message of “Into The Woods”. :)
Mattir – so what book did the guy give him?
Your last sentence says it all, PZ. For all their smiles and happy talk, these are NOT nice people. The distance between fundys of this type and the Eric Rudolphs of the world is exceedingly small. Trust me, for in my dark past I was once one of them.
I’m not very gun-savvy, so forgive my ignorance. Is a “biblical lens” the same as a rifle scope?
Nigel @15: +1, my friend. +1.
Mattir, your spawn continue to inspire.
Likewise, neither is it kind.
I wonder what the accommodationists have to say to revelations like these, other than “Myers, why do you always have to track down the fringe elements? There are a lot of perfectly reasonable Christians who believe Hitler was an atheist.”
So, according to Butterworth, the problem wasn’t that the Nazis were murdering Jews, it was that the Nazis were murdering the wrong Jews. If they had only limited themselves to murdering ‘uppity’ Jews with bad things to say about a quite possibly mythical (and, if a man called Jesus of Nazareth did live at all, ironically most likley Jewish) Palestinian carpenter and the weird cult of personality that has built up around him, then it seems that Butterworth would be the first to hail them as heroes standing in noble defence of the one true faith(TM).
Creationism attracts some real charmers, doesn’t it?
So, theists like Butterworth claim that someone who is instrumental in bringing another person into being has the moral right to do whatever they please with the person they brought into the world? Thus, by their own logic, a parent has every right to kill, maim, rape or otherwise abuse their children if the mood so takes them, and laws that render such acts illegal are unjust?
Remind me why it is that we supposedly cannot be good without this joker’s psychotic blood-hungry deity again?
“Biblical lens” = opaque oxymoron.
I have no doubt that if an average German of 1942 were to somehow have gotten an invitation to see Hitler (yes, I know. Godwin’s law. Suck it up), that Adolph would have greeted them at the door with an infectious smile and a gracious handshake. He would have been an interesting and engaging conversationalist and would have showed them works of art and literature. It would have been a most enjoyable afternoon.
Where in the world would anyone get the idea that “nice” and “evil” don’t coexist? Al Capone was a great guy if he liked you.
Mattir’s Spawn seem to be pretty much completely awesome.
The thing that gets me is that these batshit death cultists have so brainwashed themselves that they have no idea how creepy they come off to the rest of us when they get honest about what they believe.
I’d just like to comment on this whole “nice” thing. I remember another specific instance where Dan Savage while on Real Time with Bill Maher said the same about his time among some fundamentalists. It was something to the same effect: “They believe we are going to burn forever, but they are nice about it!”
Sure, I value politeness as much as anyone but many people everywhere are nice and many more people in rural areas are even nicer simply because they have to be since they see the same people all the time as opposed to someone in an urban area.
Fundamentalism is represented more in rural areas, rural areas (because of demographics) harbor more “nice” people, hence fundamentalists tend to be nice people. The religion aspect is simply correlation, not causally related to “niceness.”
But did they have banjos?
On the topic of “nice,” I remember reading some article about a decade ago that put up an interesting contrast between hospitality and altruism. They did some experiments to compare different US states in terms of politeness and aid. The interesting thing: The southern states rated high in politeness, but poor in altruism, while states like New York got the opposite.
In short, New Yorkers would be insulting, but they’d still actually be helpful while the states known for “southern hospitality” would generally be polite to someone in distress, but they wouldn’t actually do anything helpful.
No, you don’t get it, Tru Atheistes. Those people did not deserve to die. I don’t care how young they were, or how they lived.
No, they had to die. How else do you get them into hell where they belong?
You people think death is bad because it is forever. Rejoice, I tell you, it is only temporary, for they are risen as soon as no one is looking! They receive everlasting life, by the Lord’s grace, eternal life, I tell you! Verily, I say to you, they get their reward in full. Fear not, brothers, they are given everlasting life!
Does a piece of wood, thrown into an incinerator, not become transformed? Does it not become pure black coal, that it may burn even hotter?
Imagine, the ecstasy of having fleshly sins removed and for eternity, ever more intensely and freeing!
What mercy does He show, what depths of infinite love, by an eternal cleansing of the sinful flesh!
What appears hateful and cruel to the ignorant is infinite love and mercy in the eyes of His sheep.
So praise the One, and join in spreading His message of forgiveness and cleansing love!!
Wha-hey, looks like we lured in one of the brainless pro-genocide freaks.
I’ll make the popcorn.
Points irony meter at tushcloots
Hmm, a reading of 1460+1754i. I have no idea how to interpret that.
[blockquote]Those people did not deserve to die. I don’t care how young they were, or how they lived. No, they [i]had[/i] to die. How else do you get them into hell where they belong?[/blockquote]
It would be so very, very easy to Godwin this one.
and-u-say@49,
Who is this “Adolph” of whom you speak? Why would he have met visitors to Adolf Hitler?
“We’re interpreting the same Bible you do, only through a moral lens.” – nigelThe
BoldPureGoldMaybe if you put it in polar coordinates… ?
I feel sorry for you. I hope you will eventually get better.
Just goes to show the depth of dellusion of these people. But, it does fit in with the notion that god was bored, and created humans to give him something to do and play with as he sees fit…however warped that idea is.
Makes the contemporary idea of a personal “loving heavenly father” seem rather ridiculous, and shows how under this thin veil of “nicety” of modern Christianity, lies the insanity and brutality of the past. All the more reason to continue to fight for and maintain separation of church and state.
“Oh, well, there probably were Jews who did that, who hated Christianity, and those Jews would have deserved it.”
well, that’s new.
instead of Darwin -> Hitler, we have Jesus -> Hitler.
Jesus came back in the form of Hitler to enact bloody vengeance on the Jews.
all makes sense to me now.
*rolleyes*
yup.
Hitler had a mustache…
Jesus had a mustache*…
there ya have it.
Hitler was really Jesus resurrected. Can’t argue with those facts!
*I link, just to show there really is a band called “Jesus had a Moustache”
@#54:
“Any sufficiently wry wag is indistinguishable from a fullblown batshit nutcase.” — Stephen Coltrin.
tushcloots:
One of my favorite ecstasies is considered a fleshly sin by Christians.
Actually, all of my favorite ecstasies are considered sins by most Christians.
The only god who understands me is Bacchus.
This biblical lens must be like drunk glasses; you put them on, and any shitty thing god does looks good.
Killed By Fish
Those murdered babies got what they deserved because they didn’t suck up to god.
Just tried to connect with the Ministry to thank them for their gracious acceptance of you Godless heathens at Creation Ministries but it seems they have exceeded their bandwidth and cannot be reached… Holy Mother of God! And PZ the Godless has a working site…. God help us! The world is going to the devil.
So fucking sharp they cut themselves every-time they fart!
Nah. Religion is much, much smaller.
Dr. Meyers, why do you go to a creation science museum and argue with the staff about biblical ethics? Next time, take a trip to a seminary and ask a qualified scholar about the same issue. I’m eager to read your blog post about such a visit.
@72:
‘Qualified scholar’
HAH-Hahahahahaha!
Recall that Kirk Durston, a Canadian creationist, said that if he were convinced that he was ordered to do so by God, he would commit genocide. There is no limit to the insanity.
So, in essence, the same old thing yet again.
Glen Davidson
Caemeron,
A qualified Bible scholar should either be wise enough to avoid that kind of a discussion or be on the same side of the debate as professor Myers. Unless he’s a liar for God and/or profit. In any case, I’m sure it would be entertaining. On that much, we can agree.
He who believes any baby is evil enough to be smitten by God shall be smitten by God himself! Not once, not twice, but thrice – and shall live forever in the deepest bowels of the excrement of the earth. Without toilet paper.
Fester 13:19
“Surely we haven’t inflicted ourselves on the Milky Way yet.”
We sit at the center of an ever-expanding sphere of I Love Lucy, Mr. Whipple and Garner Ted Armstrong. This is how the rest of the galaxy will view all of us.
#72 Cameron
‘Next time, take a trip to a seminary and ask a qualified scholar about the same issue’
A …what ya say?
‘Qualified scholar in a seminary’…’now there is a contradiction in terms and context?
The only thing they seem qualified to pontificate on is either kiddy fiddling or financial fiddling.
Xianity ain’t got it no scholars just circle jerkists with no clue backed by personal incredulity and self imposed ignorance!
‘Qualified scholar’ indeed…are you ‘aving a laugh?
Actually, I don’t think we’ve inflicted ourselves anywhere else at all.
But no, we’ve not been in very much of it, which seems to be what was meant.
Glen Davidson
I’m not so sure. Not everybody is as certain about the barbarity of the Ancient Hebrews as you guys are.
There once was a scholar from seminary
Who proclaimed himself God’s own emissary
“However many he may smite
God is still in the right
His atrocities will be glorified in hymnary.”
Cameron:
It’s not the ancient Hebrews we’re talking about. It’s the stories of the Bible, which literalists insist are true.
If those stories were indeed true, God is the barbarian.
Rhymes are not valid arguments, thanks.
Unsupported assertions are not sound arguments, thanks. :)
Assuming you’re addressing me, it wasn’t meant to be an argument.
You’re welcome.
Bronze Dog:
And this is why in spite of their rudeness, I still think NYers rock. If I needed help, I’d rather someone actually DO something than merely be polite, even if the former comes with a dollop of brashness.
…does the study attempt to explain the weird tendency I noticed in New York for people to act like they’re going to hold the door for you, then let it swing?
Oh really? Do explain why it is OK for yahweh to invent genocide and kill everyone but 8 people.
Explain why it is OK for god to help the ancient Jews genocide the Canaanites and steal their land, women, and stuff.
Explain why it is OK to stone disobedient children, nonvirgin brides, atheists, apostates, heretics, sabbath breakers, and gays to death like it says in the bible.
And why was it a good idea for the Sky Monster to create different languages at Babel.*
The evidence for the existence of “qualified biblical scholars” is as much as the evidence for the existence of the Invisible Sky Fairy. But you can volunteer if you want, seeing as how it’s all just make believe and playing let’s pretend.
*Actually we know why. The god was afraid of humans. Same reason he kicked them out of Eden.
Hey Cameron? Read Thom Stark’s “Is God a Moral Compromiser?” for a thorough teardown of your bullshit. It’s very well-researched and includes plenty of actual biblical Hebrew in translation. Specifically, look up the sections on “herem” warfare and what “devoted to Yahweh” and “placed under the ban” actually mean.
Sure, some people don’t think the ancient Hebrews were utterly barbarous. Some people think homeopathy works, too. One opinion is not as good as another.
‘Not everybody is as certain about the barbarity of the Ancient Hebrews as you guys are’
No indeed committed clowns stick fingers in ears chant ‘all things bright and beautiful’ over and over and totally ignore the scripture in their own badly translated instruction manual.
It is called ‘cherry picking what suits’, xians do it like breathing, only are very inept at thinking while they do so!
They accept all the other codswollop, but when uncomfortable they deny it or, actually try and excuse the inexcusable even though genocide is genocide and it matters not a jot how they go running to hide behind the voluminous skirts of ‘fistikated feelology’…they are condoning literary genocide…they are applauding the death of men, women and children….and actually get righteous about the cheap thrill that the described genocide delivers.
And it does not matter a further twitch of Beelzebub’s whiskers that the biblical stories are for the most part bronze age goat-herder imagination anyway, even though they also borrowed very heavily from earlier fairy tales from earlier versions of brain dead fairy stories to titillate the poor of knowledge, or the more numerous, hard of thinking.
The OT provides overwhelming evidence of the barbarity at least of those who wrote it – I certainly wouldn’t tar all the ancient Hebrews with the same brush.
I clicked on Cameron’s name, taking me to his website. Here’s the stupid, dishonest crap I found right in front my eyes (the post is scolding some Christian idiots who argued with PZ at Scepticon):
Notice first that Cameron is too stupid to get PZ’s name right when he’s writing a post about him. Now to the content: Hitler was a baptised Catholic, he never renounced his Catholicism and was never excommunicated – nor were any of his chief followers except Goebbels, for whom it was the punishment for marrying a divorced Protestant. What Hitler’s personal beliefs were in his later years*, we don’t know for certain, although the best evidence suggests that he was not a doctrinally orthodox Christian, but remained a theist. To say the Nazis “manipulated” the Catholic Church in Germany is a disgustingly cowardly evasion of responsibility: the Catholic Centre Party provided Hitler with the votes to pass the Enabling Act and establish his dictatorship when they did not have to do so, and the Pope chose to sign a concordat with him – consonant with the history of Vatican support for fascism throughout the interwar period.
* In the period preceding the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, when he was first building up the Nazi party, Hitler was certainly a believing Catholic, and drew heavily on a south German tradition of antisemitic Catholic nationalism – see Derek Hastings Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism. Following the failure of the putsch, he reoriented the party to increase its appeal to Protestants.
Look, Cameron. The Ancient Hebrews had a system of morals, a religion, and a culture that worked for them. Like most of their contemporaries, it was high on repressive morality, strict rules, and low on recognition that other people were deserving of respect because they were people. Despite this, many ancient cultures (including the Hebrews) did manage to produce things of value – art, architecture, math, astronomy, philosophy, systems of law. These things deserve recognition and respect for what they are, but also need to be regarded as products of their times. The Code of Hammurabi was radical in its day for stipulating that certain crimes had certain, proportional, punishments. Free-wheeling vendettas were now forbidden. But yet, the code is horrid by modern standards – punishments were excessive, social inequalities were codified and enforced by law, and balance was sorely lacking.
Why are you asserting that we must obey an ancient morality system? A system developed by a seminomadic culture who lived in an arid area, surrounded by enemies that were more powerful than they were is not really applicable to us, who live in a very different time, place and situation.
Why should we worship and honor a god of that time? Why should we force our modern knowledge to submit to the blathering of an ancient people whose understanding was less than ours? Not to say that they were stupid – but their technology, their science was less advanced than ours. I find it incredibly ironic that you Creationists ignore the sensible advice of one of your own great scholars – Augustine advocated jettisoning the Bible’s scientific commentary if it was obviously wrong in favor of modern understanding. Creationism is wrong. It is not correct. Evolution happened and is still happening. Get with the program!
Hey!!! Hey, hey, hey, hey!
It’s me. I’m the one that is living in a charismatic fundamentalist community (my story is somewhere around here).
I can sound better than the christians can, I kid you not.
I just spent a week out at a retreat where they showed a movie of the gospel by Matthew, and an 8 part series called Wild at Heart, which taught that Jesus message was that men are created to be AGGRESSIVE Warriors that do battle AND TAKE RISKY Adventures (sorry, hitting caps lock) for their wifes and family. WAH is a retreat where the masculine primates learn shit their father didn’t teach them, like putting fence posts in, rappelling, fishing, shooting, horse riding, and whooping about everything and competing to be the best, most arrogant alpha malefactor.
I watched a grown man, a pastor, watch a disneyesc(?) tale of a jesus who was constantly wearing a foolish grin and praise His Ever merciful and loving Father and to love your enemy as your brother, and in the next scene, unload on the evil Pharisees (think old westerns where the good guys have white hats, are polite, and never sneer – are quite handsome, actually – and the bad guys, priests, are perpetually sneering, snickering, plotting, and shifting their eyes.
So one minute, love your foes, said to the fucking cutest little 3 yr old in perfectly clean clothes, white teeth, etc, then walk over to temple, heal a blind woman and get asked if that’s okay on sabbath, so he transformse into the cruel twistoid Dennis hopper clone and calls them hypocrites that will be cast into the fires of hell where ther will be weeping and knashing etc.
When he does this cheesy b-grade shtick and the priests scurry away in humiliation, the pastor fucking well leans forward and pumps his fucking fist and goes “Yeahhhh, yeah!”
These fuckers believe that because it was in a movie, that’s exactly how everything transpired and is now observable history that proves god is real.
Every twenty seconds, for five hours a day, I had to bite my toung, gnash my teeth, and weep fo4r how badly my respect for most the men I was with vanished.
I weep because yes, I make up the stupidest ass backwards shite and you guys can’t tell it’s parody, and neither can I, FFS!
I’ve suffered throught Purpose Driven Life classes, writings from one of the most well known and respected (and very smart, of course) authors and theoligists of this time or any, C. FUCKING. S. LEWIS.
I never really met a Christian fundy in my life for more than a few minutes, and I thought all the yahoo child molester (what was his fucking name?) apologists and Hovinds and Hams and ‘inbred tea party holywar get it on i’ts the Apocalypse finally we are saved types’, where robot programs that didn’t really exist but were sick rumours, not real peoples!
Now, I am surrounded by them. The first time I spake evolution, this well read and psych educated counselor starts in with the exact attitudes and answers I only briefly read about.
It is fucking scary, IT IS FUCKING WELL FUCKED UP SHIT SCARY.
I assure you, the fairies and goblins are alive and kicking and visible in this place. Woman giving a sermon wednesday night (big snowfall, kind of) relates her testimonial about driving a few measly miles up an 8 lane freeway through town and suddenly got scared and prayed to fuckface, the god of mercy and genocidal dictators, who not only saw it in his majestically awe inspiring heart to protect her four wheel drive SUV and her family in it, SHE SAW TWO ANGELS APPEAR, ONE ON EACH FENDER!!&**%$!! and because of that she was delivered through a ten minute drive fucking safely!, can you fucking understand the miracles going on here?!
There is no way I can see to get through to anyone on the tiniest fucking plane of logic and common sense.
I have to get hosting and my own website, and write this shit down. But you know something? I can understand why they believe in the face of incontrovertible onslaughts of reason and empiricism. I even feel drawn in, and safe and secure, with thoughts that this shite is true!!! It is appealing – while you’re sitting in the brainwashing sessions and feeling gooey inside.
But then I remember all the times I’ve posted shit like this on Facebook with them all, and maybe one or two, of 30 – 40, responds and says it’s sad, they’ll be sure to pray.
See, that’s what a christian is supposed to be concerned about, the poorest and the fucking cruelest circumstances imaginable,
and I tried to argue with the Fuckwells that jesus was trying to spread peace and love and take care of the least and most vulnerable among us, and the Fuckwells have the fucking audacity to tell me that, no, we are god’s damn warriors doing battle and we must fight the eternal war against Satan, and that the end times are near anyways, all the signs are coming true, so it isn’t important to try to change the world ythrough compassion and generosity, and protecting each other, and building bridges among nations and each other, and refusing to condone war and see everything as a final battle of the most important war, the one against evil angels……………………………………………………………..
They don’t have a clue, friends. They don’t have the slightest fucking clue how perfectly, 180degrees wrong they are. These are basically very good people, very good. But they don’t understand what they are doing, or why. Only that they’re supposed to, so they help others, us homeless and addicts, and in here it is special.
But some of them truly think I am evil. I am known as the most compassionate and generous person around here, I don’t gossip, fuck up, bitch and whine.
But when I say I don’t believe what they do, it gets chilly. LOL, we watched expelled on day last winter, and then they prayed to be protected from evil and satan, and atheists.
http://www.freerice.com/?utm_source=wfp.org&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=homepage-button#/english-vocabulary/1430
I challenge you people to see who gets the most right in a row. I think we should get screen recorders and show our performances, if you’re a christian.
I got $200 left for the month, but I gots to give some to others instead of getting hosting and get programming just yet.
I have to be good, we have to be good, do good, as much as possible, because it has to be done. We hAVE TO. We have to outweigh their good intentions by a fucking lot. We won’t convince them. I gotta forget about the fundies, they are fucked up bad.
Why does the qualifies Scholar not instead make the trip to the creation science museum to correct the ignorance of those in the pews?
Cameron @ 72;
Marginally more coherent apologia does not make an unevidenced argument any more persuasive, or out-and-out lies any more credible. That is all that your ‘qualified seminary scholars’ are – more accomplished liars.
Until actual, scientific evidence for god is forthcoming (we have already been waiting several thousand years), then all the semantic maneuvering of so called ‘sophisticated theology’ is moot. Without evidence, the null hypothesis holds, and there is no reason to suppose that god is anything more than another flavour of myth, no more real than fairies. Would you take any ‘scholar’ who pontificated on the literal existence of fairies or other mythological creatures seriously in this day and age? No? Neither would we, the difference between us being that we refuse to make a special exception for those who profess the literal existence of the god myth.
Raven,
I’m not of the literalist persuasion and am not interested in defending a global flood. But for the sake of argument I’ll play along. Genesis 6:13 exlains that “…the earth was filled with violence.” This is not an example of god being a dick for the sake of it, but justified punishment.
In regards to the Canaanites, the events described in the Bible hardly count as slaughter of the innocents. They were a very violent people. They were what those non-existent scholars call a “war-culture.” They also fought among themselves and maintained what I’m sure you agree are abhorrent religious practices, like human sacrifice and incest. Certainly practices that would warrant interference, yes?
Disobedient children were stoned, yes, but these were people, for example, who refused help contribute to the family’s survival, putting everybody else’s lives in jeopardy. This is nothing like killing your kid because he stuck his tongue out at you.
Provide reasonable rebuttals to those arguments and I’ll address the rest of your post.
I had a follower of Harold Camping explain to me that not only did God have the Nazis rise to power to kill 6 million Jews so he could get the Jews back in Israel for the end of days, but that he also set up the British Empire just so they could impose the prime meridian to match God’s standard time zone so the prophecy’s in the bible would be accurate.
KG@58
You got me. Good one.
Oh neat I can play this game too.
The Canaanites had their practices for a reason. They were in a resource scarce area of the world and often had to resort to raiding and pillaging for their own survival when harvests were scarce. They they engaged in what seem abhorrent to us like practices of incest, but they were a very limited population at times and had enemies on all sides so they couldn’t actually intermarry least they risk bringing their enemies into camp! They had human sacrifice but you have to understand it wasn’t some malicious cynical attempt to win riches and fortune, it was a desperate superstitious attempt to win favor with the Gods to drive off the diseases, famine, and drought that often plagued them. They were a harsh people only because they lived in harsh times and did what they had to to survive!
tushcloots,
Well then. I didn’t actually fall for it. I was just pretending. Right. Really.
Ok, I did. I agree, it’s sad that what you wrote could have actually been written by someone in all honesty.
Which is why God sent them a prophet to correct their wicked ways?
Oh no, right…the punishment for being war like is being exterminated in a total war. Because for some reason it’s ok then.
Just like how we rape rapists because rape is wrong and we must show them it is wrong by raping them.
Those fucking 4-year-olds refusing to their part in supporting the family, they deserved what they got!
Gregory,
Then why are Dr. Meyers and some of your fellow skeptics arguing over biblical ethics with a group of crazy creationists? In a way I agree with your point, though. If what you’re concerned about is evidence, debates about right and wrong and the nature of God tend to be irrelevant to his existence.
Genocide, idiot. “Interference” is an extremely dishonest euphemism for that.
The only “excuse” for killing the Midianites, save the girls saved for rape, was a long-past supposed “deceit”:
Oh yeah, plenty of reason for gross crimes against humanity. You’re a mindless fuck, Cameron.
Look, you’re stupid and have nothing of value, apparently giving us the best apologetics that you know, and totally fucking up.
If you can ever do anything but be dishonest, try again.
Glen Davidson
Caemeron,
Because they are wrong. And they are very loud about it, trying to teach lies to new generations.
I’ll fucking do it, right fucki8ng now, and I will fucking kick their putrid fucking asses so fucking far in that they’ll be shitting out of their noses.
I bet almost everyone here could. You don’t fucking get it, Cameron, Bible ethics are evil, the Bible is evil. Truth and compassion and love are righteous, and don’t you fucking forget it for one second.
Why I am an atheist:
I was always an atheist, yet I tried to find god from the bottom of my heart because I was hopeless. I asked hundreds of people what god meant to them, how they related to him/it, I tried to find what they had.
The harder I tried, the more I became atheistic, because the more I started feeling the filth of dishonesty and irrationality.
Learning and discovering truth, and sharing the joy of it. That is what I value, more than most christians value God and Jesus.
Because Christians convince themselves they are righteous and it’s okay to be greedy a bit, selfish a bit, hateful of whatever they decide is ungodly. They think a measure of the truth is how much faith it takes to believe it is real, and how difficult it is to figure out or understand.
I am an atheist because I know what all the Christians strive for. I know when I am wrong, a hypocrite, i find the truth easy to see, and that believing somethings that do not make sense is antithetical to life itself.
I am an atheist because no one can tell you what is right, you have to understand it for yourself.
Christians understand this so little that even the promise of being skinned alive and stuffed in a pizza oven while carboxylic acid is sprayed on your bubbling flesh is not enough for them to be slightly vigilant about their behaviour. In fact, I truly think that Christians don’t really believe it themselves.
Obviously.
MYERS not MEYERS
And he was arguing with them because he was there and not some other hypothetical place.
re: “deserved to die”
You’d think a so-called moral religion would hold itself to higher standards than an alien carnivorous plant.
youtube video link
Cameron,
You truly are disgustingly vile.
Yup, all those evil babies and non-human animals really had it coming to them, right?
First, the same comment about children applies. All the Canaanite children were evil were they, Cameron? Second, from whom do we learn about the Canaanites depravity. Oh yes, from the people who slaughtered them. If the Nazis had triumphed, no doubt you would have been certain that the Jews all deserved the holocaust – after all, they were conspiring to take over the world, and were responsible for all its evils, weren’t they?
I see you’re a shameless liar as well as an apologist for genocide, Cameron:
Leviticus 20, 9:
For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death.
Now excuse me, I think I have to go and vomit.
That is simple. You are a monster. An evil person. Humans produce them all too often.
The vast majority of those killed were women, children, babies, and the nonviolent. This is murder of the vast innocents for the crimes of a few. And how did that god-fix work out. Humans are still violent.
Bullcrap. The victors write history. The libels against the Canaanites most likely were just lies after the fact. Actually, archaeology shows that those genocides never happened. The Jews were just a tribe of Canannites. There isn’t even such a thing as the Canaanite language. There are a series of closely related Canaanite languages, one of which is Hebrew. It’s just slaughter fiction by the fundies of that era.
BTW, the vast majority of Canaanites were women, children, babies. This is again, punishment of the many for the (mythological) crimes of a few.
You are just making things up now. All societies have disobedient children. We all manage to raise them without murdering them.
I see you forgot to lie about the nonvirgin brides, sabbath breakers, gays, heretics, atheists, and quiet rape victims that are also supposed to be stoned to death.
Anyone following an OT lifestyle today would be doing multiple life sentences in prison. The FLDS’s Warren Jeffs tried it and got life + 20 years.
This is what disturbs me about religion. The followers so kind and friendly and nice, and you get to like them.
And so often there’s an awful, cruel, hateful person under all of that, and they can spout their horrible, evil dogma while smiling.
It’s just downright freaky.
These are exactly the conversations that you have with Bob Jones University people locally. They will bring you homemade chocolate chip cookies on your birthday, and simultaneously say the most bizarre, scary, outlandish things. The juxtaposition (and the moral disconnect) is really alarming.
I wish they didn’t run the county, but they do.
Cameron does show what xians mean about their religion giving them a purpose in life.
His purpose is to show how xianity creates monsters.
But we already knew that.
Weinberg:
Good people will do good. Bad people will do evil. But it takes religion to get good people to do evil.
Oh well, it’s always nice to be reminded that xianity produces monsters frequently. Which is why I dropped out of the religion. Why millions of people a year leave it.
Cameron obviously prays at the alter of WLC
Biblical barbarism proven: some righteous dude’s daughter gets raped. He cuts her up into several pieces and sends one piece to each tribe of Israel so they can share in his outrage.
I found this as I was reading the Old Testament.
Interference?
Sure.
God snaps his fingers, they quit.
Interference done, nobody gets hurt or killed or goes to everlasting hell. Is that the sort of ‘interference’ you meant?
That’s totally pathetic. If god is omnipotent, then god could always fix whatever was wrong with his creations. He wouldn’t have had to punish anyone-except for the fact that like many of his worshipers, god apparently loves sadism and death.
I apologize for misspelling his name.
Anyway,
Actually, yes, that’s precisely the case. But you’re too busy foaming at the mouth to look up any of the relevant passages.
Furthermore, there were strict instructions given to the Hebrews about their conduct. For example, they were first required to offer peace (Deut 20.10-16) and, if the fighting did commence, were to treat the women of the cities they invaded with respect (Deut 12.10) The non-existence scholars say that this was unparalleled in the Ancient Near East.
Cameron (#97)
Justified? What the fuck is wrong with you? An all-powerful being is a monster if his best “solution” for dealing with an earth filled with violence is killing off the entire planet. That sort of “justification” is a reflection of the poverty of your own imagination. I hope you don’t have kids; I’d hate to see what punishments you “justify”using on them.
(#104)
If only we could make what believers think about god irrelevant simply by pointing out that god doesn’t exist. But we can’t; people continue to justify their very real actions by claiming it’s what god wants, so it’s worth it to point out that if their version of god exists, what their god wants is evil.
Seeing as only Noah and his small family survived, and they certainly didn’t see the whole earth, how exactly do we know that the earth was “filled with violence”? The word of god? The same omnicidal maniac responsible for the flood? No other surviving independent witnesses to corroborate? How convenient for it.
And assuming there was violence, why, exactly is violence bad? Only because the innocent and non-violent majority suffer harm from the violent few.
Omnicide of all these non-violent innocents solves the problem how? Is justified punishment how?
And what’s more earth-fillingly violent than a universal omnicidal flood?
Cameron, stop switching between historical fact and what the Bible says. You lose on both counts.
Archaeology shows that the Hebrews did not move into Canaan: they were one of its indigenous tribes, which rose to prominence about the time the Old Testament was written. So if Canaanites were violent and incestuous, so were they.
The stories in the Old Testament were invented by the Hebrews to give themselves a glorious past and to assert their title to the land by right of conquest. In other words, they thought that genocides were A-OK. That part of the OT is a book of horrors.
Psychological experiments show that recounting the ‘glorious exploits’ of the OT, without ascribing them to the bible, to young children produce negative judgements. They know that the acts are evil. But if you tell them that God said it was OK or God commanded it, then they squirm and change their minds. Even children know it’s wrong. Even children can be corrupted by your religion into condoning evil acts. Now, where was that verse about “By their fruits you shall know them”?
Not only is he not very powerful, he is incompetent.
We humans were created in his own image. Things went off the rails immediately in the Garden. God’s attempts to fix his mistakes usually involve murder and never, ever work.
He keeps blaming us for his own incompetence.
The next scheduled fix is to destroy the earth and kill 7 billion people any day now. I’m sure it will work as well as anything else he failed at.
Amazing. This, after some progressive theists complained on Twitter today that Rick Santorum was “distorting” Christianity when he claimed that suffering is an essential part of being Christian, as a way to justify not helping poor people.
All we need to know about Cameron the psychopath.
Right. Turning all the girls into sex slaves is SO respectful.
Whether they deserved to die is not the issue. It’s whether one who is so willing to kill could be called good or benevolent. People could have deserved to die and killing them would still be a horrible act.
Did any gay sex occur on the exhibits? I NEED 2 KNO!!!
“we’re just interpreting the same facts that you do, only through a biblical lens,”
It just happens that that lens is a kaleidoscope.
Amphiox: As long as the bible says they were just ‘taking wives’, that point is probably going to fly over their heads. After all, as long as marriage is in there somewhere and it’s not gay, everything is great.
/bleh
Anyone who wants to understand religion should take a look at the wikipedia entry for OCD- as someone with friend with the disorder, every aspect of religious belief from the unseen, all-hearing and all knowing watcher, to ritual and feelings of personal uncleanliness and responsibility for unknown events and others actions, to expectations of magical undetectable and invisible but terrible punishment for minor or unidentified acts, all are evidenced as derivatives of the obsessive compulsive mind.
Sure, the Hebrew tribe of Canaanites offered peace: and God hardened the hearts of their listeners so that the Hebrews would be forced to slaughter them. Good plan!
Meanwhile, if your God existed and were all-powerful, he could make all the evil people drop dead and leave the rest alive. But nooooo. It’s just post hoc reasoning on your part: “God did this evil thiing so it must be justified.”
I run rings around you logically.
I’d like to help spiff up their Noah exhibit a bit. There are scads of photos of drowned people of all ages from Bangladesh, Myanmar, New Orleans, people caught in flash floods,etc. I’d be willing to print out a bunch of these and laminate them for display.
Don’t come down too hard on Cameron – I think he’s just playing Devil’s advocate.
You’re not just a liar, Cameron, but an exceptionally stupid one. Do you suppose none of us have read the Bible, or even if we haven’t, can’t look things up?
Here’s the (KJV) text of Deut. 20.10-17:
10 When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. 11 And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. 12 And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: 13 And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: 14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies , which the LORD thy God hath given thee. 15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations. 16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: 17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee
So, some cities get the choice of being tributary, or having all their men killed and the women and children enslaved. You do know, Cameron, that slaves were routinely raped? But in the cities that God has given the Israelites for an inheritance, every living thing is to be slaughtered. These are specifically excluded, in verses 15-16, from the earlier verses about giving cities the chance to submit.
Deut. 12.10, incidentally, says nothing at all about women or conquering cities.
alkaloid,
If I was to use the “God could do anything” solution in response to any objection raised to my beliefs, you all would ridicule me to no end for believing in spite of evidence. Yet, I provide a reasonable answer to a problem, which you happen not to like, and the new complaint is…”WELL GOD CAN DO ANYTHING I THOUGHT!!!!!”
Hypocrisy – nice.
Besides forcing people to change their behavior, something I’m told you folks find equally detestable, I don’t see much other option besides warning people (and they were warned many years prior to a flood)and then carrying out punishment since they refused to change their ways.
Monado,
your explanation fails for one simple reason. Post-Exodus Israel didn’t want to engage in these wars, as the text records. So for what reason did they make these accounts up?
Okay then.
Cameron, change your ways or __________ will come and slaughter your entire family.
Seeing as you feel this behaviour is entirely justified, you better hop to it.
What’s reasonable about it, vile liar?
So, idiot, are you saying that God is limited?
You saying “God can do anything” for an evolutionary feature, say, is special pleading. Saying “God can do anything” when he “actually chooses genocide” is simply comparing actions to proclaimed powers of the omnipotent God. Are you really too stupid to see the difference, dumbfuck?
“God is limited,” your stupid answer, neither explains the limits nor accords with what is provisionally understood about “God.”
The Midianites were warned? Of course not, shithead, not even according to the depraved writings for which you’re lying.
Glen Davidson
That you find genocide to be a “reasonable answer” shows exactly what sort of vile scum you are Cameron.
Note to self:
Get popcorn.
Watch Cameron dig himself deeper and deeper.
Hint to Cameron: Using a delusion to support belief in a delusion isn’t helping you at all.
Camerloon’ and his brain dead ilk can quote all the‘fistikated feelology’ they can invent…but in the end it is all an xian smoke and mirror gambit.
Because there is only one simple fact they cannot manipulate to suit…oh sure they can lie and stamp their footsies in frustrated tantrum and pretend it was a known reality, but they cannot provide one nugget of evidence, not one drop, to the one relevant most important question in the history of humanity that they skirt like nervous donkeys….
DOES THEIR VERSION OF GOD ACTUALLY EXIST?
They provide that one piece of pure evidence then all else is as important as a midge farting in a hurricane!
But they cannot, and they know it, so they play smoke and mirrors on bullshite arguments about whether or not genocide was justified in a fucking fairy story, tis what they do, it is the only thing they can do…to avoid the gaping black hole in their delusional argument.
But they can not…their make believe hero has seemingly abandoned them to pretend he is there…when in fact he is not nor has not nor ever will be!
Cameron is just demonstrating a reliable xian principle. Down to lying about what is actually in the magic book.
They never, ever miss an opportunity to show the absolute intellectual and moral bankruptcy of their religion.
Xians, making atheists since 33 CE.
Incidentally, Cameron, it’s not our problem that your religion teaches that God can do anything: it’s a staple of doctrinally orthodox Christianity. It is then perfectly reasonable to ask why God, according to your scriptures, preferred genocidal massacres as the method of clearing the “Promised Land” for the Israelites, rather than, for example, creating a new island in the Mediterranean and implanting in the current inhabitants a desire to move there.
It’s not a lens, it’s a filter. (And a pretty damn good one too.)
How do we know PZ is not lying about his conversation at the Creation Museusm?
I wouldn’t put it past someone who has as much hate as he does to do just that.
Is there a recording available?
Would he be SUPRISED if there IS a recording and it does not match what the says in his post? (Hint, this is a trick question.)
Because, you know, there are just endless cubic kilometers of Jesus’ blood to play with. Actually, there is now a dehydrated version of Jesus’ Blood – Just Add Water.
So, yeah, Those Jews must have been doing that, and got teh Hitler all riled up. It’s Their fault no matter which side you were on.
Oh, just shut up and give us a link to the recording or to a reliable transcript. You’re not clever, idiot.
And no, I don’t in the least suspect that PZ was lying, as we routinely see this kind of BS from apologists. At best I would expect that you found something left out, or some slight difference, that you wish to cling to in order to fulfill your hatred by mislabeling a paraphrase as a lie.
If he actually did lie, I’d like to know. So provide some evidence already, dumbass.
Glen Davidson
Unlikely. The fundies in Missouri were just repeating what they all say. Channeling Ken Ham, Robertson, Falwell, Hagee, etc. and William Lane Craig. Craig says the same thing about the Big Boat genocide and the Canaanite massacres.
Just look at Cameron who claims he isn’t even a biblical literalist.
So are you a Monster too? Feel free to demonstrate your intellectual and moral bankruptcies. Xians have their version of Halloween often. In fact, it seems to last 365 days out of the year.
No it’s not. You are lying. Lying is one of the 3 sacraments of fundie-ism. They all lie.
There’s still plenty of time for that.
That’s not a reasonable answer, though.
A reasonable answer, if you really thought that god was omnipotent, would be god simply stopping the behavior in question (ie, arrows never reached targets, or people just couldn’t pick up swords with bloodshed in mind, or victims were always suddenly five feet away from where a blow would land). This doesn’t even involve god ‘hardening the heart’-which the bible also says that god did, but as usual, only so he could kill more people later.
A reasonable answer isn’t killing everyone, guilty and innocent-especially if you have the power to not do so.
In fact, there was an episode of Star Trek (the original series) with a planet of insanely powerful pacifist aliens that summarily prevented any violence that was done upon them as well as in the skies above. Are you telling me that the creator of the entire universe has less creativity than Gene Roddenberry?
The problem is that you want to claim that god is omnipotent, AND that god is good, while at the same time, the god of the bible resorts to:
Omnicide
Genocide
Genocide
and more
Genocide
You guys are clearly unfamiliar with any scholarly work on this subject not written by Hector Avalos, as you constantly refer to the war with the Canaanites as a genocide.
Driving a violent people (a widely recognized fact among historians) out of their territory, under very strict conditions, and after providing ample warning, is hardly a genocide. By the way, if some of the population heeded the warning and left (they did), you don’t have a genocide, idiots.
In fact, it was only those who refused to leave who were killed in the subsequent fighting. The goal after all was to wipe out the corrupt culture, not kill every Canaanite in existence. This is reflected in the language used in the relevant passage where God gives instructions to Israel. More often than not, the language describes “driving them out of the land.
Now, the rat king, if I went around murdering my neighbors and sacrificing my children, I doubt you’d a find anybody sympathetic to my situation if I ended up in a ditch somewhere. But I don’t do any of those things, and your analogy sucks out loud.
Glen,
taking all the factors I’ve described into consideration, besides forcefully changing people’s behavior (not allowed), what other option is available if you’re God? And of course I don’t believe he’s limited. But the point is that I won’t use omnipotence as an argument to refute criticism.
The citation for treating captured women respectfully is Deuteronomy 21:10-14. And it specifically says “You must not sell her or treat her [the captive woman} as a slave.
Lets see what shows up on You Tube tommorrow morning.
Then you all be the judge! Hahahaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
By the way, if some of the population heeded the warning and left (they did), you don’t have a genocide, idiots.
Then by your definition the Holocaust was not a genocide because some people recognized the warning signs for what they were and got out?
I doubt PZ’s misrepresenting the conversation much, since I heard pretty much the same thing from my kids. Basically the argument went as follows:
–Creationist: the pre-Noachite people were sacrificing children and deserved to die
–Spawn: hey, that’s the same stupid they-sacrifice-children argument that was used against Jews to justify pograms for centuries
–Creationist: well, people who sacrifice children deserve to die, so if there were any Jews around who did sacrifice children, they’d deserve to die
Note the complete absence of any information as to whether children were actually sacrificed, except insofar as God/instigators-of-pograms specified that child sacrifice had occurred…
Umm, that is the claim of the xians. The xian god is all powerful, omniscient, and omnibeneficial.
Of course they didn’t get this from the bible. The biblical god is demonstrably none of the above.
In Isaiah, god says flat out that he created everything, including good and evil. Thanks god, we humans were having trouble getting that evil thing down right.
We don’t have that problem. The OT monster god does have one redeeming feature. It is clearly just an ancient mythological figure out of a kludgy book of fiction.
Oh, you don’t do it personally but you heartily support such actions. You know, all the stuff that everyone has been pointing out; you are currently and actively supporting GENOCIDE of a people.
Which means you support murder and the murder of children. Since you also believe this is being done in the name of your Blood God, that means these people are technically being sacrificed.
You support and endorse murder and sacrificing children.
Which means your God has every right to send a serial killer to your house on Thursday and do away with you, your wife, and take your kids away to be used as sex slaves.
You know, like the Bible says.
Why not allowed, fuckup? All societies do.
What do you mean, what other option is avaiable? Genocide is the only available option? As I noted, there’s nothing about a warning from some idiot unbelievable prophet in the case of the Midianites, nor, indeed, in the case of the Flood (pseudepigraphical II Peter opens up the case, but that’s clearly well after Genesis, seeming to follow the book of Enoch).
Gee, God could actually for once show that he exists and tell the people what he wants of them. That’s beyond your ability to consider?
You ignored everything you wanted to ignore, lying ass, and stuck with your lies. Fuck you.
Glen Davidson
As a Former Fundy (and Old Earth Creationist), I could have told you these things would happen. These people are sick, in the “addict” sense. They’re addicted to the notion that they will get to live on after they die. This whole creation-evolution thing is not about their understanding of science, education level, or anything other than their hope of salvation.
That’s where we need to focus. Everything proceeds from the premise that in order for their “recipe” for salvation to work, every jot and tittle in the bible has to be absolutely factual.
The good news is that one can recover! :) Today I am a happy atheist, toying (in my golden years) with the idea of becoming a science teacher. Who better to confront fundyism?
There actually was a Biblical gun site. The US rifle optics maker Trijicon put Bible verse numbers on their various products. They apparently discontinued the practice last year after it was pointed out it might be a violation of the US separation of church and state when the US military buys its products, and is certainly not a good thing to be doing with products that are offered to Muslim US allies through US military aid.
Cameron, a sick fuck:
Merriam-Webster:
Seriously, pop-up ads? Come on PZ, what is this 1995?
Wow, we’re just shaking at the thought of you actually being right.
I can hardly contain my
laughter, uh, concern.Glen Davidson
Hey, Cameron – about that ‘God’ you keep mentioning…
Could we please have the evidence for it / them / her / him first? That’s a pretty important prerequisite to the rest of this discussion.
Which of course is why it’s so amusing — not to mention frustrating — when fundamentalists classify atheistic humanism with populist postmodernism (“it’s all interpretation, everyone has their own truth, all views are right, there are no rational standards to judge anything as ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’) This is actually their own argument because they’re rejecting reason every bit as much as the pomos — and separating people by their “commitments.”
Faith is a subjective means of picking and choosing what’s true according to an individual preference (hope, identity, intuition) as opposed to objectively evaluating a line of evidence and drawing a conclusion on a common ground with others. Since we can’t know with certainty then we can’t know anything with any degree of confidence; reason is useless. There IS no common ground. There’s thus nothing left to do but make a leap and “choose” according to your chosen personal worldview. Pre-modernists and post-modernists agree on the basic set up and method.
However, the fundamentalists differ from the pomos in that they do indeed think there is an objective Truth out there. One gets there through being the right kind of person and having the right kind of character so that there’s immediate access to some sort of divine ESP. They usually won’t put it that bluntly, but that’s what they’re assuming when it comes down to it.
Of course, they don’t usually try to consider these details. Religious people basically try to understand reality through the framework of a story — with themselves cast as one of the main characters working their way to the Godly climax at the end.
By convention and necessity stories are always hazy on the details and consistencies. That I think is pretty much why otherwise nice, normal people can so easily condemn huge blocks of humanity as “bad guys.” There’s no depth or nuance to mythical storytelling. The damned aren’t real human beings like themselves: they’re plot devices.
Cameron – explain the acceptable rape & incest by God’s chosen people in the bible. I’ll wait for your vile excuses.
This is what Deut 21 actually says about captured women, “When you go to war against your enemies and the LORD your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, 11 if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. 12 Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails 13 and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. 14 If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.”
In other words, you can rape and enslave her, but only as your wife. Oh, and you have to give her a month to mourn the relatives you murdered first. Very…merciful.
Rob, there is this convenient little thing called Adblock. It will cure that bout of whining you seem to have.
I think the creationists just claimed they deserve to die.
The fundie xians still practice human child sacrifice. Somewhere between 10 to 100 children are sacrificed each year to their Sky Monster god, by medical neglect. Occasionally they just beat and torture them to death.
Those are US figures. In Africa it’s in the thousands. They call them child witches and kill them in various horrible ways.
Unfortunately their god seems to be sick, drunk, absent, or nonexistent. Sometimes the police and DA’s step in though.
This has its own problems – Canaanite culture stuck around for nearly a millennium longer in Africa and Spain, until the Romans took over Carthage and their other main cities. If your position is really that it was so bad as to warrant extermination from Syria-Palestine, why was it of no special concern elsewhere?
Amusing that the presupposationalists presuppose that the targets of genocide murdered children. Must be a convenient world in which to live, at least until your neighbor presupposes that you’ve done something of which he disapproves and comes to kill you.
Mattir:
Well, and God sacrificing the millions of children himself. I mean, that goes without saying. Amiright?
Cameron, your God is a fucking despicable psychopath. The fact you actually fucking worship him is disgusting. And you posting here, defending this despicable God? Yeah. That makes you despicable as well.
But please. Continue defending the atrocities of your God. It just reinforces my belief that there is no fucking god whatsoever.
Thanks.
All you need to be saved is believe jesus is god. Faith not works. That born again thing. Unless you are Catholic, than it is both.
Evolution and the Big Bang aren’t mentioned anywhere in the bible.
Mattir, once again (’cause xe’s fucking brilliant):
Yep. And that makes them bad.
But when God does it, it’s goooooood.
Gee, just like Native Americans.
Never mind that “leaving” meant going into enemy territory and killing off most of them, or your group being killed off. A-holes like Cameron don’t care that expulsion was also genocidal.
It’s another “excuse” that they’ll lie about in order to pretend that it was something other than the what it actually was.
Plus, of course, neither Amelekites nor Midianites were given even that genocidal option. Another set of facts (about the Bible) that liars like himself don’t care about.
Meanwhile, we fail to actually see how other Canaanites were any worse than the Israelites, even as depicted in the Bible, let alone by any credible facts at all.
Glen Davidson
*hugs* for tushcloots. If it’s any consolation, I remembered your nym, so I knew you were joking. Well, not a joke really, making a poe. And a very good one.
Poking through Deuteronomy…I’m now completely in love with Deut 22:12: ” 12 Make tassels for the four corners of the coat you wear.”
I am totally bringing this up the next time a fundie tries to discuss the evils of gay sex with me. Especially if it’s winter and I can examine their coat…
Longer than that. The Canaanites held the Lebanese coast long past the time of jesus. Jesus even meets a few here and there. Same thing with the Ammonites and Moabites.
Despite the bibles fiction that the Jews were heroic warriors they never managed to get very far.
The Canaanites lasted for way over a millennium after their mythological conquest. They never did manage to get rid of the Philistines either who held the southern Mediterranian coast.
While all those groups were still around, the Jews got overrun by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and then the Romans.
For all the claims that god is all powerful, it hasn’t done his chosen people a whole lot of good.
Fair enough. I was thinking of Carthaginians because they were also accused of the only serious crime here, child sacrifice, by Roman historians. I haven’t heard anyone claim it about the later Canaanites in Lebanon, who seem as nice as anyone for their time – though I haven’t read much on them.
Cameron #150 wrote:
And your analogy here just hung your own argument. Consider. Were you murdering your neighbors at the behest of God? Would you expect us to take that into account? How?
You’re forgetting one of the most wicked aspects of the OT God — God doesn’t kill or drive people out of their lands Himself. He ORDERS people to do it.
Ok then. How? How does God tell people that they need to take over a land and wipe out a “wicked” culture? The Bible never seems to be very clear on that part.
A voice in their heads? A voice in the heads of their leaders? A big booming voice from the sky? A still, small voice — an impulse really — that moves their hearts and gives them the certainty, the absolute incontrovertible unarguable certainty — that they have been touched by Absolute Power and Absolute Knowledge? They can be sure of God.
They can be sure God told them to kill. They ought to be sure of that.
But only if it really is true.
So take the statement above and plug that in:
“Now if I went around murdering my neighbors and sacrificing my children by the command of God I doubt you’d a find anybody sympathetic to my situation if I ended up in a ditch somewhere who didn’t already know that I was right about being commanded by God. But I don’t do any of those things … yet. Wait.”
There are TWO moral problems with God ordering genocide. One is the genocide itself, of course (since when is an entire people “wicked” — that’s the language of myth and fairy tale.) But the other one is encouraging people to believe voices in their heads which tell them to kill. Regardless of how literally you take the Bible, God must have allowed a Bible with that message to spread around the world. Kill for God — but only if you’re sure because you’re right. And you will know.
Before you have faith in God you have to have too high a level of faith in yourself.
I don’t generally block ads on sites that I want to support, but the unintended consequence of using sleazy, intrusive methods to cram ad impressions down my throat is that I will indeed be blocking all advertising on this site. Also, fuck you.
I understand you’re thick, but the concept of free will is not foreign to you is it?
A totally separate issue. We have to take these one at a time in order to have a discussion. But you’re leaving out inconvenient details again. Numbers says that the Midianites initiated hostilities.
Anonymous authorship nor a later date prohibit the possibility that the book records accurate history. Furthermore, you seem to accept the biblical passages that refer to “genocide” as reliable, but any portion of the text that contradicts that assertion is instantly flawed.
No, it’s not beyond my consideration. And of course there are multiple examples throughout the Bible, but the result wasn’t always instant conversion.
But I think we’re a bit beyond that. Why was God required to reveal himself to people who started wars, sacrificed children and committed incest? Your objection only holds if the Canaanites were actually an innocent society, ruthlessly and unjustly slaughtered. Not the case.
Alright.
PopQuiz
You are looking over a people you have favored and you see another group that has a corrupt violent culture
Do you
a) Expose the flaws of their culture with a prophet and use patience to lead them to enlightenment
b) Direct your chosen people to keep a wide breath away from them
c) Send dreams and visions to their priests and seers to warn them that the one true god has turned its gaze upon them and that their chosen people may pass near and should be left unharmed
d) Pose as their native gods and rewrite their covenants to establish your own moral dictates.
e) Strike anyone who acts wickedly in the name of their religion with a painful yet memorable thunder bolt until they pick up on the pattern
f) Punish them by having your people brutally murder or enslave them so that they can claim the land as their own
God is invulnerable and eternal. He cannot be harmed by the Canaanites.
The Doctor is mortal and can be felled, yet even knowing he marches to potential death he typically reveals himself to his enemies to offer a peaceful solution.
The Lord of Lords is less loving than the Lord of Time?
No sir. WRONG. WRONG WRONG WRONGITY WRONG WRONG
Their crimes were wars, sacrificing children and committing incest? They are committing violence against themselves and others and your solution is to eradicate them? Including those victims of sacrifice and incest? How does that solve the issue? You do not burn the village to save the village.
The concepts of free will, reason, and morality are foreign to you.
We, by with our free will, use the lenses of reason, data, and modern morality to evaluate the claims of the bible and xians.
They don’t look so good in the daylight.
You are just a monster worshipping an ancient middle eastern evil Sky Fairy who doesn’t even exist.
BTW, most of us, including myself, are ex-xians. We just looked at the data and the behavior of xians and decided it was all just mythology and worthless at that.
So you’re “smart enough” to see that I’m “thick” but you can’t answer why it’s permissible for humans to forcibly change behavior and not for God to do so. Nor are you intelligent enough to explain how genocide is the better course.
Btw, dumbfuck, “free will” is just another lie that you lying liars put out there to excuse violence against others.
No it isn’t separate, you simplistic bozo who can’t keep anything straight from post to post. It’s part of the whole that you wave away with your tedious apologetics for total evil.
Stupid fuck, I quoted that from the Bible in an earlier post making that claim (actually not, since it’s not a matter of initiating hostilities, rather of an old “grievance.” One of the least of your lies, though). You’ll just lie no matter what, and ignore the point that I made there that it hardly justifies genocide.
See this is just it, you’re really too much of a vapid and stupid amoralist to even support conversation. You’ll lie about my leaving things out, when I clearly did not, even as you ignore the obvious fact that an old “grievance” by a few Midianites doesn’t justify genocide and rape of the whole.
It precludes the possibility that we can know that it records accurate history, fucked-mind.
You seem to be lying out of your ass. I clearly pointed out that I was discussing what the Bible said, not “credible facts.” But the truth will never get in the way of your insipid bullshit.
It’s quite possible that it didn’t happen, bozo.
First of all, liar, there is no Biblical indication that all, or even any, of those commanded to be destroyed did those things.
Secondly, and I know that the obvious is beyond your lying ways, clearly it would be in order to avoid commanding genocide. Dumbfuck, that was the whole point.
Hardly, stupid shit.
There is no obvious reason why God wouldn’t, say, try to end evil, rather than to instigate it. All you know to do is to insist that his instigation of evil was just, with various lies and dumbass presuppositions.
Fuck you again. All you did was leave out what you wanted to ignore, while lying your presuppositional ass off yet again.
Glen Davidson
One of the claims of xians is that belief in their god is the basis of all morality.
Cameron, the creationists, and the fundies all show that it is the other way around.
You can be a xian and be good. But it seems to be difficult and doesn’t happen very often.
These days the fundies are the worst our socity has produced.
Cameron #180 wrote:
War propaganda paints an enemy in dark and simplistic terms. A careful study of history, sociology, and psychology reveals complex causes and nuances. Cultures are not monolithic blocks of cartoon “good” and cartoon “evil.” If God existed, it would know this.
The idea that the slaughter of an entire society could ever be “just” is not just nonsense, it’s wicked. You can do better. The Bible could have done better. The fact that it didn’t simply marks it as a product of its times. It is not a repository of timeless wisdom nor is it a guide for moral judgements.
And again, how does God “reveal himself” in a way with so little ambiguity that the people who have received the revelation ought to feel justified in violently destroying a culture? It is not enough to point out that the story lets us in on the fact that it really was God. The characters in the story, if they are supposed to be like our normal human selves in the same situation, would not have know they were characters in a story.
Did anyone realize “their” god was Jewish?
I should amend that. There are in some cases claims that those commanded to be destroyed did those things.
But certainly not all were even claimed to have done them, let alone credible evidence that they had (although it is likely that some had started wars–not that doing so was actually condemned in the Bible, certainly not consistently).
Glen Davidson
Why was God required to reveal himself to people who started wars, sacrificed children and committed incest?
Because a just god would want to not only stop these atrocities and save the souls of those who committed them by teaching them the error of their ways and leading them to repent and atone?
Also, if it’s somehow ok to slaughter random members of a society that is acting in an unjust manner, what are we to think of the US? Even by your, er, strict definition, the US has committed genocide many times over: there are some societies of which not a single member survives thanks to intentional efforts to destroy them by the US and, earlier Britain, Spain, etc. Does that mean that the 911 attackers are righteous because they killed members of an unjust society?
I genuinely cannot understand the kind of willful ignorance that it takes for someone to hold those views. I get the feeling our species is largely insane. I hope that some bright day in the future it will pass, but I have my doubts.
I would never suggest that Cameron and his whole family deserve to be killed or enslaved because he is a vapid amoral asshole.
But I will killfile his jackbooting ass.
raven:
Yeah. This is the sticking point, isn’t it?
Cameron has literal interpretation, leaving him (I’m assuming male, for some reason) to rationalize (dare I say ‘retcon’?) his actual belief into some semblance of what he knows to be actual morality.
Yet it’s impossible, leading to a cognitive dissonance. And so we end up with the verbal diarrhea we see here. I mean, nothing Cameron has said actually makes sense, even within the framework of his own beliefs. So how can we accept anything he says as even sane?
I submit we cannot.
Cameron @ 104;
Because biblical ethics are often invoked as justifcations for socially harmful actions, as reasons to maintain toxic memes that contribute to the nastier aspects of patriarchy such as rape culture, and are sometimes employed as a basis for actual law. This is not some dry, abstract debate with no relevance to society at large – these irrational religious worldviews directly and negatively impact the lives of real people, believer and atheist alike, everyday. From women condemned as ‘sluts’because they are the victims of rape, to homosexuals who are denied parity at law because religious bigots seek to enshrine their irrational hatred in legislation.
The toxic pseudo-morality of religion must be opposed and exposed for what it is, because if no voice is raised against it, it becomes normalised, and mythology rather than reason becomes the guiding force behind our civilisation. History is replete with examples of what comes next when religion forms the basis of social and political authority; oppression, pogroms, genocide and religious warfare.
The creationists are, if not crazy, then sorely misguided, and so long as that is all they are then the threat is contained. Give them power, however, and the Butterworths of the world won’t just be rationalising genocide – they will be enacting it. When one believes that one’s god is the ultimate moral good in the universe, then it is easy to decry any that don’t share your faith as not merely wrong, but as evil, and if you see yourself as the instrument of your deity, it is but a small step from condeming the homosexual/atheist/apostate/follower of the ‘wrong’ god to seeking to destroy them in a fit of self-righteous ferver.
It is true that the relative morality of a hypothetical deity is irrelevant to whether or not it exists. It is the evidence that counts, and there is no evidence supporting the existence of any god. However, the ethical stance of a religion is of the upmost importance in determining the effect that that creed has on society, and is certainly pertinent when the followers of that faith try to claim that their religion is the ultimate moral authority in the universe, and that no individual can be ‘good’ without observing the tenets of their faith.
If God is that no greater thing can be imagined, yet we can imagine a more moral god than that in the bible, logically that god cannot be God even if existent.
“If God is that no greater thing can be imagined, yet we can imagine a more moral god than that in the bible, logically that god cannot be God even if existent.”
Very true! And if a human being can be more moral or more merciful than that ‘god’, I can safely say that it isn’t a god.
They all deserve to die.
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.
Because in all of the whole human race
Mrs Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two
There’s the one they put in his proper place
And the one with his foot in the other one’s face
Look at me, Mrs Lovett, look at you.
Now we all deserve to die
Even you Mrs. Lovett…even I
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us death will be a relief
We all deserve to die.
And I’ll never see Joanna
No I’ll never hold my girl to me – finished!
(shouted) Alright! You sir, you sir, how about a shave?
Come and visit your good friend Sweeney.
You sir, you sir? Welcome to the grave.
I will have vengenance.
I will have salvation.
(shouted) Who sir, you sir?
No one in the chair, come on! Come on!
Sweeney’s waiting. I want you bleeders.
You sir – anybody.
Gentlemen don’t be shy!
Not one man, no, no ten men.
Not a hundred can assuage me –
I will have you!
And I will get him back even as he gloats
In the meantime I’ll practice on dishonorable throats.
And my Lucy lies in ashes
And I’ll never see my girl again.
But the work waits!
I’m alive at last!
And I’m full of joy!
PZ you are a paragon of patience to engage these bozos in dialog.
I’m pretty sure that PZ has met Hector Avalos and Bart Ehrman. I doubt they disagreed hugely.
If something claiming to be God told me to go out and kill a bunch of people — including children — I would say no. I would say “I don’t know what you are, but you’re definitely not God. Because the Creator wouldn’t kill its own children…and it certainly wouldn’t need a mere human being to kill other humans beings, not when the Creator is omnipotent.”
“Driving a violent people (a widely recognized fact among historians) out of their territory,”
Name these widely recognizing historians of the bronze/early iron age. We have the “violence” attested only by unknown & unknowable nomadic herdsmen. You’re not given the luxury of a Gibbon here, or even a Capote; “historian” as you attempt to use it did not exist for nearly 1,000 more years. And, as I recall, the instruction pamphlet© was worded just a bit more strongly than “drive out.”
A good horror story using elements of this is The Midwife’s Temptation. Sadly I can’t find it online.
Furthermore, you seem to accept the biblical passages that refer to “genocide” as reliable
no.
just because someone finds the ARGUMENT of genocide immoral or unethical, does not mean that referring to it in a piece of writing means that that writing is historically accurate.
If this is the level of intellectual dishonesty you wish to engage with, there is little point in arguing anything with you.
you’re too stupid to debate.
@ Cameron
C’mon, wise up. The commenters here are just stringing you along, hoisting you by your own petard.
The bible, from beginning to end, is so obviously a bunch of Made-Up-Shit ™, you end up looking foolish trying to justify it.
Attempting to explain away godly genocide? Really? Slavery, rape, killing almost all living things on the planet this god-is-love entity created?
Read Leviticus. Really read it and tell me the book of Made-Up-Shit ™ is worth defending.
Seriously, pop-up ads? Come on PZ, what is this 1995?
seriously, what are ya, stupid?
PZ has nothing to do with these ads.
the adfeeder has decided themselves to start pushing popups; I’ve seen it on just about every blog that uses adsense lately.
saw it on Jerry’s blog yesterday.
So if the Bible is all just made up stuff, who made it up?
You can’t blame God, since you don’t believe he exists.
That leaves…the JEWS.
JEWS foisted this on humanity. Perhaps they really are the ones who have caused so much trouble.
JEWS!
@ Heinrich
Well, the Hindu version of the book(s) of Made-Up-Shit ™ hasn’t been any kinder to humanity.
Because we never blame Xians, Muslims, Hindus, or anti-theist Communists for their evils. And Nazis, well, they were just Jews, weren’t they, or why else would we think they were the epitome of modern evil?
Right.
STFU unless you can write something that doesn’t indicate that you’re either highly dishonest or very ignorant indeed.
Glen Davidson
Not that I don’t think both are likely, I was just mentioning that at minimum you’re one or the other.
Glen Davidson
With this I totally agree. But the Bible’s misuse doesn’t prove that Christianity endorses those things, which PZ tried to suggest with his post.
He may have cornered a handful of ignorant Christians, but so what? Is that kind of interaction going prevent the passage of misguided laws? No.
Utter nonsense.
Like Stalin or Mao, perhaps? I hate to go there, but if you’re going to castigate the whole of Christianity with the views of the most fundamental of fundamentalists, then it seems entirely warranted.
In reality, PZ stumped Butterworth and the man tried to answer the best he knew how. But isn’t that what you guys count on when you confront religious folks with these arguments from outrage? You’re anticipating that they’ll be as appalled by the OT as you are. Point being, these people don’t want to institute genocide, they’re just dumb.
Other elements of Christian morality prohibit such an apocalypse. At a very fundamental level, the faith places value on human life; we’re valuable because God made us. Even among the typical fundamentalists you won’t find calls to lynch homosexuals or atheists.
Incidentally, not all Christians share the political agenda of the Christian Right, so again I doubt that you’ll see a faith-based onset of totalitarianism in America.
There you go again indicting the whole faith. Bad form.
Are you daft? Have you ever even read your book? It’s essentially a how-to-murder guide.
Westboro.
Ichthyic: “Jesus Had a Mustache.”
Did Jesus give Mary Magdalene mustache rides?
Also, does anyone else think that Cameron would get along just swell with our old friend Pilty?
No. You’re not arguing against genocide in an abstract sense. You’re suggesting that real people who have an important place in the Christian tradition committed terrible crimes, based on an account recorded in the Bible. That being the case, there’s nothing with me arguing from the same text that you are wildly incorrect.
Not typical.
And Cameron lies, as usual.
Glen Davidson
He may have cornered a handful of ignorant Christians, but so what?
I have a kilt all picked out for you.
Did Jesus give Mary Magdalene mustache rides?
Well, he was supposedly egalitarian for the time. I know I would have.
Not typical.
…the kilt is even in the traditional national colors…
PZ notes that:
Well of course they are nice and pleased that you were there. They are just regular people. They just happen to have a warped sense of reality. Though they are quite common and ordinary. Like the guy ant the local Quick Stop and the waitress at your favorite restaurant and the loan officer at your bank and your state representative and your senator.
Scary, innit?
It’s a good idea to give them some back talk.
Cameron #211 wrote:
The humanist values of the enlightenment eventually improved even the religions which fought them.
At a very fundamental level, Christian faith divides humanity into the saved and the damned. Human life only has value to the extent that it reflects and shares in God’s value — and there’s a hierarchy. There’s really no objective way to measure this. A problem.
They need not commit genocide themselves. People whose religion makes it easy to label entire cultures as wicked and deserving of a violent death carried out by people following God’s command are I think quite likely to have problems thinking reasonably when it comes to ethics. Confusing morality with obedience is a poor ground to build on. So is the black and white mindset.
Uganda’s inanity was pushed by American Christian lobbyists.
Pat Robertson has called for the death of Homosexuals on air.
I mean really, get a clue.
Because Cameron probably won’t get it, the wonderful Ichthyic is referring to the No True Scotsman fallacy, which is an absolute favourite of apologists everywhere.
‘Oh well, they aren’t REAL Christians.’ or ‘They aren’t USUAL Christians.’
Westboro is a chapter all their own, but the thing is their diseased thought process is agreed upon by a helluva lot of other churches out there, particularly in the Evangelical sector. You don’t really see a lot of other churches stepping up to tell them to stuff it, do you? No, they always seem conspicuously absent when the maniacs decide to march.
Salvation is offered to everybody. Some may reject it, but the idea of life having innate value isn’t based on who believes in Christ, but that he ever sacrificed himself in the first place.
This argument only holds if you ignore all the data I mentioned in previous posts. We are not discussing the unjust destruction of an innocent society, which even Angry Glen has partially admitted. Furthermore, Christian ethics is largely dependent on the teachings of Christ. Wars over promised land have just about nothing to do with that subject.
In what way can the Westboro folks be considered typical Christians? Indeed, everybody knows of them because they are radically extraordinary – and crazy.
Angry Glen,
you haven’t answered my arguments, except to complain that God should have magically stopped the Canaanites from doing anything wrong instead of punishing them. It’s just the problem of evil repackaged. Unless you plan to offer more, quietly shut your face.
Angry at a constantly lying ass? Not really, fuckhead, but I do know that you deserve nothing but contempt for your vile doctrines and your endless dishonesty. So again, fuck you.
Shithead, you’re not coherent or honest. I have answered your “arguments” to the extent that they actually exist, but rather than reason with me you simply lie and insist that we accept your stupidity and lies.
Why should anyone be punished if God believes in free will? You’re too stupid to even understand that such coercion is the opposite to allowing free will.
No it isn’t, fuckwit, it’s the problem of God being a purported genocidalist. You’re too dumb even to understand how that is even worse than the usual problem of theodicy, which you are too dumb to address as well.
Fuckhead, you haven’t answered a damned thing satisfactorily, while you have lied constantly, and been too stupid to understand what anyone states.
You’re a completely stupid asshole. There is no other reasonable way to judge your pathetic, dishonest, rambling, and stupid, shit.
Dumbfucks like you don’t get to tell me what to do. Are you too stupid even to recognize that fact?
Glen Davidson<
They are saying out loud and acting on what most every other Christian church is preaching inside their walls.
The only difference is that they are vocal and outspoken about it… which is, according to the bible, what you are supposed to do. Albeit with more swords and killing.
Ah, but the combined elements of Christian morality do not prohibit THE Apocalypse, do they? The evil need to be purged from the earth in pain and fire. Tsk tsk.
Damnation is the just fate of everybody. This is where you start.
Yes we are, for we are dealing with several problems.
1.) Societies are not monolithic blocks which are either “evil” or “good.”
2.) Cultures are products of their times and areas. The “wicked” cultures were probably following their divine commands as well.
and, most damning of all (and I don’t think I’ve seen you try to address it) is
3.) God presumably wants people to be so sure when He communicates to them via voices in their heads or other indirect means that they will kill on command.
The Hebrews as characters in a story were told to do things “by God.” That’s n the narrative. But if the Hebrews were supposed to be real people then like all humans they had no such author-given assurance that they were really truly hearing God.
God wants people to be certain in matters they cannot and should not be certain of … certain enough to kill an entire people. This is immoral.
And do not think that the New Testament Christ rescues this problem, for he brings up Hell.
Cameron wrote:
Here’s an interesting question: if it turns out that they’re right, and God has spoken to them and they are following God’s orders — is God now radically extraordinary and crazy?
Or would we all need to rethink on how wicked we truly are?
Cameron, ProfMTH on YouTube has explained what the Rat King, Ing, and others have been trying to tell you about Westboro. You can find it here, that is, if you have any interest whatsoever in reality.
Show me my initial assessment of you was wrong and actually watch it.
“That leaves…the JEWS.
JEWS foisted this on humanity. Perhaps they really are the ones who have caused so much trouble.
JEWS!”
LOL! So glad I stopped by. And his name is Heinrich.
Really want to Godwin this thread…
Snicker… Cameron refers to Yeheshua ben Joseph as Christ, like it’s his last name. “Yo Christ, whaddup?”
Dude reminds me of a co-worker who refers to Christ, and does all the same things Cameron does; the No True Scotsman, the goalpost shifting, the claims without citations and evidence, and worst of all, considering the bible as a book of true facts.
Archeologists have plenty of hard physical evidence that much of what is considered historical in the bible never happened. Reality is a much more interesting and awe-inspiring place, and if you’re into ancient myths, there are much better stories out there.
But you will among the atypical ones. Sometimes, you will find them murdering doctors.
And what’s to separate the typical from the atypical? You have a text that’s considered sacred that features God’s chosen ones wiping out entire populations, entire cultures, and it is not only acceptable but morally righteous because God ordered it.
And how does God order these things? Through internal revelation, with no outside verification possible. How do you tell God’s instructions from delusion? And with no standard of behavior based on consequences, subject only to what internal revelation tells you, where does it stop? What are the constraints? Sometimes genocide is OK. Sometimes beating your slave is OK. Sometimes bashing babies against rocks is OK.
Religion has no method by which to test competing ideas. “Typical” has no way to show that “atypical” is wrong with regards to interpretation of scripture, and no way to tell good ideas from bad ones. Because when “faith” becomes a virtue, you can’t tell them apart.
Salvation is offered to everybody. Some may reject it, but the idea of life having innate value isn’t based on who believes in Christ, but that he ever sacrificed himself in the first place.
Under the assumption that your faith is the only true one or indeed the only path to salvation. It’s an argument used to proselytise and destroy cultures based on the cultural arrogance that somehow faith in a magic carpenter is better than faith in the wind or faith in a magic penis god.
Life has different values to different people. I don’t see you being unable to sleep because Somalians are starving as we speak. If it was your own child you would move heaven and earth to feed him or her. The value of life depends on the social contract that we have and indeed we value the lives of people differently. Our children and lovers are more valuable than other people. If someone said “sacrifice your son to save another” you would never accept it (it’s one of the difficulties of getting family to donate organs in members with brain death. That in the grief of death, a family cannot bear to turn off the life support machines keeping the body from failing even if it means other people will get to live.).
What you are arguing is the “no true christian” argument. In the same vein we can happily state that there is no such thing as Islamic Extremism. The Fundementalist church of Latter Day Saints (child molesting, women abusing, rapists and polygamists) aren’t mormons. The Lord’s Resistance army as well are simply not christian because despite following the same bible they merely interpret it differently to you. By your logic christianity will always be a minority since you would only count members of your own denomination rather than the entire group of people who believe in it.
Except that you just finished arguing that human life has no value whatsoever. If God wants for that life to be destroyed, *boom*, human life has zero value. God can kill and kill and kill and kill, and none of the lives he destroys matter at all.
We are not discussing the just destruction of a guilty society, either.
Everything you accuse the putative Canaanites of (without basis, I note), and the putative antediluvian society, is found in God’s own actions, and/or in God’s putative chosen people.
Killing children? Of course the putative God killed children, as recorded in the myths about the actions of that God. The character, God, kills children in the flood, in Sodom and Gomorrah, and in Egypt. And the Israelites killed the Midianite boy-children, and the non-virgin girls, and are commanded to exterminate the children of their enemies as well. Jephthah sacrifices his daughter to Yahweh, cutting her throat and setting her body on fire. God offers no condemnation for this act.
Starting wars? God commands that wars of extermination be started. The Israelites launch these wars of extermination. It could also be argued that the flood was itself a war of extermination.
Incest? Adam mated with Eve, his clone-sister. Their children would have had to mate with each other, or their parents. Noah’s grandchildren would have been in the same situation as Adam’s children. Abraham married his half-sister.
Your response was inadequate, since the putative God destroyed their putative free will anyway.
Oh I love it when Christians trot out free will as an excuse. YHWH sure cared about Pharaoh’s free will when he forced him to turn Moses away, several times, even though Pharaoh actually did want to free the Hebrews.
I guess free will doesn’t matter when a god decides to have a dick-waving contest and wants to torture a whole civilization of people, and then kill off all the first-born (who totally had it coming because they totally chose to be born in that situation, amirite?). Tampering with free will to save thousands (or more!) of people and bring about peace and prosperity = bad. Tampering with people’s free will in order to justify widespread slaughter and torture = a-OK.
Or when he “put a lying spirit” into people, that’s pretty disrespectful to folks’ free will.
I wonder how people know that their god for some reason isn’t allowed to tamper with people’s free will, because it sure doesn’t say that in the bible. Says quite the opposite, in fact. Especially when he goes around lying to people and deliberately withholding valuable information. I’m pretty sure making important life decisions based on incomplete knowledge is, at the very least, questionable as an exercise of free will.
Then again, being an infant born into the wrong tribe is apparently an exercise of free will, too, or so the apologists seem to imply. Or maybe they just didn’t think this through well enough.
Until the discussion turns to which religion is the biggest or the majority and then suddenly everyone’s invited, including the kooky catholics and mormons and even the jehovahs witnesses!
Practically forcing him to do it, too, since he knew full well that Jephthah was going to have to do it and made no move to stop him, as well as ensuring his success so that he would end up doing it. I’m sure that was totally Jephthah’s free will. You know… to be coerced into a promise to kill his kid.
I don’t know how I missed this one. “Magically stopped” with an air of sarcasm, as though doing “magical” things is either beyond YHWH’s abilities or not an accurate description of what he does, let alone that “fixing” the Canaanites without wiping them out and enslaving their virgin girls would fall into said categories.
Cumeron,
You never seem to have managed to spell Prof. Myers name correctly. IN at least three posts, and on the excerpt from your blog of idiocy and justification of murder and oppression.
That you can fool yourself is no surprise. That you wish others to be as ignorant as yourself is no surprise, either, but truly disgusting and offensive to us mere human beings.
Fuck off, you hole where a human might have been.
Fuck off very much.
The world is largely as bad a place as it is because of your kind’s poisoning of innocent babies and organized hatred and self-loathing. You and yours should truly fuck off, for an extended period (and for many of you, till death).
Again, for yourself and others sake, fuck off and take a vow of silence until you have a rational and humane thought untainted by this twisted “faith” you cling to.
Fuck off.
It’s literally the LEAST you can do.
What–? No, we’re not. You don’t get to change the point of the argument just because you’re losing.
There is no evidence that the Canaanite genocide happened at all, and posters here have pointed that out. Our argument is that a god who commands genocide is an evil fuck, not benevolent, loving and all-powerful.
No, liar, we are not. We know most of the OT and much of the NT are fiction. We are arguing against the claim that the Bible can be of any use as a guide to morality. We are arguing against your repeated apologias for genocide, which are largely made up of transparent lies about what the OT actually says – like your dishonest claims that it does not mandate, praise and glorify genocide, as it does in the passage in Deut. 20 which you failed to quote because that is exactly what it does. Let’s just see the key part of that passage again:
In Joshua, these genocides are described in gloating terms. In Exodus, God undertakes mass-murder himself – killing the Egyptians’ furstborn – having first taken the precaution of hardening Pharoah’s heart so God will have an excuse to demonstrate his power by mass slaughter.
You lied again about Deut. 21.11-14. There is absolutely no indication that the “beautiful woman” is given any choice in the matter of becoming the Israelite’s wife. In other words, she is to be enslaved and repeatedly raped. This, too, you find quite acceptable, indeed admirable. You’re a sick fuck, Cameron.
Nor is the NT much better. There we find the same vile idea of collective punishment of entire cities, promulgated by Jesus himself:
We find Jesus boasting of breaking up families – all bullying cult leaders do this, but few actually record their boasts about it:
We find the disgusting intolerance of people being condemned to hell merely for failing to believe correctly:
Such people are to be cast into fire.
We also find Jesus deliberately speaking in terms that his hearers will not understand:
We find the roots of 2,000 years of vile Christian antisemitism, responsible for lie after torture after murder after pogrom, culminating in the Shoah:
Admittedly, there are also good parts in both OT and NT (although we do not find in either a single word against the vile institution of slavery); but of course, if we are to separate the good from the bad, we have to do so by standards outside the Bible itself.
I note, liar, that you have resorted to the desperate expedient of citing Stalin and Mao. Both, of course, were adherents of a specific political philosophy: Marxism-Leninism or to be more precise in their cases, Stalinism and Maoism respectively. No regular here takes the works of Marx or Lenin as a guide to morality or indeed anything else as you do the Bible, no-one claims to follow them as you do Jesus – so the attempt is just a further confirmation of your dishonesty, and moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
Cameron # 72
Late to the argument again, curse RL.
Interesting and informative has the exchanges have been, this first post from Cameron strikes me as betraying his(?)struggle with reality.
WTF does it matter what ‘qualified scholar(s)’ think about the slaughter of the Canaanites? They will only ever be a tiny and (FSM allow)powerless minority whereas people like Butterworth have the desire and potential to affect real events. If people who hold such appalling views succeed in their efforts (he runs a museum, FFS!) then we are truly fucked.
There is a lot of evidence for what can happen if we discount what people say when they they are out of power.
‘Oh he doesn’t really mean it, he’s just saying that to win votes.’
Anubis Bloodsin the third at comment 91: You’re a genius. That was beautiful.
Cameron, you’re not a creationist? Then why do you worship a creationist? I’m talking about your dead decomposed Jeebus. Why do you worship an idiot, Cameron?
Eldritch-God strikes again! I wonder how long we have before they break out the sacrificial altars and silly robes.
Er…
Cameron the (pathetic) apologist obviously hasn’t made it past the distinction between History 101 and Theology 101; nothing unusual there, but until that’s managed his/her biblical studies IQ is going to stay in single figures. God of course doesn’t just genocide the fuck out of the place, he also does a good job of slaying the innocents among his own people. Just one lovely example in 1 Chronicles 21 (and the synoptic Samuel text), where David runs a census to count his people, this pisses off god, and instead of punishing David he goes and smites seventy thousand Israelites (who didn’t want to be counted in the first place in case it pissed off god). Did this historically happen? Probably not, and apart from the disputed Tel Dan inscription there’s bugger all hard evidence that David even existed, but I’m sure Cameron will do a Craig and find an acceptable reason for The Pique of God, Revisited, Again.
Davidson, the Jews wrote the Old Testament.
You can’t blame the Nazis, or the Commmies, or anyone else.
You sure can’t blame god.
JEWS wrote it and presneted it as true.
So, YOU STFU, you silly bitch.
No. It leaves a few Jews who made it up a few thousand years ago.
Plus everyone else who has kept it going since.
The vast majority of them are xians. It is part of the xian bible after all. The current one on this blog is Cameron.
KG #240
There’s an extra added attraction to this. According to the propaganda Yahweh is supposed to be omniscient. Yet before he goes on his killing spree the Hebrews are told to mark their doors so when Yahweh is recklessly slaughtering kids he doesn’t murder the wrong kids by mistake.
Ol’ Yahweh likes to go on a nice killing frenzy every so often. It keeps his inner-sadistic bully happy.
Back in biblical times they didn’t have our concept of history – with research, documentation and some attempt at accuracy. Instead they were storytellers who told inspirational tales.
Tales to get people to fight in battle, steal shit and enslave people. Tales to convince themselves that they were important, the most important people in the world, and that anything they did was justified.
Remember that pre-industrial cultures depended on slavery the way we depend on fossil fuels. So it you wanted to build a city or a road, you wanted slaves to do it, rather than get out there and do it yourself.
Nazi germany had an economic miracle. They contracted their economy by killing or driving out 10 million people, taking their businesses, their money, their labor as slaves, and their gold teeth. Then the party handed out those resources to various thugs and party members, and suddenly there was plenty to go around. Racism and hate was just the tool. It was about greed.
A number of people mentioned how resource poor the biblical region was. I can believe greed powered their violence.
The Jews didn’t foist the OT slaughter-rape-atrocity fiction on us.
The xians flat out stole it from them. And added to it with the not much better New Testament.
Those people are all dead now for 2,000 years. But people are keeping it alive today and defending it. WL Craig, Cameron, most of the fundie xians.
At least my ex-xian sect aren’t biblical literalists. They rarely referred to the OT and, I now know, devoutly hoped no one would actually read it. The Catholic church was the same way. They resisted having the bible translated into modern languages and burned the first English translator of the bible at the stake, Tysdale.
Even 400 years ago, the RC church knew the OT was a pointless horror. Several prominent early sects, the gnotics and Marcionites wanted to toss it altogether.
Cameron is several millennia behind a lot of xians.
The Old Testament was written by Jews…whether the writings were stolen from them or not, They Wrote It.
Judaism was promoting this stuff well before the Christian era.
Voltaire: Those who can believe absurdities, can commit atrocities.
Cameron has got the “believing in absurdities” part down cold. I wouldn’t doubt that he could commit atrocities.
He is a monster, after all. It’s a fundie xian thing. And a problem for the rest of us.
A gross over-simplification. Certainly individuals and companies profited from the confiscated assets of Jewish citizens, but the German Jewish population in 1933 was only about 500,000, not 10,000,000. Most of the Nazis’ victims came from the conquered territories. German heavy industrial production soared in the pre-war period, increasing roughly fourfold between 1933 and 1939, and this contributed considerably to the fall in unemployment, as did the reintroduction of conscription in 1935. These changes can be seen as a distorted form of Keynesian economics – distorted because employment and production were geared toward the war Hitler was planning, not toward civilian infrastructure or consumer goods. Living standards for those in work did not rise very much, and in particular, there were shortages of meat and dairy products. The best treatment of the Nazi economy is probably Adam Tooze (2006) The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy.
The fault lies not with who wrote the fiction. That was a few people.
It lies with the people who believe it and claim it is some sort of magical worthwhile document from god. That is a few billion people, all but a few of which are xians.
You can just say No.
We’ve said No. As have a lot of xians, BTW. It’s fiction people, and worthless fiction in terms of telling us anything about how to live our lives. Except as a bad example.
I see we have an antisemitic scumbag commenting. Without Christianity’s adoption of the OT, it would have remained simply the collected myths of a minority group, of no importance to anyone else.
Probably not even that. This is some troll with a few sockpuppets.
JEWS wrote that stuff. And they carry it out when then are in congtrol. Look at Israel and the Palestians.
You can’t blame god, since you don’t think he exists.
And yet you refuse to face the fact, then, that JEWS started this stuff.
I think someone is morphing. “JEWS! Blah blah blah JEWS! It was the JEWS! Can you hear me now!?! I said it was the JEWS!”
HUMANS wrote that stuff. And carry it out when they are in control. It doesn’t matter where you are; your ancestors did it. And quite possibly, your country still does it.
And at the Europeans who invaded the Americas, and the various invasions of one part of Europe by other parts of Europe. And the various invasions of one part of the world by other parts of the world.
Of course God doesn’t exist. But all people who have committed invasions or occupations or massacres have declared that it was either God’s will, or “destiny” that justified their actions.
Of course they didn’t start it, you blithering moron. HUMANS started “this stuff”.
If you don’t like being human, please kill yourself. But don’t blame the Jews for the fact that you are human — or try to claim that Jews are somehow less human than yourself.
So, Stein, you’re posting with a traditionally Jewish last name and your blaming the Jews for all of the atrocities committed in god’s name. Do I have that about right?
Go jump off of a cliff, clown fucker.
The fact of the matter is, the Isreal and Palestinian conflict is about way more than religion and it’s a story as old as time– one group of people wants another group’s land. But that doesn’t matter to you, does it? You’d rather blather on about how evil and power hungry the Jews are.
Fuck you.
An antisemitic sockpuppeting scumbag. BTW scumbag, the standard antisemitic hallmark was to write “jews” thus, with no initial upper-case letter. Are you trying to start a new fashion among your fellow fuckwitted scumbags?
Of course, other christian sects exterminated them for their troubles.
Stein et al also seem to be woefully ignorant about proto-Judaism and any of the actual history of the Israelites. But that is not surprising.
Started?
*barf*
Dude. Multiple (counts ’em…19. Fucking 19.) exclamation marks. A sure sign of a diseased mind.*
*spot the quote
I’m sure they came across as nice people. Hitler could too. I knew a Phillipino who was a yo yo expert in the thirties. He had occasion to perform for Adolph one day and found him a very personable and appreciative individual.
Con artists are very adept at presenting themsleves as amiable and loving individuals. Thjese people are nothing but con artists.
Cameron @211 claims that the statement that when religions get into power they become oppressive “utter nonsense”. A short list of reasons he might be wrong:
1. The Taliban (if Islam isn’t Christianity it’s its close cousin)
2. The Spanish Inquisition
3. Take your pick of any of the Catholic-Protestant wars in Europe in the Medieval and Renaissance eras
4. The genocide of various American Indian tribes throughout the continent. One particular image I remember is “missionaries” drowning Americans while chanting over them so that they were baptized and went to “heaven”.
5.Various African wars and massacres, often motivated by conflicts between Christian and Islamic converts
IDK…Many modern adherents of an Abrahamic religions apologize the conquest of Palestine by the Hebrews as an example of the absolute goodness of God; in doing so, they exhibit contortions of moral thinking that leaves me shaken and clammy. It doesn’t matter if the stories are true or not. It doesn’t matter if “the Jews*” started it or not. It is fucking gross, and deserves no consideration in a serious discussion about ethics, other than as evidence that we can reject Abrahamic concepts of what is good outright. Even starting from scratch, we can hardly hope to do worse.
*Ancient Hebrews =/= modern Jews, FFS.
He had occasion to perform for Adolph one day and found him a very personable and appreciative individual. – Allen c. Dexter
Who is this “Adolph” of whom you speak? What relevance had he to the personal qualities of Adolf Hitler?
pj, #264: ‘And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.’
Cameron –
Kill every male among the little ones.
This is what the bible says. This is what god’s ‘righteous chosen’ ordered.
Murder every baby boy.
Not soldier. Not warrior.
Infant male children, already captured.
Take them, kill them. And their mothers.
Enslave the virgins, kill everyone else, even the newborn baby boys.
Slaughter the captured pregnant women. Take the baby girls from the breasts of their mothers to be your slaves and slaughter the mothers.
______________________
Take your bible and insert it firmly into your ass.
March 31 2003:
“Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand,”
April 10, 2003:
“”Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him. … To deliver their soul from death.”
– a Bible quotes the the cover pages of the daily intelligence briefings to the White house.
True, but considerable gains came from taking from conquered nations later on as well. Especially, a lot of gear for their military came from other nations, although in the invasion of Russia this came back to bite them as they lacked spare parts and had difficulties in supplying those to the right machines anyhow (they knew these would be problems, but supposedly the war would be over in four months, and the attrition of machinery was supposed to be manageable over that time period).
War paid off for them up until the Russian invasion, but after the first gains the old Russian abilities to destroy or move resources the war began to mean that prosecuting the war was a large drag on their economy. And the Germans didn’t even have a wartime economy until late in the war, maybe 1943 or so, mainly because they’d planned on war being profitable.
War paid for the Nazis, until it didn’t, and then they lost everything.
<a href="
Do the same with your head, unless you have anything useful to add – and I doubt you do. I addressed the same complaints you made about the treatment of captives and conduct in war way earlier in thread. Like you’re freethinking friends, you seem incapable of paying attention to context or reading any verse that softens your argument from outrage.
It’s a bit difficult to find something to soften the outrage at all the murders, rape and genocide. And at people able to find excuses for all of that.
unless you have anything useful to add – and I doubt you do.
not only have you nothing useful to ADD, Cameron, you started off with nothing useful, continued with nothing useful, and obviously will NEVER say anything useful.
get lost, idiot.
Next time, take a trip to a seminary and ask a qualified scholar about the same issue. I’m eager to read your blog post about such a visit.
here, try this one, idiot.
By ignoring the explicit commands in the bible to take no captives, but to kill everyone without mercy — including the animals — you might be seen to be implicitly condoning them.
You can address the point, or concede the point, but ignoring the point does not help your case.
Cameron:
Gee, I wish I could be an expert in makin’ up shit about made up shit.
Cameron @ 211;
The bible is supposedly the inerrant word of god, and its own passages clearly and unambiguously endorse genocide so long as it is ‘mandated by god’ – in other words, so long as the genocidal maniac in question interprets the voices xe hears in xir head as being the will of their deity. Your attempt to deploy the ‘no true scotsman’ fallacy does not alter the fact that the holy text of christianity is a horror show of ethno-nationalist hatred. Has it occured to you that, strictly speaking, it is the fundamentalists who most accurately apply the tenets of christianity? They are the one’s who take the supposedly godly commandments of the bible at face value, without any intellectually dishonest attempts to retcon the religion to make it appear less offensive to modern sensibilities. It can credibly be argued that the fanatics are the only ‘true’ christians, because they are the only ones who can stomach the full, vile implications of that creed.
Silence in the face of religious insanity most surely will not prevent religiously motivated law from appearing on the statue books. Have you not seen the Republican field for the 2012 elections? It is full of religiously extreme candidates, some of whom openly endorse bigoted laws and unbelieveably stupid policies predicated upon religious beliefs including creationism. Perry and Bachman are the worst examples, but far from the only ones. If this type of madness is not tackled, then it most certainly will continue to poison American politics.
Rewrite the history books, everybody! Cameron has come to gift us with his wisdom. Do you remember hearing about the Crusades, the atrocities of the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the various European holy wars triggered by the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, the religious basis of the KKK and the Jim Crowe Laws, the religiously motivated massacres of muslims in the Bosnian conflict, and the contemporary state sanctioned murder of homosexuals in Uganda? Well, great news everybody! None of those things ever actually happened according to Cameron. The relatives of the victims will doubtles be overjoyed….
… So, Cameron, I take it that you know where all the supposed dead of these events have been hiding all this time…?
No? I didn’t think so. History – actual history, not myths written in a book of religious fairy tales – really isn’t your friend, is it Cameron?
Stalin and Mao were motivated by extreme communist ideology paired with toxic constructions of nationalism. Communism is structurally similar to monotheistic religion – god is simply replaced with another supposedly ultimate moral authority, the ‘worker’s utopia’. To claim that atheism was the prime motivator of communist policy betrays a frankly laughable ignorance.
And whatever you want to say (or make up) about communism or fascism, christianity – mainstream christianity – is still predicated upon the supposed authority of the bible, and the bible is still full of the most horrific rationalisations for torture, rape and genocide. The religion is toxic, even if many modern christians choose to turn a blind eye to some of its nastier aspects, and a great many of those ‘nice’ christians are still perfectly prepared to tacitly endorse biblically mandated homophobia and misogyny – these are not fringe beliefs in modern christianity.
The cap fits, even if you do not care to wear it.
By endorsing genocide? Really, the best you can come up with is; “PZ surprised the guy, so naturally he went to genocide apologia…” If Butterworth really cannot understand why genocide does not suddenly become A-OK merely because voices in his head said so, then he should urgently seek psychiatric help.
Our arguments are logical and often merely point them to the repugnant tenets of their own religion, it is not our fault if theists are too incompetent and muddled to defend the positions they espouse. And as for our outrage? It comes from the very real harm that their poisonous creed does to innocent people the world over every day, all in the name of an unevidenced and frankly ludicrous sky-fairy myth.
It is entirely justified to feel outrage when the catholic church (and now it seems not just the catholic church) engages in a systematic coverup of widespread child rape and moves rapists from one parish to another to protect them from prosecution and thereby facilitate further child rape.
Outrage is the only reasonable response to the lies the Pope routinely trots out about microscopic holes engineered into condoms, and the countless lives needlessly lost to AIDS as a direct result of his wilfull deceit.
Nothing less than outrage is demanded when evangelicals deny the very humanity of homosexuals, and drive vulnerable teenagers to suicide through their toxic, judgemental piety.
When religiously motivated anti-abortionists seek to render women down into nothing more than living, ambulatory incubators, their humanity sacrificed on the alter of theist self-righteousness, what kind of ethical person feels less than outrage? Doubly so when the laughably entitled ‘pro-lifers’ back up their moronic, misogynist ideology by murdering abortion doctors.
The abuses of christianity are all about you, Cameron, you see its victims everyday. Why is it that you feel no outrage? Don’t you care, or is the appeasement of your blood-drenched god more important than a little, insignificant thing like the suffering of your fellow human beings? Now do you see why some of the other commenters here have called you a monster?
Sadly, many of them aren’t. It just goes to show how effective religious brainwashing is at dehumanising the victims of theocracy in the eyes of its adherents.
Stupidity like that can be a perilous thing in its own right. Few things are more dangerous than blind, unthinking faith. It doesn’t matter whether the person who pulls the trigger is motivated by active malice or is simply too stupid and under educated to realise that what they are doing is wrong – their victim is still just as dead.
Really? Tell that to the muslims in Bosnia, the homosexuals in Uganda, and abortion doctors everywhere.
Actually, christianity values putative ‘souls’ over actual lives, and it is the ‘saved’ who are considered valuable – the ‘damned’ get tortured for eternity, remember. Anyway, aren’t you the chap who has spent the entire thread arguing that genocide is OK so long as god orders it? Hardly a position compatible with the idea that christianity places value on all human life, now is it?
As I mentioned above, the state sanctioned murder of homosexuals is happening right now in Uganda, and that policy was promoted by American evangelicals. Then there are the homosexuals driven to suicide by christian bigotry – they may not have been lynched, but many theists are quick to condemn the victim for their sexuality, not the bigots who made their lives so unbearable that they came to believe that suicide was the only way out for them. These deaths aren’t coincidental. At the very least the evangelicals don’t care that their rhetoric ruins lives. At worst, the deaths of those homosexuals was their end goal all along. Not as direct as a noose, but the end result is the same, and so is the moral culpability of those who engender it.
And yet a non-christian candidate is widely recognised to be unelectable in the US. Open your eyes, Cameron; openly dominionist rhetroic is already a feature of the Republican Party. Religiously based laws are already being passed all over North America in defiance of the notional seperation of church and state. The rot has already set in.
Says the commenter who has spent over two hundred and fifty posts seeking to rationalise genocide… Yup, I need a new irony meter.
Is it not true that christians view their god as the ultimate moral authority in the universe? Is it not true that a substantial proportion of christians believe that all morality ultimately flows from their deity, and does it not follow from that statement that they believe that it is impossible to behave in a truly moral fashion without reference to their god? Please explain to me which part of the above is untrue or an unreasonable interpretation fo that which chrsitians believe, and indeed often openly state to be the case?
Quoth Cameron:
Oh, Cam, Cam. We read what you wrote. We paid attention. That’s why we think you are a rotten excuse for a human being.
Most devote Christians I know would never try to justify those passages. You see, they think that the Bible is full of stories intended to impress followers a long time ago, when such behavior was more or less the way of the world, but they know that such behavior is repellant, horrific, and unfortunately all too human. They prefer to believe that God had nothing to do with that part. Sure, they are “cherry picking” but at least the cherries they pick talk about love and treating your fellow humans decently. You, on the other hand are trying to justify horrific behavior with “they had it coming”, which, as the OP mentions, is an idea that us godless immoral atheists find disgraceful.
We find you disgraceful, too.
Glen Davidson@272,
Mostly I agree (and much more important, Tooze agrees) with what you say – I was only addressing the claim that the killing or exile of German Jews could have led to there suddenly being “enough to go round”. If you haven’t read Tooze’s book, do – he argues that the claim about the lack of a wartime German economy is untrue – for example, it’s often noted that female workforce participation increased less in Germany than Britain, but Tooze points out that the absolute level was much higher to begin with, and remained higher throughout. The only state that mobilised to a higher level than Germany was the Soviet Union. It’s uncomfortable reading in a way, because it undermines the conceit that democracies were better able to mobilise their people than the totalitarian states. Tooze also points out the strategic-logistical dilemma facing Hitler in early 1941: the area he had conquered was deficient in oil and food, and to a lesser extent coal, and he knew that he had to prepare for war with the USA, which together with Britain and its Empire and Dominions, commanded far greater resources. The only alternative to increasing dependence on his Soviet ally of convenience was an attack which would gain him the agricultural land necessary to feed his empire (the plan was for 30,000,000 Soviet citizens to starve), and the oil of the Caucasus – though how that would have been transported to where he needed it is hard to say.
Gregory Greenwood, you get a cookie for this thread. You have waded in and told that despicable Cameron exactly why we think he is despicable. If you didn’t already have an OM, I would be voting for you this month. You have spoken at length for decency. Thank you.
C’mon, people. Cameron is a xian fundie monster.
But it is always nice when they admit it with pride and revel in their ignorance. The flashing neon lights were a nice touch.
Normal people run screaming in horror from monsters.
And their toxic religion.
Xians, creating atheists since 33 CE. Fundie xians like Cameron create millions of ex-Xians a year.
Cameron the monster is helping us ex-Xians. He is just too dumb to know it. Don’t get too worked up because he is a monster. He obviously can’t help it. And don’t ever get too near or turn your back on them. Real monsters can be dangerous. Ask the Canaanites how that worked for them.
In other words, you don’t care about people because they are capable of the most terrible suffering and the deepest love and joy, the wonderful creativity of artists, scientists and indeed, almost all human beings, but because of a myth about where they came from. If God made us, Cameron, he made the rabies virus and the guinea worm too. Why would he do that, unless he hates and despises us, Cameron? I wouldn’t inflict these things on the vilest serial killer or totalitarian tyrant – let alone the eternity of torment your “loving” god supposedly promises those who fail to lick his divine arse.
otrame 282;
Ooh, a cookie! This is going straight to my virtual hips, but I don’t care.
*nom, nom ,nom*
;-)
Cameron, get lost. More than you’re a monster, you’re boring.
You consistently refuse to acknowledge the very real historical, archaeological, and scribal/textual problems with the Abrahamic religions, preferring instead to retreat to presuppositionalist bullshit (which many of us here, myself included and in particular, also know how to tear apart).
Rather than face these problems, which undercut your entire set of premises, you parrot the sociopathic bowel-splutter of the Calvinist camp. You start from your conclusions and whore out sweet Reason, drag her in the mud and the filth of your shrivelled, amoral little gutter of a mind, all so you won’t have to face the light of reality.
Your God is evil, malicious, tyrannical, and above all tiny. And so are you, dear boy. So are you. You have made your God in your image.
“…the Bible’s misuse doesn’t prove that Christianity endorses those things…”
I can’t be the only one here who sees the darkly hilarious hypocrisy in that.
Cameron is reduced to lying now.
Religion for most of its history has placed very little value on human life. Because our life on earth is just a brief interval before we die and go to the afterlife forever.
Xianity had no problem with slavery, female subjugation, genocide, and mass murders anywhere, anytime for much of its history. It has killed tens of millions.
Modern respect for human life and human rights is a secular achievement of the Enlightenment. One hated by a lot of xian cults to this day. Fundies like Cameron hate gays, nonxians, scientists, women, children, each other, Democrats, in summary just about everyone but their co-cultists.
Re: This “No True Christian” argument that seems to pop up from time to time.
That “true” Christians reject the clearly abominable portions of the bible would seem much more plausible if there were a mainstream Christian movement to have these portions removed from the canon. Changes in the canon have happened both on a large scale (during the protestant reformation) and on a small scale (see the plethora of new translations that emerge each decade). There really is no truly Christian precedent against revision of the canon. I would urge the more reasonable (and yet still wong) Christians who have decided that these horrible myths have no place in modern Christianity to purge them from what they regard as “sacred” scripture, including the passages that perpetuate genocide, slavery, sexism, tribalism, and the ultimate moral outrage, hell as just desserts, as the will of God.
The danger of maintaining such passages is frighteningly apparent; future fundamentalist schismatics will regard this vile, immoral nonsense as a potential basis of belief. Such writings should need not be censored, but rather censured as something other than divinely inspired. My hunch is that resistance to do as much stem from the fact that very few such “true” Christians exist.
Antiochus:
Sorta like The Jefferson Bible on steroids, eh? :) And there is now a far better corpus of manuscripts to work from.
Yes it does. For the fundies, the bible is the inerrant Word of god. “God said it, I believe it.”
Since it is a kludgy horrible book of atrocities and obsolete morality, you end up with kludgy horrible cults capable of atrocities and amoral by modern standards.
Even a lot of xians wouldn’t bother trying to justify the OT. My natal sect didn’t.
Antiochus Epiphanes @ 289;
I could live with a bible that was single page that simply stated;
“There is this idea of god that some people believe in, and we think he wants you to apply the Golden Rule and generally not be jerks to one another. This religion stuff really isn’t worth hurting anyone over. Now, get on with your lives. That is all.”
Wait a sec – did I read Cameron correctly in stating that he believes human life only has value because god created us?
So, presumably, if he ever stopped believing that, he’d think that the value of human life was… nothing, I guess.
Let’s hope he never deconverts, if he’s that contemptuous of the precious human lives around him.
Also, Cameron, just a quick hit:
As far as god respecting someone’s free will, how much free will does a dead five-year-old have?
Or a dead anyone, for that matter?
Ordering your followers to kill someone pretty much means you don’t respect either party’s free will.
How can there be free will if the god you claim is infinite, all knowing and all powerful?
Reading a quote that says God gave all the little babies free candy does not reduce in any way the reaction of horror we get reading of how he orders the kids butchered by swords on the next page.
I notice no responses to any points put forth, despite how they actually do directly address your feeble apologetics. Giving up so soon?
‘What the hell man?! He’s gutting those kids with a fucking shovel!?’
‘Yeah, but he gave them all Twix bars first.’
‘Oh, well that’s alright then.’
Cameron’s claim that salvation is available to all made me roll my eyes. The truth is that the majority of humans who have lived since Jesus death never even heard of the guy. Even if all those people haven’t been consigned to Hell, as many believers claim, they would presumably be second class citizens in the afterlife, consigned to some lesser realm than Heaven. After all you couldn’t stick them in Heaven. It might cause resentment amongst those who had relatives sent to Hell, seeing a bunch of people who didn’t actually have to be saved to get in.
Being saved is a dubious proposition anyways. It requires you to make the right choice of sect, and how can you be sure which is the right one? Join say one of the more fundementalist churchs and you might be in for a rather nasty surprise when it turns out it’s the Church of England that’s actually God’s true church.
Re KG
…The best treatment of the Nazi economy is probably Adam Tooze (2006) The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy….
Thanks for the reference. Might be interesting to read – following the money trail usually is.
I’m including the captured territories in this. 10 million is 6 million jews and 4 million assorted unliked people. That’s a lot of property.
The analysis I read said that at the end of the 12 year period, the nazi economy was running at 135% (eating its seed corn, basically).
It was part of a comparison of women’s effect on the wartime economy. The U.S. was listed at 150%, the overage explained because women taking previously male jobs in factories weren’t counted in the original algorithm.
I like Glen Davidson’s point about incompatible russian gear. Having them weakened by lack of replacement parts is a great image.
Atheist jews like Lenin and Trotsky set up a system that killed millions.
And jews wrote all that stuff in the Old Testament.
So there you go…atheists and jews, a deadly combination!!!
What possible context could there be that would make morally acceptable the mass murder and enslavement of children?
Why SHOULDN’T we be outraged by something like that when people push this around as an example of ultimately good morality?
I see that the antisemitic sockpuppet artist is back, and still has nothing of value to say.
I find it funny that it seems to think that oppressive, patriarchal religion began with Judaism. I find it downright hilarious that it is fool enough to conflate political communism with atheism.
Pro tip:- communists are usually atheists in so far as they reject the idea of a supernatural godhead, but there is no requirement for an atheist to be a communist – communism is not the inevitable outcome of atheism. Indeed, the invokation of an absolute moral authority in the form of the ‘worker’s utopia’ by many communist governments has strong structural parrallels with monotheistic religion – the claims of the unassailable moral rectitude of the ideology, the reverence for unaccountable (and usually male) authority figures that borders of deification in its own right, the suppression of dissenting voices and the rejection of the application of critical faculties to the mandated ideology, to name but a few.
Looks like you or one of your buddies is in trouble with CPS.
You really should stick to just naming your dogs after your heroes.
If you’re counting the war years, you have to count a lot more than that with regard to property. Basically, the whole of Europe west of a line from the Baltic to the black Sea, minus Italy and the offshore islands, was at Hitler’s disposal. But as Tooze shows, it wasn’t enough. Because he had to reckon on the USA keeping Britian afloat, and probably joining in at some point, in early 1941 he was “preparing for two wars at once” (one of Tooze’s chapter headings) – trying to build up the Luftwaffe and the U-boat fleet to counter Britain (plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and above all India) and America, at the same time as supplying the army for the attack on the Soviet Union. German industry just wasn’t up to it, though owing to Stalin’s initial stupidity in refusing to credit the many warnings he had of the German attack, it was a “damned close run thing”: if Stalin had fled Moscow in the second week of October, as he nearly did, panic would probably have ensued, Hitler would have taken Moscow, and the Baltic and Caucasus would have followed. The Allies might still have won, but they might not.
Lenin wasn’t a Jew, you fuckwitted lying Nazi scumbag. Nor was Stalin, who was in charge when most of the killing occurred.
Russell has a nice set of correspondences between Marxism and Christianity (and no, lying Nazi scumbag, it doesn’t work for Marxism and Judaism, despite Marx being a Jew). I don’t have the details handy, but it’s something like this:
God :: The dialectic
John the Baptist :: Hegel
Jesus :: Marx
The Bible :: Das Kapital
The elect :: The proletariat
The wordly powers :: the capitalists
The Church :: The Party
The second coming :: the revolution
The millennium :: socialism (or the dictatorship of the proletariat)
Heaven :: communism
It rather annoys me when atheists claim that Marxism is a religion, because it eschews supernaturalism, but it certainly reproduces many of Christianty’s features, notably the intolerance, the endless splitting of sects into subsects, and the doctrinal disputes about the True Meaning of the founding texts.
Be fair – he’s got dupes to fleece.
No responses? Are you blind? You guys mimic each other’s arguments, which are all lifted from your favorite John Loftus books, so I keep up with as many posts as I can.
But so far we’ve established that we’re not dealing with genocide, there were rules of engagement in place, sex slavery was not practiced by the Israelites and the attacks were responses to previous crimes committed.
Well, I’ve established these things; you guys wantonly slam your heads on your keyboards and say “fuck” a lot and call the combination an argument – and God’s a dick for allowing evil. Forgot that last one.
Don’t be silly. You guys are right here.
Lenin was not just a Commie, indeed, Commmunism would not imply atheism per se, but he was a self described Militant atheist who wanted to destroy religon.
Oh, and the jew Marx also wanted to see religion pass away, although he thought it would be a “natural” process.
Lenin just wanted to utiize Mass Murder to help it along.
Now Trotsky, there was a jew who enjoyed killing! He even took the trouble in his last testament (trotsky.net) to emphasize his Militant Atheism.
We are dealing with genocide, both with respect to the putatie flood, and of the putative Canaanites.
You’re just in denial about it, it would appear.
You ignore where the putative rules of engagement were broken.
How was this established, precisely? By you saying it?
You haven’t established that any previous “crimes” were committed. You’ve merely asserted it.
Very badly argued.
God necessarily causes and commands evil. This follows from logic, and is even asserted in the bible. Isaiah 45:7 — I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
@143 ChrisKG: “It’s not a lens, it’s a filter. (And a pretty damn good one too.)”
i.e., Re: #48, it’s a “filter” that passes no light whatsoever.
It’s a fake lens that focuses or resolves nothing.
And, I should have added, where the putative rules of engagement were explicitly stated to not hold.
I can’t find where we established that there was no sex slavery. I can only find the bit in the bible that says it’s okay to keep female prisoners of war as a reward for soldiers. Or are you seriously arguing that it doesn’t count as rape if you tell your victim she’s your wife? I assure you that if you come to my house and tell me I am now your wife, we will not be having sex. No, not even if you tell me that God said I was your wife, too.
How many rapes add up to a marriage? Does it stop being rape as soon as you rape her the first time? Or does it just stop being rape when your victim gives up on fighting back?
Are you married? Is this how YOUR marriage works? Did you kill your wife’s father, carry her back to your home, inform her that she is now married, and rape her? Would you consider it wrong to do that?
Are there any groups of people alive today that you think are as evil as the Canaanites? Gay people, maybe, or Muslims? Is it permissible today to kill a gay couple and take their daughter as your wife? If not, what has changed about morality?
Cameron wrote:
“…so I keep up with as many posts as I can.”
And one of them – 24 hours ago – asked you to name the historians you yourself alleged were widely recognizing events associated with the slaughter of the Canaanites.
Another empty bit of your bombast.
Cameron the liar,
Never read anything by him.
These are all barefaced lies. Here’s Deut.20:15-17 once again:
You see, the “rules of engagement” (which meant offering cities far off the chance to surrender peacefully, with the alternative of having all the men slaughtered and the women and children enslaved) are here explicity contrasted with the cities “which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance”, where no offer to surrender is ordered, and everyone is to be slaughtered. How can you keep repeating your lies when the plain words of the text refute you? I’m genuinely puzzled.
Deut.20:10-14, and for that matter Deut.21, make it quite clear that sex slavery was practised by the Israelites, and indeed ordered by God. As for the “crimes committed”, what crimes had the Hittite, Amorite etc. babes in arms committed, Cameron? You really are a vile, filthy, disgusting excuse for a human being, justifying the murder of children on the grounds of crimes committed by their parents.
I’m wondering which is the filthier piece of shit – Cameron, or our sockpuppetting Nazi. Personally, I think I’d go for Cameron, who appears to have a certain level of intelligence.
You know, this is almost EXACTLY, to the letter, the strategy followed some millennia or so later by a certain general by the name of Temujin.
And they named HIM the “Scourge of God” for his troubles.
Yeah, the Nazi isn’t pretending to be a decent human being, unlike Cameron.
Who the fuck is John Loftus?
I note that one of the putative “crimes” — based on nothing more than made-up nonsense, as far as I can tell — was incest. As I noted @#234, God and the Israelites were not innocent of that (or of setting up the situation where incest would necessarily happen).
But it occurs to me that Cameron seems to think that incest is and was something that deserves the death penalty for everyone involved. Why else would he mention it as a justification for genocide?
Now, without suggesting that incest is right and without potential moral problems, I don’t see how incest would deserve extermination. Assuming that it is consensual, the only one really harmed would be any putative children who receive a double-dose of harmful alleles. If there are no children, then I can’t really see who is harmed at all.
If it is not consensual, then Cameron is arguing for the extermination of rape victims, along with rapists, and presumably, their children.
I realize that the Bible does explicitly call for rape victims to be killed without mercy in some situations, but it seems odd to me that Cameron would espouse that particular biblical value as “moral”.
So, Cameron, please feel free to clarify: Should those who commit consensual incest be subjected to the death penalty? Should the victims and children of incestuous rape be executed along with their rapists?
And why, exactly?
Someone whom PZ likes who has been added to freethoughtblogs.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/loftus
Congratulations!
You are one of the first customers with the new Woo-Proof™©
Irony-O-Meter™© display!
By simply mapping the full[1] complex plane to a small sphere–one unit in radius–we are now not only able to make readings possible from zero up to infinity[2] but also give explicit readings for the imaginary part at the same time[3]!
See also our new Riemann-Minibars™©: “All the drinks you know and than some!” you may have seen in the ℵ0-Bar: “See your personal hero, here at ℵ0!”. Now 20% off[4]!
Subscribe now to be the first one with our new Power-Riemann-Maxibar™© and serve your guests not only every drink they want but also be able to mix every cocktail!
Presentation at the Methyologicon ’87[5] this autumn! Do not miss!
Our team at Photorin Ltd wishes a lot of fun with your product!
[1] Only Gaussian integers in the basic version
[2] Up to but not including infinity in the basic version
[3] May need upgrade to Absolutely-Woo-Proof™© for some
religious logic. Please consult our Quarternion-List for details.
Waranty is void if a normal display is used for entries of the list!
[4] Only a limited number of product is available.
[5] Exact date might change
That is because sex slaves are all through the bible. Women were property and it was assumed they should be treated as property. Sometimes they called them concubines. You bought concubines at Concubines R Us.
Cameron might be piltdown. The style isn’t quite the same but the wack-a-mole game is.
I think I’d go for Cameron, who appears to have a certain level of intelligence.
your standards are getting too low.
must be that we haven’t had any actually intelligent trolls about in a while now.
I find him pedantic, boring, repetetive, inane, dishonest, shallow, and credulous.
also tosses out a lot of projection and denial.
IOW, your average xian.
Who the fuck is John Loftus?
someone who doesn’t mind eating shit and enabling xians who lie and behave badly, apparently.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/loftus/2011/11/17/i-ate-some-shit-yesterday/
I call that a fail.
You’re all so certain it’s a barbaric religion perpetrated by barbaric people, yet you know so little about it. The irony…I’m choking on it.
Deuteronomy 21:10-14 specifically says they were not to be kept as slaves, so don’t you need a specific instance where the practice is approved of to make the argument from outrage work? That would be the logical conclusion, wouldn’t it? Otherwise, you’re reading your judgments into the text.
Furthermore, there’s very little evidence for sex slavery during this period in the Ancient Near East.
[OT + meta]
Ichthyic:
Your evidence is hardly compelling:
“We must eat shit once in a while.” ≠ ‘I don’t mind eating shit’.
(I call that a fail)
I agree.
Yeah, I followed the link to Loftus’ blog and read that piece. I totally commiserate with him. I simply can not afford to talk about my lack of religion with my customers.
Cameron, Exodus 21:7.
@Cameron
You’re such a liar. There’s specific instructions in the bible about how you can take someone you fancy as a war captive, marry her, clip her nails and let her morn the death of her family and then rape her, but if you don’t like it you have to set her free.
Progressive for it’s time maybe but still.
Yeah, screw the people who’ve stood up to religion when it’s controlled the schools; when it’s been allied with authoritarian governments; when they’ve been imprisoned, killed, had their children stolen,… I mean, you might lose customers. The horror.
Since we’re not talking about anything like that, SC, your concern is noted.
Are you really this foolish, or is this feigned? Do you think there aren’t real people whose lives are being ruined by religion and religiously-influenced governments today? Do you think the consequences to you of speaking out outweigh the need for change?
Deuteronomy 21:10-14 specifically says they were not to be kept as slaves,
No, Deuteronomy says that young women captured after the destruction of their cities can’t be sold as slaves if they are taken as “wives” by the victorious soldiers. It does not say that the women must be given any choice as to whether to become the “wife” of the soldier. Calling it a marriage doesn’t make it any less slavery. Furthermore, nothing at all is said of the women who no soldier picks to “marry”. The old or ugly women, presumably, can be sold at will since otherwise there would be no need to specifically prohibit resale of used “wives”.
It is clear to everyone here except, apparently, you that forced marriage is sexual slavery. Why are you pretending to not understand this?
Of course those things go on, but that’s not even remotely close to what I was talking about. If you want to address what I actually was talking about, then please do so.
a good bartender turns away an obvious alcoholic from their bar.
they don’t refuse to acknowledge they are alcoholics simply because they would lose the business of the alcoholic.
John just gave the lamest excuse EVER for enabling bad behavior.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. If you said that you do it because you don’t want to lose business but you’re ashamed of it given the sacrifices others have made and are making, that I could understand.
Calling it “marriage” makes all the difference in the world. As they do today, those words had very different meanings in the Biblical world. To be someone’s wife was not to be someone’s slave; the relationship is entirely different.
The problem, again (for the nth time) is you misinterpreting the words in the context which they are used.
The other point, as you mention, is that the text says nothing of selling the women who were not chosen for marriage. So your presumption is unfounded. Those, however, women would become servants.
Sorry if I sounded accusatory. I’m no model on that front, either. I’d just read this, and the “must” in Loftus’ comment and the “simply” in yours set me off. I think we all need to think and talk about what we can and can’t afford to do. I don’t think it’s simple.
what the fucking fuck fuck.
Don’t you have a bridge that needs defending from some billy goats or something?
CALLING A RAPE “MARRIAGE” DOESN’T MEAN YOU AREN’T A RAPIST ASSHOLE.
Calling it “marriage” makes all the difference in the world. As they do today, those words had very different meanings in the Biblical world.
meanings you of course will make up for us, and continue to change, as you move your goalposts along for us.
dishonest cretin.
Cameron = piltdown (or his clone)
All you need to know.
“Calling it ‘marriage’ makes all the difference in the world.”
Okay then.
*lurks in the shadows to “marry” some unsuspecting woman*
o.o
I must be, because I still haven’t seen you acknowledge the statements laid at your feet re: Westboro being a typical church, albeit with the volume knob broken off at 11.
WHen you are defending murder and genocide, you should expect people to be righteously pissed off at you and fling shit your way. I would absolutely love to tear your fucking head off, seeing as my great uncle was with the troops that liberated the Netherlands in 1945, and was among those that broke open the gates at the concentration camps where the atrocities you are currently in support of were committed.
And yes, you are in support of those atrocities, at any point in time you support the genocide and extermination of a people, you are in support of them. Everything you have been saying is exactly what those monsters said, and even recently, in places such as Rwanada, they would have used your statements word for word.
‘They deserve it.’
‘They are evil.’
‘They are wrong.’
But, I am keeping that urge at bay, mostly. One thing at a time. Do you acknowledge that Westboro is a vocal but otherwise typical Christian church? They read the same book you do, and listen to the very same sermons…
Am I the only one who thinks we should find out who this Cameron is? The cops should be paying a visit to his house to make sure he doesn’t have a “wife” locked up in there.
I prefer the Sumerian version of the Flood Story, largely because of what the goddess Inanna did after the event.
Now Enlil – chief of the gods – decided to exterminate Man with a great flood, because Man was getting too noisy. But he was sure to keep Inanna out of the planning because he knew she would be against it.
He also tried to make sure the other gods and goddesses wouldn’t tell on him, by making them swear solemn oaths.
So it was that the Sun god found himself spilling the beans to a crack in the wall of a house where a certain favorite of his slept. Said favorite listening in, eavesdropping if you will, on a deity’s private conversation with an accidental structural feature.
So it was that a boat got built, and a bunch of people and animals rode through the flood to safety.
But that wasn’t the worst thing where Enlil was concerned. For the very next day, after all the water had drained off, Inanna dropped be to give her father/grandfather/husband (Sumerian deital relations were complicated) a good talking to.
She explained to him, in great detail, just what sort of damn fool he was (woman had a temper), gave him a few suggestions as to how he could’ve dealt with the bad people and left the good people alone, and ended with this admonition, “Upon the sinner lay his sin.”
I try to follow Inanna’s word, and lay the sin on the sinner. I refuse to practice collective guilt, and refuse to believe in inherited guilt. What your ancestors did that was blameworthy is all to their blame, and what ever your ancestors did that was good is to their credit. What each of us does is to our blame or credit, and is not the work of any other member of our group, and certainly not the work of our descendents.
The early Jews (post Babylonian Exile) tried to explain how it was that the land of Canaan was largely abandoned when the early Hebrews moved down from the hills into the valleys. So they came up with stories about how the mighty tribes, under Joshua’s leadership, slaughtered people en masse and took over the old cities.
The vendetta with the Amalekites is another matter.
I did address this. But let’s go over it again, perhaps slowly so you can comprehend. A church that celebrates the number of days people have been in hell is not typical. A church whose primary goal is to preach hate is not typical.
As backwards as many Christians are, most don’t desire that people suffer. And of course that was whole point of Jesus’ ministry and death – so people wouldn’t suffer the fate that the Westboro raisin cakes celebrate. And as I said before, the reason you know about WBC is because they are so utterly crazy when compared to the rest of us.
I would absolutely love to tear your fucking head off
This is laughable on a level that is almost incomprehensible. In an argument about the horrors of unnecessary violence, you say that. Wow.
My whole purpose here has been to demonstrate why these events are not genocides, you self-righteous moron. I find the murder of innocent people as appalling as any sensible person does.
As PZ and others skeptics present this issue, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Hence, Christian apologetics. That wouldn’t be if we approved of unjustified violence. Understand?
The difference between my defense and that of people who slaughter people and think up ad hoc justifications for their actions is that my arguments are grounded in facts. The accusation that I’m using the same defense as a violent government doesn’t automatically put us on the same moral and intellectual level.
my arguments are grounded in facts.
ROFLMAO.
come clean, you’re trying to be a comedian, right?
Cameron says: “I find the murder of innocent people as appalling as any sensible person does.”
So you’re appalled by that whole Flood thing, right?
Except that they drop preach hate. To be anything but what they tell you to be is wrong, and you will be sent to hell. That is hatred. Using soft language does not reduce the message.
“Do not think that I come to bring the peace upon earth: I came not to send peace but the sword. For I come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and the man’s enemies shall be they of his own household. He, who loves father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me; and he, who loves son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me. And he, who does not take up his cross and follow Me, is not worthy of Me” (10: 34-38).
So… maybe he just means kill the unrighteous quickly and humanely?
But you have no problem with it being perpetrated in your Bible under the command of your God.
Sigh.
It is called colourful language, you pillock. ‘Tear your head off’ as in ‘yell at you in a vulgar fashion.’ It is in common use.
It occurs to me, we can solve this issue swiftly.
What is your definition of Genocide?
PZ, please don’t ban me, I am new here and learning. At least give me a warning or demand I read the rules.
I am sick and tired of all this back and forth about history (especially when I am not familiar with the history so I am going to fix that). This mindless bandying of the little picture should be beside the point.
—
Cameron:
I have been to your site and would like you to read the following and answer some questions.
223,000 – 100,000 BC
The earliest evidence of Hominids, such as Neanderthals[1][2] and even Homo heidelbergensis,[2][3] deliberately disposing of deceased individuals usually in funerary caches.
98,000 BC
In the area of present-day France and Belgium, Neanderthals begin defleshing their dead, possibly after a period of excarnation prior to burial.
40,000 BC
One of the earliest Anatomically modern humans to be cremated is buried near Lake Mungo
33,000 BC
All convincing evidence for Neanderthal burials ceases. Roughly coinciding with the time period of the Homo sapiens introduction to Europe and decline of the Neanderthals.[2]
25,000 BC
Individual skulls and/or long bones begin appearing heavily stained with red ochre and are separately buried. This practice may be the origins of sacred relics.[2]
25,000 – 21,000 BC
Clear examples of burials are present in Iberia, Wales, and Eastern Europe. All of these, also, incorporate the heavy use of red ochre. Additionally, various objects are being included in the graves (i.e. periwinkle shells, weighted clothing, dolls, possible drumsticks, mammoth ivory beads, fox teeth pendants, panoply of ivory artifacts, “baton” antlers, flint blades, etc.).[2]
21,000 – 11,000 BC
Convincing evidence of mortuary activity ceases.[2]
13,000 – 8,000 BC
Noticeable burial activity resumes. Large stones may have acted as grave markers. Pairs of ochred antlers are sometimes poles within the cave; this is compared to the modern practice of leaving flowers at one’s grave.
9831
The Neolithic Revolution begins and results in a worldwide population explosion. The first cities, states, kingdoms, and organized religions begin to emerge. The early states were usually theocracies, in which the political power is justified by religious prestige.
9130 – 7370 BC
The apparent lifespan of Göbekli Tepe, the oldest human-made place of worship yet discovered.
8000 BCE
Four to five pine posts are erected near the eventual site of Stonehenge.
7500 – 5700 BC
The settlements of Catalhoyuk develop as a likely spiritual center of Anatolia. Possibly practicing worship in communal shrines, its inhabitants leave behind numerous clay figurines and impressions of phallic, feminine, and hunting scenes.
3100 – 2900 BC
Newgrange, the 250,000 ton (226,796.2 tonne) passage tomb aligned to the winter solstice in Ireland, is built.
3228 – 3102 BCE
Traditionally accepted time of Krishna’s life on Earth.[12][13][14][15][16][17]
3100 BCE
The initial form of Stonehenge is completed. The circular bank and ditch enclosure, about 110 metres (360 ft) across, may be complete with a timber circle.
3000 BCE
Sumerian Cuneiform emerges from the proto-literate Uruk period, allowing the codification of beliefs and creation of detailed historical religious records.
The second phase of Stonehenge is completed and appears to function as the first enclosed cremation cemetery in the British Isles.
2635 – 2610 BCE
The oldest surviving Egyptian Pyramid is commissioned by pharaoh Djoser.
2600 BCE
Stonehenge begins to take on the form of its final phase. The wooden posts are replaced with that of bluestone. It begins taking on an increasingly complex setup—including altar, portal, station stones, etc.—and shows consideration of solar alignments.
2560 BCE
The approximate time accepted as the completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest pyramid of the Giza Plateau.
2494 – 2345 BCE
The first of the oldest surviving religious texts, the Pyramid Texts, are composed in Ancient Egypt.
2348 BCE
Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood that wiped out all previous civilizations according to the Ussher chronology.
2200 BCE
Minoan Civilization in Crete develops. Citizens worship a variety of Goddesses.
2150 – 2000 BCE
The earliest surviving versions of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (originally titled “He who Saw the Deep” (Sha naqba īmuru) or “Surpassing All Other Kings” (Shūtur eli sharrī)) were written.
2000 – 1850 BCE
The traditionally accepted period in which the Judeochristian/Islamic patriarchal figure Abraham lived. Likely born in Ur Kaśdim or Haran and died in Machpelah, Canaan.
1600 BCE
The ancient development of Stonehenge comes to an end.
1500 – 1000 BCE
Vedic ‘Samhitas’ composed (Rig-Veda : Hinduism : India)
1367 BCE
Reign of Akhenaton in Ancient Egypt. Akhenaton is sometimes credited with starting the earliest known monotheistic religion. Akenaton’s monotheistic beliefs are thought to be the precursor of the monotheistic doctrines of the Abrahamic religions.
1300 – 1000 BCE
The “standard” Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh was edited by Sin-liqe-unninni.
1250 BCE
The believed time of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt.
1200 BCE
The Greek Dark Age begins.
1200 BCE
Olmecs build earliest pyramids and temples in Central America.[18]
1100 BCE
Zoroaster (a.k.a. Zarathushtra), founder of Zoroastrianism is thought to have been born.
950 BCE
The Torah begins to be written, the core texts of Judaism and foundation of later Abrahamic religions.
877 BCE
Parsva, the penultimate (23rd) Tirthankara of Jainism is born.
800 BCE
Early Brahmanas are composed.
800 BCE
The Greek Dark Age ends.
600 – 500 BCE
Earliest Confucian writing, Shu Ching incorporates ideas of harmony and heaven.
599 BCE
Mahavira, the final (24th) Tirthankara of Jainism is born.
563 BCE
Gautama Buddha, founder of Buddhism is born.
551 BCE
Confucius, founder of Confucianism, is born.[18]
440 BCE
Zoroastrianism enters recorded history.
300 BCE
Theravada Buddhism is introduced to Sri Lanka by the Venerable Mahinda.
250 BCE
The Third Buddhist council was convened.
63 BCE
Pompey captures Jerusalem and annexes Judea as a Roman client kingdom.
7 BCE – 36 CE
The approximate time-frame for the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure of Christianity.
50-62
Council of Jerusalem is held.
70
Siege of Jerusalem and the Destruction of the Temple.
220
Manichaean Gnosticism is formed by prophet Mani
250
Some of the oldest parts of the Ginza Rba, a core text of Mandaean Gnosticism, are written.
250 – 900
Classic Mayan civilization, Stepped pyramids are constructed.
300
The oldest known version of the Tao Te Ching is written on bamboo tablets.
325
The first Ecumenical Council, the Council of Nicaea, is convened to attain a consensus on doctrine through an assembly representing all of Christendom. It establishes the original Nicene Creed, fixes Easter date, confirms primacy of the sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, and grants the See of Jerusalem a position of honor.
380
Theodosius I declares Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.
381
The second Ecumenical Council, the Council of Constantinople, reaffirms/revises the Nicene Creed repudiating Arianism and Macedonianism.
381 – 391
Theodosius proscripted Paganism within the Roman Empire.
393
The Synod of Hippo, the first time a council of bishops of early Christianity listed and approved a Biblical canon.
405
St. Jerome completes the Vulgate, the first Latin translation of the bible.
410
The Western Roman Empire begins to decline, signaling the onset of the Dark Ages.
424
The Assyrian Church of the East formally separates from the See of Antioch and the western Syrian Church
431
The third Ecumenical Council, the Council of Ephesus, is held as a result of the controversial teachings of Nestorius, of Constantinople. It repudiates Nestorianism, proclaims the Virgin Mary as the Theotokos (“Birth-giver to God”, “God-bearer”, “Mother of God”), repudiates Pelagianism, and again reaffirmes the Nicene Creed.
449
The Second Council of Ephesus declares support of Eutyches and attacked his opponents. Originally convened as an Ecumenical council, its ecumenicality is rejected and is denounced as a latrocinium by the Chalcedonian.
451
The fourth Ecumenical Council, the Council of Chalcedon rejects the Eutychian doctrine of monophysitism, adopts the Chalcedonian Creed, reinstated those deposed in 449 and deposed Dioscorus of Alexandria, and elevates of the bishoprics of Constantinople and Jerusalem to the status of patriarchates.
451
The Oriental Orthodox Church rejects the christological view put forth by the Council of Chalcedon and is excommunicated.
480 – 547
The Codex Gigas, Devil’s Bible, is written by Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western Christian monasticism.
553
The fifth Ecumenical Council, Second Council of Constantinople, repudiates the Three Chapters as Nestorian and condemns Origen of Alexandria.
570 – 632
Life-time of Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullāh RA, the founder of Islam and considered by Muslims to be a messenger of God.
632-661
The Rashidun Caliphate(Rightly Guided) brings Arab conquest of Persia, Egypt, Iraq, bringing Islam into those regions.
650
The verses of the Qur’an are compliled in the form of a book in the era of Uthman RA, the third Caliph of Islam.
661-750
The Umayyad Caliphate brings Arab conquest of North Africa, Spain, Central Asia. Marking the greatest extent of the Arab conquests bringing Islam into those regions.
680 – 681
The sixth Ecumenical Council, the Third Council of Constantinople, rejects Monothelitism and Monoenergism.
Circa 680 the split between Sunni and Shiites starts to grow.
692
The Quinisext Council (aka “Council in Trullo”), an amendment to the 5th and 6th Ecumenical Councils, establishes the Pentarchy.
712
Kojiki, the oldest Shinto text is written[18]
754
The latrocinium Council of Hieria supports iconoclasm.
787
The seventh Ecumenical Council, Second Council of Nicaea, restores the veneration of icons and denounces iconoclasm.
1054
The Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches formally takes place.
1095 – 1099
The first Crusade takes place.
1107 – 1110
Sigurd I of Norway wages the Norwegian Crusade on Muslims in Spain, the Baleares, and in Palestine.
1147 – 1149
The Second Crusade is waged in response to the fall of the County of Edessa.
1189 – 1192
The Third Crusade, European leaders attempt to reconquer the Holy Land from Saladin.
1191
Dehli Sulatanate is stablished.
1199 – 1204
The Fourth Crusade takes place.
1204
Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade sack the Christian Eastern Orthodox city of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.
1209 – 1229
The Albigensian Crusade takes place in Occitania, Europe.
1217 – 1221
The Church attempts the Fifth Crusade.
1228 – 1229
The Sixth Crusade occurs.
1244
Jerusalem is sacked again, instigating the Seventh Crusade.
1270
The Eighth Crusade is organized.
1271 – 1272
The Ninth Crusade fails.
1320
Pope John XXII lays the groundwork for the future witch-hunts with the formalization of the persecution of witchcraft.
1378 – 1417
The Roman Catholic Church is split during the Western Schism.
1469 – 1539
The life of Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism.
1484
Pope Innocent VIII marks the beginning of the classical European witch-hunts with his papal bull Summis desiderantes.
1500
African religious systems are introduced to the Americas, with the commencement of the trans-Atlantic forced migration.
1517
Martin Luther, of the Protestant Reformation, posts the 95 theses.
In the Spanish Empire, Catholicism is spread and encouraged through such institutions as missions and the Inquisition.
1699
The creation of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh Ji in Sikhism
1708
Death of Guru Gobind Singh, the last human Guru, who, before his death, instituted the Sikh
holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, as the eternal Guru.
1789 – 1799
The Dechristianisation of France during the Revolution.[19][20] The state confiscates Church properties, bans monastic vows, with the passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy removes the Church from the Roman Pope and subordinates it as a department of the Government, replaces the traditional Gregorian Calendar, and abolishes Christian holidays.
1791
Freedom of religion, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, is amended into the constitution of the United States forming an early and influential secular government.
1801
The situation following the French Revolution, France and Pope Pius VII entered into the Concordat of 1801. While “Catholicism” regains some powers and becomes recognized as “…the religion of the great majority of the French”, it’s not reafforded the latitude it had enjoyed prior to the Revolution. It’s not the official state religion, the Church relinquishes all claims to estate seized after 1790, the clergy is state salaried and must swear allegiance to the State, and religious freedom is maintained.
1819 – 1850
The life of Siyyid `Alí Muḥammad Shírází (Persian: سيد علی محمد شیرازی) Bab (October 20, 1819 – July 9, 1850), the founder of Bábism.
1817 – 1892
The life of Bahá’u’lláh, founder of the Bahá’í Faith.
1830
The Latter Day Saint movement (Mormonism) is founded by Joseph Smith, Jr.
1835 – 1908
Lifetime of Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the messianic Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam.
1899
Aradia (aka the Gospel of the Witches), one of the earliest books describing post witchhunt European religious Witchcraft, is published by Charles Godfrey Leland.[21]
1904
Thelema founded.
1905
In France the law on the Separation of the Churches and the State is passed, officially establishing it a state secularism and putting and end to the funding of religious groups by the state.[22]
Becoming a place of pilgrimage for neo-druids and other pagans, the Ancient Order of Druids organized the first recorded reconstructionist ceremony in Stonehenge.
1908
The establishment of the Khalifatul Masih after Prophethood in the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, the Second Manifestation of God’s Power.
1917
The October Revolution, in Russia, leads to the annexation of all church properties and subsequent religious suppression.
the 1917 1917 Constitution of Mexico is written making the Mexico a secular state.
1926
Cao Dai founded.
The Cristero War is fought in Mexico between the secular governmenr and religious christian rebels ends 1929.
1930s
Rastafari movement, the Nation of Islam is founded.
1932
A neo-Hindu religious movement,the Brahma Kumaris or “Daughters of Brahma” started the origin of BKWSU can be traced to the group “Om Mandali”, founded by Lekhraj Kripalani(1884–1969).
1938
The first event of the Holocaust, the Kristallnacht, takes place.
1939 – 1945
Millions of Jews are relocated and killed by the Nazi government during Holocaust.
1947
British India is partitioned on religious lines; into an Islamic country of Pakistan and the secular nation of India with a Hindu majority.
1948
The Jews return to their ancient biblical homeland and thus the state of Israel is created.
1952
Scientology is created.
1954
Wicca is publicized by Gerald Gardner.[23]
1960s
Various Neopagan and New Age movements gain momentum.
1961
Unitarian Universalism formed from merger of Unitarianism and Universalism.[24]
1962
The Church of All Worlds, the first American neo-pagan church, is formed by a group including Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, and Richard Lance Christie.
1962 – 1965
The Second Vatican Council takes place.[25][26][27][28]
1966
Religious Satanism begins, with Anton Szandor LaVey’s founding of the Church of Satan.[29]
1972 – 1984
The Stonehenge free festivals are held.
1973
Claude Vorilhon established the Raëlian Movement and changed his name to Raël following an purported extraterrestrial encounter in December 1973.
1984
Operation Blue Star occurs at holiest site of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. 1984 Anti-Sikh riots follow.
1972 – 2004
Germanic Neopaganism (aka Heathenism, Heathenry, Ásatrú, Odinism, Forn Siðr, Vor Siðr, and Theodism) begins to experience a second wave of revival.
1979
The Iranian Revolution results in the establishment of an Islamic Republic in Iran.
1981
The Stregherian revival continues. “The Book of the Holy Strega” and “The Book of Ways” Volume I & II are published.
1985
The Battle of the Beanfield forces an end to the Stonehenge free festivals.
1989
The revolutions of 1989, the overthrow of many Soviet-style states,[55] allows a resurgence in open religious practice in many Eastern European countries.[citation needed]
1990s
European pagan reconstructive movements (Celtic, Hellenic, Roman, Slavic, Baltic, Finnish, etc.) organize.
1993
The European Council convened in Copenhagen, Denmark, agrees to criteria requiring religious freedom within any and all prospective members of the European Union.
1998
The Strega Arician Tradition is founded.
2001
Osama bin Laden’s declared holy war reaches a climax with 2,993 dead, through al-Qaeda’s actions on 11 September.
2005
The Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, a parody religion is created by Oregon State physics graduate Bobby Henderson. It was originally intended as a satirical protest against the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to permit the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public schools.
2009
The Church of Scientology in France is fined €600,000 and several of its leaders are fined and sentenced to jail for defrauding new recruits out of their savings. The state fails to disband the church due to legal changes occurring over the same time period.
—
Cameron:
1. Considering the history of religion what makes Christianity so special? What makes it correct?
2. Are you saying all these others are Wrong?
3. Are you really saying all these others are wrong and you and yours are right?
4. Are you really suggesting that?
5. Is this not representative of mass confusion and the need to understand nature?
6. Considering how much knowledge has accrued since the Age of Englightenment why not move away from these prehistoric misconceptions?
7. Did Jesus beat out all these Gods to become the One True Son of God? Or is Christianity just the left-overs of a planetary confusion?
8. Is it not more likely that all religions are wrong?
Impressively un-self-aware, Cameron. You don’t even do presuppositionalism all that well.
Oops, post 355 courtesy of wikipedia edited for downsizing.
Cameron
OUT OF CONTEXT!!!
infinite123lifer
FYI, you usually get a warning. Beyond that, we get lots of trolls who are never even warned; PZ doesn’t seem to like banning people that much. If you are concerned about a post you are about to write you can always read the dungeon.
Cameron? I am anxiously waiting for your reply to post # 355 sir. Or can I just say
“thats what I thought”.
Or maybe you just went to bed, too early to tell I suppose.
By the way, I am not part of the most educated horde here. If I made you recoil I am not sure if I should count that as my first victory or not. Not that I am trying to win anything other than the answers to the questions I have asked of you, but if you cannot answer them than my presumptions about your True beliefs must be somewhere close to true and thus I have my answers.
Such as, you say what you say because you believe it is the greater good. You say what you say because you make money off of it. You say what you say because it gives you power over people.
Instead of arguing with educated scholars try taking on the general not so swift masses, such as myself, though I am not a sheep, I want answers!
ha!, how ironic thats the exact opposite of what you criticized PZ for:
BTW, it is important to address all types, educated and the general public which I am sure PZ does. Now address me Cameron or forever hold your peace. You are far more educated than me, I am atheist/agnostic/(when my ass is on the line I trust in the Universe for help) so basically I am confused due to growing up in such a confusing world. I am sick of old men telling me what to believe. I want answers. Or am I not worth saving?
—
Hurin, Nattering Nabob of Negativism right on. I just was not sure about the length. Good lookin’ out though :)
Three things you can’t do: juggle ants, use turds as currency, and justify genocide.
The above still holds if a more technically correct descriptor of your action is “total war”, “scorched earth” or “including soft targets as acceptable collateral”.
Cameron
The “fate”, of course, is completely imaginary. People dreading this fate, however, is a very real phenomenon. Christian churches, no matter how nice they are, feed on this dread. I want people to realize that there’s nothing to fear.
I’m deeply alarmed that Cameron appears sincerely to not understand why marrying a woman against her will is rape.
He isn’t just getting tangled up in his own argument; he really thinks that once he has married a woman, ‘rape’ is no longer a thing that can happen. Marriage = any sex that happens is okay, for him.
That isn’t just a theology problem, it’s a moral problem. I’m concerned for Cameron’s wife.
I hope I got that comment on video! I wanted to ask him if the children in the womb were evil? The babes still nursing? The toddlers who couldn’t speak yet, leave alone utter evil words.
You have failed to do so, and ignored the arguments that demonstrate that your demonstration fails on its face.
Ah, but if someone in a group of people being killed isn’t innocent — by your definition of “innocent” — you have no problem with an entire group being slaughtered, even if there are those in the group who are “innocent”, even by your standards. You don’t call it “murder” then, you call it justified, and make up all sorts of nonsense to continue to justify it.
You know who else made up all sorts of nonsense about some of those they wanted to kill being “guilty” of heinous acts in order to justify killing all of them?
Now you’re just lying. You have no facts; indeed, you have repeatedly ignored facts.
Actually, it kind of does. That’s the point.
Do you really think that any “violent government” simply kills large groups of innocent people, and claims that they have murdered large groups of innocent people? Of course not.
They always proclaim that the people they killed were guilty of something. Guilty, guilty, guilty. Maybe they were “violent”. Maybe they committed incest. Maybe they were “warlike”. Whatever.
They deserved it.
I’m pretty sure that this is wrong.
While the books of the OT were first compiled after the return from the Exile, most of them were written before it. I doubt that they had any memory of their ancestors moving from the highlands down to the lowlands, by the time they returned from exile and rebuilt the temple.
I’m pretty sure that the book of Joshua dates from the time of king Josiah of Judah, after the northern kingdom of Israel had been conquered by Assyria. Josiah — and/or a faction of the priests of the cult of YHWH, possibly with encouragement from former Israelites who had fled from the north after the conquest — were feeling ambitious about re-conquering the lands to their north, with Josiah ruling the unified countries.
The book of Joshua describes how, with YHWH’s aid, the children of Israel quickly conquered a bunch of cities from powerful enemies, and I suspect it was meant to encourage Josiah, and others, that what happened once could happen again, with YHWH’s aid.
Propaganda for a pro-war faction, as it were. Note the similarity in the names “Josiah” (Yoshi-yahu) and “Joshua” (Yeho-shua). Conincidence? I think not.
Then Josiah became a little too overconfident in YHWH protecting him, and got himself killed by an Egyptian army campaigning against Babylonia. Oops.
Calling it “marriage” makes all the difference in the world.
Wow. I’m stunned and extremely happy to be an internet away from the person who typed this.
But maybe Cameron just wasn’t thinking about what this means in real life. Let me give you a scenario:
You have a new neighbor, a man recently discharged from the US military after serving in Iraq. He brings with him a woman who looks probably Iraqi but doesn’t say much and is quickly shuffled out of sight. A few days later you catch a glimpse of her and notice that her head has been shaved. A month or so later you start hearing screams from the man’s apartment on a nightly or near nightly basis. Shortly thereafter the woman appears at your door telling you that the man in question killed her family, kidnapped her, and is raping her every night. The man shows up shortly thereafter and says, “No, really, it’s ok, she’s my wife.”
A quick multiple choice for you: What problem is there with this scenario:
1. Problem? I don’t see any problem.
2. The COC didn’t order complete destruction of Iraq. We live in a reduced time. Yaweh would have ordered the cities burned, population slaughtered, and fields sowed with salt by now.
3. The man is a war criminal. While we don’t know the context of the killing of the woman’s family (maybe they really were insurgents), kidnapping and raping her is clearly a war crime.
Biblicly, 1 or 2 is probably correct. To a decent human being 3 is the only possible answer.
For a sexual relationship to be called a “marriage”, both (or all) partners have to willingly enter into the relationship, agree to the cultural format of “marriage”, and continuously consent to the relationship. Just changing the label from rape to marriage doesn’t make it so.
The other point, as you mention, is that the text says nothing of selling the women who were not chosen for marriage.
So what do you imagine happens to the women not chosen to be raped by one particular man? Are they allowed to go free (wouldn’t that be bad, seeing as they’re evil and all that?) Other passages talk about capturing and selling women of enemy tribes. It seems logical that that is the fate of the women not chosen for “marriage”.
Your attempting to soften it by calling them “servants” is just silly. Servants are people who have made a contract with an employer to perform certain duties for the employer in exchange for a wage and possibly other compensation (i.e. health insurance, retirement, etc). I see no evidence that the women here would be paid any wage and certainly they weren’t entering into a voluntary contract which could be terminated by either party.
If their religion was true, then they wouldn’t have to lie all the time.
I see Cameron has been reduced to the usual; lies, evasions, and playing wack-a-mole.
Lies aren’t even the greatest of the problems of fundyism. It also seems to be a reliable and good way to produce monsters.
Anyone trying to live a biblical lifestyle today would end up doing multiple life sentences in prison. The FLDS’s Warren Jeffs tried it and got life + 20 years.
To which end you have lied repeatedly, and apparently without any shame. Par for the course for a Christian apologist for genocide, child murder, enslavement and rape.
We now see most clearly, as you have laboriously taught us, it’s no longer “a barbaric religion perpetrated by barbaric people.” It’s a barbaric religion perpetrated by idiots such as yourself.
I see Cameron has not returned to defend his position. Honestly, chew toys these days. No staying power.
I don’t imagine anything. I know that those not chosen for marriage could become servants, not slaves, and were afforded specific protections under the law. For example, they were to be afforded the same respect as the head of the household’s countrymen, according to Leviticus 19:34 and Deuteronomy 10:19.
They also became part of the family, so to speak, living, working and often worshiping with them. This is a very different arrangement compared to the modern idea of slavery you’re thinking of.
Your analogy to a solider in modern Iraq does not reflect the facts and irrelevant as a result. “Wife” wasn’t synonymous with “rape doll.” You’re completely wrong on that point. And just to underscore that this was indeed a relationship between married people, and not ownership, recognize that the marriage could be ended only by divorce and not by the sale of the wife.
Furthermore, the default for these captive women was freedom. I quoted Deuteronomy 20:14 earlier in support of the claim that they would become servants. The verse says “may” or “can” be taken, but freedom was the default option for them.
As you see, I’m still here. But like most people I do sleep and do other things besides argue on the internet.
Cameron:
Whew. That’s a relief. So the wife can divorce the husband if she’s not happy having been raped in the first place.
It’s good to know the wife could choose to leave the relationship at any time, even if she couldn’t choose it in the first place.
These women who just had their families killed and their communities destroyed and were not raped with the propose of being made a part of a family of the conquering party, gets to have freedom.
How fucking noble.
Freedom is just an other word for nothing left to lose.
You’ve done nothing of the sort. All you’ve done is say that it was a justified genocide because the victims were so evil and God only wanted to wipe out the culture, not a race (even though an aspect of genocide is killing to wipe out a culture). Oh, and you’ve also defended God on the basis that to it is unreasonable expect him to fight evil by using miracles that didn’t involve indiscriminate mass murder of people in broad geographic regions based on the behavior of a majority of people in the region. God cannot be expected to have precise aim, nor could he expected to solve problems without resorting to murder.
Cameron 372: Your two Bible quotes have to do with treatment of foreigners, not people taken on as servants from a foreign land, which is what you are implying. Do you seriously mean to say that immigrants and prisoners of war were meant to be treated by the same standards?
And having sex with someone who is a “wife against her will” would, most likely, be sex against the wife’s will. I.e. rape. Are you really this fucking dense?
Also: The fact that freedom was “default” is irrelevant if you are also explicitly permitting people to take their freedom away.
Cameron, your utter moral bankruptcy beggars belief. Even if the winning side who composed the stories in the OT really were any less appalling by our standards than the neighbours whom they killed, raped and enslaved (and that’s a very big “if”, when we only have their word for it) – their behaviour would still be appalling by our standards. Because we have higher standards than they did; we don’t think slaughtering toddlers and rape and slavery are A-OK under any circumstances.
.
So why on earth do you fondly imagine that you can hold up the collection of fairytales in which their stories are included as a source of moral guidance?
.
Because you pretend other gods invented at the time were somehow even worse, you think we should take seriously your suggestion that this particular fictional character – the one you happen to have picked – is a source of morality?
.
Religion has turned your heart to stone and your brains to putrescence.
Translation: I find the murder of some people appealing.
Cameron actually highlighst to me the progress I’ve seen NeoNazis and Holocaust deniers take
Step 1) The Holocaust never happened, there was no systematic genocide: Check on this acount
Step 2) Those who were killed were criminals and deserved it: Check
Step 3) The Jews actually DID deserve it if it happened: Check
Step 4) Arguing that Hitler was better than people like Stalin: Check
Step 5) Anger
Furthermore, the default for these captive women was freedom. I quoted Deuteronomy 20:14 earlier in support of the claim that they would become servants.
That is the most ridiculous claim I’ve seen from you yet. Here’s what Deut 20:14 actually says: “but the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves” The women and children are listed as being equivalent “plunder” as livestock. There is not a hint of a suggestion that they would ever be freed, under any circumstances.
They also became part of the family, so to speak, living, working and often worshiping with them.
It’s a nice thought, I suppose, to pretend that that makes everything fine. But I can’t help but wonder how you’d feel if, say, an Islamic military came and wiped out your country but for some reason spared you and “allowed” (aka forced) you to live with them, work for them, and worship their way. Would you be happy with that? Especially if they killed your family as Deuteronomy specifically says happened to the women in question?
“Wife” wasn’t synonymous with “rape doll.”
Not in most people’s minds, no. Again, can you give the slightest evidence that captured women were allowed to give or withhold consent for the “marriages” discussed? Or give or withhold consent for the “divorce” that the husband can impose on them if he so chooses? And where is a woman-probably by our standards a girl-supposed to go after she has been raped and “divorced” by a man who destroyed her family and home? Did the ancient Israelis have alimony?
Why would a human pay alimony to the equivalent of livestock. But, hey, at least she has her FREEDOM!
An prominent leader sounded a good deal like Cameron:
Well, some people just have to be punished….
Glen Davidson
Ah. So, apparently Cameron has failed to comprehend every Biblical passage he’s brought up so far. I certainly hope that when he said “ask a qualified scholar about the same issue”, he didn’t have himself in mind. Because, with as much scorn and disgust as he displays for our daring to see what those dumb creationists have to say on the matter instead of Bible scholars, he seems to have no problem giving equally inane and idiotic excuses of his own. Should you perhaps stop digging, Cameron, and direct the nearest Bible scholar to this thread to take your place? You’ve been doing so poorly on the issue that it is laughable. The fact that you remain so proud and condescending while making such poor excuses and ignoring the majority of criticism others have made just makes it that much more laughable.
What a shameless liar Cameron is! The KJV version of Deut. 20.:14 is as follows:
There is not the faintest suggestion that the women and children are regarded as anything but “spoil”, exactly like the cattle, let alone that freedom is the “default”. If they were to be freed, the text would say so: it is absolutely clear that they are enslaved. Just as in Deut. 20:15 there is not the faintest suggestion that the “beautiful woman” gets a choice about being “married” to an Israelite whose fancy she takes: if she doesn’t want to “marry” an Israelite who may just have butchered her male kin, she is to be raped. And raped. And raped. And raped. And raped. And raped… Forced to bear her rapist’s child. Then raped some more. And let’s remember, these women and children are, if anything, the lucky ones. Those having the misfortune to occupy cities “which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance” are to be slaughtered without mercy. Tell me, Cameron, do you think the Israelites slaughtered the children in front of their parents first, or the parents in front of the children? Is there a verse somewhere in the Bible that lays down the correct procedure in these cases?
So what ever happened to our “witness” and that forthcoming YouTube video that shows PZ is a poopyheaded liar who hates creationists so much he lies about them? Come on. That video was supposed to be up yesterday but I’m not seeing anything. Surely this so-called witness wasn’t lying!
Don’t be ridiculous; the comparison is absurd. Cameron is a man. Not only that, he’s a Christian. So obviously, God wouldn’t have told the Muslims to do that.
@385: Are you sure? Some imam or another told me that God was Islamic and therefore it was totally moral to forcefully convert Christians…surely he wasn’t lying. He was a nice religious man who probably would provide cookies to guests at his museum if he had one.
Cameron
Oh bullshit.
This article features a graphic showing the legal status of spousal rape in various countries in the world. You might notice that it is legal to rape one’s spouse in most of the middle east. Marital rape was even legal in most states of the US until the 1970s.
Another interesting tidbit from that article:
Lets look at the verse from Deuteronomy, shall we…
The interesting thing here is that when the raped woman is betrothed (read “already owned”) the rapist is to die, but if she is not, then he pays her father to marry her. We are talking about a property arrangement here, you asscarrot. The biblical treatment of rape is obviously predicated on the notion of a woman’s sexuality being the property of her father until such a time as it can be sold to an eligible bachelor.
Based on this (and the historical status of women in most of the world since time immemorial) I deduce that the meaning of “wife” in the biblical sense probably departed from “rape doll” only in the sense that a “rape doll” might be read to imply exploitation for only one type of service.
dianne@386,
Hmm. Good point. Cameron?
I think it would depend upon the ages of the children and if they were old enough to truly appreciate God’s righteousness. Other than that, God gave man free will for a purpose, no?
I mean, as long as he didn’t choose to show mercy or compassion, he was free execute the procedure in the order of his choosing.
I mean, it only makes sense, right Cam?
Fixed. Recall that the OT does not prohibit polygyny.
It baffles me how Cameron’s God is apparently weaker than Superman. I mean…Superman can stop evil without obliterating the person
Ing:
Well… God used to be really powerful you know, but his power just drained so quickly. I guess creating the universe really made his hair gray and his back weak and so on.
First God is so almighty that He creates not only the Earth, moon and sun, but “all the stars too” – as the Bible puts it. So billions of galaxies, with billions of stars, just to put humans on one insignificant speck of dust in all that vastness.
Then of course things went swiftly downhill. That God’s power has waned is obvious since nowadays a face on toast is considered a miracle when once He created galaxies just to be pretty lights in the sky. But the real problem I have is that He is so completely inefficient as a parent. As you say, another of humanity’s favorite characters – Superman – can teach people a lesson while simultaneously being overpowered and non-violent. But God can’t?
He creates two perfect humans in a perfect place and they immediately sin. And even though they and God were perfect, He cannot come up with a punishment that keeps them from sinning anymore – instead they immediately start killing each other and stuff.
After that it’s all just an exercise in utter futility as God comes up with apparently less and less successful ways of punishing his once so perfect creation. Drowning everyone – including newborn babies, kittens and the quite innocent trees and flowers – doesn’t work. Burning a city, turning someone to salt, waging war, killing firstborns or hardening the heart of a pharaoh doesn’t seem to do any good. People keep sinning.
Then doing the ultimate in plans that are simultaneously ridiculously convoluted and amazingly half-assed – sending yourself in the form of your son to get yourself killed for the sake of humanity – does nothing noticeable either. People still take slaves, kill, rape, wage war and leave the poor to die in gutters.
Maybe, just maybe, God should try giving some sort of lesson that doesn’t involve killing. Not killing soldiers. Not killing babies and kittens. Not sending bears to maul children who mock a bald man. Not even killing yourself so that you can go up to your heavenly throne to hang out with yourself. Just… no killing at all. Maybe an almighty, all powerful God could come up with some non-violent message to get people to be nicer to each other.
But what the hell do I know, right? I’m no God.
Sigh.
I know the original post is about the trip to the Creation Ministries of the Ozarks, but
Cameron, for once can you answer the big picture questions I proposed to you?
It seems all this dispute about a book is not going to give you any justice anyway, because the bible is written by men to control people and tell them how to live their lives. Lets get to the meat and potatoes. Or is the bible your only meat and potatoes? Step back from what is in dispute and answer the questions I proposed to you.
Sigh.
Not once have I justified anything with divine revelation. Every post has contained actual arguments. You may not like them, but they’re there. And nobody was forcefully converted. The purpose was to drive the Canaanites out of the land, not to butcher them. The people who stayed and waited for the Israelites were expecting a fight and prepared for the possibility that they actually might lose. The possibility of joining the country you just lost a war to probably wasn’t a terrible option at that point.
I submit that basing marriage laws on requirements in Deuteronomy is unnecessary and wrong, because they were intended for a certain people living in a specific setting. The laws don’t make sense in Geneva or anywhere else outside the Ancient Near East (See below).
A little background about the social context of the Biblical world would do you all a world of good. First of all, after being raped, the woman would no longer have been marriageable. That means she’d lose the support normally provided by a family after marrying into it. By marrying the man involved she’d be guaranteed that support. After researching this a little I’ve learned that the woman likely would have demanded such an arrangement for the reason I gave above.
Secondly, the Hebrew word translated as “rape” merely means “lie with.” It’s likely that the encounter would have been entirely consensual, especially since women were fiercely protected by their families in those days. This is why it’s problematic to read ancient texts in a modern language without consulting any sources except, lol, the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. Clowns.
A few more things:
The verse doesn’t actually use the word “rape.” It is solely implied by people looking for things to rage about. The word used in Hebrew is “tabas,” which doesn’t imply force and translates into English as “seize.”
The author could have implied “rape” if he wanted to with the word “chazak,” which does carry such a connotation.
Also of note: “rape” had a definition in the Middle Ages that included “seduction.” That means they were interpreting Deuteronomy 22:28-29 the way I’m suggesting it should be interpreted.
It has a script.
Anything that agrees with the script is all right.
Anyone or anything that disagrees with the script is evil and/or “angry,” because how else could anyone disagree with the script?
For, the script is All Truth.
Glen Davidson
While a literal translation might be just ‘lie with’, it is actually used for any act of intercourse, consensual or not, as is obvious in the passages quoted by Hurin in post 387. In other words, you really are another of the type of William Lane Craig, willing to justify and defend anything their mythic god ordered with a mixture of obfuscation, semantics and/or outright lies. To quote your own bible;
And your fruits offered here, taste of shit of the bovine male variety.
By the way, you really haven’t fully thought out your argument have you, for how did those ancient Jews know god’s orders if not by divine revelation. Or did they just trip over the bible while out for a walk one day? Then again, it makes as much sense as any other claim that xianity, or any other of the world’s religions for that matter, makes.
So Cameron, as someone who is appalled by the slaughter of innocent, you ARE appalled by that whole Flood thing, right?
We’ve been saying this all along. Bronze age goat-herders.
Ahhhhh!!!!! Specific setting!!! Moral relativism…
I answered post 355 on my blog. It’s a different topic, so I won’t address it here. Comment on my post if you want to talk about why Christianity is correct or not.
And answer my arguments about OT marriage laws. Don’t scream about moral relativism or how much of an asshole I am.
John Phillips, there is a word for “rape” in Ancient Hebrew. It was not used in Deuteronomy 22:28, but it was used in the law immediately preceding the one you guys are wrongly ripping your hair out over. “But if a man finds a betrothed young woman in the countryside, and the man forces her and lies with her…” Do you understand? One verse specifically indicates force; the other does not.
And being a more generalized term with a more generalized and widespread usage, that makes it EVEN MORE EVIL than if the word translates directly to “rape”.
So then, we’re going to throw the whole “these are laws given by an all-knowing God” thing out the window? That’s grand of you, but then I don’t why you are bothering to defend the accounts of the Biblical God when you could so easily discard and disregard the accounts of fallible men on the subject of God’s intentions and deeds. Oh, cherry picking…
The totally not-barbaric Hebrews and their totally not evil God couldn’t have been expected to come up with a way to help raped women other than to require their rapist to marry them. They couldn’t have been expected to have a society where a woman’s worth wasn’t based on marriageability, and marriageability based on virginity. They couldn’t have been expected to take on a system that was less Puritanical and misogynistic. So, given that their society already devalued women so much, forcing their rapists to marry them was really a gift. The women should treasure that they were given that much protection, to be able to do the only thing that could give her social worth, with the only price being forever attached to the man that exploited and violently, sexually abused her. What more could be expected of a loving, wise God and the non-barbaric people that he totally gave explicit moral laws to? All about the context.
This God of yours sure is pathetic, Cameron. Can’t even be arsed to hand out those Objective Morals your fellow sheep are always bleating about, let alone intervene in modern day society, let alone intervene in ancient society without resorting to indiscriminate murder based on geographic location. A regular 21st century person with a satellite, a loudspeaker, and a few nukes could easily do as good of a job, or better. That’s gotta sting, with all this talk about Bible God’s infinite wisdom and power. And that’s why apologetics are a thing.
And a god that is not a monster could simply have instructed his people that a woman must still be marriageable WITHOUT STIGMA, after being raped.
And a god that is not a monster could simply have COMMANDED that women should be allowed and enabled to support themselves, so they wouldn’t need such a thing.
And a god that is not a monster could simply have COMMANDED that such support BE GUARANTEED as REPARATION from the offending man WITHOUT marriage.
But Cameron’s god, it seems, IS a monster, as it did not.
Yay! Even more rape apologetics from Cameron!
“No guys, for realzies, it was TOTALLY consensual. After I killed her family.”
Asshole? Pfttt! I wouldn’t put effort into calling you a hypocrite. Let alone an asshole. The crux of the matter is your lack of awareness. Why you chose to flagellate over a tome of Jewish neurosis is beyond me. Of all the things in the universe to cling to… Which reminds me, I have to get lottery tickets tomorrow.
Why?
1. The OT marriage laws are also a tangent, when the main topic was Biblical genocide, which is a topic you were even more incompetent in defending.
2. Pointing out that one of your arguments reeks of moral relativism is to show that it is inconsistent with being orders from God.
3. Pointing out that you are an asshole is fun, and is often just done in conjunction with pointing out that you are wrong.
Also: Hey look, the two different Hebrew words used to describe rape and “euphemism for rape that is totally different because Cameron believes that to be the case” have overlapping definitions. Whoddathunk? But yeah, chazak would be a much better fit. That word definitely means rape. You’re such the Bible scholar, Cameron.
I’m glad that you acknowledge that your intellectual dishonesty has nothing to do with God.
Argument by fiat is a logical fallacy. Argument by selective and dishonest reading fails.
Confabulated exegesis is obviously a sign of intellectual dishonesty and compulsive lying.
The purpose was to butcher the Canaanites.
You dishonest confabulation is noted, liar.
And yet, that option was not even suggested. The bible says “kill them all”.
Or in other words, they were part of the culture of a patriarchial and misogynistic society.
The laws make “sense” in any patriarchial and misogynistic society, which is why so many patriarchial and misogynistic societies had and have similar laws.
Why not? Because the society was patriarchial and misogynistic, of course, to an extremely evil degree.
And of course, rapists always honor their marital commitments.
Hahahahaha!
Of course, of course. If you were raped, you too would demand from your rapist an arrangement of marriage, and be glad to have it, right?
Your omission of context is most ironic.
Ah, I see. Every virgin enjoys being grabbed and raped. You’d probably enjoy being raped too!
So if she happened to be alone, for any reason whatsoever, she’s just asking to be raped.
The SAB is the KJV, moron.
Neither does Genesis 19:4-5 or Genesis 19:8, and yet, strangely enough, no one ever suggests that a consensual invitation to have tea and cookies is intended by the words used there.
Isn’t that odd?
Your Hebrew sucks, loser. The word used is “תְפָשָׂ֖הּ”, far better transliterated “t’fasa”. What brain fart turned a “פ” into a “b”?
Because, of course, a rapist never seizes his victim using force.
Or rather, “seizes her”
For pity’s sake, are you really so desperate that you’re reduced to these miserable nonsensical word games?
Like your pathetically incompetent idea of what should have been written even matters.
Look, if you saw the sentence “a man seized Cameron, and, uh, lay with Cameron (and then offered Cameron’s dad fifty bucks)”, would you have any doubts at all that rape was being described, even though the word itself was not used?
Or are you going to argue that of course you would consent to lay with any man who seized you?
Bleh. Cameron’s Hebrew sucks, so he’s giving the root of the verb, because he has no idea how to transliterate the form used in Deut 22:25, “הֶחֱזִיק־בָּהּ”.
There, the phrase “hechezik (bah)” does mean “forces [himself] (on [her])”
Although I note that it is immediately followed by the verb phrase “שָׁכַב עִמָּהּ”, “lie with” — the same phrase that he whines does not mean “rape” in Deuteronomy 22:28.
Again, I am just in awe of how kind-hearted and forward-thinking this is. Truly, they were progressives, inspired by God Himself. Though, I wonder why a raped woman wouldn’t be considered marriageable? I mean, it’s not like the same divine book attempting to save rape victims from the undeniable evils of becoming worthless due to a society’s obsession with marriage and virginity would also try to perpetuate that obsession with marriage and virginity? Right? It totally wouldn’t do that over the course of nine verses, seven verses before their incredibly kind and insightful rules. Right…
Well, isn’t that odd. It’s almost as if the rules in question were instating the kind of culture that Cameron claims that “marry your rapist” rule was trying its damnedest to circumvent. Funny how that works.
Cameron
Oh yes, just think of the applications…
That’s fine as an explanation, but I’m hoping you aren’t implying that this standard of what is ‘marriageable’ is in any way defensible.
Skeptics Annotated Bible is just KJV with some additional commentary. Its convenient for directing people to passages within the KJV as it has them in an online format. The citation was not made for any of the side commentary.
Second your “likely” is absolutely meaningless. Your argument about families being fiercely protective makes consensual relations equally unlikely. If the language includes consensual cases along with rape, then my assessment stands.
I note that you make no attempt to address the status of women as chattel in Deuteronomy.
Concession accepted.
Now why would marriage laws that only apply to a particular time and place be given by anyone other than people living in that time and place?
I defy you to explain how the type of marriage laws being indicated would be supported by anyone or anything with a grip on ethics (let alone an benevolent deity FFS). Culturally relativistic arguments about the “time and place” are only relevant if the ancient Hebrew people are properly the inventors of the ideas in Deuteronomy. You weren’t arguing that, were you?
Cameron, you are really trying it on, for it is obvious from the wording in the verses quoted in post 387, i.e.
22:25 …the man force her, and he lie with her…
22:27 For if he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her…
22:28 …lay hold on her and lie with her..
that only a xian apologist maroon could claim that they meant anything but rape in the context of those verses. Any other attempts at semantic apologetics will simply show how devoid of morality and empathy you are. If you genuinely interpret those verses as meaning anything other than rape, then I really hope that you are never left alone with those of the opposite sex.
Why didn’t God tell the ancient Hebrews they must not treat a raped woman as no longer marriageable, rather than telling them to force her into marriage with her rapist? What a disgusting piece of shit your God would be if it existed, Cameron.
Oh dear, Cameron, now Owlmirror’s here you’re up against someone who knows this stuff much better than you do!
Oh, please. If I don’t mindlessly nod and agree with Cameron’s genocide apology, conquest apology, and misogynistic rape apology, then obviously nothing I write matters.
To Cameron, anyway.
Secondly, the Hebrew word translated as “rape” merely means “lie with.” It’s likely that the encounter would have been entirely consensual
I knew the old “she wanted it” excuse would come up eventually.
Not once have I justified anything with divine revelation. Every post has contained actual arguments. You may not like them, but they’re there.
Not notably. Mostly you’ve made assertions and demanded that others believe the assertions. You’ve referred to passages in the Bible-sometimes misleadingly-a number of times, but isn’t the Bible supposed to be, essentially, divinely inspired writing? In other words, divine revelation, if a bit delayed. Your posts have been severely lacking in any sort of fact or documentation.
And nobody was forcefully converted.
So you’re saying that the “brides” kidnapped from their homelands after the slaughter of their families would be allowed to continue practicing their own religions if they so desired? That just seems…improbable.
The purpose was to drive the Canaanites out of the land, not to butcher them. The people who stayed and waited for the Israelites were expecting a fight and prepared for the possibility that they actually might lose. The possibility of joining the country you just lost a war to probably wasn’t a terrible option at that point.
Including the babies and small children? No doubt it’s their own fault for not crawling away when they could. You never have addressed this issue when any one of a number of people have brought it up. I can’t say I blame you, though: it’s indefensible and really proof positive of the lack of morals of your god.
Again, a modern analogy. I don’t know where you live, but if it’s not the US, please pretend for the moment that it is. Suppose some Islamic country-say UAE just because as far as I know it generally doesn’t scare anyone in the US and therefore using it as a completely hypothetical example that has NO basis in reality (so don’t go using this as an excuse to invade)-invented a “magical” weapon that actually could threaten the US. They demonstrate this weapon and say, “We intend to conquer your country in 30 days. Flee if you want, everyone who does not will be killed except some we take a fancy to whom we will ‘marry’ or maybe keep around as ‘servants’.”
What would you do? Would you run? To where? Suppose you didn’t run and the US lost the war. All your relatives were killed in the fighting or maybe in massacres after the fighting. You, however, survived. Maybe someone took a fancy to you and declared you his or her “husband”. How would you feel about that? Would you cheerfully join in the Islamic celebrations, enjoy your role as junior husband, and rejoice in the mercy of your conqueror? Would you consider the deaths of your relatives to be fair and as expected in war? Would you feel that your position was your own fault for not running?
This has been asked a few times above, but I just wanted to quote it again for Cameron’s sake so that he doesn’t miss some of the important questions he should ask himself.
So, Cameron, why are you worshiping such an evil God? Because God must be evil – if the stories about him are to be believed. Supposedly the all powerful creator (and drowner) of worlds, supposedly the origin of all that is good and of all morality… But He still can’t just tell a tribe of ancient Hebrews to try and treat women with some basic human respect?
What kind of monster of a God would use his divine might to just say “well, you know boys – gals get raped sometimes and I know that makes her worthless. But still, you need to marry her, no matter how much of a bother it is for you. You know, for her sake. Sorry for lumbering you with a piece of worthless property like that, but hey, at least I’m not making you treat her like a human, right, lol?”
The verse doesn’t actually use the word “rape.” …The word used in Hebrew is “tabas,” which doesn’t imply force and translates into English as “seize.”
Two things: First, rapists often don’t call it rape. They employ a number of excuses, including some that you’ve used here: She really wanted it. She didn’t say no (being dead drunk or drugged). She said yes to me before. We’re married. She said yes-coercion-what coercion? And so on.
I remember hearing about a study in which college age men were asked if they would rape someone. Most said no. Later, they asked if they would force someone to have sex with them. A substantial number said yes. But again not calling it rape doesn’t make it not rape: it just means that the rapist understands, on some level, that “rape” is wrong, but doesn’t necessarily understand why or how it is wrong.
Second, the English word “seize” implies force or taking unwillingly. Especially when applied to a person. Or do you think the classic villains line, “Seize them!” implies an entirely consensual and non-violent contact? Or even that there is no threat or violence implied in statements such as “The police seized 10,000 copies of bootlegged DVDs in a raid on Camden last week”?
As I’ll illustrate below.
And you’re the one who’s supposed to know this stuff better than I do? The Israelites were first commanded to drive the Canaanites from the land. In fact, such wording outnumbers that related to destruction nearly 3-to-1. (See Ex 24.34, Num 33.52f
Deut 4.38, Deut 9.3,4,5, Deut 11.23, Deut 18.12 for examples) Now, if the order was to butcher them, why not say only that? There are two different word groups used to described what should be done to the Canaanites, and the one which describes annihilation is used far less than the word group which describes dispossession, or “drive them out.” This is consistent with my interpretation that it was only the die hard defenders that were subject to attack; the ones who refused the warnings to leave. Also, why instructions about how to treat the survivors of the conflict if the point was to kill everybody?
Yes, referring to those who remained in the cities, not the entire population of Canaanites.
I expanded on my earlier response. “Rape” would have been defined during the Middle Ages to include “seduction,” which Wikipedia failed to mention. Women during that period were not required to marry their rapists based on the laws in Deuteronomy. Calvin, for example, interpreted the law exactly as I am. “The remedy is, that he who has corrupted the girl should be compelled to marry her, and also to give her a dowry from his own property, lest, if he should afterwards cast her off, she should go away from her bed penniless” -Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, vol. 3, pp. 83-84.
And before anybody says “corrupted” is synonymous with “rape,” understand that “seduction” would have been equally frowned upon and referred to as “corruption.”
Who said that?
I’m not referring to their preferred translation, captain retardo. I’m saying that the SAB is not a scholarly source. It’s just a giant collection of arguments from outrage with no useful commentary about how to understand the verses in context.
No, it’s not. The context clearly indicates what the men intended to do. Donald Wold’s commentary, Out of Order: Homosexuality and the Bible in the Ancient Near East, says that the men’s request in Genesis 19:4-11 is made to demonstrate social dominance through homosexual acts with Lott’s guests. And notice that they refused his daughters.
How funny. You attack my lack of knowledge of Hebrew, which comes directly from scholarly commentaries on this subject, and then shrug off the fact that there is a word in Hebrew that specifically refers to “rape.” Look up any of these sources if you doubt me: Treaty of the Great King: The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy, p. 111;Deuteronomy: Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Series, p. 237;Toward Old Testament Ethics, p. 107).
Furthermore, the verse in Deuteronomy merely restates the same law given in Exodus 22:16: “If a man seduces a virgin who is not pledged to be married and sleeps with her, he must pay the bride-price, and she shall be his wife.” The same word used in Deut 22:28-29, “tabas,” is used here in Exodus.
Camerons’ latest brilliance:
Exodus 24:34 doesn’t exist.
Numbers 33:
God ordered his minions to “drive out” the Canaanites, yes. But he also ordered them to systematically destroy anything they left behind and warned them of the danger of leaving any Canaanite behind. Yes, he specifically ordered killing the people who were too “stubborn” to abandon their homes, under the pretense of the Canaanites being evil. God specifically ordered them to have no mercy on those who, for whatever, were unwilling or unable to flee. How is that better?
Deuteronomy 9:
Well, he does say drive them out. Immediately after he says he will destroy them and before he says he will annihilate them.
Deuteronomy 11:
But God is totally going to let them conquer all of these nations and terrify everyone everywhere using non-violent means, of course. The “No one will be able to stand against you” doesn’t at all imply that God is going to be aiding them in combat. It is clearly stating that He will be using YHWH magic to make everyone scurry away into a super-safe land specifically designated for Israel to not conquer. Obviously.
Could it not be that maybe, just maybe, “drive out” is similar to “invade” in definition, and may be more of a euphemism for the kind of violence that we were talking about already, rather than simply, through some unspecified non-violent means, causing them evacuate their country? You know, pulling the same semantics games that you are trying to pull in regards to the ancient terminology for rape?
The idea that is the same law is hilarious in light of the details of the passage, as well as the preceding passage:
So, the rules in this chapter before this are:
-Kill non-virgin potential wives.
-Kill man who sleeps with another man’s wife, and also the wife.
-Kill man who sleeps with another man’s wife-to-be, and also the future wife is she was in the city and could have screamed for help. Leave her alone if she was helpless in the countryside.
And we are to believe that the next rule has nothing to do with the previous rule in regards to rape, despite the fact that Deut. 22:28-29 mentions humiliating the woman. Yeah, I buy it. It’s especially credible since, no, the passage in Exodus doesn’t use “tabas” . No, “taphas” doesn’t mean “seduce”. And no, the relevant word in Exodus doesn’t overlap with “taphas” either. Good show, old boy.
Cameron is a totally honest and forthright debater. Bible scholar through and through. And really not a squirming, lying slimeball doing his best to defend the Bible with stupidity and apologetics for rape and genocide. I have no idea where people would even get that idea.
Cameron the shameless liar and apologist for genocide,
Let’s assume for a moment you’re right. This is still a commandment to slaughter all those remianing, including children. This is still utterly vile, and would still be genocide under international law. Why do you worship evil, Cameron?
Again, let’s suppose you’re right. It’s still utterly vile to make the rape victim marry the rapist, as the Bible commands. Why not command that a rape victim is to be considered as marriageable as before the rape, and inflict any penalty solely on the rapist. Anything that fails to do this is, quite simply, evil. Why do you worship evil, Cameron?
camerloon:
“I don’t imagine anything.”
no, cupcake, you imagine EVERYTHING.
In fact, such wording outnumbers that related to destruction nearly 3-to-1.
if you commit total destruction, you only NEED to do it once.
of course, that entirely ignores your completely inane “statistical” argument.
point is, even YOU, in posting your 3:1 ration, have conceded that Jahweh demands his tribe to kill other tribes.
so, God demands genocide.
how could one possibly think to justify that?
even the allies didn’t fucking EXTERMINATE the Nazis in reprisal for the holocaust.
firebomb a city or two, kill hundreds of thousands, sure.
but it wasn’t genocide, even by that measure.
Oh. Not killed or raped. Merely dispossessed and seized.
Our God is an Awesome God!
Maranatha!
Ah, here are some less euphemistic translations for “yaresh”/”drive out” (the simple definition is just “take possession of, inherit, dispossess”).*
So, basically, with the elements of causing impoverishment, gaining possession, and consumption/destruction, it probably has the full connotation of what I thought it did before: invasion. It’s not just causing people to run away, but also seizing their property and causing general destruction.* All it took to find this out was some curiosity and internet access. Though, in fairness, obtaining that curiosity was easy: all it would take to realize that something is wrong with the picture of “driving out” the people of an entire nation without violence is thinking about it for three seconds. And it should have led anyone with a working brain to think about the mere possibility that it might be talking about a military invasion or attack of some kind, instead of giving an entire country a magical eviction notice, or something. So, what’s your excuse Cameron?
*Anyone can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong: I know fuck-all about Hebrew and may be interpreting the relevant website incorrectly.
I beg to differ. He couldn’t imagine his way out of a paper bag. He honestly thinks that genocide after partial evacuation of a country was YHWH’s only option for giving his chosen people land. He can’t imagine how a tri-omni God could’ve done any better for women than to order rapists to marry their victims. He is simultaneously of the opinion that God used the kind of cleverness he avoided so painstakingly in those situations to “drive out” the populations of entire countries without causing any casualties, and can’t be arsed to notice that maybe, just maybe, the “driving out” process might also include violence. He probably has regurgitated mutually contradictory accounts from whatever sources he can scrounge up, assuring that he never needs to conjure up an original thought. He has consistently failed to read Biblical passages when accusing us of neglecting context. He just can’t imagine how forcing a woman to marry against her will might be conducive to rape. He is the striking portrait of the Christian dogmatist: accepting the world as distorted by church authorities and never daring to think enough to imagine a world even slightly different. Or bothering to notice how the various views contradict one another. His God isn’t his imaginary friend, a playful phantom that he actually perceives as real: it’s a fiction that he accepts blindly and unthinkingly, because he is too lazy or scared to imagine how every other lie he was told would make sense if God didn’t exist. He is the poster child for lack of imagination. Or, at least that’s my impression so far. YMMV.
Ah. So God is 3 parts not-quite-as-bad-as-Milosevic-asshole with 1 part complete and total douche-dei. Shaken, not stirred.
Good to know.
Cameron the clown
If the term really contains such a conflation then that is a problem. If an actual God perpetuated such a conflation in any way, that is an enormous problem.
But feel free not to worry about it. I mean the important thing here is clearly the Hebrew word that was used, and not the fact that the passage alleges a God endorsing horribly faulty concepts of sexuality and marraige.
Oh and outrage. OUTRAGE!!!
You’re right about this, so let me correct myself before moving on. Deuteronomy 22:25 uses the verb “chazak,” rightly translated as “rape.” 22:28 uses the verb “Tabas,” which doesn’t indicate the use of force by itself. So far, I stand by this. Why not use the exact same verb if both verses are referring to forced sex? That’s what leads me to conclude that former is describing rape and other just seduction. I didn’t make that up. Check the commentaries I cited in my last comment if you doubt this.
As you discovered, Exodus 22:16 doesn’t use the same verb as Deuteronomy 22:28. My mistake. It uses “patah,” which is translated as “Seduce.” So what I should have said is that neither passage indicates that force is involved, and both detail with what is to happen when a man sleeps with a virgin. Interestingly, the only passage (Deut. 22:25) that indicates the use of force requires that the man be punished. All that to say, you guys are still wrong that the Bible requires a woman to marry her rapist.
Your incredulity on this point is not enough to make it false. It is well established that the Canaanites weren’t a peaceful people just trying to make it through life. Quite the opposite. They had built up a reputation for themselves as a violent, decadent society, who had attacked Israel previously. This is why it’s more accurate to call this a war to force the Canaanites out, not a genocide. The purpose was to keep them from influencing Israel’s religious culture, and you don’t need to slaughter everybody to achieve that.
That’s all for now. I’ll be back tomorrow.
Does Cameron remind anybody but me of consulscipio?
Cameron
So, let’s say that you’re right about this. Then what happens to the woman who were actually raped? Have we not already established that her status would be pretty worthless at that state, if she is unmarried and not a virgin? So either she’ll be an outcast or she will marry her rapist out of necessity rather than love – that is, being forced into it.
Let me quote you on the subject
Why does God’s Holy Bible perpetuate such a system? Why verses about how many shekels a father should be paid for his daughter, but no verses about real equality between the sexes? A good God who had any part whatsoever in inspiring the writing of the Bible could easily have instructed His followers in real morality rather than telling them to perpetuate a system where a woman’s worth is decided by who her father or husband is.
Why believe in a supposedly almighty and moral God who couldn’t even get such a basic bit of information into his own holy book? Obviously He’s either a misogynistic bastard or non-existent.
Still a fucking moron. The primary definition of taphas is “seize”. The primary definition of chazak is “be strong”, and is apparently a root word for the relevant word in that passage, which is translated as “forces”. Also, funny thing: the root word “anah”/”humbled” in 22:29 also shows up to describe the rape of Dinah in Genesis 34:2, and is the only word indicating a rape. Also, it is used in Deut 22:24, where the sex with the woman is clearly supposed to be rape but uses a different term than Deut 22:25 (I’ve seen the relevant word translated as “violated”). Face it: seized, laid with, and humbled is far more indicative of rape than forced and laid with. You’ve got nothing.
And it was already explained to you that these horrible crimes that warranted them being killed at God’s command were confined within their own society. Not exactly a pressing matter. And it still raises the question: What magnitude of “evil” behavior could people possibly be performing in order to justify death for everyone in the same geographic region? Doesn’t the fact that the proposed course of action is systematic eradication of their culture and systematic slaughter of those who dared to remain suggest that, in order to be just punishment, these people would need to be fucking horrible? Like, a nation full of Hitlers? So why do we only get weak tea complaints about incest and human sacrifice? If the worst they were doing was occasionally killing some of their own and having a limited gene pool, how does that warrant totally eradicating them?
Anyway, via wikipedia:
But, fine, I will graciously accept that it wasn’t a genocide: It was just a concerted effort to destroy a culture in the process of a military invasion, accomplished in part through mass killings of those who remained during the course of the invasion. Which is, of course, totally not what genocide actually is.
Isn’t that so much better? Your God can finally be viewed as benevolent and loving. What a difference it all makes!
Nah, of course not. YHWH just decided to include that as part of the process for shits and giggles. He likes to be thorough. Sometimes.
Cameron the clown:
Again:
(my emphasis)
The relevant distinction to my eye is that in case 1 she is betrothed and in case 2 she is not.
Its a distinction made based on who owns her, and whether she is available for purchase by way of a bride price.
The idea that we are going immediately from a case where she is both betrothed and raped to one in which she is neither is nonsensical. Why not use the same word both times? Style. Why use the same word over and over again if the context makes it evident what you mean?
Cameron, to return to another point where you are obviously talking out of your nether orifice, i.e. divine revelation. While you deny any divine revelation, you still haven’t actually explained how the writers of their holy books knew it was their god’s word. If it wasn’t divine revelation, then what other means could their god have communicated his oh so compassionate (not) wishes to his chosen people. Pray tell, for we are agog in anticipation of more of your tortuous semantic games.
Tosh. Historically, the whole story is a crock of crap, because the evidence indicates there never was an Israelite invasion of Canaan; the Israelites were Canaanites. But the point is that you believe in it, and attempt to justify the genocide, child murder, enslavement and rape commanded in Deut. 20:10-17. You’re vile, Cameron.
They were commanded to kill.
If someone were write a letter that says “get rid of Cameron” 3 times, and “Kill Cameron” 1 time, that means that the letter writer only wants to make you homeless?
There is no such verse, you incompetent boob.
Oh, I see what happened. You copied and pasted from another incompetent boob.
Well, if you’re going to be lazy, I’m just going to link to a complete refutation of your incompetent boob’s dishonest and incompetent biblical scholarship.
http://theskepticalreview.com/JFTMillerGoodQuestion5.html
I mean, if you’re not going to do your own work, why should I?
Because people with many words with similar meanings can use those words any way they want?
Fixed that for you.
What warnings to leave? The bible does not say “warn them and allow those who want to leave to leave”.
It says “KILL THEM ALL”.
You illiterate incompetent, that wasn’t in reference to the Canaanites, but to inhabitants of “very far” cities, and therefore, not Canaanites. If the point was to “drive the Cannanites out”, as in, make them leave, why would having them pay tribute be sufficient? They were supposed to be out, according to your stupid confabulation, not still there and paying rent!
You’ve completely lost track of what bible verses refer to which people, haven’t you?
======
What does the Middle Ages have to do with it? The point is that the woman’s — or girl’s — consent is not relevant to the people who make these laws, only her “value” to men.
Or in other words, the men don’t care if she was raped or was seduced. Either way her “value” to men is lowered, quite possibly to nothing.
You, by implication.
How so? Because you don’t like it?
It’s a useful collation of the nonsense, lies, contradictions, and horrors in the bible.
So you’re basically saying that genocide is not outrageous? Massacres are not outrageous? Butchering children is not outrageous?
What on earth do you think is outrageous?
On the contrary, it clearly shows the context of the verses to be what they are without the apologetic “lens” that insists that the putative God of the bible is good, no matter what that God does or what that God commands his followers to do.
Just like the context of Deuteronomy “clearly indicates” what the man is putatively doing. Which was my point.
Your scholarly commentaries suck if they imply that there is only one word or phrase that can possibly mean “rape”, and no other word or phrase has that meaning?
Your sources are all incompetents, if they really say that, or imply that.
Of course, I’ll bet a cookie that you haven’t read those sources either, and you’re incompetent anyway.
See? You’ve just demonstrated your pathetic incompetence again.
1) The word in Exodus 22:16 is not the same as in Deuteronomy. Exodus 22:16 says “יְפַתֶּה”, “yefateh”, and the root is “patah”, which does mean “seduce”, “entice”, and not “seize”.
2) I note that in Exodus 22:16, also, the girl’s consent to the marriage is not considered relevant.
3) Why are you so stupid as to repeat the same error twice? The word can be transliterated in any number of ways, but it is not “tabas”. There is no Hebrew root that looks like that. There is no Hebrew word that looks like that. The root is tet-fey-sin, tafas. A “fey” can become a “pey” in some conjugations, but it cannot become a “b” — in the Hebrew language, at any rate.
Stop copypasting from incompetents, will you?
Crank exegesis at its worst. These are two different laws and neither deals with ownership. v.25 described the punishment for raping an engaged virgin; v.28 describes the procedure following consensual intercourse between two unmarried people. That’s the reason for the change in word choice; the verses deal with two separate issues. Your stylistic argument is crap.
Ownership of the woman is not in question in either. This is you reading the text through your modern filter – “pay a price for the woman? That’s barbaric!” The reason, as I said, was that the woman’s family would be losing her contribution to daily survival, since she would be joining her new husband’s family. And if she was abandoned by her husband, the money would be used to support the woman and her children, if she had any.
About Divine Revelation: My point was that I am not justifying the actions taken against the Canaanites the way the Ozark creation folks did – i.e. “God said it has to be done, so they must have had it coming.” The Bible does indeed say that the God told the Israelites to drive them out, but my point was that there were good reasons for that action. In other words, it wasn’t sanctioned just because God said so.
The new definition of genocide that’s posted above is interesting. Throughout this entire debate we have all been operating under the assumption that “genocide” suggests completely eliminating a people. I’ve been arguing that that is not what’s described in the OT, and you all have been calling be an evil bastard for it.
Now, the new definition describes exactly what I’ve been saying: the wiping out of the culture, not necessarily all the individuals belonging to it. Neat trick. You haven’t actually won the argument just change the definition.
No, you’re an evil bastard because you defend the Bible verses we’ve been discussing. That you as usual quibble endlessly over the exact meaning of ambiguous words is beside the point. The point has always been that the kind of God that orders the destruction of another people and their culture is immoral – regardless of if the destruction is a type that fits your narrow definition of genocide or not.
I addressed this above and corrected my mistake. Perhaps your reading comprehension is as bad as my Hebrew.
As I said, she likely wouldn’t have refused the arrangement. It probably would have been preferred given the circumstances.
Duly noted.
Your idiocy beggars belief, Camoron. They use different words but the vast majority of people who aren’t as blinkered as you translate these words to be synonyms. The stylistic argument explains why one might choose a synonym instead of using the same word. The fact that you cannot fathom that just shows, yet again, how truly deficient you are.
Of which, you have presented only bad reasons. You must either be holding some of these stellar reasons back, or you are far more of credulous moron than I had previously given you credit for.
No, it has been brought up before that you were using an overly restrictive definition of genocide, but you ignored it along with whatever else you decided you couldn’t be arsed to address. And do you really think that saying “well, they weren’t completely killed, so it wasn’t technically genocide” actually resolves the moral problem here? Are you that fucking dense? The obvious answer is yes, but I want to know if you at least have enough self-awareness to even have an inkling about how abysmally stupid you are.
I am sincerely sorry that you couldn’t bother to look up the full definition of genocide. I am sorry that you didn’t bother to ponder to yourself whether complete annihilation was necessary for it to be genocide, or whether eliminating the culture in the process of all the killing was an aspect of genocide. And I am so incredibly sorry that you are moronic enough to think that we are the one playing word games, when you were trying to duck out of calling mass-murder “genocide”, despite the fact that whether or not we call it “genocide” is irrelevant to the fact that the “technically not-genocide” still involves killing at a massive scale. What the fuck is wrong with your brain, Camoron? What kind of person are you that makes you believe that any of these arguments are compelling, in any way? The only people you could possibly convince with all of this shit are yourself and particularly gullible 6 year olds.
Owlmirror,
those sources I cited agreed about the interpretation of Deuteronomy 22:28 -that it’s not referring to rape. My misspelling of the Hebrew word is solely my mistake, so please don’t expand that to include anything I say about the verse, or what my sources say.
take note everyone: apparently, neither the Holocaust nor the slaughter of Native Americans were genocides; neither was Pol Pot’s regime genocidal.
what an asinine definition of genocide; not even the UN defines it that way:
and I note that the last part of that definition makes it very clear that cultural genocide (i.e. the destruction of a culture, but without necessarily destroying the individuals who had been part of it) is also a form of genocide.
and while we’re at it, here’s another definition of a Crime Against Humanity Cameron needs to desperately familiarize himself with:
your god, according to your text, has ordered a number of crimes against humanity, no matter how you slice it. most people are far more moral than your barbaric god
That’s one wacky source with one horrible explanation: Of sixteen English translations of the Bible, 2 use the word “rape”, 1 uses the word “forces”, 12 use variations of seize/lay hold of/catch, and only 1, the New Living Translation, lacks anything suggestive of rape. Oh yeah, and 5 translate “humbled” in the next verse as “violated”. And 1 translates it as “raped”.
Really, you are doing a fantastic job at being consistently stupid and unrelentingly wrong. Are you trying for a record?
No, we haven’t. That would mean the Shoah was not genocide, the Armenian genocide (note the name by which the event is known) was not genocide, the Rwandan genocide (that pesky name again) was not genocide… If you have been misusing the term, that’s your responsibility, no-one else’s.
So. Fucking. What? As I’ve said more than once, why didn’t God tell the Israelites that they must not treat rape as devaluing the victim?
For contrast: translations of the key word in Deut 22:25 are lay hold/seize in 3 versions, “forces” in 10 versions, and “rapes” in 3 more versions. Notice the overlap here: roughly the same number translated as “rapes”, and the translation of “forces” and “seizes” simply flip-flopped between the two verses.
Maybe you should hold all of those Bible translators accountable if you truly believe that 22:28 wasn’t talking about rape? Because, just looking at the English translators, the words are just as indicative of rape in 28 as they are in 25. Those translators really dropped the ball, huh?
Cameron has standards for his god, you know.
Worse than Hitler, and he’s out (ok, probably not really, but it seems to be his line here).
Glen Davidson
You guys have repeatedly whined about God ordering the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites. Not true.
And genocide describes, according to the guy that coined the term, an attempt to physically eliminate a group of people.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007043
In other words, God did not command genocide. The goal was not to destroy all the people.
Again, this just shows that regardless of it being enforced by the Bible or not, she was forced to marry him by the culture she was living in.
And your wonderful God supposedly formed and gave rules to that culture, right? Why did He not stop such an obviously misogynistic practice? Why did He not even mention that they should stop it? Did God not realize that it was immoral? Is God a moral relativist who has changed his sense of morality after the sexual liberation of the 60’s? Or does he simply not exist? Maybe the Bible was written wholly by patriarchal human men?
Well, you’ve already seen the currently used definitions of genocide quoted above. But by all means, keep quibbling about the meaning of the word genocide, so you don’t have to contemplate that your God ordered immoral acts against a group of people regardless of what you call it.
So the fact that God killed the majority of a group of people and tried to eliminate their entire culture wasn’t genocide because his goal wasn’t to kill all of them? Camoron, you sink to new depths with each ignorant post. Well, the depth is new, but it’s still basically the same place, because you’ve been effectively making the same argument over and over without acknowledging that pretty much everything you’ve said has been thoroughly countered.
Also: the origin of the word doesn’t matter. It’s current usage does.
those aren’t new depths, it’s the same rock-bottom as before: his delusion in thinking that playing word-games will lessen the crimes his god has supposedly committed and admitted to in the bible.
The official definition of genocide includes destroying a group in part or wholly; in fact, the point of amending the originally invented definition was that the original definition was worthless, since no one is so efficient a tyrant as to kill every single individual of a group; nor is complete eradication of individuals usually the goal: the destruction of the group as a group, not of all the members of said group, is the goal of genocide.
Not that it matters; we could call what is being described in the bible “happy fun time”, and its atrociousness and immorality wouldn’t change one bit.
No, it doesn’t, you moron. Because the verb “tabas” doesn’t fucking exist.
The verb “tafas” means “seize”; the form used in Deut 22:28 means “seized her”
So you’re back to playing stupid fucking dishonest incompetent word games, eh?
Hey, you’re not just incompetent in Hebrew, you’re also incompetent in English.
Let’s check out what the English dictionary
seize /siz/ Show Spelled verb, seized, seiz·ing.
verb (used with object)
1. to take hold of suddenly or forcibly; grasp: to seize a weapon.
[…]
3. to take possession of by force or at will: to seize enemy ships.
And let’s look at “rape” while we’re at it:
rape /reɪp/ Show Spelled noun, verb, raped, rap·ing.
[…]
verb (used with object)
6. to force to have sexual intercourse.
7. to plunder (a place); despoil.
8. to seize, take, or carry off by force.
Because you’re a moron.
Because language does not work in the way that incompetent asshole moron apologists want it to.
Your fundamental incompetence leads you to act like Humpty-Dumpty.
Your commentaries are incompetent too.
One describes seduction, the other describes rape. Neither one cares about what the girl actually wants.
Except that he does not just use force, he uses force on someone else’s designated property.
The Bible does not require just any woman to marry her rapist. It requires that a raped unbetrothed girl marry her rapist.
The Israelites weren’t a peaceful people just trying to make it through life either.
The Israelites butchered Midianite children and young women. The Israelites were told to attack and enslave non-Canaanites who didn’t pay them extortion money.
That is violent. And pretty decadent, too.
Numbers 31:17 contradicts you.
Huh. I think you’re right. I must’ve been mislead by the all digging…
Camaroon, we are still waiting for you to tell us how this compassionate god of yours got his followers to know his commands if not by divine revelation. Or did his followers, which is our position, simply imagine much of it, perhaps under an ergot or similar induced trip, and just invent the rest so as to justify any actions they cared to.
The contortions you apologetisists will do to exonerate your monster god of any possible moral approbrium or responsibility really emphasises that Stephen Weinberg quote:
Your contortions and escape into semantic arguments to defend your god on this thread provides ample evidence for all to see of how right he was. Be ashamed, be very very ashamed.
Why am I supposed to believe your sources? Just because they say so?
Actually, it’s not.
I Googled “tabas” and Deuteronomy, and found a whole bunch of pages basically making the same apologetic argument that you are making, using the same incorrect transliteration for the root word used in the verse.
Your mistake is not so much in misspelling the word, but in repeatedly relying blindly on the incompetent scholarship of others.
Your sources not knowing enough about the Hebrew language to recognize an obvious mistake, or much about language in general, reflects very badly on their scholarship.
Cameron:
Dude, we’re not whining. I’m not sure why you used that particular loaded word, but it’s not even close to what we’re doing.
We’re simply point out the fact that your stories paint your God as someone willing to destroy entire cultures, wiping out thousands of innocent people just so his “chosen” people can have some nice land.
This in spite of the fact that your god is supposed to be powerful enough to create a paradise anywhere he wants, including the place where the Israelites already live.
So your God is willing to order his people in to displace the folks who built the area, killing as many as necessary (or more), and including women and children in the spoils of war.
The fact that your god exhibits the same behavior as many vicious modern warlords seems inconsequential to you.
Me, I refuse to accept in a god any behavior I find horrifying in my fellow humans.
Right, killing many of the people and driving them away from their homes, in order to TAKE THEIR LAND. That’s SO MUCH BETTER, SO MUCH MORE ENLIGHTENED.
Camaroon’s basically saying it’s not like what the Nazis did to the Jews, and instead it’s like what the Nazis did to the Ukrainians, and that makes it all ok.
With friends like this, who needs enemies? If the Christian god really did exist, he ought to be frying Camaroon with a lightning bolt right now, for slandering him so.
Established where? In the bible?
Notwithstanding the above applies to EVERY SINGLE HUMAN TRIBE AND CULTURE THAT HAS EVER EXISTED.
Way the hell back in #284,
Thank you. This is exactly the reason I fucking hate the song “Tell Me Why” by Pat Benatar every time it comes on the music channel my toddler loves so much. No, Spawn, there is no God. But I still love you dearly.
Speaking of violence…
As long as we’re looking at Deuteronomy 22, let’s look at Deuteronomy 22:13-21.
If a girl is found to not be a virgin by her betrothed — and the reason for her not being a virgin is irrelevant; maybe she was raped, or maybe she had a lover, or a string of affairs; it isn’t brought up, and doesn’t matter to the writer — kill her. With stones.
How about Deuteronomy 22:23-24?
If a betrothed girl has sex with someone not her betrothed — and it’s implied that as long as she didn’t scream, for whatever reason, it was consensual — kill them both. With stones.
A very violent society indeed.
Or if she did scream and whoever was in the next room was hard-of-hearing too, I assume.
Or rather, the writer seems to want for it to have been consensual. It’s not even suggested that anyone pay attention to the girl’s version of events. If she had been raped, the writer seems to not care, or not believe it.
Ah, yes, but you see, given that she would no longer be marriageable, that’s probably what she would prefer.
/Cameron
Cameron has referred to outrage at his justifications of genocide and other vile crimes as “whining” on his own blog too. Do you remember John Pilger whining about western governments supporting the Khmer Rouge long after their atrocities were well-known? I remember quite a lot of whining about those in democratic countries who defended apartheid, too. A few people in the UK whined rather about money being collected and propaganda issued for the PIRA in the USA. Quite a lot in the USA whined about the gloating statements certain prominent Muslims issued after 9/11. I shall bear the stigma of being told I’m a whiner by an apologist for genocide with what fortitude I may.
Should have heard those damn Canaanites whining as they were slaughtered (in the story, at least).
Oooh, we don’t deserve to die just because we were here first and have no place to go.
Christ, what a bunch of crybabies.
Glen Davidson
Amphiox
Well, that’s always been God’s big loophole, hasn’t it?
Step 1) Create imperfect humans that immediately sin.
Step 2) Do not properly teach humans how to live in peaceful and tranquil societies, so that they continue to wage war, murder and sin.
Step 3) Set yourself up as the ultimate moral arbitrator.
And then, voila, there’s profit – if you are an immoral, violent asshole who thinks that a license to kill and torture people counts as profit. Since people are immoral, God can go all old testament (literally) on any group he chooses and then just shrug and say “Well, they had it coming. They weren’t a peaceful people just trying to make it through life. They deserved every bit of my divine punishments. Who’re you to question me anyways, huh?”
Extra credit on the topic of Why Cameron is a Profound Moron (Rape Apologetics Version):
Guess what the popular translations are of the “sexual activity commonly accepted as rape” of Dinah in Genesis 34:2? And how it compares to Deut 22:25 and 28 respectively? Well, they don’t compare in a way that helps Camoron out, that’s for sure. (Relevant website is here for those wanting to rummage for the same info.)
[Slashes will separate terms occurring in same general passage, I will use asterisks to divide separate passages. The order will be Rape of Dinah, Rule about rape in the city, Rule about marrying rapist. The specific form will be:
First term in Genesis 34:2/ Second term in Genesis 34:2 *Deut 22:25* Deut 22:28/ Deut 22:29. Synonym category is synonyms for seized (took, caught, lay hold of, etc.). Violated includes “defiled” and Humbled includes “humiliated” and “put shame upon”.]
Scoreboard:
Violated: 0/5 *0* 0/5
Raped: 0/2 *3* 2/1
Seized: 2/0 *1* 2/0
Synonym: 13/0 *2* 10/0
Forces: 1/2 *10* 1/0
Humbled: 0/6 *0* 0/10
Other: 0/1 *0* 1/0
So, looking at rape of Dinah: There is a term that is most commonly translated as a synonym for seize followed by a word that is most commonly translated as either violated or humbled (and occasionally as raped or forced).
Looking at the “Must marry your ‘not-rapist'” passage: There is a term that is most commonly translated as a synonym for seize (and occasionally as raped), followed by a term most commonly translated as either humbled or violated, favoring humbled.
The fact that these are translated similarly would be obvious to anyone who isn’t suffering from a lobotomy.
Looking at the passage that Cameron esteems as obviously rape: It is translated as force most often, which is a term that is occasionally used as a translation for terms in the rape of Dinah, but less so than the term used in 28-29. It is just as often translated as “rape” as the relevant terms in either of the other two passages. And it is also translated on occasion as a synonym for seize about as often as it is translated as “rape”.
So, the question for you, Camoron: Are you willing to continue along the line of your idiotic argument enough to proclaim that the rape of Dinah wasn’t actually rape, because the relevant word for “seize” isn’t supposed to be indicative of rape in the Bible? Are you going to doubt your beloved Bible scholars and translators to such a degree as to blatantly say “no, Dinah wasn’t raped” in order to keep your floundering arguments from fully dying? Or are you just going to ignore this problem, like you tend to do? This doesn’t even require knowledge of Hebrew, by the way. It just requires you to know what the most common translations are, and bother to look that shit up. Which is trivial in the internet age. Why do you continue to wallow in such abject ignorance?
I swear Cameron sounds so much like actual holocaust deniers I’ve heard that it’s uncanny.
Unless you’re utterly retarded, it should be clear that I’m providing reasons why the good book does not condone rape. But I must remember who I’m arguing with.
No? The word in Genesis 34:8 is way·‘an·ne·hā. It translates literally as “with her by force.” http://concordances.org/hebrew/vayanneha_6031.htm
Now, the word used in Deut. 22:25, the passage that also clearly refers to rape, is translated literally as “force.”
So both passages refer, I agree, to rape. And both also explain that everybody involved was very unhappy with the rapist. The Deut. passage says the man can be stoned for his actions, and in Genesis 34 Dinah’s family is way pissed about what happened. “…Jacob’s sons had come in from the fields as soon as they heard what had happened. They were shocked and furious, because Shechem had done an outrageous thing in Israel by sleeping with Jacob’s daughter…(v. 6-7) And “Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, ‘You have brought trouble on me by making me obnoxious to the Canaanites and Perizzites…But they replied, ‘Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?’ (v.30-31)
Context, fool. The same word is used in 2 Samuel 13:14 and it’s translated the same way, as “violated” or “forced” her. See this page again: http://concordances.org/hebrew/vayanneha_6031.htm
I agree. The word in Deut. 22:28 almost never means “rape.” http://biblos.com/deuteronomy/22-28.htm
No, bitch tits, it wouldn’t be. The context the word is used in is equally important. In the two verses (Gen. 34, Deut 22:25) that render the Hebrew word “rape,” the man is the subject of scorn. In Deut. 28:22 he’s not punished for his indiscretion except to be required to support the woman he slept with. That should very clearly suggest to you that rape isn’t condoned.
But here’s a question for you: why aren’t either of the words from Gen. 34 or Deut 22:25 used in Deut. 22:28? There is still no reason for the change in words between v.25 and 28 Unless the author isn’t saying the same thing.
Holy fuck are you obtuse, Cameron.
But do go on. I’ve got a 6 pack of Spaten and I’ll make some popcorn. Watching you get ripped apart some more will be a nice distraction while I do some of my prep cooking for tomorrow.
It’s funny Cameron.
You seem to only be able to see certain posts. You love to nitpick about semantics – especially when it is impossible to know for 100% sure what the author’s original intention was. That way, you can endlessly bicker and quibble over the same little details instead of looking at the whole picture.
But you know what? A number of people have already told you that it doesn’t actually matter that much to the big picture. It doesn’t matter if you believe the author meant a word to mean rape or not. It doesn’t matter what the original definition of genocide was. None of that matters if you look at the big picture instead of hiding away, burying your head in minuscule details.
Why don’t you ever respond to the posts that point out that God is still being immoral in the Bible? Why no reply to all the people pointing out that it doesn’t matter if it’s “actual genocide” or “well, not really genocide, at least not according to the original definition of the word”? Why no reply to the posts pointing out that God is still supporting and perpetuating a very misogynistic system?
Is it just because you know that you have nothing? There’s after all no real way to defend the way God acts in the verses mentioned – not if you want to keep any semblance of a coherent morality. Instead you only respond to the posts about semantics, because you know that that’s a discussion you can keep going forever. You can discuss those few words for all eternity without ever having to take your head out of the sand. As long as you can nitpick two or three words, you never have to examine or even acknowledge the big picture.
I don’t think that level of denial is healthy. You really should take a long, hard look at your own beliefs if you so easily hide away from all the things you don’t want to discuss.
Wow, Cameron. Did you happen to notice that I was deliberately not mentioning the original Hebrew and dealing with the common English translations of the word IN CONTEXT, as determined by the people who translate the fucking Bible? Because we have already thoroughly demonstrated how idiotic you are in dealing with the original Hebrew?
But, whatever:
34:2. You keep fucking up verses. Also, it is only “by force” in the New American Standard, which is what they use as default for the one example of an English translation. There are many different translations. I thought that was your entire fucking point, allowing you to endlessly flail your arms about in dismay at the fact that we are reading the actual words written by translators in the Bible. But since I apparently have to hold your fucking hand, this is the relevant page. Which is exactly what I was referring to before. Do you even have the slightest inkling of what I am saying? Because you also made the mistake of believing there was only relevant word in 34:2. This is the other one. Not that it is relevant to refuting you, as much as just showing that you are fucking sloppy.
Which I have already said, but have also pointed out that you are an abject moron for thinking that only the word “force” is a good indicator of rape. A better indicator of rape than “seize” coupled with “humbled”. You are not a bright person. You are not an honest person. You are neither of these things, because having either of these qualities would have been sufficient for you to realize that your argument is shit by now.
Which actually helps your case, because it is actually often translated that way. And also translated as “humbled”. You know, the term used in Deuteronomy 22:29 that is totally not indicative of rape.
Way to be a moron. Still. No word in any passage means “rape” according to the pages on that site as you linked to it. That’s because they use other terms to describe rape. The website uses the New American Standard translation as its English translation, as I mentioned previously, which only uses the actual word “rape” once in the entire Bible, in Judges 19. Just like every other translation, it uses synonyms in other cases. Like force and seize. You fucking ignoramus.
So, it’s not rape because if it were rape, they would condemn the rapist, therefore the Bible doesn’t condone rape. Got it.
Here’s my question for you: If it is describing rape in both Genesis 34 (with the words way·yiq·qaḥ and way·‘an·ne·hā, with root words laqach and anah respectively) and in only one of those Deuteronomy passages (with the word wə·he·ḥĕ·zîq, root word chazaq), why don’t they use the same word there, unless the author isn’t saying the same thing? And why does Deuteronomy 22:29 actually contain a word with a root word in common with the key words describing rape from Genesis 34 (innah with root word anah)? Why does the same exact word occur to describe the “violation” of the woman in the city (instead of the fields) in verse 24, just before your much lauded True Rape Word in the following verse?
It was originally hilarious to watch you miss the point so consistently. Now it’s just pathetic, and becoming dramatically more pathetic each time. Please, get your much esteemed Bible scholar to take your place. You’ve made a fool of yourself enough for almost-week that you’ve spent repeating the same nonsense and showing zero reading comprehension in your selective “responses”. Spare yourself and just walk away with whatever tattered dignity someone as incompetent as yourself could possibly scrounge up.
zabinatrix:
^This, a thousand times over. I hate to contribute to his quibbling, but he fails so spectacularly at even the small niggling details that I think it further helps to illustrate just how full of shit he is, on top of also pointing out that his little pet arguments don’t help defend his God against the claims of immorality. Oh, and to also point out that he can’t grapple with the criticism at all. He is so incredibly poor at it that I’m beginning to think he might just be a chatterbot. It’s getting sad. I wonder if we all should just refuse to further respond to him until he passes a Minimum Intelligent Signal test .
Actually, you’re implicitly condoning the bibles condemning of women and girls to death by stoning for having consensual sex in a fashion not approved by society, or for not being able to prove that they were raped in a city after being betrothed. And you’re condoning the bible condemning a girl to marry whoever fucked her first, be it by seduction or rape.
Way to argue for the bible being the “good” book.
Your use of a misogynistic gendered insult is noted. Now you’re implying that there is some sort of essential wrongness to being female.
While I applaud your discovery of the amazing tool that is a concordance, I am afraid your own incompetent scholarship is now being highlighted in your ignorance of the proper use of this tool.
Case in point (as noted above — this time I did catch up before posting), Deut 22:29, the continuation of Deut 22:28:
http://concordances.org/hebrew/innah_6031.htm
Or, since you like roots rather than conjugations, Gen 34:2 and Deut 22:29 both use the word whose root is ayin-nun-hey.
I’m sorry. My replies are lengthy and frequent. I feel like I’m spamming the thread. Unless Camoron grows a brain or passes a Turing test, I’m probably going to keep my future prodding to a minimum. Or at least I’ll try.
Anyway, my 478:
-Yes, I fucked up a link right before calling Camoron sloppy. Ironic.
-Cameron’s first link I responded to actually had three of the sixteen translations, including the New American Standard translation that is the typical translation they display on different pages, which made his third link irrelevant. It wasn’t just NAS on the first page, however, which I suggested was the case.
-Also I said “No word…means rape according to…”, when I should have said “Next to no word…means rape according to…”. Because the relevant translation, as I note, does actually translate a Hebrew word as “rape” exactly once.
Can’t resist.
Hey Camoron. So, you are going to stick by the argument that there is no reason to change word choice from one synonym to another, and that use of another word that means essentially the same thing means that they are referring to something different? Well, I have two Hebrew words for you: Elohim, Yahweh. Two different words that refer to God interchangeably in the Bible. Which one is the real word and which one refers to something completely different, Camoron? After all, there is no need to change between two synonyms, therefore one of the words must not refer to God, right?
But that’s the problem. If any English translation renders the Hebrew word in Deut 22:28 “rape,” you conclude without evidence that it must mean that the Bible is somehow endorsing rape. That’s why we have to go back the original language. There’s no other way to determine the correct meaning.
Clearly. My point is that the Hebrew there indicates that the interaction was not consensual, regardless of how certain English versions read.
Yes, there are other relevant words, specifically laqach. And used with anah, it clearly suggests that Shechem forced himself on Dinah.
I never said that. I think you misunderstood my point that the Hebrew in Gen. 34:2 and Deut. 22:25 points to rape. That’s all I meant.
It may sometimes be translated as “humbled.” But it’s not translated that way in either the verse from Genesis or 2 Samuel, and it’s not indicative of rape in Deut. 22:28-9 based on the context – “…he seizes her and lies with her, and THEY ARE found out
That’s not really the point. None of the words have to literally translate as “rape,” I agree; they just have to indicate that rape took place.
And though you didn’t mean it this way, your point about synonyms above is entirely my point; taphas (to lay hold of, seize, arrest, catch)by itself is no help to you. There are better words to describe rape. Hence, it’s used in the verse that (ready for this) isn’t discussing rape (Deut. 22:28).
You just used an incomplete sentence to call me ignorant. Think about how ridiculous that looks.
I’m not quite sure what’s so difficult about this. This is either obfuscation or you’re just dumb. We have three total passages. In two passages the man involved in the act is killed. In the other passage he is simply required to marry the woman he slept with. If they’re all discussing rape, why the different reactions to the man’s behavior? I say it’s because only the first two verses are discussing rape.
Interestingly, this matches what we know about why these marriage laws were in place (http://christianthinktank.com/virginity.html). For socio-economic reasons,it had to be possible to demonstrate paternity, and the only way to do that was for a mother to be a virgin at the time of her marriage and completely faithful to her husband until the baby was born.
These verses make much more sense with that in mind. Deut 22:25 – the man is killed because he has raped an engaged woman. Deut. 22:28 – the man isn’t killed because he has only engaged in consensual sex with a virgin not pledged to be married. It’s possible here to determine paternity if the man and woman are married after having sex. This is why he is only required to provide for the woman and not face the death penalty.
You need to answer my question, especially in light of the background info I provided about the marriage laws. But to answer your question, the words used in Genesis 34 and Deuteronomy 22:25 all convey roughly the same meaning. As we both agree, there’s more than one way to express that someone was raped.
And why does Deuteronomy 22:29 actually contain a word with a root word in common with the key words describing rape from Genesis 34 (innah with root word anah)?
The difference is that anah is not used with taphas in Genesis 34; it’s used with laqach. That’s strange. I vaguely recall you ripping on me above because I only cited one relevant word from this very same verse
The context of v. 24 makes clear what’s happening there. It’s merely adultery that’s taking place – not rape. And taphas isn’t used there either.
He’s not condoning immoral behavior. And the reason I delve into the obscure details about the social setting is because that’s the only way to illustrate that larger point you’re referring to. It’s not fair to judge an ancient society that you don’t understand with your cultural presuppositions. By the way, several of you engage me on the linguistics and the history (sort of), and then I’m ridiculed for discussing those points.
I’ll be back after turkey day. Everyone enjoy the Holiday.
That would be a fair point, if I was judging an ancient society. I’m not. I’m pointing out that your Bible reflects the values of an ancient society, instead of the values that a moral and good God would have. How could that be, if the Bible and its God is not a work of utter fiction?
Again, is God a moral relativist? Why would He judge a culture by the cultural setting of the time, instead of teaching them proper morality?
Today we know that women shouldn’t be treated as we’ve discussed that the culture of that time treated them. So, did an eternal, all-knowing God inspire the writing of the Bible and forget to tell them that women should be treated as equals to men? Or has God’s morality changed since then?
Or maybe it’s just that the Bible is pure fiction, written by men who had no moral problem with perpetuating a misogynistic culture?
And no matter what the “culture of the time” was, I can’t see how there is any defense for all the people (including innocent babies) who die throughout the Bible in the name of God. What kind of God would have any hand in the writing of the Bible and not consistently discourage killing in His name? That’s not really a cultural thing – I’m pretty sure that killing has always been seen as a bit of a moral no-no.
Please stop lying. You’re not being ridiculed for discussing them. I and some other ridicule you for focusing only on the things that are easiest for you to answer. The semantic arguments are important too – it’s just so telling that you ignore the rest and reply just to them.
Camaroon, to repeat what others have said, we are not judging the people of that time, we are judging their god. For if god is the final arbiter of morality, as idiots like you and William Lane Craig keep insisting, then why couldn’t your god impart the proper morailty to his chosen people at that time. Why is it that largely secular society since the enlightenment, i.e. from when the chrches started losing their grip on power, has produced a morality that is orders of magnitude superior to you god’s.
When you understand that you just might begin to understand why we think god, if he existed, and the people, like you, who not only excuse him his vileness but try to explain it away, monsters. E.g. instead of telling his people to treat women as equals under all circumstances, he basically gives instructions in his laws that means that women are nothing but property, often not even of much value either apparently.
Now to anyone with a competently working brain, that implies one of two things. One, your so called god’s laws are nothing of the kind, simply the invention of a patriarchal society intent on protecting its ‘property’, about what you would expect of a society of that sophistication, surprisingly like similar societies today. Or two, your god is a monster who considers women second class citizens and if you are not of the chosen people, man, woman or child, and are in the way, then you are royally screwed by your own god’s words and commands.
So, which do you think most likely? BTW, whichever you choose, you have already proven with your choice of insults upthread that you have about as much respect for women as your mysoginistic god or the patriachal society claiming to be his chosen people.
I just have to say: Wow, Camoron. The only new things you’ve brought up in your latest is to also deny that 22:24 refers to rape, and to link to a source that excuses Biblical laws because Ancient Hebrews also had other non-Biblical laws to make things work. Why is this particularly impressive and yet another typical display of Camoron’s incredible idiocy? Because the source he links to refers to 22:24 as “the rape in the city” passage. You remain a true Bible scholar, Camoron.
The Bible is implicitly endorsing rape of virgin girls because at no point does it state, anywhere, that the former virgin girl’s desires had anything to do with what happens to her after being raped, and the only “punishment” on a rapist of a virgin girl is to pay a fine to her father and marry the former virgin.
If you were paying attention, you would have realized that you just shot yourself in the foot, here.
Or maybe you did realize it, and that’s why you have stayed away.
Um, the point of them needing to be found is misogynistic: only the rapist being caught “counts” for the fine and permanent marriage to kick in.
Otherwise, the girl gets herself stoned to death if she is later betrothed and her betrothed husband complains, as per Deut 22:20-21.
And the girl is in deep trouble no matter what. If she complains, and is believed, she’s forced to marry her rapist. If she keeps silent, and is later betrothed, she better hope that her groom doesn’t complain, or it’s death by rocks for her.
You’re shooting yourself in the foot, here, again.
To seize a girl and lie with her is to rape her. That is what rape means; that is how “rape” came to have the meaning it now has in English, you moron.
The verse is precisely discussing rape.
Because in the third passage, he’s raped an unbetrothed virgin. A girl who is not betrothed is the sole property of her father, and it is to her father that he pays the fine.
And it’s obvious that you’re a disingenuous moron.
Because the society was hideously patriarchical…
… and the society was also misogynistic enough to kill any woman not considered “useful” to a patriarchy for breeding purposes.
It’s ironic that your source resorts to moral relativism in defence of the passages — and that many of the legal sources cited in support of the arguments indicate that the other cultures in the ANE being used as examples were less cruel than the laws in the bible.
The man isn’t killed because the writer of the passage really doesn’t care that he raped. If she was unbetrothed, she was the property of her father, so the rapist must pay a fine to her father.
Yes, and “laqach“, to “take”, is less indicative of force than “taphas“, because to seize is to take with force.
So if you agree that Gen, 34:2 implies rape — as you did above — then only sheer bloody-minded intellectual perversity can cause you to argue that Deut. 22:28-29 is not describing rape.
Or in other words: moral relativism, at its most relativistic.
Owlmirror:
You’re too kind in assuming that Camoron has any foot left to shoot. Hell, his argument against synonyms has single-handedly proven that Christianity isn’t monotheistic. He has decided that the best way to defend his God’s honor in the face of clearly immoral acts is to quibble over the definition of genocide and accuse people who can support their definitions of it as “playing word games”. He is desperate to look at the original Hebrew in order to suggest that we are so unsophisticated for taking popular English Bible translations at their word and not looking into the nuances of the original language, yet he has consistently refused to look at the Hebrew translations for words other than those given by (drumroll please) the two/three most popular Bible translations. Poke Camoron with a stick long enough and I’d bet he’d accidentally refute any ideology he was supposed to defend in 10 paragraphs or less. His ineptitude is borderline brilliance.
after nearly 500 posts, my conclusion:
Cameron appears to be a very durable squeaky chew toy.
I’ll fix that for you, Ichthyic:
“Cameron appears to have been a very durable squeaky chew toy”
I believe he may have squeaked his last. Now who will try to justify Old Testament law and wanton mass-murder? Who!?