The death of the male children would insure the extermination of the Midianites as a people and keep them from ever again seducing Israel to sin. Only the young girls who were virgins would be allowed to live and assimilated into the nation of Israel. Our politically correct sensibilities bristle at such a description, but the death of the Midianites was not commanded capriciously for the sake of heartless cruelty and the securing of material gain. God was bringing swift and deserving punishment upon a wicked nation that reveled in their sin against God and His holy people
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"God was bringing swift and deserving punishment upon a wicked nation that reveled in their sin against God and His holy people
So there's no problem with allah commanding muslims to kill all you infidels?
"God was bringing swift and deserving punishment upon a wicked nation...."
Interesting how this god is so interested in political borders. It's almost as if this god is just a tool used for political purposes.
Do you realise that's almost exactly the way the Nazis justified the killing of 5,7 million of my Jewish brethren and about 5 million Gentile Slavs, Romani, gays, dissenters, disabled, and Jehovah's Witnesses?
"They were a wicked people; therefore, they were asking for it! It's justice!"
Our politically correct sensibilities bristle at such a description,
Not killing children is "political correctness" now?
Fred Butler: "The death of the Midianites was not commanded capriciously for the sake of heartless cruelty and the securing of material gain. God was bringing swift and deserving punishment upon a wicked nation that reveled in their sin against God and His holy people!"
creativerealms: "Doesn't that sound similar to the actions of ISIS?"
Fred Butler (eyeroll): "Don't be ridiculous! ISIS are *MUSLIMS*!!!!"
First off, the extermination of the Midianites probably did not take place, along with much of the history in the Torah. More than that, though, if it did take place, why not just admit that it was a tribal affair and that the little girls were the booty of such a war? Why try to make it into a holy order? That really is what Islam does, Fred.
The death of the male children would insure the extermination of the Americans as a people and keep them from ever again seducing Islam to sin. Only the young girls who were virgins would be allowed to live and assimilated into the Islamic State. Our politically correct sensibilities bristle at such a description, but the death of the Americans was not commanded capriciously for the sake of heartless cruelty and the securing of material gain. Allah was bringing swift and deserving punishment upon a wicked nation that reveled in their sin against Allah and His holy people.
Well Fred, absolute morality is a contradiction in terms. Most philosophers define absolute as meaning without condition or restriction. Most people would define morality in terms of relations between sentient agents. As such, morality could not exist outside of relations between sentient agents, and would not be defined as absolute.
In any case, there are many theories of ethics which existed long before anyone knew or cared that your tribal war god had a hate boner for nonconformists. Your divine command theory is one of the most poorly thought out models of morality that anyone could come up with. It is quite telling that when you want to talk about the horrors of a world without gods, you appeal to humanist sentiments rather than Biblical sentiments of "without God, who will torture people for thoughtcrime?". That in itself shows the superiority of humanism over divine command theory. I'll post this over on your blog if you like.
@Fred:
Next, your assumptions about what we think are merely that - assumptions.
Besides, you're basically arguing that committing genocide, forcing female children into becoming basically sex slaves, and forcing the survivors to deny their ethnic heritage are GOOD things - which, in any civilized society, they would not be. Only a psychopath would see those as positive actions.
And for the record, murdering an entire civilization & taking their female children as prizes, just because they didn't follow another civilization's religious laws, is evil. Period. You might as well argue that it's okay for Muslim extremists to attack Americans for not adhering to Sharia law... actually, that's pretty much EXACTLY what you're saying.
@Nemo:
I'll wager Fred just deletes any comments that make him look foolish; that's been the case for almost every fundamentalist I've seen who has kept a blog condoning murder, hate, or rape on religious grounds.
> Are any of you all gonna come over to my blog and engage me there, or just guffaw with each other here in your atheist bubble?
Fundie blogs have a habit of censorship. If yours is different, then sure.
@John: ah, but rape isn't one of the *big* sins. not like eating shellfish, or wearing mixed fibers, i mean. you can get out of rape by paying bride price to the victim's father, after all, and even then any sin's lesser when the victim is one of "them" --- a godless outsider.
@Fred
I don't need an absolute morality to know that you're absolutely off your rocker. And by the way, someone who believes that morality is relative (as in, it's not defined for us in some book and it must be discovered) can still believe that there is not one single case in which genocide is okay. The advantage of relative morality is that you can realize that something is wrong even if the dominant religion says it's perfectly fine.
I've had it with this rank heresy concerning Cthulhu! Cthulhu is not "like" some Semitic sheep-herder's so-called god. Cthulhu does not make his "intentions" known. Cthulhu's many-angled thoughts are far beyond the pathetic ken of man. He would not choose to destroy one tribe over another any more than you or I would show favoritism to insect colonies. The groupings of men are beneath his notice and the destruction he would wreak upon our frail civilization would merely be the side-effects of his very existence impugning upon the wispy fabric of our so-called reality like a lawn mower annihilating ant-hills.
And were he to decide to eliminate a group he'd do a heck of a better job of it than Yahweh or Allah I can tell you! Yahweh had Moses eradicate the Midianite men and mothers and marry the virgins. Allah destroyed them with an earthquake after they refused Shu'aib. Yet they were still extant in the days of Claudius Ptolemy a century after Christ.
You call that an extirpation? Pah! I could fill a dozen eldritch tomes bound with human skin and inked with angel's blood detailing exactly what Cthulhu has forgotten about genocidal exterminations that the gods of men never knew! Single spaced. In Enochian.
Well, looks like he's gone to censoring. I replied to his last post on the site, and for some reason, the reply won't show up at all. I even entered in all of the required information. And these guys wonder why fundamentalism is losing.
Yeah, the Bible justifies genocide and the enslavement of young girls and Christians accept this as good.
There's a fucking huge point you idiots gloss right over here and that's one of the biggest problems with your religion.
"Hey God said it's OK to do this, killing, slavery and incest aren't problems when you're a Godly guy."
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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