God's Violence - OT

Apr 22, 2011 14:04


God's Violence - OT

I've been mulling about in my admittedly feeble brain, the Old Testament historical accounts of the numerous wars the Israelites engaged in before reaching the Promised Land.   Like many other people, I've never been very comfortable with what seemed like excessive violence, and complete genocide, and more horrified to read about the mass infanticide.   After years of such mulling, I have just recently come to some amazing (to me) conclusions about the whole matter.

If you want to look at this in terms of God and religion, I'm not at all qualified or even ready to expound on that front.  I did come across the following Biblical explanations through an email subscription today.   http://www.gotquestions.org/Old-Testament-violence.html   In particular, he makes a rather interesting point about the babies in this short article.   But my conclusions haven't been changed at all by this article, since my entry here is NOT on religious grounds at all.

One must also look at this through the lens of just logic and human nature.

Killing all cattle.
Dunno.   However, since the Israelites were nomadic at the time, and in a land not exactly overflowing with water and grazing fodder (never mind milk and honey), then the sudden influx of so much livestock coupled with the added burden of caring for them, shepherding, driving them as you all wander - would be quite taxing, upon the people and the land itself.

Not collecting any spoils, riches.  
Well, lots of those "riches" came in the physical art form of other gods/idols, and the accompanying symbols for such.   One would have to melt down all of the metal things to remove this, and some other things couldn't be transformed in any such way at all, or without seriously causing damage and reducing the article's "value".   And so there would be the temptation to leave items in their original state, and keep them in secrecy.   This is the only point I'm making which has anything at all to do with religion.

And then there's the difficulty of equitable distribution of this sudden windfall of wealth (articles from a competing religion, and simply items of monetary or artist/aesthetic value).   Should it be distributed equally across the entire people of Israel?  Should it go only to the families of the actual military?   Should each piece be allowed to be kept by who grabbed it after the war?  (First come first served?  Well, that's a sure recipe for the greediest to abandon their orders near the end of a conflict and set about smashing and grabbing and hoarding instead, leaving the more honorable ones to finish up the grisly task of winning the war, and carrying out the wounded from the hot zones of harm.)   Should it go only to the governing bodies, or to the religious leaders, or other groups of power?   Each of those scenarios are rampant with the possibilities of corruption and sin.

Killing the children of your enemies.
Give this a good think - in terms of human nature - on both sides - the side of the kids, and the side of their adoptive caretakers.   If you were to incorporate them only as slaves or lesser citizens, this is a recipe for disaster.   They do grow up, ya know.   Never mind that upcoming adult stage, just the adolescence is a nightmare.   And if you tried to find them all "caring" homes to adopted into - how RARE is it that you could find some parents to completely overlook the hated enemy heritage?   And exactly how young IS the cutoff for reprogramming a kid and the safety zone of getting one that hasn't been already poisoned against your people by his parents?   And you'd better go down a couple of years, for the cases of intellectually gifted children.   Having raised one of those freaks, trust me, they grasp concepts frighteningly earlier than you'd ever suspect.   Our own U.S. radical cultic groups have shown us that extreme bigotry can be transferred far earlier than even age five - and that's presumably just the kids of average or normal intelligence.

Killing the babies. 
I know! Right?
OK, so they are obviously exempt from any chance that their birth parents have brainwashed them against you, the Israelites.  They are rather a "blank slate".  Here's where YOUR OWN SINS come in.   You suddenly have to find completely UNBIASED, unbigotted homes for a few HUNDRED babies, where you can be CERTAIN that the parents will raise them without any secret hatred against them, and completely equal love as they give their biological children.  Just our modern collective experience with stepchildren shows this to be quite difficult to achieve.   And Worse, you have to put them into a "neighborhood" where, as they are growing up, NO ONE ELSE hates their origins either !  Yeah, Right !   If the young children suspect or even smell that you treat them differently because they are from a different race, group, culture, religion, tribe, etc., things are not going to go well once those now-warped children grow up to their full power as adults, even if you could hold back their rebellions as teenagers.  (And I don't even need to mention the difficulties of finding enough wet nurses or women willing to re-lactate to feed all these squalling brats at a time before the Great Gerber twisted the minds of billions of mothers into thinking that fake food/formula was better, or even adequate for infants' nutrition.  So I won't even hint about my biases in that area....)

So, with almost no points made regarding religion or God's divine rights, or His Purpose, I have shown just from the human and logical points of view that those 4 practices were necessary in in that situation.

____________________________________________________________________________
 So, after 48 years of blundering about on this planet, mulling this over, and about 46 of them being a Christian, I am satisfied on wondering about that subject.   Now, if I could just make some headway into understanding the purpose of PRAISE as one of the three elements of prayer, ......and an explanation for the platypus, I might just get some sleep.

kids, long, church, what i'd like to know, lecture, prayer, thoughts, religion, essay, character, parenting, what i learned today, sin, values

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