Oddbean

That's one opinion, and a common one. I'm still learning about this, but... If you were born to be sacrificed and eaten, it may just be better to not have to go through that particular torture. So, you may see that as punishment. Others may see that as release from a horrible fate. Like I said, that's the hardest part to reconcile and I am still learning it. But... Everyone else? I'm very OK with slaughtering satanic, cannibalistic pedos. 🤷‍♂️

The understanding of those passages that I've heard runs along a few parallel tracks. The first is that God commands this to protect the Israelites. As it turns out later, the Israelites don't completely uproot the inhabitants of the land, and they fall into the pagan practices of the Canaanites. If they had obeyed God's commands, they would not have been as tempted towards idolatry. A second reading is more metaphorical. We can see in the Canaanites an image of sin and temptations. If we are to be holy as God wishes for us, we must completely uproot sin and all of its occasions from our lives. In this reading, God's command is directed at us today: we must purge all that separates us from him. All of this is not necessarily incompatible with God's mercy. The Canaanites were utterly lost in multifarious sins and idolatries. Even the children would just grow up to heap condemnation upon themselves. If they die at the hands of the Israelites that spares them from the future sins they would otherwise commit.

Yes. Maybe I was being a little harsh but I still stand by the statement. I'm a "Christian" in name as I was christend as a baby, I didn't obviously concent to this but there we are. Are the 10 commandments a good code to live your life by? Well yes, of course they are. Do I believe that Jesus was the son of God? Nope. Muhammad the prophet of Allah? Nope. All "Moderates" of most religions are absolutely fine. It's the fucking lunatic fringe of each one that causes all the evil, ergo "Religion is the root of all evil"......That and Central Bankers🤷🏻‍♂️.

Fair point. The Old Testament has some difficult passages, and I don't claim to know completely how to think about them. "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away." The utter sovereignty of God is a theme of the Old Testament, to be sure. If God commands the destruction of a people, it must be just, because God is just. Abortion is different because God is not commanding it.

God is perfectly capable of taking action himself if action needs taking. Sodom and Gommorah would agree. Failing that, God is capable of communicating to individual mortals like me directly. Too many examples. If some mortal man is telling me God wants me to kill children and infants, its probably Hitler or Ben Gvir, and he probably needs company in his tent (of the fragmenting kind...)

That last point is why I led with the moral/allegorical interpretation of the passage. Frankly, I don't fully understand why God would command the Israelites to kill all of the Canaanites, but I do understand that when I read it today, I can understand it as an admonition to aggressively root out all the things in my life that will draw me away from God. Yet, we can't simply discard the literal meaning of the text, and those passages are definitely among the most difficult to understand literally, at least from a moral framework shaped by the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God. God also allowed divorce in ancient Israel, but Jesus forbids it to Christians. Is this a contradiction? It sure can feel that way sometimes. Is God "allowed" to command what he pleases? Yes. Now, this goes back to the ancient question: "Does God commands something because it is just, or is it just because he commands it?" I tend towards the Medieval view of divine simplicity—that God is identical with all of his attributes. So God and justice are the same thing. Which suggests to me that if these passages of Scripture don't *appear* just, it must be because I am failing to grasp some underlying unity. All this isn't much in the way of answers, but it's how I try to think about such things.

A bit of searching brought this up; Article 5 is especially pertinent: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2094.htm Thomas asserts God's absolute sovereignty over life and death, saying: "All men alike, both guilty and innocent, die the death of nature: which death of nature is inflicted by the power of God on account of original sin, according to 1 Samuel 2:6: "The Lord killeth and maketh alive." Consequently, by the command of God, death can be inflicted on any man, guilty or innocent, without any injustice whatever." All the objections and replies are worth a read, though.

While searching I also read the suggestion that the commands we see to put all the Canaanites to the sword was a Hebrew idiomatic hyperbole; indeed we see examples of hyperbole throughout Scripture ("If your eye causes you to sin,..." etc.). If this is the case, then, as you suggested earlier, perhaps we are not to take it absolutely literally, in which case the moral or spiritual meaning becomes primary in governing our understanding of such passages.

It's still hard to conceive a god who kill innocent children en masse. Where's justice in that? To make justice you need first that someone conscientiously commits a crime and the punishment must fit the crime. If your god can break this rule then he's committing a contradiction of the rules which himself created, if he's contradictory then he isn't a real god

That's exactly what I'm trying to point out: if the god of the Bible can change the notion of justice (opening exceptions from the natural law which himself supposedly created) whenever he wants then he cannot be a god, because one of the characteristics of the God is being perfect and immutable, if he can "change his mind" about what is justice then he's mutable and mutability is not perfect

Another example how the Bible is contradictory: "The Lord reigns forever; he has established his throne for judgment. He rules the world in righteousness and judges the peoples with equity." (Psalm 9:7-8) If he "judges with equity" why did he command the killing of innocent children?

In Vol 2 a child molester went to court to get out of paying the child's bride price as a fine. The Sages sided with the molester on the grounds that the victim was under 3 and (in their, medically wrong, opinion) her hymen will regrow so no harm done. This was considered an important and valuable precedent, and included in the Talmud so future child molesters could re-use the defence. The actual text is worse than my summary - its the tone, and the shekel-counting. There's lots of other bad mojo - advice for slave-trading and the like, but the above is the worst. I stopped after volume two, and stopped wondering about my great-grandparents apostasy from Judiasm to Christianity...