I [heart] Genocide
Some people have criticized the Torah for being cruel because the Torah commands the extermination of certain ancient peoples, specificially the Canaanites, the Amalekites and the Midianites, including the killing of women and children.
I think that a few things must however be borne in mind.
These commandments were given by God who knows all of people's thoughts and all their future actions and the actions of their potential descendents. God knew that these people were evil, they were "bad to the bone", and the kindest solution was to kill them, for their sakes and the sakes of everyone else. Killing a baby is normally a heinous crime. However if someone would be truly psychic and would have truly been able to see the future, surely he would have done everyone a big favor if he would have strangled Adolf Hitler in his crib.
Additionally, we must bear in mind that these commandments were specifically regarding those nationalities. Orthodox Jews today are basically pacsifists who are almost never kill anyone.
53 comments
Babies are born "bad to the bone"?
A good God who was omnipotent and omniscient wouldn't *make* babies that were doomed to be "bad to the bone".
Evil is either, in such a construct, an essence made by "Gahd", and therefore it is contradictory to order others to commit evil to destroy it, or it is a choice, and therefore not inevitable.
Your "Gahd" is therefore evil, Sir, and it appears that so are you.
Your god is an excuse to kill and plunder.
Your religion is offensive to all good people because it endorses genocide, incest, slavery, and racism.
Orthodox jews are dangerous lunatics who's violence is held back only by fear of punishment.
When turned loose on defenceless Palestinians, they rape and kill with out hesitation.
The sooner your cult reforms itself, the better.
So every single one of the Canaanites, Amalekites and Midianites, and their potential descendents, was irredeemably evil, without exception? Hmm, that's mighty convenient.
One person, or a small group of people, being so bad that killing them was the lesser of two evils I can certainly buy. (Although I'm sure an omniscient God could have found an even better way way. Kidnapping baby Adolf and giving him to a family which believed in the values of tolerance and equality would have had the same effect without the infanticide...) An entire nationality? No way.
D Laurier: the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel refuse to serve in the army and essentially do not recognize the validity of the State of Israel. Some of them side with the Palestinians and are anti-Zionist.
The notion that an entire nation, such as the Canaanites, could be completely and irredeemably evil is one of the parts of the Bible that defies common sense and daily experience. Fortunately, historians believe none of it ever happened, that the whole story is a nation-building myth from a time when violent conquest was considered a valid claim to a piece of territory.
These commandments were given by God who knows all of people's thoughts and all their future actions and the actions of their potential descendents.
Actually, the people who did the killing claimed it was God's commandment. What would you expect them to say? We wanted the land, so we just went in there and slaughtered everybody and took it? Almost everyone in the history of mankind has claimed some sort of divine permission to kill people and take over their territory.
"Orthodox Jews today are basically pacsifists who are almost never kill anyone."
I think I read somewhere that they did 9/11. It was on the Internet. On Encyclopedia Dramatica, so it's probably true, unless it isn't.
Ooh, Torah fail. Half the time it was Moses acting on his own who ordered the genocide. So your excuse about being able to see the future holds no water. At least real Jews, who were once subjected to genocide by that same reasoning (that all Jews were rotten to the core) understand the immorality of the argument.
Also, Jewish Philosopher, you are forgetting something. God is supposed to be both omniscient and omnipotent. Surely He would be able to cure the Canaanites or Amalekites of their evil ways by having the Jews teach them morality or assimilate them into Jewish culture if necessary. (And yes, Converted-Jewish Philosopher, this is totally possible. Not only are you yourself a convert to what you believe is the best culture, human nature hasn't changed in 3500 years. The Europeans went from one of the most racist and bloodthirsty peoples on the planet to a continent of almost totally unbigoted pacifists within a single generation. Don't tell me the Canaanites could not have done the same if they had been educated instead of exterminated.)
So if the christian god commands that jews be killed, it's good by definition because god commanded it?
You might want to rethink your philosophy.
Oh, it's the faux-Jew again. Asshole and idiot. I'm not sure about frummers being pacifists, either ... there are some violent nutjobs among them, and I don't even know if the Haredim can be called pacifists, exactly. True, they rarely practice violence, but that might just be due to violence being hard work, and they being bone-idle parasites.
Nothing like claiming all members of an entire ethnicity to be "evil" so that you can kill them all for the greater good
Ironic, because I'm pretty sure that something like that happened to the Jews.
It didn't need to be Hitler that caused so much of a ruckus. Germany was in a position to be taken advantage of anyone who tried. Hitler just proved to be the most charismatic. I'm sure if I had access to German politics at the time just before the Nazi Party was created, I would find dozens of other candidates. So killing little baby Adolf would not have necessarily stopped a great tragedy from unfolding, it simply would have happened differently than we now remember.
Also your argument is crap on several other levels.
Oh great, this sociopathic scumbag again, utterly failing to appreciate the irony of excusing genocide by using the "excuse" that they were all evil anyway. I wish I was surprised.
@Stonespiral
Yes, thank you. The fallacy that Germany would have been just hunky dory if it weren't for that mean ol' Hitler pisses me off endlessly.
Stonespiral and Extraintrovert: Post WWI Germany was ripe for someone to pop up and lead them in some direction, but it could have been a better someone in a better direction...and we ourselves, these days, walk on the edge of a knife.
And yes, I think if little Adolf had been swiped from his cradle and raised by kindly, cultured people, he might by now have been known as an architect instead of a mass murderer. Somehow, though, I don't see Eichmann as anything but Eichmann.
A orthodox Jew saying "I heart genocide"?
Yeah, there was another guy who hearted genocide Adolf somebody...
I apologize for invoking Godwin's Law, but I have to ask this philosopher the old question that this line of reasoning always leads to... If he had access to a time machine that could only go to Austria in 1889, would he use it as an opportunity to kill baby Hitler?
What am I thinking? With such a shortsighted philosophy, he'd do it in a heartbeat, to hell with the moral consequences.
By your logic, then, surely God, being able to see the future, wouldn't have created those peoples in the fiorst place if they were going to turn out to be so evil that they neeed to be wiped out. The only conclusion left, then, would be that the murdering wasn't commanded by God, but by men who wanted to get rid of those people for their own reasons.
God knew that these people were evil, they were "bad to the bone", and the kindest solution was to kill them, for their sakes and the sakes of everyone else.
So you're OK with Nebuchadnezzar doing the same thing to a bunch of Jewish people about 400 years later?
Orthodox Jews today are basically pacsifists who are almost never kill anyone.
Yes, their peaceful nature is very evident in the Gaza and West Bank settlements. They're just like newborn lambs there.
Not.
Wow, the bullshit in "jewish philosopher's" post is knee deep.
So, using this logic, we should kill everyone 'just in case' they become a potentially 'bad' person. You and everyone you know would also not be exempt from this self 'poential bad person' cleansing.
You throw the word 'God' in there as if that was what 'it' wanted as if you or your ancestors are special little buddies to the supposed master of the universe.It is nothing but voices in people's heads. They wanted the other peopel dead, so they said 'God told me to'. No one could possibly have proven them wrong. Your religion is terrible by any standard.Give it up already.
Killing one baby who would grow up to be Hitler is fairly ok. Killing all Austrians(Hitler was austrian) because one of them might grow up to be Hitler is not Ok.
Oh, and what evidence do you have that the Amaleks Midianites and Canaanites were irredeemably evil? Oh, just the bible, what a steaming pile of bullshit.
You heart Genocide eh?
How are we supposed to know which are the 'bad to the bone' people that God apparently created with the intention of them being evil, like the monster he is, so he could punish them, because he gets off on it or something.
What if the Nazis were right, and God wanted the Jews exterminated because they are evil, and the Allies got in the way of his divine plan? That's essentially what you're saying about other peoples, after all.
Any Jew that supports genocide is the worst kind of hypocrite imaginable. If Plato were to have crossed over into his world of the forms, the form of hypocrisy would have been you.
I [heart] Genocide
Only an Israeli Zionist pig could vomit such blasphemy and still call himself Jewish, and if he did that in front of European or even American Jews, he would probably get beaten up, or at least get yelled at furiously.
The thing that truly gets me about quotes like this or the majority of other quotes here on FSTDT where the author defends some otherwise repugnant verse from scripture, is that common sense should dictate that at least that passage should be disregarded (if not the entire scripture), not upheld or defended.
Yes, the god of the Torah is violent, vengeful, horrific, and, well, antithetical to peaceful existence. He commanded entire civilizations to be wiped out. Given the choice of defending him or disregarding him, the choice seems quite clear. Why do so many people choose to defend the indefensible?
The god who commanded genocide is no god. He is a monster and a devil.
I also note that this god/devil would have communicated his commands via humans...
Need I say more?
Need I say more also about the origins of the Bible?
Two words.
Baruch Goldstein.
That mother-fucker killed 29 Muslims kneeling at prayer in their mosque, and wounded an additional 125.
He is revered as a hero and martyr by the Orthodox Jewish population of Israel.
If Jewish Orthodox people are basically pacifists, why are they armed to the teeth and provoking Palestinians all the time?
{I [heart] Genocide }
Nice. Do you whistle that same tune to Hamas?
{God knew that these people were evil, they were "bad to the bone", and the kindest solution was to kill them }
Or instead of having to kill them later, maybe God could have just not created those 'bad to the bone' in the first place?
Nah, nah. Real logic defies Biblical logic (and jewish philospher's "philosophy"), so it must be shunned to the side. Well, that and basic human decency...
Why create these people in the first place then, if you know beforehand, as God supposedly does, that they're going to turn out to be evil? Why not just... not create them?
As for strangling Hitler in his crib, you obviously don't know your time travel sci-fi. That might lead to even worse repercussions.
Who's to say that another leader might not have gained power in Germany who was even worse? What if it was Himmler or Goerring or Goebbels? All the elements would've still been there. After all, Hitler didn't accomplish the holocaust all on his own.
Why do we consider Hitler bad? Could it be because he massacred entire peoples he didn't like? How is this different? Oh right, God told you to do it. But you'd never do it on your own, you're pacifists.
Until "God" commands you to kill again, of course.
So, why did your bone-head god create evil people in the first place?
Oh, yeah, because it gets off on watching really stupid people torture and kill other people.
"However if someone would be truly psychic and would have truly been able to see the future, surely he would have done everyone a big favor if he would have strangled Adolf Hitler in his crib. "
Or perhaps Hitler would have grown up well adjusted but some psychopath tried to strangle him as an infant, leading him to become the charismatic mass murderer he did.
People are idiots. More specifically, people that think if Hitler would have been killed as a child Germany would not have become a dictatorship are idiots. When looking at the election result in the Weimar Republic, the KPD, German now outlawed communist party, would have quite probably dominated German politics. This would include AN ALLY FOR THE SOVIET UNION. Still want Hitler to be killed as a baby? No? Didn't think so.
I feel I must be truthful, though it may earn me some hate.
I most certainly *would* go back in time and kill the living shit out of Hitler, but not as an infant. I would wait until he showed signs of and action towards his horrible ambitions before challenging to a duel to the death. Being an admittedly twisted sort of gentleman, I'd offer him my own knife in the fight (I typically carry two) but in the end I'd do everything in my power to kill the son of a bitch.
That said there is an awe-inspiringly enormous difference between what *could* be and what I know to be the future, furthermore what you propose is the slaughter of those who might seek attrition for a sin you yourself committed compounding upon that sin in ways that sicken those you dementedly believe bereft of morals. Not even Ghengis Khan or his prize general Subotai were that soulless, and they were kind of famous for being bloodthirsty assholes and anethema in the eyes of your God .
You quite thoroughly disgust me.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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