Should we handle victory the way the Christian god decrees?

Such a thread is fruitless if you fail to realize that there would be no war, no crime, no sickness and no death were it not for the rebellion of Adam and Eve. Your insistence on declaring these consequences of the Edenic rebellions as an indictment against the personality of God belies the entire message of the bible. Your failure to realize that Adam and Eve sinned out of free will and not out of kindergarten naivete, presents a false image of God, one the other bible writers never picked up on.

Instead of honestly rejecting the entire bible, you wish to use its contents as an ambidexter instrument for ego enhancement.

If you wish to find out what the true God is like, you have only to look at the works of the one who He sent forth as perfect representation and representative, Jesus.

You fail to understand that by his life and death, Jesus ended our obligation to the law and initiated a new covenant, where now our warfare is spiritual.

I'm turning off email updates but will revisit your fiasco from time to time to view your charade, er, parade, er, tirade.

Let me offer to you Frank. The God portrayed in the bible is a fabrication. The bible is only a reflection of the time in which it was written.


And to you neologist. Adam and Eve

You are so cute when you are frustrated, Neo.

I am delighted you have visited...and posted.

No one helps me make the points I am arguing quite like you.

And as such...it makes complete sense. As such...my hat is off to the authors. They are to be commended. They did an excellent job of what they had to do.

None of this praise is phony.

It is heartfelt.

The men (and more than likely it was mostly men) who wrote this mythology did so for good and compelling reasons...and they did one hell of a job.

For folks today to take this stuff seriously, though, goes beyond silly.

Frank
It's called blind faith. It has been called the greatest story ever told. In reality it is the greatest con job ever pulled off.

At the time, given the peoples' level of civilization, the Bible was a monumental work. I do not believe that the Bible was a mythology. It was written, based on what those folks understood of the world, and how it worked. In hindsight, one can dismiss the writing as mythology, but I do believe that the authors of the Bible were sincere.

Unfortunately, instead of understanding what the Bible is, a history, philosophy and treatise on ethics written by a primitive people, there are those in the 21st century who attempt to use the work as a guide in living a modern, civilized life.

I would not take a science book written in the 15th century as relevent as anything except in terms of a historical perspective. I certainly would not take something written thousands of years ago as anything more than an interesting historical artifact.

I appreciate your comment, Phoenix and Au....but please do answer the question also.

QUESTION; How many of you think we should have acted as the god of the Bible suggests after World War II? The Germans and Japanese refused to "open their gates to us" and instead "offered battle."

When we defeated them...should we have gone in and killed every last male (of more than a child's age)...and put all the women and children into lifelong slavery?

How would you have felt if some leader of the Allies suggested such a course of action?

Frank
That is too far out to even contemplate.

Phoenix, I must disagree with you; one of the very few times, too! I do not believe the authors of the bible were sincere, because most of the stories used in the bible came from mythology and stories that were somewhat common in other cultures. For example, I believe the story of the world flood was interpreted from actual regional floods, but the writers didn't have the knowledge about other continents or cultures. The virgin birth was very common in many cultural mythology. The writers of the bible also didn't know anything about dinosaurs that would refute the story of creation and the age of the earth.

As Frank has listed the many contradictions and character flaws of the bible god, it's surprising to see so many still engaged in the christian religion. Wholesale punishment of humans by the bible god should be the clue that it's all hogwash.

As usual, Phoenix's answer is so well thought out, it's hard to add much to it.

The Old Testament, in particular, is part history, part mythology, part allegory and all of it intended to give the Hebrew people a sense of pride, a sense of morality (as it was understood in that place at that time) and a sense of unity as a people. The god these books describe is a higher power as it was understood by the people for whom the books were written. Furthermore, by saying that murder, theft and other felonies were branded as 'sin' by god, rather than as 'crimes' as defined by men gave the priestly class some extra clout. It also helped to insure compliance, or so it was hoped. The whole of the Decalogue is nothing more than an outline of Hebraic criminal law. The civil law is dealt with in the books of Leviticus, Deuteronomy and elsewhere.

But, as to your specific question, Frank, I think the admonition to take no prisoners was meant as pep talk to the troops. By bringing god into the exhortation, it was hoped, perhaps, that the marauders would feel less pangs of conscience. It's OK to kill 'em all -- god told me so. It's not that much different from what General Patton told his troops before the Battle of the Bulge.

C.I.
Something that I learned about on these threads is the concept of original sin. The belief in which I find incredible

Yep...there are some who say you are being punished by a god...because of one sin committed by two people thousands of years ago.

And they claim that this god is humanity loving.

Hey....whatever.

Was the Bible the first piece of literature in history that relied on a sequel and where the sequel was in fact much better? No offence to anyone of the Jewish faith but Bible 1 - the Old Testament - is a pretty tough effort. The God that Frank refers to in the OT is scary.

But when they made Bible 2 - the New Testament - with the main character being Jesus it was a breath of fresh air. All those new ideas. Jeepers if we'd only stuck to the script.

Just to answer the question Frank, no, Bible 1 is too far out there. I prefer to think we would follow St Augustine and Acquinas as regards a Just War.

There was serious thought at the end of WWII to turning Germany into a purely agricultural economy and destroying all industry to prevent another German war. WWII was the third in 80 years. As industrial economies, for what ever reason support a higher level of population than agricultural economies there would have been a population decline which would in effect have accomplished what you proposed. So your suggestion is not all that far fetched.

c.i.- Funny, I don't see a conflict in our two thoughts on the subject. The people who wrote the Bible wrote it as they knew and understood the world. I would assume that to the naive, what we now understand as mythology might very well have been taken literally. If you think about it, isn't that what we are constantly discussing on A2K? There are many people now who take literally what others consider mythology.

Sure, I would suppose that in Biblical times there were some politicians in the crowd, as there always are, who had their own personal axe to grind, but basically, I think that they meant what they wrote.

Gods need perfect obedience. If they were all warm and fuzzy, nobody'd be afraid, let alone listen to anything it says. So, we hadda make up stories of smiting and wrath and more smiting and turning to stone and salt.
"I am the Lord thy God, though shalt not have any false fods before me" 1 st commandment


" Having seen the first commandment I giveth thee,And having thus obeyed it, in all other matters thou shalt piss me off not" That should really be the second commandment. Itd be way more logical

The old testament badly suffers from multiple personality disorder. Earlier portions admit of the existence of more than one god, and the god of the Hebrews is not immediately identified as the supreme god--that comes later. After what would have been the period of the Babylonian captivity (not an implausible scenario, there is evidence from other sources that entire tribal populations were forced to migrate for public works projects), the Hebrews suddenly got religion in the form of monotheism.

There is only one incidence of monotheism known to have been practiced before the arrival of the Medes and Persians. This was Amenhotep IV of Egypt, who renamed himself Akhenaten, meaning Servant of Aten. His Aten was a sun god and not a jealous god like the Hebrew god--the jealousy implying the existence of other gods--he was the one and only. The priests moved quickly to eradicate all traces (unsuccessfully, obviously) of Akhenaten and his "cult" after his death, and they renamed his adolescent son who then became Pharaoh Tutakhenamen--Tut, the servant of Amen. (The brother of Amenhotep was Tutmoses, and the name Tut as a short form is not uncommon in the dynasties.) Amen was the supreme but not exclusive deity which the priestly caste worshipped, and from the worship of whom, therefore, they derived their power and livelihood.

In the Zoarastrian tradition, there is the same process of one god of many, to supreme god, to sole god. The Medes and Farsi (or Persians, as i prefer to name them) were Aryan tribesmen who lived in what was then called Bactria, and traded extensively with the Assyrians, especially trading in lapis lazuli. Zoarastrianism was a creation of these Aryan tribesmen--some scholars attribute the development of Zoarastrianism to borrowings from the Vedic scripts, but i am doubtful, the lineage of each being just about equally ancient.

The Medes and Persians, from long exposure to the Assyrians, developed a contempt for them, apparently, at least militarily. That is some contempt, as the Assyrians were long the military terror of the middle east. First the Medes, and subsequently the Persians (perhaps a client tribe, they were not long to remain in that status), turned to raiding into Anatolia, and finally came in to conquer and stay. This is the time of the Babylonian captivity. There were three separate "deportations" of the Hebrews, who had been subdued two centuries earlier by Tiglath Pileser. They had allied with the Arameans. The Arameans made use of the disaster to spread throughout the middle east and become the merchants par excellence of the region, caring little for theology or ideology. This is why Aramaic became the lingua franca of the middle east, and remained so for more than a millenium. When the Arameans became Jews in the theological sense, they spread Judaism throughout the middle east and far into central Asia. Those Arabs who were not "pagans" at the time of Mohammed were theological Jews.

The deportation of the Hebrews resulted in their exposure to real culture, the culture of the Akkadians, who founded Babylon and took Semitic culture to its greatest heights. This, not simply despite the Assyrian conquest, but because of it the Akkadians were able to spread that cutlure far and wide, and refine it through exposure to other traditions. At the beginning of the the sixth century BCE, the Farsi or Persians succeeded in ovethrowing the Medean monarchy, and imposed their own monarchy. It seems likely that the Medes remained the dominant population in terms of numbers, as the Greeks referred to the men of the Persian empire as Medes as late as two centuries later. The great conquering Persian King Cyrus gave the Hebrews the opportunity to return to Judea. It is considered not unreasonable to suggest that about 40,000 of them, the bulk of the surviving deportees, took him up on the offer. They brought with them a general literacy (something which there is no good reason to believe existed among them before) as the Hebraic script at this time replaces the Israelite script, thought to be a preistly script; most of the creation myths of the Akkadian mythic classic, The Gilgamesh Epic, and very likely the monotheism of the Medes and Persians. This is the most likely time for the adoption of monotheism by the Hebrews, because no clear monotheism is to be found in Israelite script, for which, admittedly, there is little source material. But as nearly every other aspect of their subsequent culture can be seen to have been borrowed during the Babylonian captivity, it is a bit much to expect that they just happened to think up monothesim on their own at exactly the time the monotheistic Medes and Persians appear on the scene as conquerors.

The Hebrews of the period before the captivity are a paltry tribal bunch. The vaunted temple of which they boasted would not have made a decent sarcophagus for an Assyrian King, based on the measurements given in the bible. To put it in perspective, neither the temple nor the palace of Solomon as large as, in the given dimensions, the hull of the American frigate Constitution. The Persians practiced satrapy, meaning that a local dependent monarch was put in place. Had the Hebrews considered their "ur-culture" superior to what they brought back from Babylon, nothing would have prevented them from "re-instituting" that culture. They became politically quietist, meaning they were not given to rebellion--they practiced a cultural-mandated ethic of "rendering unto Caesar." The Hebrews of the period of the Egyptian captivity have no identifiable culture at all. They were likely an extremely primitive tribal people forcibly deported for the public works projects of the Pharaohs. When they secured their release, and conquered Canaan, they showed all of the brutish cruelty and casually murderous behavior of a tribal people with little cultural development. Killing all of the males and enslaving the women and children is common among warlike tribes in history. One thereby stamps out the "inferior seed" (self-evidently inferior, after all, they lost the war), while recruiting more child-bearers and a body of potential slave labor (the children) who can be raised to fill the lowly station for which they are intended. The pre-Babylonian god is a jealous and brutal god because he (it?) is in competition with a host of equally clueless and brutal petty gods, and intends that his people will supplant the worship of these other weakling gods just as they have killed the men and taken the wives of their hapless victims.

The tragedy of western civilization is the extent to which its ethos and cultural antecedants have been polluted by this petty god and his petty culture. The Babylonian captivity may have polished up the Hebrew culture so that it could put on clean clothes and come to dinner in a respectable house--but it remained a brutish lout of a culture, and it has imposed, via christianity, its brutish ways on Europe and the European nations of the western hemisphere.

That's my story, and i'm stickin' to it.

No christians yet, Frank; does that mean you are winning?

Phoenix, Yup; more in agreement than not. I'm not so sure about the "sincere." They turned mythology onto it's head, and made it into stories about jesus. At worst, they have freely plagiarized other works, and at best, they embellished old wive's tales.