In a post entitled “A Seriously Warped Moral Compass,” Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism relates a discussion he had with an evangelical fellow. The topic? Hosea, chapter 13, a Bible passage in which God promises that for the crime of disbelief, the city of Samaria’s “infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.” This is one of those many Bible passages that the anti-abortion demonstrators refuse to display on their signs as they march in front of clinics.
I’ve often been in discussions similar to the one described by Ebonmuse. Such discussions are highly predictable, actually. They all lead to the same conclusion. The fundamentalists all end up insisting that whatever God does, He is still “good” or “just.”
Here’s how the encounter of Ebonmuse with his fundamentalist acquaintance:
“You’ve said that it’s perfectly okay for God to command genocide. You’ve said it’s okay for him to condemn people to be tortured for all eternity because they had some sincere doubts about his existence. And now you’re saying it’s perfectly okay for him to order the slaughter of pregnant women and their unborn children! So what would you consider immoral? Is there anything you think he can’t do and still be good? Is there any act – anything at all – that a good god would never command?”
For the first time, a shadow of disgust passed across John’s face. “Yes. A good God would never say that it’s okay for people to be gay. Homosexuality is disgusting and unnatural and God would never permit it.”
Here’s how I see it. Either God is not “good” or one can still be good even though one slaughters babies. Now, maybe those babies (some of them being unborn babies) were morally deficient and “had it coming,” but I doubt it.
In my heathen view, babies are not capable of doing anything capable of earning the death penalty. In the meantime, we’ve got a language problem. If fundamentalists keep insisting that God is good when He kills babies, we’ll just have to advise all of the dictionary makers that there is a new definition of “good.” We’ll call it “good #2” (or something like that) and it will mean something like this: evil, depraved, morally obtuse and dangerous. Once this new definition of good (#2) is commonly accepted, we can start using it commonly. For instance, if someone sticks a gun in your face to rob you, you can say, “Hey! You’re good #2!”
Here is how Ebonmuse ends his post:
People such as this have a seriously warped moral compass. They have their priorities precisely backwards, they are obsessed with precisely the wrong things. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once said: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
As long as fundamentalists can’t shake off the effects of the LSD they apparently take, they rest of us will just have to understand that they give God a free pass, morally speaking. He gets all the credit but none of the blame. Although He’s sometimes good, he’s often good #2. He’s always “just.” He is incapable of doing evil even when he’s busy slaughtering innocent babies. And perhaps it is because God is so good (#2) that the fundamentalists are “inspired” to be good (#3), namely, they (sometimes) refrain from killing and stealing because they’re afraid that God might be good (#2) to them too.
BTW, I’d highly recommend that you check out Ebonmuse’s site. Lots of thoughtful analysis and good clear writing.
He comes at the topic of religion from many angles, always with new fruitful observations. Here’s how he describes himself:
Part-time computer hacker, part-time freethought activist; optimist and skeptic rolled into one; a poet at heart but a scientist at mind; a thorough-going atheist who admires religious music and architecture. I contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it. And anyone who suggests that I’m only an atheist because of a dysfunctional family or a bad experience with church gets fifty lashes with a wet noodle blessed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
[Note: This is not the original version of this post. While I was correcting a typo, the original post got “eaten” by an airport Internet connection].
Karl
You are misreading and mis-comprehending.
We do not characterize your god as being biased.
We do characterize him/her/it as being mean, spiteful and ornery.
I agree that your god has done many horrible things to the supposed 'chosen people' as to others. Although, on balance, there is some definite bias in favor of the 'chosen ones' – but then, they wrote the book and history is always written by the winners!
Regarding rewards: your say your reward is in heaven, but you need to trust it's actually there! Your trust is based only on the evidence of a book compiled from many many different oral (and written) histories, and on hearsay from others (whose only actual evidence is that same book). You may sincerely believe. I applaud you for that sincerity. But I do not share your faith or trust in those claims.
We have but one life. My reward is the good that I do while living my life, and the positive legacy I leave in the memories of my friends and family.
I hope never to see my full reward – because that would mean I had not really left any significant legacy in thought or in deed.
I can only hope that you, despite a belief in a life after death, approach your time on earth with the same perspective: to leave it a little better off that when you arrived.
Christianity doesn't even make the top ten for atrocities prior to the 20th century, and is less than 3% of the totals (excluding wars). For the 20th century, "Christian" atrocities doen't even make the top 20, whereas atheistic regimes claim three out of the top five spots for mass murder.
For more information, see What About Atrocities That Have Been Done in the Name of Religion the link is below.
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/atrociti…
Karl
Your caveat 'excluding wars' is telling – the majority of religious atrocities have been state sponsored war.
Your list is also appallingly bad history – only a fool would suggest that the majority of wars on the list were not religious. Religion and politics were inseparable for most of the history of the world.
One example: the thirty years war laid waste a continent, and was an appalling waste of human life, all because of a turf war between catholics, other catholics, and protestants.
Almost every atrocity you care to name has been driven by religion. Your link proclaims a somewhat biased viewpoint, that religion has only been responsible for the crusades, and the inquisition. Accepting responsibility for the obvious atrocities is disingenuous at best, outright lying at worst.
The most populous atrocities have been in the 20th century, perhaps because we've just gotten better at it, because populations are larger, because urban civilization provides a 'target-rich' field.
And I don't accept many of the regimes cited as atheist – most (to use hank's fabulous word) were auto-theist. Stalinism was NOT communism, it was elevation of an individual into dictatorial power. Mao, and the gang of four, were similar, and have led to other regimes in the far east (Pol Pot, and Kim Jung Il, among others).
Say what you like – but these regimes were religious. The only difference is that their gods and demons were living among them.
I do not agree with juxtaposing the word "horrible" next to the judgments inacted and intended to maintain a balance between free will and proper values. Correction or discipline being experienced by someone who refuses to learn is not pleasant, especially to anyone who insists on trying to ignore the impact of consequences for their actions.
If you can understand how police officers are needed for the good of the social order, How is it you don't call them evil and purposeless – or am I assuming too much here?
Karl: When police officers slaughter innocent babies (or do other despicable acts), we throw them in prison for a long time. You really can't see the difference between the exercise of force (or not) and the committing of a despicable act (or not)?
Karl Ctrl+V'd: http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/atrociti…
Interesting link. It begins with this polly of a cracker:
"Many atheists claim that religion is evil and, as such, cannot be from God."
Not a good start. People may frequently use religion to justify evil, but it doesn't follow that religion is inherently evil. Religion is like science, dance or origami in a way: it can be used for whatever purpose the user sees fit: charity and goodness or cruelty and barbarism. A tool does not dictate how it will be used, its user does.
Second, atheists don't believe gods exist, therefore "from God" is inapplicable. The whole thing starts off completely wrong. It doesn't improve either.
The article is yet another tiresome attempt to paint the worst atrocities of history as atheist in origin – that is, anything not directly attributable to religious motives is automatically called 'atheist', in a very simplistic, binary and dishonest fashion. It's a simple-minded scoreboard designed for lackwits to look at and say "Hey, they're a lot worse than us!"
The reasons for totalitarian brutality are generally to do with the power-lust and rigid ideology of the tyrant and his intense fear of revolt or being usurped. The fact that Stalin, Hitler and Mao (and other punching-bags beloved by the liars for Jesus) didn't expressly commit their crimes under the banner of God doesn't automatically make their atrocities based upon atheism (which is just a lack of god-belief and hardly something to base anything on). Many tyrants throughout history certainly feared religion for its organisational power and ability to mobilise large numbers of people. Stamping out religion was a practical consideration more than anything else; another way of keeping the population in check. Saddam Hussein, for example, was accused repeatedly of having links to al-Qaeda. In fact, he despised extremists like bin Laden and took great pains to crush extremism in Iraq, primarily to discourage people from mobilising against him. People, that is, who weren't from his particular sect of Islam. As soon as Hussein was toppled in 2003, look what happened: sectarian brutality, pent-up for years, erupted across the country and opportunists poured across the newly-unsecured borders. Just as opponents of the invasion predicted, but that's incidental.
Now, a few examples from that list. The Vietnam death toll – I'm wondering if that includes all the innocent Vietnamese bombed, shot and napalmed by US invaders. But was the US an atheist nation during their invasion of Vietnam? Were the killers of My-Lai a pack of rampant heathens? Or was the abject fear of "godless Commies" still as rampant as it was in the 1950s when "In God We Trust" was added to US currency in response to alleged Soviet atheism?
The Aztec figure is bogus too – considering their society was expressly religious and their high priests apparently executed people daily to ensure the sun would rise and that the gods would smile on their crops, that's a particularly glaring lie. "Not Christian" does not necessarily mean "atheist." Now, I could mention the genocide later perpetrated against native South Americans by the Catholic Spanish – but I'm more inclined to attribute that to the mountains of gold and land they possessed, surely a tempting prize to a pre-Renaissance European monarchy plagued by largesse and often at war with its neighbours. Religion may not have been the driving force behind the rape of South America, but the Catholic faith of the Conquistadors certainly didn't hold them back from the enslavement, torture and mass extermination of millions of poor heathens.
The Yugoslavia figure? I fail to see how that can be attributed to atheism, considering Yugoslavia was torn apart by violence & atrocities between Muslims and Christians in its last years. Yugoslavia's dissolution also occurred in the wake of the fall of the USSR, and any country being split up to form separate states is always going to experience intense upheaval & friction over borders and culture and long-held grievances.
Pure numbers are misleading in any case: leaders of the 20th century had access to much more efficient human-killing technology than the Catholic Inquisitors or Genghis Khan's Mongols (who I strongly doubt were atheist). But the numbers or percentages are irrelevant.
The ignorance and selective history on display in that article would blow me away, were I not bored to bloody, stinging tears by its predictable dishonesty, which is all too common among Christian apologetics. Your source, as usual, is lop-sided and geared to fit an existing conclusion.
Atheists have bigger problems with religion than its specific death toll (though religious atrocities certainly cast a large shadow on religion's claim to be the source of all morality). I consider the fact that religion can be used by some people to justify selective readings of history and flat-out lies like in that article to be one of them. Religion frequently permits those with an agenda to ignore inconvenient facts and invent others so as to support their own theories, because apparently lying's ok if it's for Jesus (bearing false witness against atheists seems to be the exception to that commandment).
The point is, this body-count game can be fixed more or less equally in either direction to denigrate either position. Because of that, it is irrelevant. Humans always have and always will find reasons to kill each other en masse. Lust for power, wealth or territory are as good a justification for murder as religious reasons. In the case of the Inquisition, the combination of a quest for doctrinal purity and the lust for property, gold and power was a very handy fringe benefit which enriched and empowered the Vatican beyond measure.
I don't personally subscribe to the theory that religion is evil because of its bodycount. However, what that bodycount (the bits that are honest) reveals to me is that religion's claim to imbue its followers with absolute heaven-bestowed morality is bogus. To a lesser extent, the article itself does the same thing. An honest person and competent researcher wouldn't be presenting history's tragedies in such an insultingly simplistic, "us vs them" manner. Humans and human failings are to blame for our hatred of each other and the abuse of religion is just one of myriad contributing factors.
Tony writes:—"One example: the thirty years war laid waste a continent, and was an appalling waste of human life, all because of a turf war between catholics, other catholics, and protestants."
Gotta disagree. It certainly had a lot of that to it, but it was a war about that started over a questionable transfer of title to a throne, and was primarily Emperor Ferdinand II's attempt to enlarge the Holy Roman Empire. Like all good despots he used religion to pit peoples against each other, but the whole conflict quickly devolved into competing autarchs vying for position. True, there was a Catholic-Protestant grid involved, but that really became immaterial after the first ten years.
Few wars were ever begun over religion. When you look closely, most were over power or resource issues, and if anything used religion as a recruiting tool—which to my mind is even more insidious. Even the Crusades were more about trade lanes and what to do with the many "royal" sons who had no kingdoms to inherit scattered across Europe. Money and power. The true believers are often sacrificed by their own side because they can't be controlled (Joan of Arc).
Karl Writes:—"If you can understand how police officers are needed for the good of the social order, How is it you don’t call them evil and purposeless – or am I assuming too much here?"
Now you're being obtuse. The statement concerned police officers overstepping their authority and maltreating innocents. No one here has had much quibble with the attribution of war victories to the Yahweh faction—it's the further annihilation of women and children that's at question.
To what purpose is the exercise of so-called punitive action when the people who are meant to learn from it are left dead on the field? The Hebrew engaged in wars of conquest. They credited Yahweh when they won, thought he was pissed at them when they lost. But when they won and as part of the winnings they also slaughtered all the noncombatants and claimed, in their books, that Yahweh instructed them to do so, what are we left to think but that this Yahweh guy, in his followers' imagination, is some kind of bloodthirsty psychopath.
Personally, I think all the wrong lessons are being gleaned from these stories. In the long run, the Hebrews got nothing Yahweh supposedly promised them. They flunked the tests, did not prove themselves charitable or moral, and blew their legacy. Slaughtering all those kids and raping all those women, just because they prayed differently, did not win them any points.
Here's my take: it goes back to Abraham. When Yahweh told him to sacrifice Isaac, what Abraham should have said was "Stick it! You can have my life, because my life is mine to give, but Isaac is his own person, with a choice of his own, not property. You have no right to ask me to kill him for you." That would have been a moral response. Abraham flunked the test. All the shit Yahweh promised him for his obedience did not come to pass. Israel was short-lived, small nation of modest importance, that, once it fell to the Babylonians, never really rose again. My read is that Yahweh looked at what Abraham was about to do and thought, "Damn, the yutz still doesn't get it—the law must be in his heart and be there regardless. He's a boneheaded automaton, a soldier 'just following orders.' Well, back to the drawing board."
On from there, we see a catalogue of Hebrew war and lawmaking and from time to time atrocities. And then…nothing. They failed.
"You will kill them all, even the children, for my glory," says Yahweh.
"Up yours," they should have said. "They're children, that's wrong. So sue us."
All this would be relevant, however, if Yahweh was actually the one issuing the orders.
Tony,
Lets understand this shall we.
You are not justified in saying that "modern atheists" get a free ride and can be detached from the historical varieties of atheism because of the warm fuzzies of the "new humanistic version."
You constantly berate and conflate historical Christianity with everything it had been related to in the past, mostly bad or indifferent, seldom the good.
It seems to me that most people consider that a religious war is a war caused by religious differences. Yet the most straightforward definition of a "relgious" differnce simply can not be assigned be assigned to the position of a modern atheists because they are simply not religious. How could they ever even be accused of participating in a religious war?
Now you claim to be both atheist and areligious as if that were ever possible for a human being.
You want run down on who starts the wars versus who stops them? How can you believe that atheists have taken the noble road in the past and they will also take it in the future?
Tony states:
"Almost every atrocity you care to name has been driven by religion." Your link proclaims a somewhat biased viewpoint, that religion has only been responsible for the crusades, and the inquisition. Accepting responsibility for the obvious atrocities is disingenuous at best, outright lying at worst."
The statistics obviously can not be applied to "modern atheists" because they are something so new on the scene that they have never existed in history.
I'll but that only if your admit you believe "atheists" are indeed evolving and changing into a new and improved human species.
Karl writes:—"Now you claim to be both atheist and areligious as if that were ever possible for a human being."
That's an interesting assertion, but only an assertion. Inverted logic. I am an atheist and I am without religion. It is your contention that secularism and, by extension, atheism is a religion, but we've been over that and it just doesn't hold water. It would be nice for you if it were true, but that's another issue.
Here is a historical fact for you. The prevelence of atheists in history is so small as to be statistically insignificant. Their support base has never been in the majority, so it is quite unlikely that any of them could ever have held the kind of power required to wage major wars without at least pretending to some religious observance. Given how difficult it always is to prove what is in another's heart, it is safe to say that until the advent of, say, Stalin and Mao, atheism has never been a viable political movement. It isn't today. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the former states erupted in a veritable flood of all manner of religious expression. Likewise in China, religion is still one of their biggest social problems (for the government, not necessarily for the people).
You may not intend this, but it comes across every time that you discount every other religion in these discussions, as if all the pagan religions were somehow just different brands of atheism, which is not good anthropology much less history. You are defending christianity from a charge of mass murder in the name of religion, but I and, I presume, Hank and Tony don't confine ourselves to just one brand of supernatural obsession. Speaking for myself, when I say religion I mean all of them, because to me they are all—ALL—manifestations of the same thing. So when Julian the Apostate tried to reestablish paganism in 355 C.E. it was not an attempt to establish atheism, but to revive an older, Roman religious view.
I will grant you that in a discussion over "religious differences" atheism must be counted as an alternative viewpoint. That still doesn't make it a religion.
But it also doesn't free anybody from human weaknesses. It only means that if someone says to an atheist "You should do this because god commands it," the atheist has the personal luxury to completely ignore that charge. He or she doesn't even have to hesitate to consider "Well, what if this is true?"
I repeat, the religious perspective is one which by definition cannot allow itself to be replaced by nonreligion—it must characterize all competing ideologies as religion in order to justify the conflict and avoid obsolescence. You personify that admirably. You attempt time and again to redefine secularism and atheism (which, by the way, are not the same things) as religions because…
Why? Because they incorporate belief? Ritual? Habit? Claims to address morality?
Without a deity at the center of a practice, it is ridiculous to call something a religion. But further, ritual, law, communal conformity, all those things are not the result of belief in god. Rather they have all been subsumed into religious observance, tools to be used by the perspective brought to the table.
Point to me a large, near-national community that has ever come together out of mutually-held atheism. If any had ever begun to evolve, they would have been destroyed by the surrounding religious states. It is difficult for even a religious country to form based on ideas that diverge from the majority religious practice (i.e. the Albigensians). Religion demands conformity. (See, I'm not saying here that god demanded these states be crushed, this is just the way people are.) If you are going to argue that religious people come in all flavors, I won't argue with you, but then you must agree that atheists do as well. But atheists, till recently, have perforce been more individualistic and self-sufficient in their chosen viewpoint simply because of the difficulty of existing openly as such in the midst of religious communities. It is very akin to the homosexual experience in that way, where being "in the closet" was the norm until recently. (Not an exact parallel, but close enough to demonstrate my point.)
People kill other people for all sorts of reasons. I am less concerned in this debate with the reasons national leaders go to war than with the fact that the people who must fill the front lines in combat can be so easily duped into it through appeals to patriotism and religious viewpoint. The Popes waged war for political reasons—their soldiers fought for Christ. However you want to parse that to make the case for or against religion as motive for mass slaughter, there it is. God and country.
Okay, I wouldn't like being bunched in with a group of pagans either who worshipped their local material deities that dwelt on their mountaintops or under the trees where their sexual favors where doled out.
Many gods with perverted senses of morality, especially towards their own children were common back in the days of Genesis and they have never fully gone away.
Did God himself ever kill any innocent people along with the evil ones? I've already answered that question but it keeps not getting posted. God took pleasure in laying the sin of the world upon Jesus.
No where else does it even imply that the physical death of anyone is something the one true God takes solace in.
When God was about to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham asked God if He would destroy the cities if there were 50 righteous people in them.5 God said no. Then Abraham asked the same question if there were 45 righteous people. Every time he dropped the number and got the same answer. The fact is that God would not have destroyed those cities if there were any righteous people in them. The few righteous who were in those cities He warned ahead of time to get out. So, God does not destroy the righteous along with the evil when the warning is given and when people have the ability to physically respond to the warning.
Apparently God considers infants, and children who are unable to leave from a societal judgment passed upon their parents as part of the consequences of the judgment.
Could God have miraculously saved these young ones from the same judgment as that placed upon their parents? Yes, and He did and He still does today. These infants and children are not held culpable for the moral failures of their parents, but that does not mean the consequences of the judgment against their parents (and often the parents society) will be held back. In due season, that judgment always comes one way or another.
The snafu comes from the naturalistic materialists who can see no further than the faces on their noses, which reject that God could do anything believable with the spirit of a person after the physical flesh is dead and or decaying.
The fact that infants and children will not be judged as part of their whole society is indicated even by atheists who insist upon the innocence of the infants and children. This however does not mean consequences are distinctly different for a society made up of adults. If Lot had considered that Sodom was in His blood, or that he wanted to shield the rest from destruction, God would have seen him as part of the judgment upon the society God called him to leave.
There were untold variations on what it meant to worship pagan Gods. But most of the more disgusting ones actually required that parents willfully committed physical sacrifice of their own offspring.
Apparently back when God was calling Abraham out from among the other nations there was a point where God was trying to make a point about dedication to the one true God versus dedication to the pagans chosen supreme deity, strange how somethings were common all over the world back in those days.
Yahweh wanted to show that if a god truly loved his people he wouldn't permit the slaughter of their own children and call it worship to Him.
God's judgment of people groups found in the Old Testament actually pales in comparison to the judgment He will render at the end of time. According to the New Testament Book of Revelation, God will judge and send billions of people into material nothingness as you call it. This will include 200 million killed in a single battle. Such large armies have never existed in the history of mankind until the last 100 years, suggesting the this judgment could come at any time.
Karl: That's a pathetic set of excuses for a Being who is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent.
These are not excuses; they are rational points for consideration which enable belief in the true character and attributes of the one true God.
I'm sure you think I sound like I'm not on the side of the "new atheists" but there will come a time when there will be no side worth fighting for because of the evil corrupt one world government political system coming.
I applaud your desire to do good and love everyone for the sake of humanity, I just wish you the very best when the fewer and fewer values you currently share with the religious right are also run out of town.
Karl writes:—"Yahweh wanted to show that if a god truly loved his people he wouldn’t permit the slaughter of their own children and call it worship to Him."
Ah. So it's the "worship me or I'll kill your children" sermon.
If you really believe Yahweh took all those little Sodomians and Ghomorians (sorry, I wasn't about to use the more standard apellation) to heaven, then why would you fight so damned hard for the life of your own child?
Don't answer that, it was rhetorical.
Given that what happened to Sodom was likely the consequence of a natural disaster, this really is a rather pointless conversation except insofar as how a christian interprets it. It's the interpretation at issue here, not what a nonexistent god did or didn't do.
It's the fact that you would allow for these kinds of deaths under any circumstance that is bothersome, whether you credit some divine fix or not. See, just on the face of it, according to the story, god told Abraham what he was gonna do. We see nothing where it says he said anything to the inhabitants of either city. We can assume many things, presume all we want, but that part of it didn't get into the story, so I'll assume that letting these corrupt, horrible, perverted people AND THEIR CHILDREN fry without warning was pretty much okay with whoever wrote the story down.
And that's the point. This was a net good to the chronicler. This was "Hah! We got those suckers!" thinking and no commentary is made about…
Well, about the incredible unlikelihood of Lot being the only "righteous" man in two whole cities. Unless by that is meant the only one who was a follower of Yahweh. That's not quite the same thing. It puts a different light on it. What that says is, this was an issue over who was following what religion. We don't actually know much about the common lives of the farmers and tradesmen of that time in that region. We do know that the lives the Pharoahs lived was profoundly different from the lives their subjects lived, and that most Romans found the venality of the Imperial household repugnant under Caligula and his like.
Again—the OT is a chronicle of the Hebrew nation and how they felt about their enemies. The credited Yahweh with a lot, but that's immaterial. Yahweh wasn't there. What matters is how these people saw those who were different from them and how you choose to interpret their actions as either good or bad.
Not to derail the discourse, but a key-phrase jumped out at me (asterisks mine):
"…there will come a time when there will be no side worth fighting for because of the *evil corrupt one world government* political system coming."
Mercy, looks like we got ourselves a bona fide Revelations-reading, end-times Rapturist. So, how's the Rapture Index today? Can we expect Jesus any time soon? Do you think all us naturalisticist baby-eating hedonists will be Left Behind? D'you think I should I stop laughing before I attempt to eat my breakfast bagel?
Yeah, and how's that NAFTA superhighway project going, Karl? The one supposedly connecting Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, which is proof that the Bible is right, and that we are indeed in the End Times. Or something like that.
Abraham believes God is a bit unjust to consider destroying two entire cites and their entire populations. If there were any infants, doubtful few would have had any hope of avoiding the impact of homosexuality upon their lives and their future unless they some how ran away and left.
Consider the warped impression we have of those who think God condones any of the activities that were occurring in Sodom. The record say of Lot that he was tormented himself. Nice pasture lands for his flocks, but apparently human social activities that were far from what he desired.
The messengers stated purpose for coming to Abraham was to see what was known to Abraham about the corruptness of the city. The judgment had already been decreed.
Please read how Lot was spared not because he was actually righteous, God attempted to spare Lot and his family because God remembers Abraham (19:29).
Please consider how Lot knew the atrocities of homosexual gang rape were either used by the men of the city to humiliate foreigners or as a means to dominate anyone with any sense of right and wrong. To prevent the people from trying to even consider that homosexual activity might be a bit less than the perfect lifestyle. It was preferred by the power dominated class of leaders because it kept them in control of the customs of their society.
Please read how Lot offered his own daughters to see if the attempted brazen corporate homosexual rape (initiation) of these strangers could be abated.
These men, including the leaders of the city down to the youngest males (Pedophilia) didn't only have a fetish for other men, they made certain everyman who came through their gates or who lived in their city environs was forced to consent to their lifestyle choice.
You can almost bet Lot was also put through the ritual to humiliate him as well. Lot of course lived to survive the gang rape, but somehow he still clung to the proper order of things in God's creation. His appeal to offer his daughters was not an approval of fornication under consent of the king, it was a last ditch attempt to avoid an incident that very night. The messengers had had enough and Lot was convinced he had to leave or die along with everyone else in the cities.
His wife dies because she actually somehow thought things weren't so bad because the males were the ones treated as the sex objects back in Sodom and not the women. The women may have had more influence than we know over the befuddled convoluted mess of a city.
Lots own daughters then reveal the practices they were taught and somehow had to follow the tricks they were told to use as to how to actually get pregnant by getting the one whose seed you wanted to be deceived into sexual activity, probably by alcoholic intoxication.
Please do not use perverted logic to say that Lot and his daughters were righteous. It is obvious they were not. They were only rescued from the destruction because of God's mercy, not because of their uprightness of character.
God does try to consider if there are ways of protecting the lives of less guilty men, women and children from the judgments leveled upon a society, but even at that it is sometimes beyond reason to expect them to consider His mercy as something they even would care to consider for themselves.
In Genesis, Abraham believes God is a bit unjust to consider destroying two entire cites and their entire populations. If there were any infants, doubtful few would have had any hope of avoiding the impact of nonconsensual homosexuality upon their lives and their future unless they some how ran away and left.
Please read how Lot was spared not because he was actually righteous, God attempted to spare Lot and his family because God remembers Abraham (19:29).
Please consider how Lot knew the atrocities of homosexual gang rape were either used by the men of the city to humiliate foreigners or as a means to dominate anyone with any sense of right and wrong. To prevent the people from trying to even consider that homosexual activity might be a bit less than the perfect lifestyle. It was preferred by the power dominated class of leaders because it kept them in control of the customs of their society.
However, please note how Lot offered his own daughters to see if the attempted brazen corporate homosexual rape (initiation) of these strangers could be abated.
These men, including the leaders of the city right down to the youngest males (Pedophilia) didn't only have a fetish for other men, they made certain everyman who came through their gates or who lived in their city environs was forced to consent to their lifestyle choice.
You can almost bet Lot was also put through the ritual to initiate him as well. Lot of course lived to survive the gang rape, but somehow he still clung to the proper order of things in God's creation. His appeal to offer his daughters was not an approval of fornication under the consent of King "whoever," it was a last ditch attempt to avoid an incident that very night. The messengers however were convinced they had had enough and Lot was convinced he had to leave or die along with everyone else in the cities.
His wife dies because she actually somehow also most likely has a distorted view that things weren't so bad because the males were the ones treated as the sex objects back in Sodom and not the women. The women roles must have also been seriously out of the common place in these convoluted cities.
Once they are out of Sodom Lots own daughters then reveal some of the practices they were taught and encouraged by the older women who somehow had to follow some sorts or types of tricks to actually get pregnant by getting the one whose seed they wanted to be deceived into sexual activity with a woman, probably by alcoholic intoxication. Please do not use perverted logic to say that Lot and his daughters were righteous. It is obvious they were not.
I fully believe God does try to consider if there are ways of protecting the lives of "less guilty men, women and children" from the judgments leveled upon a society. But even at that, it is sometimes beyond reason to expect anyone to consider His mercy as something they even would care to consider for themselves.
Mark
I agree with your more nuanced reading of the thirty years war, but I still would support my assertion that it was a religious war – since the initiator was a religious power-play.
As you said, it
The point being that religion has seldom been about 'the people': it has always been about 'the power'. People 'inherited' the religion of their lord – and during the thirty years war that was excruciatingly apparent. As minor 'princes' vied for power, their religious stance changed with their allegiance: Catholic to Protestant to Catholic, and on and on and on. The same small piece of turf (and the same peasantry) would be attacked and brutalized by the 'Catholic' mercenaries and the 'Protestant' mercenaries in turn. The people – were simply brutalized.
It wasn't simply a religious war – but it was a war inseparable from religion.
Karl,
I won't even bother taking that diatribe point for point. In the face of such guileless gullibility what can one do?
It's a parable, Karl, based perhaps on the memory of some ruined cities, with the overlay of Yahweh's wrath to make it a better yarn.
There is so much here that beggars the mind…
It's pretty clear that Karl has put a great deal of deep & creative thought into the detailed inner workings of ancient Sodomite society. Which, it must be noted, says a great deal more about his own inner workings than he'd likely be prepared to admit. I'm no psych graduate but I'd bet any Freudian worth his salt would have a field day with these kinds of fantasies.
Mark, you might abjure confrontation with Karl over his rambling statements (simply through exhaustion!) but he begins (more or less) with a statement I cannot dismiss:
Karl
You fucking homophobic ass.
Can you not read anything without imposing your sick and sycophantic religious bias upon it? Can you not think without the tint of your god colored lenses interposing between you and the facts?
Your biases are showing, and they're not pretty.
It has been said on this site many times.
Homosexuality is natural, it is a natural behavior, it is not an imposed and indoctrinated 'choice' (as if that even makes sense). We share homosexuality with almost every sexually dimorphic species more complex than insects. It. Is. Not. Weird!
What is weird is the fundamentalist christian (and fundamentalist jewish/moslem) perspective that homosexuality is disgusting, unless one approaches the problem from an zoological perspective.
Male-centric authoritarian societies often have a harem culture for alpha-males (similar to much of the OT) along with a denial of 'valid' sexual outlets for male competitors. In such cultures, it is common for non-alpha-males to use sex as a pecking order characteristic… I can use you for sex if I am more important than you. (this is common in many primate, and human 'authoritarian' societies). In other words, homosex is a dominance game, not a 'sexual' act. And the alpha male determines what is right.
From our 'modern' perspective, using sex for power and leverage is 'a bad thing'. It implies essentially that the more powerful 'own' the bodies of the less powerful. Unless you are into slavery, this is simply wrong.
Absent slavery, any imposition of 'body ownership' is a bad thing, and your implicit assumption that homosexuality is somehow a 'lifestyle' that would lead to 'enforced indoctrination' of infants is nothing less than the most egregious and extreme projection imaginable.
What you imply is essentially what happens to almost every infant in a religious community. No choice. No objection. No dissent. Simply indoctrination in the behavioral and memetic norms of that society. As a religious person, you see that imprinting as a 'good thing'. I see it as brainwashing.
To close, Karl. Homosexuality is a perfectly normal sexual expression. It exists in many many animals – humans are merely one species among many. The true abnormality among humans is our strange predilection with religion.
If you want to excise an abnormal behavior – I'd start with religion. From a zoological perspective it seems to be a problem particular to humans.
Not to be mean, but Hank – it's clear only that
Fixed it for you.
Tony Says, (Of the animals of course)
"In other words, homosex is a dominance game, not a ’sexual’ act. And the alpha male determines what is right."
This sounds a bit too much like Perez Hilton to me. I would interject that for animals this is true, but for people "might does not make right." When you have that attitude, wars will never cease and you sentence mankind to their own destruction.
Then you make the assumption essentially that modern enlightened, more wise and noble homosexuals (many of whom claim to be atheists, or if not atheists they are wishing to change religion into their stripe of interpretation) are not at all like the ones described in Sodom.
I can see clearly that there are people in the world with all manner of passive to aggressive natures, whatever their sexual preferences may be. Believing there are no "dominant alphas" in the ranks of homo-sexuals is outright ignorance.
You don't like what the Bible says about the events in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, Nor in the days of Noah, nor about the end of days upon the earth.
Neither do I!
But I don't believe my not liking it can change what was written, what it means, or how I can twist what was written to make it agree with something that is its antithesis. I can not make it have less pleasant of an impact upon people who refuse to seriously consider what it says.
If homosexuality is so natural then why does it not result in offspring like any species needs in order for survival? Think about it.
John: Please have a seat and take a deep breath. Then, put one of your fingers in one of your ears so what I'm about to write doesn't go in one ear and out the other. If production of offspring defines what is "natural," then all of the following activities should be banned:
All you've got to do at this site to earn a modicum of respect is to admit that you don't like gays or that gay sex creeps you out. Then we'll know that all the religious, scientific or moralistic "reasoning" you write is driven by your unwillingness to let others live in peace. Or maybe your crusade against gays is caused (as it so often is), because you have sexual feelings for another guy.
I'd recommend that you work out these issues on your own, with a therapist, if need be. Please don't come crawling over to this site any further with a claim that gays are "unnatural." That excuse has caused far to many deaths, injuries, broken families, all of it needless.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
"Takes one to know one." – said in snotty kid-voice, of course.
"What one dislikes most in others is usually a reflection of what one disdains most in oneself."
I have no doubt that most men who protest vehemently against homosexuality have had those feelings of their own and because of their own indoctrination into the culture of roaring, big-bicepped, conquest-over-babes masculinity, are terrified of such a thing ever being accepted in the open. That culture, along with the religious warnings against gay sex, are more than those men can grapple with and come out sane. So MAKE IT GO AWAY is the only answer. They are too uncertain of their own self-identity to allow for any flexibility, any gray area, any acceptance there.
People who are comfortable in their own skin, with their own internal needs and moral codes, do not require an imaginary entity forcing a 2,000 yr. old "code of moral conduct" on their selves. I'm not saying that all religious people fit that description – most, probably, embrace religion for a variety of other reasons, including the love of ritual, a sense of community and well-being, a vehicle through which to exercise their empathy and compassion, etc. They are perfectly rational, lovely people who understand that their religion is not everyone's religion – and that is just peachy.
The ones who push it down everyone else's throats, regardless of which religion we are discussing – do not believe for a moment that people can be good on their own. They believe that without the external pressure of God, without the threat of eternal damnation, every one of us will dissolve into a puddle of ugly selfishness, our every action committed for self-satisfaction only – everyone else be damned. They cannot accept that anyone could WANT to do good for the sake of their fellow human beings – and even if they did, who cares? If it's not about glorifying their deity, it wasn't really good in the first place.
I can only assume that those people are basing their fear of utter chaos on the fear of their own inability to self-regulate without their God keeping a close eye on their every move. As for the many who find credit God with the miracle of saving them from drugs, alcohol, gambling, or sex, I would wager that for a significant number of those people, religion merely becomes the next addiction for them – not actually taking the to a new level of self-awareness and understanding, but, instead, replacing one obsession with another. And yes, I speak from experience here. I was an addict, many years ago. I overcame it with treatment and therapy, and decided I wanted to live a better life, for the sake of my own sanity but also for the sake of my family and friends. I watched many of my rehab peers dive into meetings and church with the same religious fervor they'd expended on their various additions, and almost every one who took that road relapsed. They swapped addictions, back to drugs from religion, and probably back again maybe a few more times. Kind of like the difference between behavior modification and therapeutic analysis. Not that the behavior changes aren't valuable, of course – replacing unhealthy behavior with healthy behavior is a good move, yes. But understanding all that is behind the unhealthy behavior in order to come to terms with it, move past it and find peace, then find an internal impetus for healthy actions seems to be a much more effective – albeit more difficult – undertaking.
Religion is a great way to control oneself, if one doesn't think one can on one's own. If you convince yourself that God will get you if you misbehave, that you can't hide from God so he WILL get you no matter what, and that his punishment is not just awful, it's forever-awful, well, then maybe you can force yourself to "behave" in this lifetime. And if that is really necessary, then I guess it's a good thing we have religion.
Damn, did I just argue myself over to the other side?! I wish Karl, John and their crowd could see that just because THEY need religion, not everyone does, just as I have now accepted that apparently SOME need it, even though I and many others do not. Uh-oh, back to the "to each his own" concept that they just can't quite get.
Whew. I'm still on the same "side" of the argument. . . . ;->
Clothes aren't natural, either, and clearly interfere with reproduction. Think about that. . .
Karl writes:—"I would interject that for animals this is true, but for people “might does not make right.” When you have that attitude, wars will never cease and you sentence mankind to their own destruction."
Well, duh. Why do you think we DO have endless wars?
Watch children in a playground unsupervised and you will see, eventually, the emergence of dominance and the establishment of a pecking order. Natural as can be.
Might does not make right, you are correct, but it does make for conformity, it does make for oppression, it does make for one ideology dominating another, and it does make for the insistence that there is only one way to do thing. Might does not make right, but it often ends the argument.
Now, you know—and I know this will probably make no difference—but it doesn't actually say anything in Genesis about homosexuality. If, in fact, all these residents of Sodom were homosexuals, why would Lot even presume they'd be interested in his daughters? What it says is they intended to abuse the messengers, which could mean anything. And in previous passages to that, the concern was that Yahweh could not find any "just" men—which is a damn sight different than the usual reading. (I am referring to the New Jerusalem Bible, the text of which I consider more accurate than most others.) Just. Which means they were likely criminals.
Sodom and Gomorrah were two of the so-called Five Cities of the Plains, along with Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar. These five cities stood as a bulwark against invasion from the east, by the armies of the Amorites, under Amraphel and his ally Chedorlaomer of Elam. They had brought down Sumer and absorbed most of the territory that had been under Sumero-Akkadian rule in the Fertile Crescent. The five cities had been paying tribute, but now they balked and resisted. Genesis 14:3 "These latter all banded together in the Valley of Siddim (that is, the Salt Sea). For twelve years they had been under the yoke of Chedorlaomer, but in the thirteenth year they revolted."
Interestingly, Lot is carried off in captivity by the subsequently victorious Amorites, who took possession of the cities. Abraham whips up some followers and goes after these guys, ambushes them, kills them all and frees Lot and the other captives. The king of Sodom later comes to talk and by the account in Genesis 14, they parted amicably.
Lot goes back to live in Sodom.
Reading between the lines, Sodom and Gomorrah become the major powers in the region and apparently not very nice ones. The key line seems to be Genesis 18:20 "Then Yahweh said 'How great an outcry there is against Sodom and Gomorrah! How grievous is their sin!"
But it doesn't say what that sin is. From the sound of this, Yahweh has been listening to complaints from those not living in the twin cities, so I conclude that the complaints are political—taxes, bad administrators, etc. Corruption. And maybe they've become the Las Vegas and Reno of the Fertile Crescent, but I don't see anything to specifically indicate homosexuality. That is a conclusion drawn later by interpreters. Not saying it's necessarily wrong, but it is unlikely that that it is the only or even the major complaint.
Now, then. We come to the modern era and archaeology. The closest things found to these fabled cities are the sites known as Bab edh-Dhra and Numeira, early Bronze Age cities. I quote from Rast and Schaub expedition material:
"The site of Bab edh-Dhra' has been discussed in connection with the "cities of the plain" (Gen. 13:10-13; 14;18-19) because of the traditional view that these cities were located at the south end of the Dead Sea . Albright (1926) conjectured that Bab edh-Dhra' was a ceremonial site for these cities and that the ruins of the cities were probably located under the shallow waters of the southern basin of the Dead Sea . Lapp (1968a) interpreted Bab edh-Dhra' as a cultic burial ground for the cities. The discovery of four other sites with Early Bronze cultural materials during a survey of the southern Ghor region in 1973 led Rast and Schaub (1974) to suggest a possible linkage to the biblical cities. Van Hattem (1981) carried this suggestion further by identifying Bab edh-Dhra' as Sodom . In a recent article which analyzes the tradition of Sodom Rast has revised the suggestion that all the Ghor sites were historically linked with the cities of the plain, arguing that the biblical tradition centered originally on a pair of cities, Sodom and Gomorrah . The two related Early Bronze towns of Bab edh-Dhra' and Numeria may thus have generated the popular biblical tradition (Rast 1984)."
Early Bronze Age would be 3500 B.C.E. to about 2000 B.C.E., bringing it close enough to the assumed period of Abraham. The excavations, however, show trading and manufacturing centers, traditional EBA settlements, likely with the same heterogeneous population types as anywhere else.
This is of interest:
"Excavations discovered two distinct occupational phases at the site, demonstrating the potential to investigate diachronic change at the settlement. Fascinatingly, the inhabitants of Numeira abandoned the town, but seemed to prepare the structures for that abandonment and an eventual return that never materialized. After the preparation and abandonment of Numeira, the town was burned and one of the fortification towers collapsed, crushing three individuals beneath its walls."
There is no similar evidence of conflagration at the other site. Between both towns is an extensive collection of burials sites, which seems to have been the earliest use the area was put to.
Best estimates place Abraham at 1900 B.C.E.
It is also possible that these are not the Biblical towns. The level of the Dead Sea has actually risen since then and there may be ruins under the water yet to be found.
But the cataclysm described in Genesis is not corroborated by the geology.
Point being, the destruction of these cities may have been nothing more than what happened regularly at that time when competing empires collided and the events retrofitted for the purposes of whoever wrote Genesis—which was not Abraham and probably not Moses—the writing of which took place some four or five centuries after the events described.
To treat the drama of Sodom and Gomorrah as actual history is ludicrous. We can establish that there were such cities. We can establish the political patterns of the period from corroborative records of other empires. For all we know, however, Abraham is fabrication—not that there was no Abraham, but that the character recorded in Genesis is likely a conflation of several people, an iconic figure, like Gilgamesh or, more aptly, Melchizidek, who seems to have been several different potentates—as is Lot.
The physics of Lot's wife being turned to salt is ridiculous.
Your assertion that Lot's daughters had become "infected" by the sinfulness of Sodom is ludicrous, even by the statements of Genesis. This is clearly a origin story about the establishment of two tribes, not to be taken literally. It imitates, in some ways, the creation of Eve—Adam was put to sleep; Lot was made drunk to the point of unconsciousness, and the result were the Moabites and Bene-Ammon…
For someone who once claimed not to be a Biblical literalist, you certainly have a penchant for it. But you then do the common thing of interpreting to fit your preferred reading.
And again, let us be clear. It is not so much that Yahweh did something I consider unethical—remember, to me there is no Yahweh—the point is that the stories reflect the prejudices of the authors. They wanted their god to be a bad-ass MF who would smite their enemies. The OT is full of that wish-fulfillment calling upon god to do badness to our enemies. It does not reflect god's will, but the hearts of those who claim to follow him. So it is not that Yahweh hates gays, it is that his followers do, and so their god must.
This is tiresome.
Oh, the link to the website about Numeiri etc is:
http://www.nd.edu/~edsp/index.html
Thank you very much.
Karl says:
Please read how Lot was spared not because he was actually righteous, God attempted to spare Lot and his family because God remembers Abraham (19:29).
But Peter says he was spared because he was righteous:
2 Peter 2:7-8
And [God] delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: (For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;)
Hmm. Whom shall we believe? Neither, actually. Lot's stories is one of the more abhorrent in my mind because it requires so much twisted imagination to make it an example of. . .well, anything positive.
Lot convinces the "angels" from Sodom to stay overnight. Men come from the town and demand they be sent out so they can "know" them, and Lot says no, how about raping my two virgin daughters instead? The crowd insists that another man who came into the city needs to be a judge – it seems to be that the men of the city have a gripe with these men, not that they want to initiate them into the boys' club. So, even worse, Lot's offering his daughters up for gang rape to protect criminals masquerading as angels.
The "angels" tell him to warn all his loved ones – sons in law, sons, and any others, to get out of the city because it's going to be destroyed. (In fact, that THEY are going to destroy it. God gets credit after the fact.) Well, apparently not everyone in the city is into that gay stuff, or there wouldn't be offspring to warn, and Lot's not the only righteous one, or he wouldn't have been allowed to pass the word around. So clearly this isn't a situation where one and all are party to encouraging icky buttsecks.
Lot turns out to be a bit of a whiner, asking god if maybe he can go live in this itty bitty town, so small it would be easy to not destroy, rather than go hide in the scary mountains. God says OK, but then wait. . .Lot takes his daughters and goes to hide in the scary mountains after all. God rains fire down. Cities are destroyed. From the mountain, and from the POV of these primitive people, the whole world has been destroyed. Poor Lot's daughters are worried that there won't be any people left unless they get pregnant by their dad. They give him wine, and he doesn't even notice when they've come and gone. (Is it possible for a man to be drunk enough to not know that he's having sex? At all, much less with his daughters?) They each have sons. End of story. Until apologetics get involved, and we hear that the daughters were little virgin sluts and Lot had to be made drunk in order to do something so unrighteous.
And the moral of the story is "God hates fags."
Plus, no innocents were harmed in the making of this story. I call shenanigans.