Okay, I've been away for a few days, and there is no way I can reply to all that has been written, so here's a succinct summary of what I would say otherwise:
EveryoneI maintain that what happened with the Canaanite cities is not properly described as genocide. The idea of "genocide in the third degree", while closer to being a valid description, is still not quite right.
1) As I read over the book of Joshua again, I noticed this rather important fact: however one interprets the injunction given to the Israelites, it is clear that
they understood it to mean that they were to target certain cities. "Destroy city X. Destroy city Y. Destroy city Z." This was how they carried out the campaign. Restricted, targeted action such as this is different from the wholesale killing required by genocide. In other words, they weren't killing all Canaanites, but rather these and those particular groups of Canaanites. In this light, it seems that the order to "destroy the Canaanites" referred to shattering their society (and their religious practices in particular), not to killing every last one of them. This is added to by the fact that for every order to kill to Canaanites in the book of Joshua there are two that say the Israelites are to drive them out of the land.
2a) The idea of "genocide in the third degree" entails the notion that it was not deliberate. But genocide is defined as deliberate (see link to Merriam-Webster posted above), and so the idea does not strictly make sense. We do not talk about "third degree murder" for the same reason. We use the word "manslaughter" to differentiate because without any intention the act of killing a person is no longer murder. Same story with genocide. So even if it weren't for consideration #1 above, this still shouldn't have the word genocide attached to it.
2b) Kazan's cited WordNet as providing a definiton which allows one to understand what happened to the Canaanite cities as genocide. However, WordNet's own
website says: "We are not a dictionary or thesaurus service." WordNet groups words together based on similar ideas. That will make it inherently tend towards generalisation in its definitions, not exactitude. Merriam-Webster's definition has more clarity, and according to that definition, what happened with the Canaanites would not quite fit the bill for the term genocide even if it weren't for consideration #1.
Thus, I object to the term genocide being used for it, especially when it is used in a way that impugns my friend Setekh (or myself, as it later turned out).
Now, those things having been said, I certainly grant that there was a mass killing of many Canaanites, and that that raises a whole heap of moral issues, and none of them easy. Interested parties can scan through the sections below and look for topic headings that grab their attention if they want more detail.
Mikhael:Thank you, I like debating with you too.
Re: the Bible as a witness to history:
To clarify, when I say "a witness to history," I mean that it gives evidence to be weighed, not that it is the be-all and end-all of history. It is well and good to take the Bible with a grain of salt. It certainly does not tell the whole story of everything that happens in its accounts--no account ever does or could. I am only saying that to do historical investigation properly, one should not come with an attitude of suspicion or an attitude of naivete--one should come to all the evidence with a non-committal attitude. The process of weighing the evidence has to come afterwards--nothing should be ruled out before the investigation begins.
Re: NOT being an atheist:
Ah, my bad. From your other comments in this thread, I'd guess you are a deist. But rather then me guessing, how would your describe your beliefs, my friend?
Re: God should hang for making a world like this:
You mean, something like this?
Actually, I'm not merely trying to be witty. No one way of explaining the meaning of what Christ did can suffice. One of the most meaningful for me is captured well in the following:
"I could never myself believe in a God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as "God on the cross." In a real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have enterd many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted tortured figure on the cross, nails through his hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thony pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered into our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our suffering became more manageable in light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. 'The cross of Christ ... is God's only self-justification in a world such as ours.'"
Kazan:I will cut out the various side tracks and stick to the primary issue in this post.
ADDRESS THE FACT THAT YOUR SUPPOSEDLY LOVING GOD COMMITED GENOCIDE
You cannot deny it - you can only try and doublespeak your way out of it.
Did you read what I wrote? I wasn't trying to worm
out of anything. I was getting
in as deep as possible. I am, contrary to your apparent belief, interested in the truth, not in protecting my current belief system. Thus, I am not happy to deal with one isolated instance, but want to deal with the whole damn thing. So what if we do find an explanation for this case?--there are billions upon billions more cases of God bringing infants to death. I was showing how
HUGE the problem was, not getting out of it.
I do, of course, continue to insist that your emotionally-charged use of the term genocide is inaccurate, but as said above, we can agree that even without that incorrect term there are still plenty of moral issues to deal with. The best way to go about talking about those is actually by way of answering others of your questions. We'll get back to this issue shortly.
Important Question: Have you ever asked yourself WHY you believe what you do
Indeed I have. Many times. The answer is not simple.
To begin, we must consider the problem of evil briefly. To get to the point quickly, the argument from the problem of evil fails to prove that monotheism is wrong, but only just.
The propositions:
(A) God exists
(B) If God allows an evil, then God has a morally sufficent reason for allowing it
(C) There is evil
are none of them are self-contradictory, nor are they apparently incompatible. The only serious objection to be raised is against (B). Without going through the form, the essence of the objection is that if there were a justification for any evil, we would know it, but there are many for which we do not know of a justification. But there is no more reason to think that we would than that we wouldn't know what goes on in the mind of a being whose cognitive capacities, moral goodness, and causal powers vastly exceed ours. With no way to choose between these two options, I am left at a stalemate on the question, and cannot decide on this basis.
Next we consider the various events I have seen that we would commonly call miracles (I myself eschew the term miracle on other grounds that I don't have time to go into, but it will serve well enough for now). I usualy tell of one in particular, though there are more, for the reason that it is a physical healing that took place under the eyes of several non-religous medical professionals in a hospital to my younger brother. The medical records still exist. The short version is this: My 3 year old (at the time) brother fell eleven feet through the air onto a concrete floor, rupturing what the doctors figure was his spleen. His abdomen incredibly swollen, we rushed him to the hospital where they took him in immediately. While we prayed, they had him stretched out on a table while they did their scans (I am not familiar with the name of the scan) to determine exactly what was going on. On minute Zac's belly was swollen and he could hardly breathe for the pain. The next he was laughing, with no swelling, and nothing whatever wrong according to the scans anymore. The doctors declared that they had no explanation. The only available one is that God supernaturally healed him. However, it is also possible that an explanation that does not entail divine intervention will some day be discovered. There is no way to decide between these possibilities, and so this experience is also inconclusive as evidence regarding God.
So the score is tied at this point. Now for the two that make me a Christian:
I am convinced that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was a real historical event. Having investigated it quite a lot, I am convinced that 1) those who claim to have seen him alive after his crucifixion really and truly believed they had and that he was, and more importantly 2) that for him to die and rise from the dead was
the very last thing that any first century Jew would expect their Messiah to do. I can go into more details on that if you wish.
It seems to me that the only logical conclusion of atheism is nihilism. Nietzsche saw it, and spent the rest of his life an career trying to find a way out of it. Kafka, Sartre, Camus, etc etc etc have all done likewise. You say that there is no good or evil, the main sign of nihilism in morality. But I am not willing to accept nihilism, for I see in it intellectual suicide. YOu're familiar with nihilism, I'm sure, so I needn't go into the details of why it is intellectual suicide. So, if I have to choose between being unable to solve the problem of evil and being unable to trust my mind's solutions to anything, I'll take the former option. Incomprehensible mystery on one issue is better than incomprehensible mystery on every level.
My "interpretation" of reality has the force of evidence and logic behind it. I can easily give compelling arguments that you cannot refute. ... I also often use the simplification "god does not exist" which is the compression of "Since there is absolutely no evidence for god, nor any logical reason for one to exist I find it extremely unlikely one exists" - and irrational is by definition, if you believe in something that you have no evidence to support you are irrational. ... As for better access to reality - I consider everything logically and evenly, I do not make a judgement until I have all the evidence. ... Faith is a fallacy, if you cannot understand why having a fallacy as the foundation of your worldview is bad then perhaps you're beyond hope.
When does any human have all the evidence? Assuming that you are not omniscient, you have to make judgements all the time without all the evidence. As such, you should recognise that all such judgements are tentative, like everyone else's. Being logical doesn't give one better access, it just allows one to work with what one has accessed.
So, show me your evidence that God does not exist. Failing that, you are making unfounded claims. Now, if you wanted to say "I find no evidence for the existence of God" that would be fine: you'd be a "soft" agnostic. But if you want to make the positive claim that there is no God, demonstrate it, or else recognise that everything you claim for my worldview is equally true of yours.
In fact, I'll cut to the chase: the thing about every worldview is that each on is comprised of unfounded claims--they are
all taken on faith, atheistic ones included. We all of us have to have things that we "just believe" so that we have somewhere to start in evaluating ideas and otherwise engaging in the process of thinking. The only way to judge a worldview is not to examine its foundations (it is the foundation), but rather is to see how well it makes sense of the world we encounter.
Now, as already indicated above, I find that theism, and Christianity in particular, makes sense of the world I have encountered far better than atheism. That being the case, I have given it my provisional assent. That being the case, I must also accept that God is omnicompetent and morally perfect, as is entailed in accepting Christian theism as true. Therefore, I have to conclude that, even if I don't know the morally sufficient reason for an evil, or for evil in general, that there nevertheless is one.
So, turning back to the original problem regarding the Canaanites: We have already found what seem to me to be morally sufficient grounds for the adults in these Canaanite cities to be put to death. The question of the children remains outstanding. In doing a bit of research, I have found several possible explanations, but none of them seem entirely satisfactory to me. So on this issue I am forced to conclude that if there is a morally sufficent ground for making these (or any) children die, I do not know it. Having acceptd on other grounds that Christian theism is true, I therefore conclude that God has a reason, but I don't know it.
So, only one issue remains outstanding: how is that I can say that neither I nor Setekh are willing to support large scale killing on the basis of this text, even though I conclude that God must have been justified in so doing in this case?
The answer is so blindingly obvious to me that it was only as a result of something you said in your last post that I realised that you didn't see it. To sum it up succinctly:
Matthew 5:43-44
You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you
Under the law of the Mosaic covenant, it was possible for God to order his people to be his instruments when meting out punishment and death. But Jesus raises the law to a new level. Since Christ gave that command, God will now have to use other means to bring woe on the world: Christians are disbarred by his own command from being his instruments for that.
(Oh, and if you are worried about a Christian receiving a word from God to go kill people: no matter what sort of supposed "divine command" might be given contradicting Christ's word, a Christian cannot accept it. That's part of what is entailed in passages like Matthew 24:23-27: if anyone ever claims to have the authority to countermand Christ's command, we are to reject him and his words.)
GhostavoOriginally posted by Ghostavo
Wasn't god's intention to wipe out those 2 cities? You can't say it wasn't genocide because by doing it he was trying to accomplish something else, because that way you couldn't say Hitler commited genocide either.
Yes I can. Wiping out a city is not genocide. One might call it "urbicide" perhaps, but it does not count as genocide. The word genocide indicates that an attempt is being made to eliminate a certain national, racial, political, or cultural group. The racial group itself is the target. In the case in question, the racial group itself isn't the target. Instead, there is simply an overlap in membership between the racial group and the target group.
It's like this. Let's say we have four objects, X1, X2, Y1 and Y2. Now, if I give orders that all X's are to be destroyed, X1 and X2 have had it. But if I give orders that all 1's are to be destroyed, X1 and Y1 are in trouble. In either case, X1 gets it.
Now let's say that X1 and Y2 are sitting on the shelf while X2 and Y1 are not. If I give orders that all 1's sitting on the shelf are to be destroyed, only X1 faces destruction. In this scenario, ordering that all 1's sitting on the shelf are to be destroyed has the same results as ordering that all X's sitting on the shelf are to be destroyed: X1 becomes a target.
Now replace "X" with "Canaanite", "1" with "so sinful as to deserve destruction", and "sitting on the shelf" with "inhabiting particular cities in the area of Israel's invasion". If God orders the destruction of all 1's sitting on the shelf, it isn't actually genocide. It'd only be genocide if X was the determining factor instead of 1.
This differs from Hilter's case in that Hilter was destroying people on the basis of X, and that his "shelf" extended to anywhere his power could reach.
karajormaThe basic difference between what God condemns these Canaanites for and what he himself does to the first-born of Egypt (or indeed to any infant who dies, or all of us, since we are all condemned to death from before we are even born) is this: the Canaanites do not have the right to sacrifice children to their gods, God does have the right to bring death to any and all of us. It's blunt, but its true.
Phew! Even trying to be short that got long. Anyway, I will be offline for the next month or so. With my wedding approaching quickly, and then my honeymoon, I won't be online much at all between now and the middle of June. If anyone wants to continue the discussion, fair and good, but be aware that I won't be back for some time, so it'll have to wait and then get bumped.
