this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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christianity

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There's a part in the Bible where humans are so powerful when working together as one that god has to make us speak different languages to make it harder for us to communicate and work together. (hexbear.net)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by Dirt_Owl@hexbear.net to c/christianity@hexbear.net
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specter-global Communism is so powerful that even God fears it

The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. - Genesis 11:6

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[–] Crucible@hexbear.net 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Deuteronomy 20 is a full chapter about how good it is to do genocide on everyone else, enslave women and children, destroy everything other than things you'll use afterwards, and take their cities as your own.

10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.

16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy[a] them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.

19 When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees people, that you should besiege them?[b] 20 However, you may cut down trees that you know are not fruit trees and use them to build siege works until the city at war with you falls.

[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 2 points 7 months ago

Find me the line in Deuteronomy 20 saying any of this is good.

Also as I and others have said in other comments

  1. this isn't exceptional for bronze age and iron age near eastern warfare; the weird part about biblical god is that there are written and codified limits to the destruction and plundering;

  2. Genesis through 2 Chronicles are 'historical' books and not necessarily endorsements of the behaviour or laws depicted, as god can and quite explicitly does change his mind (e.g. Jeremiah and the Potter);

  3. this behaviour (the killing, expansion of Israel and forced labour) is explicitly cited as one reason for Israel's destruction in Isaiah and Jeremiah;

  4. Jeremiah explicitly says that the "lying pens of the scribe have handled it [the holy texts] falsely" and we know from linguistic and historical/archaeological research that the Pentateuch (the first five books) are the most heavily edited of all the books especially in terms of and around the sections of laws;

  5. Deuteronomy is known to be one of the later and most priestly of edits;

So all in all I don't think Deuteronomy 20 is the gotcha you think it is (it is also bad priestly fanfiction to justify bad kingly fanfiction, but extratextual debunking is less fun)