On Killing Canaanites: One Simple, Hardly Worth Mentioning (but I feel that I should) Thought:
I followed a link to a discussion --mostly among Bible-Only evangelical types, poor things-- about God's orders to the Israelites to commit what we currently call genocide and which we consider an atrocity and a crime against humanity. It's an old old old problem for Christians about the Old Testament.
Marcion simply decided to cut and run, dropping the Jewish scriptures entirely. The orthodox Church kept both Testaments and then proceeded to grapple with the perceived difference between Jesus' Father, the God of the Sermon on the Mount, and the fairly regular bloodletting which Jesus' Father mandated in his "earlier" life. And it's been grappling for two thousand years. In ancient times it was the question of how to contain both the very anthropomorphic deity of the Bible with the Uncaused Caused and Ultimate GoodTruthBeauty of Greek thinking. It's the conflict between Pascal's "God of the philosophers" and "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
The farther I move away from the Liberal bubble in which most people live, the clearer its outlines and boundaries become. All these nice Christians are like fish in the waters of modernity, what I might call post-war UN moralism. All kinds of grand and highminded pronouncements about rights and such. The farther away I move, the thinner the discourse becomes. Although, as young Dr. Richwine can tell you, the liberal snake still packs a deadly venom if you cross him with taboo and heretical notions.
Part of what I have kept from my encounter with Gnosticism, and my earlier and more fundamentally transforming encounter with AIDS, is that God cannot be innocent of the structures of the universe which he has created. Sin did not create death. God did. I don't see any way around that. And that tells you something about God that you might not want to know.
One of my observations about Christianity's acceptance of scientific evolution is that it has, I think, failed to absorb the full shock not only how immense in time and space, but how violent is the structure of this created world. Think just of all the creatures, on this planet alone, who were engaged in the bloody and savage business of eating each other to death even before hominids appeared. And on this planet alone, how many die-offs were there before Homo Sapiens? Suffering and death are built in. And God did it.
Think again of all the ways in which human beings have died and continue to die every hour, even as I write this. About one every second of every minute. And think of the centrality in the Gospel of Love of one particular and central death, a gruesome episode of torture and crucifixion. Clearly, despite the plentiful goo in Christianity about love and peace and joy, etc., savagery is central to it. And to its God. After all, don't these pious evangelicals believe in Hell?
A couple of thousand murdered Canaanites is therefore hardly exceptional.
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'via Blog this'
1 comment:
There's a saying in my family: every death is answered with a birth. Whether human death was intended from the beginning or a result of our own failing is up in the air for me, but death, often violent, has been a part of the universe since day one. Which raises the question: does God care for us? He certainly made us, but is God concerned for each individual's wellbeing, or is he apathetic?
The implications of this discussion could keep a guy up all night.
The AIDS crisis must have been a horrible time to encounter the reality of random death. I know a lot of gay men my age act like it was so long ago and it'll never happen to them, but it is still a specter hanging over the gay community. Mind boggling to me that so many gay men have not recognized how beneficial monogamy is from a health perspective- just you and your partner whittles the chance of infection down, and in the case of infection, you know who you got it from.
-Sean
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