Why is belief in a higher power required?

[Esquilax]

No they're not the same thing, if I cut down a tree and it falls on and kills a man I certainly did not murder him, my actions caused his death so I killed him but I did not murder him.

True, but that's still manslaughter, and you still get punished for it.

Thank you, and no above I explained the difference in killing and murder. So you do not think you may have misread other things or should I say you haven't the whole of the story.

I'll get into this in more detail further down, but what I will say is that I probably wasn't phrasing my question right. I should have asked why what happened is killing, and not murder. Happily, you answered that, though I'm afraid we still disagree.

Killing is not always okay, murder is never okay. Killing for the most part is a bad action, it usually brings sadness to someone. When a war breaks out killing becomes a necessary tragedy, that does not make it murder in all cases, self defense in taking a life is killing but, it's not murder. I've not said the killing in those verses was good nor did I say it was bad, what I will say it was just because it served a purpose that proved what God had promised His people the Israelites.

I submit to you that all loss of life, god sanctioned or not, is wrong, and immoral by definition.

You equate death with injustice in these verses without the understanding of the whole situation and in this case part of this situation goes back to Moses time.

I equate death with injustice, period. Unless there was a clear and immediate danger being posed by those infants and virgin women, there can be no justification for their death, whether or not god ordered it. There can be no context in which an utterly immoral act becomes okay; it's you guys that so often argue for moral absolutes, after all. If you wouldn't accept this as moral from a mere human, but would if it serves god's purposes, then it's hardly objective, is it?

You can not solve a math problem without all the necessary information and I'm saying you have neglected to gather all the information that's available to this situation, so you can not possibly give a correct verdict to those verses. Like I told you I went back and read the story and found that I had forgotten part of it, nothing that would change my stance though. You on the other hand do not even know why this all got started, it was a promise from God to His people, Moses warned them yet they insisted on taking an oath.

I don't care. That's the thing. Whether they caused god trouble or not, their children couldn't possibly have been involved in that, nor could there have been any action they could have taken that was worthy of execution. It's the same reason we don't jail the tax evader's children.

Your position here seriously seems to be that they got in the way of god, and therefore every last one of them was deserving of death. That's not moral, that's just following dear leader no matter what. It's sociopathy dressed up as righteousness.

I think I've pretty well have distinguished between the two, however in the case of these verses I say again it was just to God's purpose.

So you follow divine command theory? There are no moral absolutes, whatever suits god's purposes is permitted, no matter what? If god ordered you to do the same thing, would you? Could you? We disagree quite a lot, but I don't think you're an evil person, GC. I don't think you would.

God never lets anyone off the hook as you put it, all sin is payed for, either through Christ or, for those who reject Christ through their own selves. You're right you could be a killer, worse than anyone ever and still be forgiven, but only through Christ, there is no other way. If you would not chose Christ as your savior then you would be paying for your sins. I do not pretend the Bible actually solves the problem of atonement, Christ did that, scripture records for us what He did for us, and if that's a loophole I'll take it,why, because God made the loophole for me to have in my favor, praise God on high.

That is... actually a surprisingly honest answer, and one I can respect. I wish you'd said it first off, instead of representing it all as something properly moral, but I can get behind the admission.

In this case you are being intellectually dishonest because you have cherry picked a few verses out of an entire story, and as I said part of the story Goes back to Moses time. I said that the destruction of the town and it's people was just and it served God's purpose through a promise, so in that sense it was good, though I'm sure you will never see it.

There is no sense in which genocide becomes moral. Look, I know you're okay with it, but don't go telling me that the only reason I'm not okay with it too is because I don't know the whole story. That's incorrect; I could have been there personally, and still seen no justification for it. Being god doesn't give one a pass on basic morality, unless the context was that the people killed in his name were building a superweapon to wipe all life from the face of the earth and strike out at him personally, and they were minutes away from pulling the trigger.

You are the one who keeps harping on sex, sex here, sex there, sex everywhere it seems that's all you can think about,

I don't find anything shameful about admitting I like sex, yes.

I was beginning to think you wished you could have been one of the 600.

Oh no no: I'm very serious about consent.

Of coarse sex was engaged in to have babies, Israel was trying to help the family of Benjamin to survive, but not in a way that you claim, murder and rape were not a part of this.

So did the virgins consent? Because if they didn't, then it's rape.

They did not have to be raped, the only reason you say this is because you hate God and desire to twist His word into something it's not.

No, I say it because I live in reality, where words and actions mean things and those things aren't contingent on whether the cause is mundane or divine. I don't hate your god, because I don't think he exists. I also don't hate Voldemort, for that matter. But the fact remains, if consent was not given by these prisoners of war, then they were raped. I'm sorry it makes you uncomfortable, but that's the inescapable reality of things.

Binary choice, you sound like you want to be a god and dictate the only choices these people had. Well you got it all wrong, you do not even know who this women were, they were Israelite women, they were not marrying outside their nationality, just as God had commanded long ago.

Um, what? Why does it matter what nationality they were?

They could have very well known some of these men, we do not know for sure, but it's not like they live a hundred miles away.

I thought it wasn't good to make assumptions that aren't present in the text? Besides, I know my friends, that doesn't mean I want to marry them, nor that me being forced to is okay. This isn't an excuse.

Yes that's right the men, women and children that were killed were Israelites, surprised? Do you know why one Israelite town was attacked by the rest of the nation, let's just say they let down the rest of Israel and payed the price and through all this God's judgement came upon the nation. Do you even know how all this got started, it all came about because of rape and murder, yep that's right some men of Benjamin raped and murdered and the tribe would not give up the ones who did this terrible thing. So it started with Israel taking action against Benjamin, it cost Israel dearly but, it cost Benjamin almost everything. I have a suggestion go read the entire story and then find God's promise to the nation during Moses time, you'll have the whole of the story then, even if you do reject it.

So, they refused to give up the criminals, yes, we agree that that's wrong. And the children of the town were responsible for this because...?

I doubt they were even involved in the decision making process.

I do not worship a religion, I worship the triune God, the Father, the Christ and the Holy Spirit, and He is completely just and moral.

How do you know you got the right version of his words? There's more than one. Truth is, without getting confirmation from the big guy himself, every last one of you is just worshiping a religious interpretation of things he's said and done.