(September 10, 2014 at 10:05 am)Chad32 Wrote: If it was going to be that selective, though, why not elaborate on the commandment? Why just have "thou shall not kill", and then start making various exceptions without describing them within the commandment?I think it's probably impossible to ever discover what the original set of rules or laws were, or how specific they were. The earliest books of the Bible seem to be an amalgam of stuff from any number of sources with different goals and agendas. It's possible that the morals of the time were very tribal, so that "don't kill" meant don't kill your fellow tribesman without legal sanction, which was then provided in all of the laws that said "if someone does this, kill him."
It also wouldn't apply to those outside of the tribe, especially if we're talking about a region and/or period where there were wars of conquest. Perhaps under those circumstances, the willingness to take slaves, rape women and girls, and ransack towns and cities right down to the last person isn't as surprising as it would be in a more orderly and secure environment. "Live and let live" may not have worked as well as "do unto them before they do unto us" at the time.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
