RE: Why do you believe in God?
May 2, 2015 at 10:29 pm
(This post was last modified: May 2, 2015 at 10:32 pm by Hatshepsut.)
(May 2, 2015 at 4:23 pm)Jenny A Wrote: What in the Bible? The impossible creation stories (both of them). The parts where god orders the Hebrews to commit genocide. God's decision to kill a bunch of Egyptian babies...
I always appreciate someone who's read enough to realize there are in fact two creation traditions in Genesis 1 and 2. Slaughter and plunder celebrated in pompous texts (c.f. Joshua 8:24-29) was pretty standard fare; the Egyptians had such literature too, including their description of Thutmose III's battle at Megiddo (Urk. IV 645-669). Whether any actual genocides were ever completed in those days is doubtful: Ethnic cleansing seems a modern phenomenon; ancient regimes and their armies weren't really efficient enough to accomplish it, although they could kill everyone in a town after a siege.
War was horrible, of course, but less deadly than our modern secular wars fought with advanced equipment. In fact, Truman's order to drop the bomb on Hiroshima destroyed far more souls than the Hebrew war god Yahweh could ever claim in all his history.
