"Thou shall not kill" commandment is hypocritical?

[Drich]

So we have Moses, bringing "his people" from Egypt to Mt. Sinai where Jehova gives him the ten commandments...

And one of them is simply "you shall not murder", but... but... what did god do with all the plagues he sent down on Egypt, particularly the one with all the firstborns, if not murdering?

What sort of moral authority does such a being have to tell his "children" not to murder when that's exactly what he did a couple of pages back?!

The command is you shall not murder.

The law is not about taking human life. (as you point out God authorizes the taking of life in several places) The commands tell us we shall not take a human life unless authorized.

Atheist 'morality'= The law of morals is the standard in which we should all live, the bench mark in which all right and wrong are measured.. The greatest sin/crime? Causing harm to one another.

The Righteousness of God= our act in of themselves hold no moral value. What makes an act good or evil is what God says about that given act in a given circumstance. This makes God the bench mark, the alpha and Omega. no standard nor value is above Him.

So the command you shall not murder means you shall not take life unless order or authorized to do so.

[pocaracas]

Hey Drich! Nice of you to drop by!

In the latin Vulgate, it's "non occides" (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se...on=VULGATE).
"occidere" is the indicative form of the verb and means:
http://www.latin-dictionary.net/search/latin/occide

1. cut/knock down
2. kill, murder, slaughter, slay
3. weary, be the death/ruin of

Kill and murder are both acceptable... but this thing wasn't written in latin by god, right?

Let's look at the hebrew one (http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0220.htm):
יב לֹא תִרְצָח
I have no idea how to read that.... I know the יב is supposed to be the verse number, because it's bolded on the site where I got it from and this language goes from right to left.
Let's translate it!
http://www.morfix.co.il/%D7%99%D7%91%20%...6%B8%D7%97

יב לֹא תִרְצָח
12 thou shalt not kill
תוצאה זו הופקה על-ידי תרגום מכונה
Powered by Microsoft® Translator


י"ב
twelve

That's no good... microsoft is biased!
Let's try to translate this one word at a time. It seems that site found the 12 easily enough, but missed the rest.

Removing the 12:
http://www.morfix.co.il/%D7%9C%D6%B9%D7%...6%B8%D7%97

לֹא תואר
no, not ; don't, isn't ; no matter ; לֹא

Now he only got the "no" part.... let's remove that, too and see what we get.
תִרְצָח
http://www.morfix.co.il/%D7%AA%D6%B4%D7%...6%B8%D7%97

נִרְצַח
to be murdered, to be assassinated

There we go.
There's a slight difference on the first symbol on the right, but I'll assume that's because of the coupling with the "no" particle.


Still, I think that the killing of all the firstborn of Egypt, regardless of which entity did it, can be regarded as murder.
There was no war, so no martial law was in place... there was no need to kill so many innocent civilian children.
There was just a necessity to convince one single person to release a few slaves - Just saying that it could have been handled with much less loss of human life - hence it was murder. Murder by the law giver.... but not the Egyptian law giver. So the law of Egypt would stand in Egypt... I'm sure they had some similar rule encoded.
Whatever happened to "Render unto Ceaser..."?

[Mr Greene]

As I understand it in the original Hebrew sources the commandment is;

"Thou shall not murder Jews"

source: The God Delusion . Dawkins

This is reiterated in Mosaic Law making it clear that bumping off gentiles is perfectly acceptable.