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Posted by on Mar 9, 2013 in Biblical Exegesis, God's Characteristics, Morality | 12 comments

Christians, watch this and then tell me your God underwrites morality…

WARNING. Watch this video will disturb you. It is horrific. But I ask that you do so, Christian, Muslim, atheist or other. You will never watch it again, and it will scar you. But remember, this activity was divinely decreed by an all-loving God. Yes, all-loving. And for what? For all of the actions below. Am I going over the top? Is this snuff?

The reason I post this is as follows. Christians (and Muslims) often argue the Old Testament directives in a kind of abstract, intellectual manner, distanced from the reality and brutality of such death. It is easy to defend something which is conceptual and distant. But is it so easy to defend when you see it before your eyes, in seemingly the way your all-loving God commanded? I think not. And I think this is a really powerful indictment of God. This rather violent Old Testament incarnation of God was dismissed as a demiurge by early bishop Marcion. And for good reason. The rather vicious and parochial nature of Yahweh just didn’t seem to fit with the New Testament. Or is it that the New Testament doesn’t really fit with what God is more actually like (if he existed)? This is hardcore. This is the world of the Bible. Either it is morally abhorrent, or it is not. And don’t give me Covenantal Moral Relativism. That’s bullshit. If God decreed this as morally justified then, then the birth and death of Jesus (and his fulfillment of every jot and tittle of the law) doesn’t change a damned thing. Suddenly homosexuality is OK enough NOT to be punishable by death? Trying to convert people to another religion? Should I be stoned for espousing atheism?

Even in modern societies which do still have the death penalty (come on US, catch up) it is done as humanely as possible, if that is not an oxymoron. There is so much wrong with the Old Testament. This is a massive example of it abhorrence.

The question is, would YOU throw a stone? And if not, how is it acceptable that these people do or did? And before you give me the quote from John about casting the first stone (“He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” John 8:7), that is a well known interpolation, and Jesus didn’t say that.

Conclusion – those who defend the Old Testament and its decrees are no better than the people stoning this Muslim couple. Discuss.

[UPDATE: people I have spoken to elsewhere online about this post have declared that they are unable to watch this video. Which is immensely powerful, and kind of the point. It is THAT intuitively morally disgusting.]

Here is the entry from RationalWiki entitled Actions punishable by death in the Old Testament.

General

The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (the source for the Christian Old Testament), which forms the core texts of the Halakha, or corpus of Jewish divine law, include a surprising number of crimes which merit the death penalty as punishment. These laws were believed to form an integral part of the overall “Covenant” between the Israelites and YHWH. When the Christians adopted the Old Testament as their canon, neither they as a body, or Jesus as the Messiah revised or redacted any of these laws, for all they edited the Hebrew texts.

Crimes that merit the death penalty are generally crimes against God. A smaller, but no less important set of capital crimes are sexual transgressions. It should be noted that things we consider crimes (like rape and child abuse) are not what the Old Testament is talking about. Sexual transgressions typically relate to a failure to comport oneself (sexually) in a manner that adds to the community. Adultery and masturbation are as bad or worse than modern crimes of molestation or rape – simply because they challenged such moral issues as “Who of my children is really mine, so gets my land”, and “The more sons I have the more land I can work, so the more money I own.” Taken by the word of God alone, however, one just has to assume that God cares if you touch yourself or find someone sexy before you are married. Though exactly whyGod should have such a deep and abiding interest in the sexual and marital predications of his creations is not clear. The religious laws describe the various rituals and taboos involved in the proper way of worshipping the Israelite God, and also seek to prevent apostasy. At least in this case, the reasoning behind assassinating anybody who stepped out of line is clear.

The rules in the Torah still form a part of the body of the Jewish law, though they fortunately cannot be considered a complete description of Jewish law. This is because no legal system can be fully understood without also considering the way its rules are being interpreted and applied in practice by the courts and other institutions of its society - or, for that matter, the body of rituals and social conventions surrounding such institutions. For example, a Jewish court could not say that it was acceptable to sell your daughter into slavery, even if that is the alternative to killing her for a misdeed. Today, only a few isolated Islamic courts have ever actually applied the death penalties for apostasy and sexual crimes in the modern era, despite the fact that many honor killings occur claiming to be legally sanctioned.[1]

There are also a few fundamentalist Christians such as the followers of Dominionism who feel that the death penalties as described should to be enforced today.[2][3]

Sexual activities

“And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you.” —George Carlin

  • Adultery (Leviticus 20:10-12, man and woman)
  • Lying about virginity. Applies to girls who are still in their fathers’ homes, who lie about their virginity, and are presented to their husband as a virgin. The accused is guilty until proved innocent. (Deuteronomy 22:20-21)
  • The daughter of a priest practicing prostitution (death by fire) (Leviticus 21:9)
  • Rape of a virgin who is engaged. If she is not engaged you only have to marry her and give her father 50 shekels. No mention is made of the girl’s opinion, and no punishment is specified for raping a single non-virgin female. (Deuteronomy 22:25)
  • Being the victim of rape, if one is an engaged female virgin and the rape occurs in a city. If it takes place in a field, the victim is spared because nobody would have heard her screams. (Deuteronomy 22:23-27) Presumably, virgins who scream for help inside a city will always be rescued.
  • Men practicing bestiality. (Both man and animal die). (Leviticus 20:15) [4]
  • Women practicing bestiality (Both woman and animal die). (Leviticus 20:16) [4]
  • Having sex with your father’s wife, as distinct from “your mother”, as it was common practice for men at the time to have several wives. (both die) (Leviticus 20:20)
  • Having sex with your daughter-in-law. (Leviticus 20:30)
  • Incest. (Leviticus 20:17) [5]
  • (for men): Sex with a man in the same manner as sex with women. Generally interpreted as male homosexuality. The girls seem to get a free… errrr …ride on this one. (Leviticus 18:22)
  • Marrying a woman and her daughter. They are all burnt to death (Leviticus 20:14)

A couple of these demand that the “sinners” be burned to death rather than stoned — which was the more usual form of capital punishment. One can wonder why these crimes in particular merit this especially horrible fate.

Religious laws

Parents and Children.

Violent and legal crimes

  • Murder. However if a slave is beaten to death the owner is “punished” — not necessarily killed. If the slave survives the beating then there is no punishment. This is part of a wide range of slavery laws in the Old and New Testament. (Genesis 9:6, Exodus 21:12, Numbers 35:16-21)
  • Kidnapping and selling a man. This is really a law against making an Israelite a slave against his will, as other laws happily allow the “stealing of men” to make slaves. (Exodus 21:16).
  • Perjury (in certain cases) (Deuteronomy 19:15-21).
  • Deuteronomy 19:20 explicitly identifies that the purpose of this is deterrence. “The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing (malicious and false testimony by one man against another) be done among you.” Presumably all the other death penalties are assumed to be for deterrence as well.
  • Ignoring the verdict of a judge – (or a priest!) (Deuteronomy 17:8-13).
  • Not penning up a known dangerous bull, if the bull subsequently kills a man or a woman. Both the animal and the reckless owner of the dangerous bull are to be put to death. (Exodus 21:29)

Things that don’t go anywhere else.

  • Living in a city that failed to surrender to the Israelites. (Kill all the men, make the women and children slaves.) (Deuteronomy 20:12-14)

Possible grounds for execution.

The following carry the punishment of being “cut off from his people”. Some people seem to feel that this is the same as the death penalty, although the ancient Israelites may simply have interpreted it as exile.

  • Clare45

    I am just waiting for a Christian to say that the old testament is not to be taken literally, or that you have quoted out of context.:)

  • http://www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce
  • Bret

    . “It will scar you” is an understatement. Think of how seeing this video rocks your psyche, in comparison to simply talking about someone being stoned to death. I think it would be safe to assume the magnitude of disturbance would be just as great when comparing seeing a stoning with your own eyes as opposed to watching a video of one.

    Old Testament/ fundamental theism is intellectually bankrupt to me, but I can still hear my liberal Christian friends praising the bible for the insights it gives them into the nature of their loving and Jesus centered theism, while dismissing things like this as remnant activities of the culture of biblical times.

    I’d have to ask even the liberal Christian though, can the horrendous in something not outweigh the good so much that the good is crushed, and the whole damn thing should be discarded as any sort of metric for morality? For all of the fascinating things in it, the bible seems so problematic. So irrelevant. It is the liberal Christians who still see the bible as incredibly relevant who frustrate me most.

    That said, I’m gonna go hold my daughter close. It’s too early in the day to imagine the hopeless, dark, despair that so many have lived just before oblivion took over.

  • http://www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

    Beautifully said, Bret. I particularly like your point about Liberals. There is a strange logical consistency to fundamentalist literalists. Liberals do cherry pick and special plead there way to ‘truth’.

  • http://mysoulhole.blogspot.com/ Sarah Bee

    ” It is the liberal Christians who still see the bible as incredibly relevant who frustrate me most.”

    While I appreciate that liberal Christians tend to be more open-minded to progress and accepting of people and new ideas, I do agree; there is no consistency and that can be dangerous too. It’s frustrating that they can’t go just a few steps forward, enough to realize that even the cherry-picked good bits of the Bible are unnecessary justification for their cause. We CAN just … “be good, for goodness’ sake!”

  • http://mysoulhole.blogspot.com/ Sarah Bee

    Somehow, I managed to watch the whole thing, but not without feeling sick to my stomach. This is such an important post, though. I’m sure some Christians will manage to find an excuse of some sort (out of context?!?) but for others, they may only need to be faced with the reality. This is pretty powerful, I’d imagine, even for the hardest Christian-shell!

  • http://www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

    There are some pretty bloody stubborn Christians with whom I am arguing on facebook doing some lovely evading.

  • L.Long

    I watched, Eh! So What? No big deal. The resolution is awful and details are thin. Seen better on a number of movies. Seen better on street cams that capture a few guys beating the crap out of a gay. Also taking a xtian view that aint xtian! Cheeses is LOOOVVVVEEE!
    And I have to disagree with Sarah, I’ve never met a liberal Xtian. Oh I have met many vanilla xtians who CLAIM to be against all that OT stuff as Cheeses came and erased it from our beliefs or some such nonsense. Cuz all you have to do is ask them if they will get together and stone one of there divorced members and they will refuse. OK. Then let’s get together decide on the parts you all think should not be done and tear those parts out of the buyBull and burn them! 2 seconds later you get the ‘we cant desecrate the word of gawd!!!!!’ I have found that you have fundies like those in the video and then you have ‘fundy enablers’. And I think all the above applies to islame as well, although I have not spoken to very many – OK none actually- so I don’t know that the ‘tear it out of the koran’ test would be the same.

    History (and present stuff) has shown that in any religion that has the power to do so will be enabled by the ‘liberals’ and the fundies will do as seen above.

  • RebeccaBradley

    The chorus of “Allahu akbar” – “God is great” kind of makes your point even sharper, Jonathan.

  • http://www.skepticink.com/incredulous Edward Clint

    Even in the US, the death penalty is only legal in 33 states. 5 more states has a “de facto moratorium” and the most of the rest have exceedingly low rates of just a few people per decade (atrocious as I find even that). Only a couple states routinely execute people and I hope to see those abolish in the coming years.

  • http://www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

    That’s really interesting, Ed. I wonder what the stats are for that. I really do imagine that people would have a progressively slimmer appetite for the death penalty. It seems to be less int eh news / popular culture these days. I/ wonder if that is reflective of the reality in the US penal system.

  • John Grove

    Muslim bastards