For those Australians amongst us

Thou shall not kill. One of the ten commandments, and by all means concise enough to resist ambiguity. Yet in the Bible, people are slain on numerous occasions on divine command and believers are instructed to kill people for a wide variety of purported "offences", my favorite being Deuteronomy 13:13-19:

"Suppose you hear in one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you that some worthless rabble among you have led their fellow citizens astray by encouraging them to worship foreign gods. In such cases, you must examine the facts carefully. If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock. Then you must pile all the plunder in the middle of the street and burn it. Put the entire town to the torch as a burnt offering to the LORD your God. That town must remain a ruin forever; it may never be rebuilt. Keep none of the plunder that has been set apart for destruction. Then the LORD will turn from his fierce anger and be merciful to you. He will have compassion on you and make you a great nation, just as he solemnly promised your ancestors. "The LORD your God will be merciful only if you obey him and keep all the commands I am giving you today, doing what is pleasing to him."

Perhaps I am irredeemably uneducated, but I find this a wee bit contradictionary.

 

It is indeed interesting that Yahweh should be described as fair, just and merciful when he spends most of the Old Testament doing his very best to not live up to those epithets. As should be sufficiently exemplified in the above verses, Yahwehs sense of justice is nothing but terribly off in all the wrong directions, and does certainly not speak of love as anyone in their right mind would define it. The infidels aren't even given the chance of atonement, but are slain, no questions asked. Morally objectionable? Oh yes.

Furthermore, we have no reason to believe that children are to be spared from the onslaught, especially seeing as this particular venue was something of a fad in the days of Moses. The wording is clear enough, all inhabitants of the city must die by the sword. Appealing to Yahweh's infinite wisdom just doesn't seem right in this case. The children cannot be held responsible for whatever wrongs committed by their parents. Not even the livestock is spared, not that I could see how bovine could possibly be held guilty for anything.

I think I just wrote how unacceptable this is.

 

Why would anyone want to read non-fiction about a thing that has never been proven to exist?

 

Yet he hasn't broken the rules. (What are the rules anyway?)

 

Slaughtering innocent children is morally wrong regardless of context.

A good ruler rules out of respect, not out of fear. If a totalitarian regime would set villages ablaze and gun the citizenry down to every last man, woman and child because they supported the opposition, anyone in their right mind would condemn it.

 

Call me hopelessly backwards, but I believe there to be a difference between soldiers dying on the field of battle and civilian casualties. After all, we call mujahedin who hide in schools cowards.

 

Considering that Eisenhower, MacArthur etc were of the belief that the bombings were unnecessary on military grounds I cannot shake the feeling that unleashing the most destructive weaponry humanity had ever seen on civilian targets wasn't exactly the wisest course of action to take.