Is genocide ever justified?

Occams Barber

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How do you mean?

The earlier argument was basically "if we didn't kill all of them they'd kill all of us. It's just what you did in those days".

Remember that God wasn't just a bystander here. He advocated for the kill-em-all.

If kill-em-all is morally wrong why did God encourage as opposed to prevent?
OB
 
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JohnClay

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Well, yes. It's not a modern history book. Certainly the Israelites engaged in warfare, sometimes as aggressors, sometimes as defenders. The actual accounts in the bible are there to make one point or another, that is their purpose, why they were written, not to provide an actual account of historical events in the sense that we think of that now. That was an irrelevant concept at the time, not an important consideration, and in any case impossible to achieve.
BTW is there a technical term for this? Liberalism?
 
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Occams Barber

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Well, yes. It's not a modern history book. Certainly the Israelites engaged in warfare, sometimes as aggressors, sometimes as defenders. The actual accounts in the bible are there to make one point or another, that is their purpose, why they were written, not to provide an actual account of historical events in the sense that we think of that now. That was an irrelevant concept at the time, not an important consideration, and in any case impossible to achieve.
I think Christians seriously need to accept that much of this OT behaviour was culture being given a religious justification. This happens in many places where culture and religion occupy a similar space. The Bible may attribute responsibility to God when it's really just men justifying their own actions by attributing divine command.
OB
 
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Tom 1

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The earlier argument was basically "if we didn't kill all of them they'd kill all of us. It's just what you did in those days".

Remember that God wasn't just a bystander here. He advocated for the kill-em-all.

If kill-em-all is morally wrong why did God encourage as opposed to prevent?
OB

My question was what you meant by prevent - I mean how do you think that would work, if there was a god who stepped in to prevent humans doing anything harmful, or on some sliding scale preventing things that go past some particular criteria - ?

The bible doesn't address questions of whether warfare for the purposes of survival or maintaining ethnic identity is 'morally good', just that it happened. Put into the context of other texts on warfare between city states at the time, what is generally meant is that some men of fighting age would be killed and the remaining people subjugated or enslaved. The biblical texts were written at a time when Israel was in exile under a foreign power and one of the main intents was to establish a strong sense of cultural identity, in this case emphasising rather brutally the imperative to avoid any kind of ethnic, religious or cultural contamination. Whether that is what actually happened or not is another question, given that the writing was retrospective and there would have been little means to verify any past events at the time of writing.

More generally, states do this today. The killing of what would have amounted to several thousand people to prevent the dissolution of the Hebrew people is comparable, I think, to US carpet bombing of Cambodian civilians, killing 10s of thousands, in an attempt to prevent the spread of communism, as one example. History isn't easily divided into 'that was good/that was bad'. Generally it comes down to what was the most expedient choice and from whose perspective.
 
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Tom 1

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I think Christians seriously need to accept that much of this OT behaviour was culture being given a religious justification. This happens in many places where culture and religion occupy a similar space. The Bible may attribute responsibility to God when it's really just men justifying their own actions by attributing divine command.
OB

Maybe, it's more of a blend though. Different parts of the text were written with different aims in mind.
 
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Norbert L

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Deuteronomy 20:16-18

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.
I think that could be called "genocide". If you are the Christian do you think this example of genocide is moral? My opinion is that this command is a test - a bit like the test that Abraham was given...
And the LORD replied, “If I find fifty righteous people in Sodom, I will spare the entire city for their sake.” Genesis 18:26

Not all opponents of Israel were marked for complete destruction.

It is well known that anti-semitism is still alive and well today to the point where radical Islamists preach the destruction of Israel today.

As far as predictive powers go by mere men such as myself, who's to say that had those cities been allowed survivors, there would have been many more Hitler's birthed down the road of history that would have finally succeeded in the genociding and exterminating the Jewish nation off the place of this planet.
 
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Sketcher

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And that sentence Sketcher, is what really scares me about Christianity.
OB
I don't see why it should. In the context of genocide, God gave the only exceptions he is ever going to give, and all of that business was taken care of thousands of years ago. There will never again be a truly holy genocide. Or am I misunderstanding you?
 
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Occams Barber

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I don't see why it should. In the context of genocide, God gave the only exceptions he is ever going to give, and all of that business was taken care of thousands of years ago. There will never again be a truly holy genocide. Or am I misunderstanding you?

You are misunderstanding me.

In this one statement
God's moral code is up to him. He is the judge, we are not.
you have abdicated personal responsibility for moral judgements and implied you will do as you are instructed by God in spite of any moral misgivings. It also implies that where God 's morality contradicts common moral standards you cannot be reasoned with.

It represents a phase in religious fanaticism - and that's why I find it frightening.
OB
 
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Sketcher

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You are misunderstanding me.

In this one statement
God's moral code is up to him. He is the judge, we are not.
you have abdicated personal responsibility for moral judgements and implied you will do as you are instructed by God in spite of any moral misgivings. It also implies that where God 's morality contradicts common moral standards you cannot be reasoned with.

It represents a phase in religious fanaticism - and that's why I find it frightening.
OB
If God won't have me commit violent or fraudulent acts - and Scripture says he won't - what exactly is the problem?
 
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Quid est Veritas?

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What do you mean by Genocide? That is a modern term, so it is anachronistic to apply it historically. We may still think it a crime, but it is less clear cut. Genocide as an idea was only invented post WWII, and means the willful destruction, in whole or in part, of a group and/or their culture and institutions.

So based on this definition, is Genocide ever justified? I think it can be, for instance the Aztecs ripping out hearts, infant sacrifice amongst Carthaginians, the head-hunting tribes of New Guinea, Sati amongst the Rajputs, the Thuggee, or the Druids of the Celts with their wicker men to burn captives alive. Genocide in these cases is not only excusable, but fit and proper.

You can argue that they need not kill the entire population - which is true - but therein you run serious risks. For instance, Mexico struggled for centuries with pseudo-Catholic folk beliefs, like Jesus Malverde or Santa Muerte, that have roots in their Aztec past. This in part helped fuel revolution, gansterism, drug-running, etc. If the upper echelons of Texcoco had been destroyed as Tenochtitlan was, a more complete Genocide, the end result might have been very different. The English killed every single Thuggee they found - and it is extinct now, with no insidious effects to speak of that I am aware of.

Now the Ancient Israelites were not the most loyal of peoples in the Biblical narrative, and this whole thing is about purity. I mean, they sacrificed their children and whored after foreign gods, repeatedly. I can see an argument for a necessary violence, to keep the influence away to prepare the Israelites for their role in history. Abhorrent certainly, but perhaps necessary. I cannot really speculate on counter-factuals if things had occured differently, but wars were quite brutal back then in general. Think of the de-Nazification in Germany or the enforced Pacifism in Japan, otherwise we may have had another sets of wars in 20 or 30 years or so. The issue is more complex than people realise, even if we are granting a basic historicity to the narrative, which of course is a different matter entirely. The point is that God specifically chose the Israelites, and that they are apart for this purpose.
 
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MrsFoundit

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However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance,

they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods,​

They are a real threat as they are, and they can relocate, and/or start following God to cease posing a threat.
 
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JohnClay

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What do you mean by Genocide? That is a modern term, so it is anachronistic to apply it historically....
I think the terms "heliocentrism" and "geocentrism" are fairly modern too but I think it can be applied historically.
 
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JohnClay

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They are a real threat as they are
Even the babies and animals?
and they can relocate, and/or start following God to cease posing a threat.
The Israelites didn't wipe out those cultures and the only threat they were was to encourage the Israelites to worship other gods. God didn't say that those cultures following God would save them.
 
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I think the terms "heliocentrism" and "geocentrism" are fairly modern too but I think it can be applied historically.
That is a false equivalence. Heliocentrism refers to a type of argument within Astronomy, while Genocide refers to a form of Crime - the former is a descriptive and usually empiric historic modifier within the field itself, the latter dependant on the moral or legal framework within which it is placed, and in this case was a proscriptive one. So unless you assume all of humanity has the same laws, and always has had such, of which Genocide is an enshrined examplar, this is not the case. Essentially, you would be arguing seeing our definition of Genocide as wrong is a universal human value, which historically is clearly untrue; or that it is true in an absolute moral sense, which would essentially be a circular argument, as the only way to do so would be to invoke an Absolute.
 
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JohnClay

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That is a false equivalence. Heliocentrism refers to a type of argument within Astronomy, while Genocide refers to a form of Crime - the former is a descriptive and usually empiric historic modifier within the field itself, the latter dependant on the moral or legal framework within which it is placed, and in this case was a proscriptive one. So unless you assume all of humanity has the same laws, and always has had such, of which Genocide is an enshrined examplar, this is not the case. Essentially, you would be arguing seeing our definition of Genocide as wrong is a universal human value, which historically is clearly untrue; or that it is true in an absolute moral sense, which would essentially be a circular argument, as the only way to do so would be to invoke an Absolute.
I'm not saying genocide is necessarily immoral - many Christians think it can be fine (depending on the circumstances). It is a description of a type of killing.... "spermicide" is a related term. And spermicide isn't necessarily moral or immoral.
It is true that today the term "genocide" is often seen as immoral, but like I said, many Christians think it is justified when talking about Deut 20. BTW in Australia significant numbers of Aboriginal people were massacred - perhaps that could be called genocide.

Even if you don't agree that there was genocide, you would probably agree that it said "kill everything that breathes" - including babies and animals.
 
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MrsFoundit

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Even the babies and animals?

So you read "everything that breathes" and call it "genocide" on that basis, you do not include plants, and call it an instruction to instigate desertification for some reason, even though that would be even more literally accurate.

The Israelites didn't wipe out those cultures and the only threat they were was to encourage the Israelites to worship other gods.

Well does "all the detestable things they do" really only mean believe in other gods? Is the issue for you what happens next, or the moral acceptability of what you call genocide? As I said,
they can relocate, the instruction is "in the cities of the nations"

God didn't say that those cultures following God would save them.

The threat is specified as risks involved in their religions, so yes He did.
 
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JohnClay

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So you read "everything that breathes" and call it "genocide" on that basis,
I called it genocide because it said:
"Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites"

Well does "all the detestable things they do" really only mean believe in other gods?
It said:
"Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God"

Which might include temple prostitutes and child sacrifice.

Is the issue for you what happens next, or the moral acceptability of what you call genocide? As I said,
they can relocate, the instruction is "in the cities of the nations"
Even if they went to another nation they could still be taken as slaves or if they were men and didn't surrender they'd be killed.

The threat is specified as risks involved in their religions, so yes He did.
Here is a related passage:

Deuteronomy 13:12
If you hear it said about one of the towns the Lord your God is giving you to live in that troublemakers have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. You must destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock.
Note it says to kill everyone rather than saying that those who believe in God would be saved.
 
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BigV

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It says that God commanded genocide - that implies he approved of it... except in the case of Abraham, God actually didn't want Abraham to kill Isaac... but he wanted Abraham to choose to try and kill Isaac.
FYI, there is a Jewish tradition that Abraham did kill Isaac. If you read the OT, Isaac strangely repeats the pattern of Abraham.

When Abraham murdered Isaac
 
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