Ok so I came across the verse of 1 Samuel 15:3 in which the Israelites are to destroy everything of the Amalekites. I did a bit of background and reading on this and the Amalekites often lied and attacked Israel. However the destruction of women, children, cattle, and everything? If God is supposed to be merciful and loves all of his creations equally, why would he demand the complete destruction of innocent women, children, babies, and animals. Babies and animals can't even do anything. If anyone can answer this that would be great. Thank you.
First of all, I don't believe that Scripture teaches that God loves all of his creations equally. People are worth more to him than animals. Cattle were sacrificed and eaten. Doing either to a child was a grave sin. So this reduces the problem to the Amelekite people.
The men would have carried out the offenses primarily, but most if not all of the women and teenagers would have had the same biases and value system that justified the vile crimes that the Amelekites committed. So they are not innocent, and it reduces the problem to the Amelekite children and babies.
And that is the hardest part of this. Now, what may have been part of the issue is that the children and babies would have been seen as property, possibly as a slave labor force or slaves to trade. This was to be an annihilation of the Amalekites' property as well as punishment of the Amelekite people. But this comes up short as an explanation, I think.
Ultimately, we need to look at the basis by which we consider this wrong to begin with. At first glance, it appears that the human rights of these people were violated. But where do those rights come from?
Human rights do not come from governments, or by social consensus. There have been too many human rights violations that occurred because of government mandate or social consensus throughout the ages to accept that as an answer. If the government wants you out of the way, they can't just have the police or an assassin kill you for their convenience. Nor can they railroad you on a false charge to have you arrested and punished for a crime you didn't commit. If your rights came from them, they could do that easily. And authoritarian regimes have done that, but it was still wrong, even if not everyone saw it as wrong. If we accept that, human rights must come from a moral authority higher than any government or social consensus.
In Christianity and Judaism, they come from God. He is the King of Kings with the authority to judge the whole world, governments, individual people, everyone. He alone gives us our rights, no government can give them or take them away - all they can do is protect and respect them, or trample them and be judged by God for it. By the same token however, he alone can take rights away. If he takes a person's right to live away, they will probably die in short order. He is the giver and taker of life.
Therefore, God took away the right to life of all of the Amalekites, because he had sole authority to do so. Because he had the sole authority to do so, that takes away the moral problem. However, we need to be very careful to not misuse the name of God to justify other such works that he has not ordained. The Amalekites, along with the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites were special cases. I know of no other people group in Scripture who were to be wiped out, everyone else was under a different set of rules, and this level of destruction was not ordained for them. Therefore, if anyone invokes the name of God to wipe out a different people group, that person is lying, and blaspheming.