In another thread an atheist poster had doubts on this.
For me, the answer is clear: God made lives, he can take them, too. Even if it's the lives of entire peoples.
God shouldn't be restricted to keep the same laws that humans (should) keep, I think.
Last time this topic came up, there was a comparison between God and a dictator that has a very bad reputation.
To keep this thread open... even if you think this sort of comparison is rightly made, don't post it please.
You could write "God shouldn't kill entire peoples!" instead, if you feel this is right.
I hope this regulation is ok for you and you can still speak your mind freely.
Thomas
It's a difficult question.
I don't think the dictator comparison is all that useful, for one thing a dictator is not the creator of the people under him or her. Dictators have their own rationales for killing, which generally tend to be about preserving their own power or (ostensibly) removing influences or threats to the polictical system they believe in, as all rulers do to one extent or another, if we include killing people in other nations.
God doesn't need to kill people to maintain his power. In terms of influences and threats, in the OT the Israelites were comanded to remain 'separate and apart' from other people, which sometimes meant fighting with and killing other peoples. Christians on the other hand are commanded not to fight against their enemies, and the whole battle to resist or remove threat and influence is reconfigured as a 'spiritual' battle.
There are instances in the bible of God apparently directly intervening to kill people, usually in fairly large groups. These include instances of God obliterating people he considers to be 'too far gone' in some sense, as in Sodom and Gomorrah, or whose devotion has switched from him to some other deity. I suppose the question is who decides what God is entitled to do, and by what criteria? If there ever has been a leader of any major power who didn't make decisions resulting in many deaths, that person would be an extreme rarity. Death is part of human existance, including violent death. It happens - it can't really not happen, not in any model of human existance that has yet existed anyway. Nicolas Gomez Davila calls violence 'the cruel minister of the limited nature of things [as they are]', and I don't think he's wrong in that description. It is apparent then that
any ruler will
need to make some life and death choices.
I think the only questions are of degree and purpose - what is necessary and for what purpose, and what consitutes a purpose that grants entitlement? In our own time this is a valid question, we all live in countries whose armed forces kill people in order to maintain our way of life, and that is far from being a simple issue.
The question of entitlement and what might be thought of as acceptable is addressed in stories about King David's life. His behaviour with Bathsheba and her husband was entirely normal for a ruler in many periods of time in the ancient world, the fact that it is pulled into sharp focus as an immoral act puts Hebrew thinking about that kind of behaviour at odds with how the same situation may have been viewed within a different tribal kingdom or religious/ethnic group at the time. Was David entitled to do what he wanted with his subjects? Apparently not. Is God entitled to do what he wants with creatures he made? Well, one answer is that he doesn't, always. According to the bible he restrains himself, parlays with men, as with Abraham over S/G, warns, informs and allows time for change and so on. The degree is the limit at which God appears to consider it necessary to act, so perhaps it could be said that God, being able to see the ultimate big picture, is entitled to make that kind of decision, in the same way in which a national leader might decide when is the right time to intervene in some conflict, or start one.
