From: davec@csufres.CSUFresno.EDU (David C. Choweller)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Re: Crusades; Once more into the breach
Date: 14 Aug 1992 00:51:07 -0500
Organization: Liverpool Supporters Club
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

In article <Aug.14.00.05.15.1992.17895@athos.rutgers.edu> Charles Hedrick
writes:
:davec@csufres.CSUFresno.EDU (David C. Choweller) writes:
:
:>Do you agree, Greg, that the God that you believe in, at one time
:>prescribed the death penalty for homosexual acts?  Regardless of
:>whether the law was changed later, many people were put to death
:>because of what your God laid down as the law.  Would you agree
:>with this statement?  I know that this is off the main point, but
:>I'm curious.  I want to understand liberal Christianity, and how
:>it can be justified in the face of the barbarity described in the
:>bible.  Mostly I want to understand how liberal Christians can believe
:>in a God who laid down a harsh, barbaric law--as a result of which
:>many people were murdered--and then turn around and say that the
:>actions for which those people were killed are no longer punishable.
:
:Speaking strictly for myself (as a liberal Christian), I think the OT
:has to be judged in the context of its time.  If you look at the
:development of teachings over time, you can see them leading in a more
:"enlightened" direction.  At the beginning of this process, God looks
:a lot like a tribal war-god, and his justice is pretty rough.  It *is*
:an attempt at justice I think.  In many cases you can see the rules
:protecting the rights of people who would be likely to be abused.
:However there are still people who are simply to be wiped out (pagans,
:homosexuals).  Over time you see the prophets introducing ideas such
:as not holding sins against an entire family, and you can see
:attitudes towards non-Jews becoming more positive -- from trying to
:wipe everybody out, Israel is seen as a "light for the Gentiles".  The
:book of Jonah is a biting satire against people who still hold the old
:ideas in this area.  By NT times, the "righteous Gentile" was
:considered by many to be equal to a Jew.
:
:Thus I'm saying that the early law is barbaric because that's all the
:people were ready to hear.

I have a hard time understanding this.  Do you mean that people in
those times were incapable of being enlightened?  Was there something
in their makeup (genetic?) that made them bigoted thugs?

To me, it seems that people behave in ways prescribed by the mores of
the society they live in.  If God told them to kill homosexuals, they'd
think that this was right.  If God told them that being bigoted was 
sinful, they wouldn't murder innocent homosexuals.

:I think there's a combination of their
:mishearing what God was saying, and God "accomodating" himself by
:giving rules that were an approximation of his eventual goal, adopted
:to the situation of the time.  I'm not sure how I'd decide in any
:given case which it was.

So God sacrificed those poor early homosexuals to our bloodthirsty
ancestors?

:This kind of account is not going to satisfy many readers here,
:because it raises a variant of the basic problem of suffering -- why
:would God adopt a strategy of bringing people along slowly, rather
:than setting things up so that everybody understood him from the
:beginning?

The suffering stuff is a little easier to accept.  Suffering can be
explained away by saying it is necessary for Free Will, etc.  The causes
of the suffering are presumably free moral agents.  However in the case we are
discussing, God him/her/itself is ordering that homosexuals be put to
death!  It just doesn't make sense.

:But given that you don't see it as a problem that God acts
:so as to maintain a reasonable degree of autonomy for his creation, I
:don't think what you see in the OT is any particular problem.

So to assure autonomy, God orders reprehensible acts to be committed?  To
placate our savage ancestors, God orders them to murder babies to satisfy
their blood lust?
-- 
                                            davec@csufres.csufresno.edu
Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief
that the gods are on the side of the Government.
				-Bertrand Russell