From: strom@watson.ibm.com (Rob Strom)
Subject: Re: The Canaanites(was Re: Achilles heels for religion?)
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 16:26:53 GMT
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not necessarily those of IBM
Organization: IBM Research

In article <1992Apr10.055955.10455@bmerh2.bnr.ca>, dgraham@bmers30.bnr.ca (Douglas Graham) writes:

|> Perhaps much of the damage can be undone by adding commentary to
|> obfuscate the message in the original texts, but I don't think all
|> of it can be.  Presumably your intent is to teach your children to
|> be peaceful, tolerant people.  Do you really believe that using a
|> book filled with intolerance, bloodshed and warfare, all condoned
|> by God, is the best way to teach these qualities?  I think that
|> the Bible is an important cultural record, and should be studied
|> by "kids" when they're about 20 or so, and able to understand just
|> what it is, but as a source of moral teachings it fails miserably.
|> 
Of course you don't start with the Bible.  And even when
you get to the Bible, you definitely don't start with
the conquest of the *Canaanites*.  But by the time
a child becomes Bar/Bat Mitzvah (13/12) or is confirmed
(about 16), he/she should, in my opinion, be aware of
the bits of the bible which appear to describe God condoning
violence and bloodshed.

Remember that the Bible is the most influential book in
Western civilization.  It's much better to teach
the passages and explain how our thinking has evolved
since the time they are written than to let people
read the passages from a "Sola Scriptura" perspective
when they are 20.

|> >|> The problem is that it is the righteous bunch who get to define
|> >|> "righteousness".  If Hitler had won WWII, our history books would
|> >|> speak of how the Nazis had rid the world of the evil Jews, and made
|> >|> the world safe for the righteous Nazis.  IMO, any decent moral teaching
|> >|> should emphasize that there is no such thing as righteousness.  Only
|> >|> self-righteousness.
|> >
|> >Here I disagree.  I believe there is such a thing as righteousness
|> >and I believe that there is not a moral symmetry between the
|> >position of the Nazis and the position of their victims.
|> 
|> I'm afraid that I really can't tell the difference between what
|> the Nazis did to the Jews, and what the Jews purportedly did to
|> the Canaanites.  If the Canaanites had managed to wipe out the
|> Jews instead, do you really think that their history books would
|> admit that they were unrighteous but won anyway?  I suspect it far
|> more likely that they would tell stories of how their god helped
|> the righteous to fight off the unrighteous invading barbarians.
|> 

Well there are some differences (the Nazis didn't just conquer
land and kill the defenders, they wiped out those from their
own midst who had "Jewish blood"; they used sadistic tortures;
it was 1940 CE not 1300 BCE --- the standards supposedly
went up in the interval).  However, even granting that
there was symmetry between the Nazi treatment of the Jews
and the Israelite treatment of the Canaanites, I hope
you will grant that there is *no* moral symmetry between
the Nazi treatment of the Jews and the Jews' treatment
of the Nazis.  If you accept this, then there is some
notion of righteousness that you have and we can argue
details.  If you don't accept this, then I'm not sure
I can argue further.

|> I would like to know more about what you think is righteous.
|> For example, it seems that the Yahwists had some pretty major
|> hangups about sex.  I seem to remember more than one tale where
|> a bunch of people were slaughtered because they happened to
|> be more sexually promiscuous than the Yahwists approved of.
|> Do you think that sexual promiscuity is unrighteous?  If you've
|> read Huxley's _Brave New World_ you'll remember that people
|> were encouraged to sleep around as much as possible.  Was than
|> an unrighteous society?
|> 

For someone who seems (e.g. in your next paragraph) to be
a moral relativist, you seem very judgemental in calling
the "Yahwists'" sexual taboos "major hangups".  I'm not
sure which taboos you're referring to or which story
you mean where a tribe was slaughtered for not conforming
to Israelite sexual customs.  There is a story from
before the Mosaic covenant in which a sub-tribe is slaughtered
as a revenge for a rape -- is that the one you mean?

In any case I've read "Brave New World".  I believe that
Huxley himself viewed this society as an unrighteous
society --- as a dystopia.  Not necessarily because
of the sexual morality.  The society denied individualism,
personal "attachments", personal creativity, the pain
and struggle which are a prerequisite for art, poetry,
music, science.  They did all this to create a "stable
society", a soma-maintained virtual reality in which everyone was
happy and nothing ever changed.  The encouragement of sexual promiscuity
was just one of the forms of central social control
which was used to discourage personal attachments.
Yes, I think this was an "unrighteous" society, don't you?

|> Is our society more righteous than say, a primitive tribe of
|> aboriginal people running around naked in the Amazon jungle?
|> Were the Europeans more righteous than the native "savages"
|> of North America that they pretty much wiped out?

The aboriginals weren't themselves unrighteous.
But a society which starts with the level of
Western culture and evolves towards the behavior
of aboriginal peoples *is*, imho, unrighteous.

It's wrong to wipe out "primitive" cultures.  But it's
not wrong to change them so that their young
children don't die horrible deaths because magic
is used instead of medicine.  It is wrong to
replace medicine with magic in our society.
-- 
Rob Strom, strom@watson.ibm.com, (914) 784-7641
IBM Research, 30 Saw Mill River Road, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY  10598