Biblical atrocities... ????

The problem with the "God defines what's good and evil and so anything He does is by definition good" argument is that it means that religious genocide is not wrong, because God does it.So. Would a military campaign, wiping out the muslim population of the middle east and replacing them with Christian settlers, be justified? If not, why not? God did it.Insistence on reading accounts written by people whose conception of God was extremely primitive and above all tribal as literal accounts of the nature of God is a sure-fire way of getting the wrong end of the stick. It is exactly what Jesus' disciples did - "Master! Shall we call down fire on them like Elijah did?". I note Jesus' response was "You do not no what kind of Spirit you belong to". The understanding of God evolved through the OT - it was written over hundreds of years. These atrocities are part of an early tribal conception of God and give a totally disordered picture of Him taken literally and in isolation. To put it bluntly, I, and many other Christians, do not believe that God ordered the genocides recorded in the OT.

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Originally posted by NeoPagan:
I totally agree. Christians are always saying that because Christ died & took our punishment, the price was paid "in full." How could it be paid in full, if our sentence was supposedly an "eternity" in hell? Jesus spends three days there & then gets whisked back to the comforts of heaven. Big deal! Anyone can suffer anything for a little while if they know they're going back to heaven shortly.

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I have used this line of reasoning to defend my rejection of Hell as eternal torment.Having said that, the Christ "took our punishment" model is only one and it is just that - a model. It is a mistake IMO to speak of it as an absolute and objective truth.My take: No webpage found at provided URL: http://freespace.virgin.net/karl_and.gnome/believe.htmMr Davies - the slaying of the firstborn, as a deliberate act of God to free the Israelites is not something I believe in. It is a reflection of the tribal understanding of God at the time the books were written. I am agnostic about the historicity of the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan - I note that Hebrew is most closely related to Canaanite - if the Genesis and Exodus accounts were historical I would expect it to be more closely related to Babylonian and to have a considerable number of loan words from Egyptian.