Many early Christians were killed for their beliefs. In the Bible, Jesus warns his disciples that people would kill them thinking “they were offering service to God” (John 16:2). That seems appalling – how could God’s chosen people kill God’s new chosen people?
It makes complete sense, though. God himself commanded this many times to the Jews. He told them to kill people who turned after other gods. He often told the Israelites to commit genocide in service to him. It’s not strange at all if you’re familiar with the Bible.
If God didn’t want the Jews to kill Christians, or Christians to kill Jews, or Jesus to be put to death, why didn’t he write some exceptions into his rules? If he knows all things and knows the future — hell, even if he could just think a little ahead — he could have put in some exceptions or qualifications, like “Kill those who follow after other gods, except around the time of Herod, when Jesus of Nazareth, whose mother will be a virgin called Mary and father will be a carpenter named Joseph, who will work many miracles among you – even raising the dead: do not kill him, for he is God himself in the flesh. And do not kill any of his followers.”
But God didn’t do anything like that. So Jesus was killed for claiming he was God’s son, and his followers were persecuted because they were following a man who they claimed to be God. In other words, Jesus’ death and the persecution and martyrdom of his followers are God’s fault. A few sentences could have stopped it all, while at the same time providing a real specific prophecy about Jesus.
My response to this post – and, in fact, to most of your posts – would be that you are right but regretfully only trivially so.
As an ex-fundy you should know that rational argument doesn’t work against those who did not arrive at their positions in a rational way. Litterally anything can be explained away by skillful juggling of ‘God’s mysterious ways’ and ‘Satan blinding us to the real Truth(TM)’.
Therefore, although you are correct in almost everything you say, your blog will only speak to those who are already doubting.
You probably already knew this (I realise) but please do not get frustrated. Keep on writing this blog. It’s nice.
Neat blog! Just stumbled upon it today, through Pharyngula. At the risk of appearing to take myself a mite too seriously, I venture a few comments:
In regard to the genocide, I believe you’re referring to passages like Joshua 6, where God says, “The city and and everything in it must be completely destroyed as an offering to the Lord. Only Rahab the prostitute and the others in her house will be spared.” The destroyed people in this case were the Canaanites, who did a lot of infant sacrifice and temple prostitution. Translation: We care more about our men than the dignity of our women and lives of our children.
Having attended Bible college, you probably learned that God’s anger in the OT is always just – at least it’s supposed to be; the punishment is supposed to fit the crime. I grant that if God isn’t just, then there’s no compelling reason to follow him or even believe in him. The central issue is whether God is fair or just mean.
To be fair to God, the Canaanites were killing babies and prostituting their women, and He didn’t end up killing all of them after all; he saved Rahab and her family. As for the blanket instructions God gave to kill everyone, it is my understanding that the Canaanite society, and many societies of that area, back then and today, were much more homogeneous in belief and practice than we in America are. Those who were insoluble in the homogeneity and did good, like Rahab and friends, were spared.
And to be fair to Jesus, he did toss quite a few OT prophecies to the Jews regarding “the Messiah.” The Jews chose not to believe that the prophecies applied to him. God didn’t throw Jesus at the Jews out of nowhere; he set a precedent in prophecy.
If the prophecy was as specific as we might like it to have been, God must be a divine carrot-dangler: Malcontent to allow people to think for themselves, he must explicitly, in legal-quality text, mark out proper human action in any and every situation. Laying down principles in the Bible is a good compromise between unhelpful silence and exhaustive legality – both of which would have been poor choices.
Finally, saying that Jesus, Christians, and Jews’ deaths are God’s fault is a little like saying the coach of a sports team is at fault for their team’s losing streak; if they’d done as the coach asked, their record would be much-improved.
If you’re still reading, then you have my sincere thanks – especially considering it’s likely you’ve heard it all before. You know as well as I do that it’s difficult to be short-winded in conversations of this nature without seeming to be intellectually shortsighted or hopelessly fundamentalist. I am looking for what is true just as eagerly as you are. I’m a scientist too, after all; I want dialogue.