Murder has been a societal no-no ever since there were human societies.
Long before the Old Testament fables were concocted by Hebrew priests in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., there were Middle Eastern laws which declared murder to be a capital offense. The earliest known law code surviving today (on stone tablets) is the Code of Ur-Nammu, written in the Sumerian language (in Mesopotamia) roughly 4,000 years ago.
Of course, back in those days, killing on behalf of the state (i.e. military) was an exception to the rule. Huge armies periodically ran roughshod throughout the Middle East, smiting enemies right and left. The writing of the Old Testament was commenced during the Babylonian Captivity, after the small Kingdom of Judea had been overrun by the forces of King Nebuchadnezzar and the surviving Judeans were exiled to Babylon.
Help from God was needed, pronto.
Killing on behalf of God was excused by the Hebrew clerics who wrote the Old Testament, claiming that God “gave” the Promised Land to the Jews and they were entitled to take it by force from the historical occupants. This helpful “permission” from God simultaneously violated three of His Commandments to the Jews: “Thou shall not kill” and “Thou shall not covet”, and “Thou shall not steal”.
But, the invasion, mass slaughter, and confiscation of property was (conveniently) God’s idea, according to the priests who penned the Holy Scripture.
I’ve always wondered why God would need human help to accomplish anything that He wanted. After all, He’s a God, he’s omnipotent, he created the Universe in seven days, and, when pissed off, he drowned the whole World in a catastrophic flood. It seems silly to think that such a Superman would require an Army of God (human beings) to accomplish His goals here on earth.
Nevertheless, according to the Bible, Joshua and the Host (God’s human army) conducted a murderous campaign throughout Palestine, wiping out city after city, and sparing no man, woman, or child. If this Old Testament tale is true, the Jews under Joshua committed one of the earliest documented cases of “ethnic cleansing”.
Once Christians had become powerful, they justified doing horrible things to people on behalf of God. In the Medieval period, several Popes (“God’s emissary on Earth”) sanctioned bloody religious wars in the Holy Lands with the objective of recovering Jerusalem and its surrounding area from Islamic rule. Once again, slaughtering men, women, and children and stealing their property in God’s name was encouraged. In fact, the members of the Army of God were given “indulgences” by the Pope, meaning that all of the stealing, smiting, torturing, and raping that they did during the Crusades was “forgiven” in advance. The end justified the means, I guess.
I wonder, though, why didn’t God just smite the Muslims by himself with a plague, a drought, an earthquake, or a series of lightning bolts?Better still, He could have solved the Islam “problem” if He’d caused Muhammad’s mother to miscarry. Why would a God rely on Crusader swords and mass murder 300 years later?
In the Middle Ages, Christian zealots, led by Catholic clergy like Dominican friar Tomas Torquemada, used the Inquisition to torture, maim, and kill non-Catholics in cruel and sadistic ways. Presumably God blessed this horrific conduct, since the Pope condoned it.
Fast forward to the 1930’s and 1940’s in Hitler’s Germany, when six million European Jews were ethnically-cleansed by the Nazi’s in what would become known as the Holocaust. Was Hitler sanctioned by God to do this work on His behalf? Who’s to say, but the Catholic Church remained absolutely mute during the carnage. Interestingly, Adolph Hitler was a Catholic altar boy in his youth and always considered himself a devout Christian.
I wonder whatever happened to the Christian concept of “free will”? I have yet to find, in the New Testament, where Jesus encouraged the righteous to kill Jews or non-believers of any sort.
Jesus was “The Prince of Peace”, for God’s sake.
Nowadays, we have vigilante Christianism, where righteous believers beat homosexuals to death and firebomb abortion clinics as if they have been deputized to wreak such mayhem. Muslims stone women to death for their perceived indiscretions. All of this confuses me somewhat, as I was taught in Sunday school that it is God’s job to pass judgment on a person’s behavior here on earth.
I worry when I see true believers of any religion running amok in the name of their God. They don’t seem to be accountable to anyone and any tactic, including murder, appears to be acceptable to accomplish their goal.
I wonder what Jesus would say about this.