That Hideous Sense; Part IV

3: "Why is there so much genocide in the Old Testament?"

And now we have reached, aside from the Problem of Evil, perhaps the greatest argument in the modern atheist arsenal against Christianity (and I suppose against Judaism and Islam as well). For the atheist points out that our God, who is supposedly Loving and Good, seems to order that quite a lot of people (and peoples) be butchered throughout the Old Testament.

And this is a great argument because it is quite strong. It is, on the face of it, paradoxical to our eyes that a God who is Love would order the deaths of various peoples. It is even more paradoxical that the God who supplied us with the 10 Commandments would seemingly order His people to violate one of them.

I agree with the atheist, this observation of God is not only paradoxical, it is contradictory. What I don't agree with, however, is that the argument has accurately described God! Again I am struck by the hideous strength which entitlement exerts over our thinking. Before, I said that all the goods in our life are gifts given by God. All those things that are rights or perceived as rights, are in fact gifts. The previous two problems dealt with two powerful examples of those alleged rights and the problems of entitlement that they entail.

Now what we must contend with is the principle problem of this issue. It is the principle problem because it is the greatest good! Thomistic philosophy states that existence is in and of itself Good, that Good and existence are fundamentally related to each other. For all other rights, we have so far identified them as Good things in our lives, but now we have come to the "right to life" and we must admit that it is not only the foremost good in our life, but it is the foremost good because it is our life. It is our very existence on this Earth, and thus is the most powerful and relevant Good available to us. And it is the thing that we are most likely to feel entitled to as a result. If all else can be taken from us, we still have our lives. Yet if even our lives be taken from us, what have we? Western liberal thinking has enshrined the right to life as foremost of the first three, the great three, rights. The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but happiness and liberty are automatically forfeited should we lose life. Life is the principle liberty, the greatest good. It is the thing that liberal philosophy most wants us to believe we are entitled to, that we deserve, and that our possession of it should be utterly inviolable. And against it stands, I believe somewhat ironically, Christianity.

Now certainly Christianity has used the expression "right to life." But Christianity has a peculiar advantage over the strictly secular world in doing so. Christians in the United States arguing about the right of children in the womb to live can do so because they live under a political system that works in terms of rights. And Christianity as a system can (and has) embrace the idea that all humans intrinsically have worth, and that we are equal, precisely and only because Christianity has taught this since long before "rights" existed, for it is what God Himself revealed to us. But none of this means that we have the "right to live." We have no such thing. As usual, the Christian concept is quite the opposite, what we have is the lack of the right to murder. "Thou shalt not murder," so often mistranslated as "thou shalt not kill" is the heart of the issue.

This commandment does not mean that we are entitled to life. Life is a gift. To paraphrase Chesterton, it is the birthday gift of being born. It is a gift, and it always will be. And what we have is not the right to it, but the lack of a right to unjustly suspend or end it. And this refers to all human lives. We have no right to unjustly end our own lives, nor those of our children, nor those of our neighbors, nor those of the infirm, etc.

"A-ha!" cries the atheist! "I have you now! You have admitted that we do not have the right to kill others unjustly, that we do not have the right to kill our children or our selves! So why is it that the Old Testament portrays not only genocide, but even commands that children be killed in certain situations?!"

And entitlement strikes again. For modern sensibilities, even if they accept that they do not have a right to live, still operate under the flawed assumption that they are entitled to a certain sense of justice. This is not the case. There is only one Justice, it is the objective Justice of God. Killing in the Old Testament falls under several categories. Some of the killings are murders, and you will note that God Himself reacts quite strictly to those. Some of them are not murders but are what atheists term genocide, and what the Hebrews understood as punishment. The Hebrews record in their Scriptures not only that God told them to kill or enslave a town or population, but that God gave them specific reasons for doing so. These people were not innocents being executed unjustly as is so often alleged by the atheist camp, they were sinners and those who rejected God. Not only were they not entitled to the gift of life, but they had taken their gift, and used it only to spurn God and fight against God's people (it should also be noted that just about every city destroyed was given the opportunity to peacefully join the Israelites).

In addition to this, we also have the situation arising where these people were worshiping other gods, and God (rightly if we examine the later history of Israel) noted that such worship would tempt His Chosen People. God is a jealous God (another often misunderstood phrase, which we should do well to note means that God is not tolerant of unfaithfulness, or in other words, sin, which is a natural outgrowth of His dual properties of being Good and being Just), and commanded the end of the worship of false gods among His people, and even that they prevent this by going so far as to destroy those whose gift of life God no longer chose to grant.

Some people, with modern sensibilities, would normally believe those people executed in this manner to be innocent of any crime, and would consider God to be a horrible monster. This is based not only on our sense of entitlement to life, but also entitlement to what we believe is justice. Because we are not objectively knowledgeable creatures, it is not only likely, it is expected and obvious that we will never be able to determine what is truly just. We do not know the perfect reality of any given situation, and any attempt on the part of atheists to argue that God here was not Just or that God was cruel or contradictory, etc. must be met with amusement. If an atheist cannot demonstrate to us objective morality, how much more unlikely is it that an atheist is going to be able to demonstrate to us objective Justice? And most especially objective Justice of events that occurred thousands of years ago? Their argument is easily dismissed, and with it, this argument as a whole. It is simply another problem of entitlement, though one doubly difficult to deal with, since it involved perhaps those two that are most important to us, life and fairness.

And that, will bring us to the last and final difficulty presented by atheism and related to entitlement, in the final piece of this series.