To the 3rd and 4th Generation: the Torah's Legacy of Evil

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

The Bible is full of morally disgusting injunctions and deeds said and done in the name and with the support of God. But if there’s any slam-dunk reason to reject the Bible and its promoters as a moral authority, it’s this little-known humdinger from a passage you may have heard of, The Ten Commandments.

I begin with this passage because it is so indefensibly and devastatingly clear. It provides the articulation of a principle which shapes the entire Old and New Testament: that children are to be punished for the sins of their ancestors. But Yahweh doesn’t just talk the talk: according to the Bible, this principle shapes the first major events of human history. Just for fun, let’s call this principle “collateral punishment”.

  1. In the Garden of Eden, collateral punishment results in Original Sin, as the entire human race is punished for the disobedience of Adam and Eve.
  2. Noah’s flood destroys almost the entire human race for the sins of an unspecified majority of wicked people.
  3. Noah curses Canaan for his father’s sin of looking upon him naked. This curse conveniently provides Israel with an excuse to conquer Palestine and drive out the Canaanites.

and some time later…

  1. God sacrifices himself in the person of Jesus to finally somehow stem the tide of perdition unleashed by the collateral punishment of Original Sin. (At least, for those who are baptized, or something… Christians still haven’t quite figured out this one).

You can interpret these incidents of collateral punishment in several ways:

  1. You might say that God really was responsible for them, but he’s mysterious and not subject to human moral constraints and such, so they’re not really all that evil. To this I would ask: if you wouldn’t accept such behavior from a human king, why would you accept it from a divine king? What has God done to show that his plan is so much better than our own, that we should accept all the collateral damage that comes with it? Should we so easily submit our moral sense to a being that constantly outrages it? What if Yahweh is just some devil and the real God has yet to contact us in writing?

  2. You could instead recall that in ancient times (and in some parts of the world it persists today) authorities commonly punished entire families for the sins of an individual. In a world where feuds of cyclic revenge killings were common, it’s only practical for an offended party to off an entire family (or an entire people) to avoid reprisal. When the ancient mythmakers set about constructing God in man’s image, they thoughtfully provided him with this useful human characteristic. (Nevermind that, being supposedly all-powerful, reprisal would mean little to God, so “jealousy” and collateral punishment would be pointless. The mythmakers were not too picky about such details.) As civil authority increased in power and tribal revenge killing declined, God became more like a civil authority and less like a vengeful tribal tyrant.

  3. You could also try and say that the bible is the recording of God’s works as interpreted by imperfect human minds. So God wasn’t really as nasty as all that, the people just saw him that way because that was how authority operated in that time. This of course would present serious issues for the biblical infallibility claimed by most major Jewish and Christian sects.

So what do you think of my analysis of collateral punishment, and how to interpret it? Is there another way for Jews and Christians to deal with this problem?

2

Ezekiel 18:1 ff –

“1 And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: What is the meaning? 2 That you use among you this parable as a proverb in the land of Israel, saying: The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children are set on edge. 3 As I live, saith the Lord God, this parable shall be no more to you a proverb in Israel. 4 Behold all souls are mine: as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, the same shall die…”
drbo.org/cgi-bin/d?b=drb&bk= … &l=2&f=s#x

I think this passage fortells a different dispensation for hereditary crimes.

3

John 9:2-4 (Contemporary English Version)
Contemporary English Version (CEV)
Copyright © 1995 by American Bible Society

2Jesus’ disciples asked, “Teacher, why was this man born blind? Was it because he or his parents sinned?”

3"No, it wasn't!" Jesus answered. "But because of his blindness, you will see God work a miracle for him.

4As long as it is day, we must do what the one who sent me wants me to do. When night comes, no one can work.

4

I don’t think I’ve gotten my point across yet. Let me ask more pointed questions.

If you believe in Yahweh:

  1. Do you agree that Yahweh punishes, or has historically punished, the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of sinners? And that this collateral punishment shapes much of Jewish and human history?
  2. Does this outrage your sense of morality and justice?
    2a. If not, how would you feel about God punishing your children for the sins of your slaveowning fathers (or insert other ancestors’ sin here as necessary)? And how is such a situation any different from the Biblical stories?
    2b. If so, how do you reconcile your moral outrage with your belief in Yahweh?

mrn: even if Jesus ended collateral punishment as I think you’re implying, you still have the history to deal with. Christians affirm the holiness and inspiration of the Torah just as much as the Jews. I am not any more willing to worship a god just because he eventually stopped one of his horrible tyrannical practices.

felix: same remark as to mrn, although you picked a more explicit passage.

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Yahweh/Elohiam was certain a vainglorious and vindictive deity in the Torah. Gods own admissions in the story of Job reaffirm this. Remember, the ideas we have of rightousness and piety along with the ideas of good and evil didn’t exist in the same forms back then.

6

It did,and always has done.Just that people were more ignorant then

.

7

Good questions all. This is a huge topic. There is a very good book entitled A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong that makes a good introduction to the subject. God is an evolving concept. God, if seen at all, is always seen through the lense of culture. I quoted Jesus above because to me his simple answer speaks volumes about the difference between his view of God and the punisher in Exodus. On the other hand, to simply dismiss the God of the Hebrew Bible as barbaric is to miss the theological and historical significance of those writings. In the Torah which comprises the first five books of the Hebrew Bible there are competing conceptions of God as Yahweh and Elohim. The Hebrew Bible has had a profound positive effect on our notions of social justice. God is also revealed there as one who is on the side of the poor and oppressed.

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Felix, thanks for the book suggestion, and for putting our conversation in a larger context. Unfortunately most people do not share your magnanimous conception of God as an evolving human concept. Most religious believe there is a personal God who really said and did the stuff in the Bible (to a more or less literal degree depending on which sect you ask). This belief compromises our moral and scientific sense, and thereby corrupts society.

Therefore, I want to use this thread to call such believers out and ask them to face what they profess to believe.

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aporia, I find agreement with felix here – at least it’s what they taught me at a Jesuit college, and I’ve found that position useful in arguing against forms of atheism on this board. But why can God not be – to us – an evolving concept, as well as – in Himself – a person(s) capable of being experienced while remaining beyond our abilty to grasp fully?

mrn

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aporia, testing the ethical waters here:

How would you feel about the son of an infamous criminal?
How would you feel about the son of a famous philanthropist?

I would tend to feel some shame upon the former and some glory on the latter.
Not that they couldn’t do better or worse than their origin or genetics.

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felix, I was just thinking of the quote from Matthew 10:

“36 And as a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household. 37 He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me.”
drbo.org/cgi-bin/d?b=drb&bk= … l=37&f=s#x

So if your parents are wicked, you can turn your back to them and start a new life.

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By the way, aporia, aren’t you kind of bypassing part of the same quote you gave?

How does this make you feel about God?

13

God is just, but also an asshole apparently.

To judge others by what their forefathers have done seems like an asshole, unjust god to me.

It appears to me that you either consider this passage to be a false understanding of god and some sort of misprint as it was all written and copied thru the ages by human hands, or that god is just a little bit of an unjust jerk and asshole.

It appears that the god in these old collection of books is a god who is both just and an asshole. Not a god I am interested in, no thanks.

14

We are inside a Spinozean Hartshornean process theological schizophrenic dialectical geist. Saully was right…God is mad, and each one of you is a piece of that madness.

I cannot even begin to explain exactly what is happening here, in our existence. I would need a new lexicon and too much of your time. Maybe I’ll publish before I die so you can tell your children the truth and the last philosophy.

15

mrn,

Let us be clear about the path you’re taking here. Did the Jews invent the stories of the Pentateuch to express their “evolving concept of God” or not? If they didn’t, you’re back to my original questions about moral outrage. If they did, that would have dire implications for the authoritarian claims of the Catholic church. For if the Jews are in the habit of writing historical-sounding mythological literature which then gets confused for historical fact, then the Gospels may also be such works. Jesus’ resurrection may just be another myth born of some 1st century Jews’ evolving conception of God, along with the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”

Yet you have indicated previously in your sig that you are completely committed to the doctrines of the Church, which would never admit that Jesus-as-God-man and the Church itself may just be products of a mythological, evolving conception of God and religion.

I would tend to have suspicions of the one and be hopeful for the other, I suppose. We know that often, the apple does not fall far from the tree. But this is a far cry from punishing children for the sins of their parents. (I certainly would not feel that the criminal’s son deserved any ‘shame’ or the philanthropist’s son any ‘glory’ in themselves.) A new life should always be given a chance to rise above where it came from.

As for God’s steadfast love to the generations of children of those who keep his commandments – it is less cruel than punishing children for the sins of their fathers, but it is equally absurd. What if the kids turn rotten? We should decide whether to help or punish based on who people are as demonstrated by the lives they’ve lived.

It’s possible that punishing tribes for the sins of individuals was practical in Biblical times, but that’s no reason for God to do it as well – unless they, and we, have made him in our image.

felix,
I just wanted to note that I have grabbed Karen Armstrong’s book from the library. She is quite clear from the outset that she believes this is all myth; in fact, she thinks that at first the myths were not confused with fact. I’m not sure I believe this. Are Orthodox Judaism and traditional Christianity just big misunderstandings? Why would the misunderstanding develop? Wouldn’t people pass on the fact that the myths weren’t real?

I think that, to the contrary, the ancient people who made the bible were so committed to understanding the world through myth that they could not distinguish it from fact. The distinction has always been blurred, and we are still committed to understanding the world through myth – even science is a myth in some sense – but we are learning that, like in science, our myths are not facts, and as such they should keep changing to fit new facts and new situations. The traditional sects of the major monotheistic religions reject this principle, and in doing so blaspheme unforgivably against the Holy Spirit of human knowledge.

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I think you make interesting points. The differentiation that we make between myth and fact is an outcome of historical developments on our culture. Suffice it to say that the writers of the Bible didn’t see matters the way we do. Some of the stories are based on history, some are pure fiction. When present the historical facts went though a “traditioning process” in which elements of imagination, ideology and inspiration were added. The exodus story that you reference above is probably a historical event mythologized. The purely metaphorical narratives, like the book of Jonah for instance, nevertheless, can be conveyors of truth.

I can run with your comments above until I get to the last sentence. I think it’s a mistake to look at “the major monotheistic religions” as a monolithic whole that is blaspheming against knowledge. [That “blaspheming against the Holy Spirit” expression may just be an unfortunate one to begin with.] But what I see is that contempory religion fundamentalism and possibly authoritarian religious institutions structures selectively reject knowledge that conflicts with their belief systems.

17

I think the crux of my belief has to do with people known as prophets, evangelists, etc., actually having insight into God which many other people don’t have.

The story of Jesus is given to be believed in historically, both from the text of the Gospels (Luke’s opening, St. John on the Crucifixion, Paul on the Resurrection) as well is from the Nicene Creed.

It is perhaps very human (we are his creatures) to love the sons of your friends and to have some disdain for the sons of your foe. But what the quote says to me is that our loving God’s mercy is much greater than His judgement.

So do good and bless your inheritance.

18

The Jews also gave their history to be believed in historically; if they didn’t, they sure did a good job of fooling everyone. Yet it appears that their history is laced with myth, suggesting that they either couldn’t or didn’t want to distinguish fact and myth in their holy texts. My guess is that it was a little of both.

There’s a wonderful incident in Beverly Cleary’s “Ramona the Brave” (please do read the whole Ramona series), where Ramona excitedly tells her class about how construction workers chopped through her house with an axe while remodeling. Her sister Beezus explains how she has gotten it all wrong and Ramona becomes upset, feeling that her version of the story was essentially accurate. And it was accurate, in a sense; it captured her feelings and interpretation of what the workers did. But in a scientific sense it was quite wrong, because Ramona imagined the facts to suit her interpretation of what happened.

My belief is that Jewish and Christian history was constructed through the imaginative eyewitness of a bunch of Ramonas. Committed to their revolutionary teacher and unable to cope with his loss, the early Christians found meaning in Jesus’ death by interpreting him as the resurrected God-man. The Gospels are the blend of history and myth they created to sell that interpretation. Like Ramona, they sold the story as “what really happened” because to them it WAS.

That’s all I wanted to say with the blaspheming part. I thought I was using a clever and ironic reference to make an important point, but upon further examination I can’t figure out the relationship between the reference and the point. The point I wanted to make, at least, was this: asserting that myth is fact causes myth to lose its flexibility, making it a stumbling block rather than an expression of ineffable truth.

19

You mean all the apostles went to their deaths professing a story they made up?
I think anyone who chooses to do that believes in what they say.

As forgiving a person as you project yourself to be, I wonder why you are not on the side of the pacifist Christians. Would you prefer the Romans?

20

The apostles went to their deaths professing a story they both made up and believed wholeheartedly. Like Ramona, they saw nothing wrong with this, for they were not even aware they had made it up.

If you find this so implausible, tell me, how do you explain Muhammad? He did not suffer for his beliefs in the same helpless way that Christians did, but he did endure hardship promoting Islam. Presumably you do not believe he actually received the Koran from the angel Gabriel. Did he make up his story in a secret shrewd plot to gain honor, wives, and fortune? Or did he find his own story so compellingly meaningful that, like Ramona, he unconciously revised his own memory of the facts to fit the story? Now, however you explained why Muhammad was wrong, why doesn’t that carry over to Jesus’ disciples?

Jesus was an astonishing figure to first century Jews, and meant everything to his disciples. Suicide cults have been founded around figures of much less forceful personality and revolutionary ideas. When he died, his disciples desperately needed him to live on, so they pulled a Ramona/Muhammed/Moses and made him do just that. Maybe it started with hallucinations of a risen Jesus. Who knows. All I know is that the psychological, social, and cultural circumstances were perfect for Ramona-ism.

I find much to admire about Christian social and political ideas. But whoever’s side I may have been on, I hope that I could distinguish between social policy and claims of miraculous God-men.