That is on the author’s mind. Saul’s motives for sparing anyone were bad.
But, in the background are God’s genocidal commands going back to Joshua. How do you rationalize that?
I’m opposed to all war. The ethics of the sermon on the mount. Absolute non violence. Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world. Why do Christians defend themselves with guns if they believe heavenly bliss awaits them? Jesus said” take up your cross and follow me.” He didn’t say pick up a gun.
Do you think clearing the temple of the tables of the moneychangers was a nonviolent action? Do you know how many times Jesus provoked people to want to kill him before they actually went through with it (temporarily)? Do you know how his disciples died? Do you think that people who abuse their power are never going to be checked?
Probably. The accounts vary in the four gospels which were probably written after 70 AD when the temple was destroyed. It was likely the demonstration that got him killed. None of the accounts say that he hurt anyone. I think Jesus was seeking to fulfill the prophecy in Zechariah 14: 21 “ On the day of the Lord no merchant will be found in the temple.” Or at least that’s what the gospel writers thought he was doing. A mosque now stands where the temple once did—a perfect symbol of the dispute over the land that YHWH is said to have promised and in a larger sense the religious, ethnic and national conflicts which endanger the world. Temples are built to symbolize the Eternal but they only do this apophatically because they are temporary.
There is a dfference between a living child and a foetus.
The woman’s layers of tissue?
Hi there, it’s me BeingMuslim, back for a brief while. I agree about the whole land-religion thing, it’s vain.
Also the lies being posted on this thread should be exposed.
Palestine does not need to have been known as Palestine for the Palestinians to have a right to exist there.
Whatever it was called in the past (and it was called Palestine for a very, very long tinme), the people are pretty much unchanged, they are a mix of:
Canaanites
Greek Sea People
Hebrews
Egyptians (?)
It is a flagrant lie to say the Arabs invaded and displaced all the people living there. Arabic became a linguistic division on the command of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), he said that from now on, whoever speaks Arabic is an Arab. So, the Arabs of the Levant are the same people that always lived there, but they changed their language to Arabic, and that includes the Christians, many of whom are the original Nazarenes.
The Hebrews migrated there from the marsh region near Basra in southern Iraq. The Hebrew language is from that region. The Hebrew alphabet is actually taken from a western Aramaic alphabet, which some Muslim villages still use in western Syria, but most abandoned it to disassociate from Israeli settlers. So, the Israelites actually migrated to the land as their own Bible states.
When Islam arrived, the companion of the Prophet Muhammad, Omar ibn al Khattab, allowed the Jews to re-settle the Holy Land, including Jerusalem, after they had been banned for centuries by Christians,
Over the ensuing centuries there was mass conversion among Christians, Jews, Sabians (l think these were Mandaeans, Johannites, John or Yahya, peace be upon him, having been a prophet in his own right) to Islam.
Then the Crusades happened, they ate Christian and Muslim babies (literally) and burned Jews alive.
Then the Muslims reconquered the area and after a long peace, the Ottomans took over but lost control as their empire broke up under massive attack from multiple competing European empires.
After accepting mass migration of Jewish refugees from Muslim Spain and then centuries later, European Jews from the WW1 era pogroms, the Ottomans sold Theodor Herzl and the Zionist Congress a large tract of land which was to form the basis of modern day Israel. Jewish postage stamps from the era clearly call it Palestine, by the way. The Ottomans also helped Jews escape the WW2 Holocaust and some even perished trying to ferry Jewish refugees across the Black Sea into the Ottoman Empire, resettling them in Anatolia etc. Unsure if Ottomans controlled Palestine throughout most of WW2 or only some of WW2.
Then radical Zionist gangs took over after the temporary British Mandate of WW2 Palestine and seized a much larger area and created modern Israel. Even at the time, many Orthodox Jews sought a miitary alliance with Palestinian Arabs and sought to live as citizens of a Palestinian state as they rejected Israel without the Messiah (the Messiah being Jesus, the same in Islam as in Christianity). Sadly those Orthodox Jews were attacked by the atheist Zionists and today they have become the foremost Zionists, and in fact Zionism has now become a full on religious movement.
Sad to see so many lies about Palestine, making out that Israel always existed there and the Palestinian Arabs just appeared as aliens in the land ex nihilo.
The Palestinians of today ARE THE ORIGINAL CANAANITES, GREEKS, HENREWS & EGYPTIANS (?) that ALWAYS lived there. They just converted with Islam and Christianity and changed language to the lingua franca: Arabic, and thus according to Islam, are all classed as Arabs.
Typical religious cherry picking.
It’s a wonder why people are not more alert to this obvious move.
Then we look around at what people seem to be ignoring in Trump’s activities and it seems that many (most?) humans are more concerned with what they want to believe so as to disregard the rest.
Maybe we are all guilty of that. But I pride myself on changing my mind is quite radical ways through my life, whereas I see in others a tendancy to prefer to reproduce and reiterate the ideas and thoughts of their early teachings and bolster themselves with the false ideaologies of their contemporaries and associates beyond what is reasonable and prudent.
Don’t be like Dave.
4 posts were split to a new topic: Lies About Religion