Sunday morning seems like a good time to introduce the lord God Creator's very own foreign policy. There has been so much discussion about war and torture and so forth here at dkos, perhaps it is time to resolve all this librul whining once and for all. [Wish I could remember where I got this, maybe corrente.com.]
(Deuteronomy 20)
10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
16 However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them--the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites--as the LORD your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God.
19 When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees of the field people, that you should besiege them? 20 However, you may cut down trees that you know are not fruit trees and use them to build siege works until the city at war with you falls.
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So as long as you treat the trees ok, that's fine with God.
Questions for discussion:
- Is the God of our fathers still a demented psychopath or was this just an unfortunate phase he was going through?
- Is everyone who takes this as the literal word of God just as batshit crazy as God is?
- Is there perhaps something amiss with our popular understanding of divine revelation?
- Did we just get it wrong? Is the fella who allegedly wrote this really the other fella, you know, the one down below with the hooves & horns?
- If this kind of stuff is the foundation for the world's woes, what might we do about it?